The message arrived at 11:40 on a Sunday night, the night before Akinola’s final-year examination in thermodynamics. It came into the class WhatsApp group from a number nobody recognised, and it said only this: “Expo for tomorrow. 100% confirmed. DM for the PDF. Last chance.”
Akinola was sitting on the edge of his bed in a hostel room in Akoka, with a fan that turned slowly whenever the light came back. He had been reading since seven o’clock. He was tired, he was behind, and thermodynamics was the course he had already failed once. If he failed it again, his graduation would be delayed by a full year, and his mother, who sold provisions in a kiosk in Mushin, would have to find another year of fees.
He did not reply. He did not put the phone down either. He read the message again. He opened the sender’s profile. He typed “Pls send” and deleted it. He typed it again and deleted it again. For almost twenty minutes he sat with the phone warm in his hand, wanting that PDF more than he could remember wanting anything. Then he switched the phone off, pushed it under his pillow, and went back to his textbook with his heart pounding.
He came to see me the following week. He had written the paper honestly and thought he had passed. He was not relieved. He was ashamed. “Pastor,” he said, “I wanted it. I really wanted it. I sat there for twenty minutes. What kind of Christian wants to cheat that badly? I think something is wrong with me. Maybe I was never truly saved.”
I asked him whether he had sent the message. He said no. I asked whether he had opened the file. He said there was no file, because he had never asked for it. Then I asked him the question that is the subject of this article. “Akinola, do you know that Jesus Himself was tempted?”
Tempted in all points, yet without sin
The letter to the Hebrews was written to weary believers under pressure to drift back into the old ways, and the writer keeps pointing them to Jesus as the great High Priest. In the middle of that argument he says this:
Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.
Read verse 15 slowly: “but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”
Those words settle something that many troubled believers have never settled. Jesus was tempted in all points. He never faced a leaked exam paper on WhatsApp, yet He faced the full range of human temptation: to the body’s appetites, to pride, to fear, to the shortcut around the will of the Father. His temptations were real. They were not a performance put on for our benefit.
Yet He was “without sin.” The writer puts the two things side by side in one breath: tempted, and without sin. If being tempted were itself a sin, that sentence would contradict itself. It does not. It shows us, in the clearest possible way, that the arrival of temptation is one thing and the committing of sin is another. Jesus experienced the first in full and never once did the second.
The word translated tempted is peirazo, which means to test or to try. What matters for us is that Jesus felt the pressure. The phrase “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” translates a single Greek word, sympatheo, from which we get our word sympathise. He suffers along with us. He knows from the inside what it is to want something that the Father has not given.
That is why the writer’s conclusion is so warm. “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” Notice when the help is offered: in time of need. The throne of grace is open while the message is still glowing on the screen, not only after we have failed. It is help for the twenty minutes on the edge of the bed.
PunchlineThe arrival of temptation is not the committing of sin. Jesus was tempted in all points like as we are, and He was without sin.
What happened in the wilderness
The Gospels let us see one of these temptations closely. Matthew places it immediately after Jesus’ baptism, where the heavens opened and the Father said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). Then the very next sentence:
Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
There are several things in this short scene that every tempted believer needs to see.
First, Jesus was “led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted.” The Spirit never leads anyone into sin. He did lead Jesus into a place where temptation would come. Being tempted was no evidence that Jesus had wandered out of the will of God. Sometimes we do walk carelessly into temptation, and we will come back to that. Yet temptation can also come to a person walking faithfully in the centre of God’s will.
Second, temptation came straight after a great spiritual high. If you have ever come home from a powerful vigil and found yourself fighting the ugliest thoughts within days, you are in good company. That pattern says nothing against the genuineness of what you experienced. It may say a great deal about how much the enemy resents it.
Third, the temptation aimed at His identity. “If thou be the Son of God.” The Father had just said, “This is my beloved Son.” The devil’s first move was to make that identity something Jesus would have to prove by acting independently of the Father. Much temptation still works this way. It whispers, “If you were really a child of God, you would not have to wait. You would not have to suffer. You would deserve this.”
