The Riptide Within

"Sometimes life hurts like heaven, which feels sometimes worse than hell, because heaven wants you to change, and hell hopes you never do."

From the sermon entitled, "The Riptide Within" by Pastor Joe Novenson given at Lee University in 2008. You can download the sermon by clicking here.

The Nature of Temptation by Bonhoeffer

In our members there is a slumbering inclination towards desire which is both sudden and fierce. With irresistible power, desire seizes mastery over the flesh. All at once a secret, smoldering fire is kindled. The flesh burns and is in flames. It makes no difference whether it is sexual desire, or ambition, or vanity, or desire for revenge, or love of fame and power, or greed for money, or, finally, that strange desire for the beauty of the world, of nature. Joy in God is in course of being extinguished in us and we seek all our joy in the creature. At this moment God is quite unreal to us, he loses all reality, and only desire for the creature is real; the only reality is the devil. Satan does not here fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God…. The lust thus aroused envelopes the mind and will of man in deepest darkness. The powers of clear discrimination and of decision are taken from us….It is here that everything within me rises up against the Word of God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall and Temptation pp116-117