Quotes about Temptation

Paul's witness was "No test or temptation that comes your way is beyond the course of what others have had to face. All you need to remember is that God will never let you down; he'll never let you be pushed past your limit; he'll always be there to help you come through it" (1 Cor 10:13). "He knows when to say, It is enough.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, one of our great modern Isaian prophets who had extensive experience with violence in two world wars, wrote, "The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships."

Not a day goes by but what we have to deal with that ancient triple threat that Christians in the Middle Ages summarized under the headings of the world, the flesh and the devil:

Passion is the evil in adultery. If a man has no opportunity of living with another man's wife, but if it is obvious for some reason that he would like to do so, and would do so if he could, he is no less guilty than if he was caught in the act.

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.

The least temptation thou hast met. He knows thy blemishes and how to purge away the dross, Not overlong will he allow The anguish of thy cross. Love is the Judge, and he doth see The surest way to perfect thee. Thou can not perish if thou wilt But turn thee to the light, Love bleeds with thee in all thy guilt And waits to set thee right. Love means to save sin's outcasts lost, And cares not at what awful cost.

The teaching here is simply this, that anything allowed in the heart which is contrary to the will of God, let it seem ever so insignificant, or be ever so deeply hidden, will cause us to fall before our enemies.

I believe ingratitude is the original sin. I believe if Adam and Eve had been grateful for the garden of Eden they had, they would not have been so focused on the one tree they didn't have.

People fall in private, long before they fall in public. The tree falls with a great crash, but the secret decay which accounts for it, is often not discovered until it is down on the ground.

So glistered the dire Snake , and into fraud Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the Tree Of Prohibition, root of all our woe.

The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.

Each tree Laden with fairest fruit, that hung to th' eye Tempting, stirr'd in me sudden appetite To pluck and eat.