Fourth, the temptation appealed to a real need. Jesus “was afterward an hungred,” and there is nothing sinful about hunger. The temptation was to meet a good need by a route the Father had not chosen. Akinola’s desire to graduate and spare his mother another year of fees was a good desire. The temptation was to satisfy it dishonestly.
Fifth, Jesus answered with the Word of God. “It is written.” He did not debate the devil on the devil’s terms or lean on sheer willpower. He placed the word of the Father between Himself and the suggestion, three times, each time from Deuteronomy. At the end Matthew says, “Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him” (Matthew 4:11). The hunger was met, in God’s way, after the test was passed.
Luke adds a sober note: the devil “departed from him for a season” (Luke 4:13). Temptation returned in Gethsemane and at the cross, where the crowd mocked, “If thou be the Son of God, come down.” Jesus met it again and again, and He overcame it every time.
Where temptation comes from
If Hebrews shows us that temptation and sin are different, James shows us how one can turn into the other. He writes to believers who were suffering trials, and he wants them to understand what is happening inside them:
Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him. Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
James begins with a blessing: “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation.” You cannot endure what you never experience. The man James calls blessed is not the man who has never felt the pull. He is the man who has felt it and has stood. James speaks of a crown of life promised “to them that love him.” Enduring temptation is one of the ways love for God is proved and strengthened.
Then James closes a door that people have always tried to open. “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God.” God tests His people, as He tested Abraham, yet He never entices anyone to evil. Neither does James blame the devil here, although he tells us elsewhere to resist him (James 4:7). He points inward: “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.”
The word lust is epithumia, a strong desire. It is not always sexual and not always evil; the same word can describe a good longing. But here it means desire running toward what God has forbidden. The two verbs that follow come from the world of hunting and fishing. Drawn away pictures an animal being lured out of its safe place. Enticed comes from the word for bait. A fish does not swim after a hook. It swims after the worm on the hook. Temptation never shows you the hook. It shows you the bait, and it promises that this time you will get the worm without the hook.
The moment desire becomes sin
Now James traces the sequence, and he uses the language of pregnancy and birth. “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”
Look at the stages. There is desire. There is the drawing away and the enticing, as the mind begins to dwell on the bait. Then there is conception, when desire and the will come together. Then there is birth, when sin comes out into the open in word or deed. And finally there is growth, when sin that is “finished,” fully grown, produces death: broken trust, broken relationships, deadened conscience, and the separation that sin always brings.
Here is the crucial point for every troubled believer. In James’s picture, sin is born when desire has conceived, when the will has embraced what the desire was offering. Conception requires consent. Before that moment there is pressure, pull and struggle. There is not yet sin.
That is why Akinola’s twenty minutes, painful as they were, were not twenty minutes of sinning. They were twenty minutes of being tempted. The bait was dangled, the pull was strong, and he was being drawn away. He was dangerously close to conception. If he had sent the message, the desire would have conceived. But he switched off the phone. The thing never came to birth.
I do not make light of how close he came. Lingering is dangerous. Still, there is an enormous difference between a man who is pulled and a man who yields, and the enemy works very hard to blur it. If he can persuade you that being pulled is the same as yielding, he gains twice. He loads you with guilt for something you did not do, and then he whispers, “You have already sinned in your heart, so you may as well do it.”
You may say, “But Jesus said that looking on a woman to lust after her is adultery in the heart.” He did, and it is a searching word. But read it exactly: “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). The phrase to lust after her describes purpose: a man who looks in order to desire, who chooses to feed it, whose heart has consented even if his body has not acted. Jesus is not condemning the man who feels an unwelcome flicker of attraction and refuses it. The first has conceived. The second is being tempted, and in refusing he is enduring.
Watching the sequence in the garden
The very first temptation in Scripture shows the same stages in slow motion:
Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
The serpent began with a question: “Yea, hath God said?” He did not begin by offering fruit. He began by unsettling Eve’s confidence in what God had said and in God’s goodness. Then he contradicted God outright: “Ye shall not surely die.” Then he suggested that God was holding something good back: “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened.”
Then comes the sentence where everything turns. “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.”
