Often when we talk about temptation, our minds run to certain attitudes and actions that exert a magnetic pull on our hearts. We know the experience well: what it’s like to lash out in anger, to indulge a lustful fantasy, to take pleasure in words that cut down someone else, or to dwell on a wrong done to us, nurturing and nourishing a root of bitter self-pity.
When we think of temptation, we think of sin. We think of selfish impulses. And we hope to fight sin and temptation with the truth of God’s Word in the power of the Spirit.
Overlooked Temptation
But I wonder if, in all our good and godly resistance to particular sins, we sometimes overlook a far greater and all-encompassing temptation, a deeper source of selfishness, a disposition that matters for the direction of life. This temptation lies at the heart of other transgressions, with consequences far more profound than those of individual sins or petty attitudes.
It’s the temptation of godlessness.
I’m not referring to the atheist’s refusal to acknowledge God’s existence. Nor am I referring to spiritual or religious people who deny certain biblical teachings about God. I’m talking about the temptation to elbow God out of daily life, to push him out of the center, to live without reference to our Creator. We may still nod to him, of course, but he’s secondary. We shrink the Author of life to a footnote in a story we write ourselves.
It’s fitting to name this temptation “godlessness” because, even if we don’t deny God, we can live as if he doesn’t exist. He simply isn’t relevant for most of what constitutes daily life.
Absence of God
In our secularizing society, it isn’t the presence of sin that defines our culture but the absence of God. We’ve constructed a human-centered world where God is peripheral, flitting here or there at the edges of life, waiting to be summoned as a source of therapeutic benefit or comfort in distress but otherwise safely ensconced in a different realm from our day-to-day. We let God out of the prison of personal and private religion on occasion, but always on our terms. We’re safe from his bothering us, his impinging on our freedom, his interfering with our aspirations.
This is the great temptation of life in a secular age—to live as if God doesn’t exist, or to live as if the God who’s there is who we’ve made him out to be, not who he’s revealed himself to be.
Temptation for the Christian
If you’re a Christian reading this, you may nod and think, Yes, how terrible it is that so many in our world live as if God is irrelevant! But we mustn’t shield our eyes when the spotlight turns back on us. This temptation applies to the Christian and non-Christian alike.
How often do I as a Christian live as if God were absent? How often does the all-powerful “I” crowd out the Great I Am at the center of my thoughts and aspirations? How much of our worship, our gatherings and goings, our service and ministry is done without any real thought to the presence and power of God?
The church in a secular age faces the ever-present temptation to busy ourselves in all sorts of activity in the name of a God we rarely invoke aside from the pleasantries of our normal Christian lingo. We recite the Christian creed . . . as functional secularists.
Prayerlessness
The clearest sign we’ve succumbed to the temptation of forgetting or sidelining God is prayerlessness. The absence of prayer is what exposes and unmasks our self-sufficient spirit. The absence of prayer is what proves we see the “real world” as one of power, of politics, of work and leisure, or even of ministry—that we’ve accepted a dichotomy between the spiritual realm of churchiness and the earthly rough-and-tumble.
Meanwhile, the One who is realer than real—the God who strips away our illusions of grandeur and self-dependence—is set aside. Were we to truly see our need, our dependence on the One who has called us, we would summon his presence with quiet desperation, begging that he might allow us to taste and see his goodness, to experience the freshness of his tender touch alongside the white-hot fire of his holiness.
Sidelining God
The deadliest temptation in a secular age, for the Christian and non-Christian alike, is the sidelining of God. The more we push God to the periphery, the more we take center stage. It’s our activity that matters. Our goals and aspirations. Our strategies. Our techniques. Our purposes. Our plans. We lose eternal perspective because the Eternal One plays only a supporting role. And thus the things we think are most important in life are never shown up as the nothings they are, and the One who is everything remains hidden.
The sidelining of God, as demonstrated by the absence of fervent prayer—surely this is the great temptation of our times.
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