To Think About…
by Norman Grubb

Renewed in Christ, crucified and risen with Him by faith and inward witness, once again the choice has been fully made by some through the enabling of His Spirit, Who was spurned in that first garden. Our wills have become one with God’s. Now God works in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. Our set purpose with purified hearts has become to love Him with all our strength and our neighbour as ourselves. But we remain in a vitiated world. Almost all things around us, sights and sounds and influences, are charged with temptation. Satan remains the prince of this world, the god of this age. Our bodies, still in the bondage of corruption, were in the past given over to sinful habits and respond very often more easily to temptation along the lines in which they were over-indulged. Most people have special sins that “easily beset” them.

Temptation, therefore, remains the constant element in which we live, sometimes consciously, always there subconsciously in the very environment. But we are to understand that this is both our blessing and our battlefield. For it is by conquest over temptation, by the integration and invigoration derived from the struggle, that we both move forward decisively and definitely ourselves along a clear line of action and also release new redemptive forces in the world.