She saw. She desired. She took. She ate. She gave. Somewhere between saw and took, desire conceived, and the looking became longing, then reaching, then sin.
Notice that the temptation came through a conversation that should have ended at the first question. The longer Eve engaged with the serpent’s reasoning, the more reasonable it sounded. Notice too that it attacked the goodness of God before it ever offered the fruit. Almost all temptation carries a hidden message about God: that He is holding out on you, that His way is too slow. Jesus answered that lie in the wilderness. Eve listened to it in the garden.
Think of the hawkers who run alongside your car in Lagos traffic, pressing their goods against the window. You did not invite them. You cannot stop them appearing at every hold-up. But there is a world of difference between looking straight ahead while the window stays up, and winding it down to ask the price. The hawker at the glass is temptation. The conversation through the open window is the beginning of conception.
A word of care belongs here. Some sincere believers are troubled by intrusive thoughts: sudden, repeated, horrifying thoughts that they hate. The harder they fight, the more stubbornly the thoughts return, and many live in terror of having committed some unforgivable sin. If that describes you, please hear me: thoughts you hate and reject are not your consent. You are being troubled, not sinning. Such patterns are often a recognised and treatable condition, and a good doctor or a qualified Christian counsellor can help you a great deal. Seeking that help is not a lack of faith.
Why the enemy wants you to confuse the two
If being tempted is not the same as sinning, why do so many believers feel as guilty after a temptation as they would after a fall?
Part of the answer is that the enemy is “the accuser of our brethren” (Revelation 12:10). He tempts and then he accuses. He offers the bait, and when you refuse it he tells you that you are filthy for having noticed it. If he cannot get you to sin, he will try to make you feel so condemned that you stop praying, stop gathering with God’s people, and become easier to bring down next time.
Hebrews answers him with a second passage that belongs beside the first:
Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted.
“For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted.” Look at that word suffered. Temptation was suffering for Jesus. Resisting it cost Him something. He knows that resisting temptation hurts. The word succour carries the idea of running to help someone who cries out. That is what Jesus does for the tempted believer. He does not stand at a distance with folded arms, disappointed that you are struggling at all. He runs to help.
NuggetAnd notice who He helps: “them that are tempted.” When temptation arrives, you are not on trial before Him. You are under attack, and He is on your side.
So the arrival of temptation proves nothing about your spiritual failure. If anything, the struggle proves that a new nature is alive in you. An unbeliever may give in to the same desires without a moment’s conflict. The fact that Akinola sat on that bed in anguish, wanting the thing and refusing it, was a sign that the Spirit of God was at work in him, not a sign that He was absent.
The way of escape
Paul writes to the Corinthians with both a warning and a promise. He has just recounted how Israel fell in the wilderness through idolatry, immorality and complaining, and he says those things were written as examples for us. Then:
Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.
Verse 12 is the warning, and it must not be skipped. “Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” Everything we have said can be misused by a careless person. “It is not sin until I consent,” he says, and so he keeps placing himself in front of the bait, confident that he is strong enough. Paul’s word to that man is: take heed. The people who fell in the wilderness had all seen the Red Sea part. Overconfidence is one of the commonest roads to a fall.
Verse 13 is the promise, and it is one of the most comforting in the New Testament. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man.” The word means human. Whatever you are facing, it is not some unique, unheard-of pressure that marks you out as uniquely corrupt. Other believers have faced it and stood. The enemy loves to isolate the tempted person: nobody else struggles with this; you could never tell anyone. Paul says otherwise.
“But God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able.” God sets limits on temptation. He knows your frame, your history and your strength, and He does not allow the pressure to exceed what, with His help, you can withstand.
“But will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” The phrase way to escape means a way out, an exit. With every temptation God provides one. It may be a phone that can be switched off, a door you can walk through, a friend you can call, or a verse that comes to mind at exactly the right moment.
Joseph found his exit in the most literal way. When Potiphar’s wife seized him, “he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out” (Genesis 39:12). He did not stay to explain himself. He did not test how strong he was. He ran. Sometimes the way of escape is not a spiritual technique at all. It is your two legs.
