Day XCIII
Remember the prayer that our Lord Jesus Christ taught us?
Matthew 6:9
9 So pray this way:
Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored,
10 may your kingdom come,
may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread,
12 and forgive us our debts, as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors.
13 And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
14 “For if you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
15 But if you do not forgive others, your Father will not forgive you your sins.
take note of the words in bold and underlined. Also in the book of Psalm 116:8-9
8 Yes, LORD, you rescued my life from death,
and kept my feet from stumbling.
9 I will serve the LORD
in the land of the living.
Today brothers and sisters I would like to rewrite the words from the book COME LORD JESUS by Thomas Kempis. For me it was said perfectly and great utterance for us to learn to fight evil.
And He said:
The enemy is easily defeated, if we resist him and shut him out of the heart - the way you bar the gate on an invading enemy...
One way that we are easily defeated is to despair when we are tempted. When we despair, we look at ourselves, and say "Look at me. I'am so hopeless." That is a mistake, because our hope is not in ourselves, it is in the Lord!
A second mistake is to give up the battle when we have only lost the first small skirmish. By that He means, we may catch ourselves entertaining a tempting thought... and give in wholeheartedly, thinking, I've given in this far. I might as well go the rest of the way.
Let's say an impure thought comes to mind - not one of us can help this from happening. The difference is this : you can turn aside from it and fix our eyes on the Lord - or you can dwell on the thought and develop it into a dull image in your mind. Then you begin to direct the fantasy until it gives you the satisfaction you desire... until the day comes when the evil images are so rooted in you that you act on them, and they are not fantasy but sin born out of the corruption in your heart.
Isn't this the way it goes?
And so the enemy gains his foothold little by little, till he has full entrance in us. Because we did not resist him at the very beginning. The more lax we are, failing to put him out immediately, the more ground he gains in us, inch by inch. And every day he becomes a little stronger, more sure about winning the victory over our soul.
Let us not be like the person who waits too long to take strong medicine, until a sickness has taken hold of our body... and help is too late. Turn to the Lord, place all our hope in HIM, the moment we are tempted. The vision of His goodness and strength will make us strong to resist the enemy.
THIS IS THE BEST KNOWN ANTIDOTE for temptation and sin.
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