The Temptation to the Good
Just something I was thinking about this past week. The exchange between the unseen world and the seen world facsinates many of us, and scripture gives us interesting clues as to the nature of that exchange, all of them intriguing. Two prevalent places of contact between the seen and the unseen are in the notions of prayer and temptation. Whether regular pray-ers or not, almost all people end up invoking God in some fashion or another, hoping for some bit of power to live that they might not otherwise have. And most of us, recognizing that there is (at least in a practical sense) a difference in good and evil, speak of being "tempted" to do some bad thing or another.
I'm not sure why I found this helpful, but suddenly I realized that "temptation" might not only be toward evil. What is temptation but the suggestion of a possible action that is appealing from a selfish point of view, an action that either has indirect or direct negative consequences in the lives of others, an action that is offensive to other people, to your true self (whoever that may be), or to God? On the other hand, don't we get "temptations" in the other direction? Suggestions of actions that have direct or indirect positive consequences in the lives of our friends and our God, actions that move the Kingdom of God forward? Some Christian groups call these "promptings," referring to the action of the Holy Spirit.
If you come from a Christian heritage that believes in the active work of the Holy Spirit, then the idea that He communicates with us daily, trying to lean us into this action or that, is something you're probably comfortable with. But if you are like me, coming from a religious tradition that is willing to give a lot of creedence to temptation, but not much to "prompting", the thought that not all your good ideas of noble and right action come from your own noble and right head, but instead are suggestions offered up by the Holy Spirit of God, can be disconcerting. Add obedience to the mix, that perhaps these are not so much suggestions as (surely I don't use this word) commands, then we all get really nervous.
And rightly so, I suppose. After all, this is a world where people are "prompted" by God to do weird and terrible things. But still, do we throw out hearing from God simply because some people do evil, using God's name to mask it? All of this to say that as surely as there are unseen forces in the world working to destroy, there are unseen forces trying to nudge us toward the good, the righteous, the noble, the loving. We all know that sensation of a potential good act suggesting itself, and the instantaneous weighing that goes on--"Do I do this good or not?"
...let us yield to the temptation to the good...
9:03:39 AM