Practical help for resisting
PunchlineHow, then, do you resist temptation without treating its arrival as a verdict on your faith? Here is some practical wisdom drawn from these passages.
Act early in the sequence. The further along James’s chain you allow yourself to go, the harder it becomes to stop. It is far easier to switch off the phone at the first message than after twenty minutes of staring at it. Akinola stood, and I honour that, but he learned that night that the place to stand is at the first step, not at the edge of conception.
Know your bait. Temptation is personal: what pulls one person hardly touches another. Learn what draws you, and when. Many people are far more vulnerable when they are exhausted, lonely, angry or alone late at night. That is no excuse. It is intelligence. Paul tells us to “make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Romans 13:14). Provision means planning ahead. Do not leave the bait where you know you will meet it.
Watch and pray. On the night of His arrest Jesus told His sleepy disciples, “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). Prayer before the moment of pressure prepares the heart for the moment itself.
Answer with the Word. Jesus said, “It is written.” The psalmist said, “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Psalm 119:11). Choose a few verses that speak to the temptations you face most often, and learn them by heart so that they are available when you are tired and the phone is glowing.
Meet the real need in God’s way. Akinola’s need to pass was real, and the right response was more study, honest help from a tutor, and trust in God for the outcome. Temptation often feeds on a genuine need we have not brought honestly to God.
Bring it into the light. Telling a trusted, mature believer what you are facing takes much of the power out of temptation. Paul told Timothy to “flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart” (2 Timothy 2:22). We flee, and we flee with others.
Come boldly to the throne of grace. When the temptation is strongest, run toward God. Being tempted does not disqualify you from His presence. You are invited into it precisely because you need help.
And if you do fall, which every honest believer knows can happen, remember that John wrote, “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). The aim is that you do not sin. If you do, confess it plainly, receive His cleansing, and get up. The same High Priest who helps the tempted also restores the fallen.
Akinola passed thermodynamics. His mark was modest, and he graduated with his class. I sat with his mother at the ceremony, and she cried through most of it.
But the real result of that night came two years later. Akinola was working as a junior engineer with a firm that did maintenance contracts for a state agency. One afternoon a contractor slipped an envelope onto his desk and said, “Just sign the completion certificate, my brother. The work will be finished next month. This is for your weekend.” Akinola told me afterwards that he felt the same pull he had felt on the edge of that hostel bed. The same heat in his chest. The same voice telling him that he deserved it, that everybody did it, that God was slow.
“This time,” he said, “I knew what it was. I knew the feeling was not the sin. So I did not panic, and I did not wait. I pushed the envelope back before I had even counted what was inside it.” Then he smiled. “And I did not spend the next week thinking I was a hypocrite for wanting it.”
That is what this truth does for a believer. It does not make temptation weaker. It makes you clearer. The pull is not the fall. Jesus felt it too and never yielded, the throne of grace is open while the pressure is on, and God has already made a way out. So you take it, early, with your face toward the One who was tempted in all points like as you are, yet without sin.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Have you ever treated the arrival of temptation as proof that something was wrong with your faith? How does Hebrews 4:15 change that conclusion?
- James describes desire, enticement, conception and birth. At which stage do you usually try to resist? What would it mean to act earlier?
- What is the particular “bait” that draws you most often, and in what circumstances are you most vulnerable to it?
- Jesus answered temptation with “It is written.” Which verses could you hide in your heart for the temptations you face most?
- When you are tempted, do you tend to run toward God or away from Him? What would coming boldly to the throne of grace look like for you?
This Week
This week, identify one temptation that returns to you regularly. Write down the circumstances in which it usually comes: the time of day, the place, your mood, the device or the people involved. Then plan one practical “way of escape” for each circumstance, such as charging your phone outside the bedroom or calling a friend when you are lonely. Choose one verse that answers the lie behind that temptation, write it on a card and learn it by heart. Each morning, pray Matthew 6:13 in your own words. When the temptation comes, take your planned exit early, and thank God that the pull is not the fall.
A Prayer
Lord Jesus, thank You that You were tempted in all points like as I am, and yet You never sinned. Thank You that You know from the inside what it costs to resist, and that You run to help those who are tempted. Forgive me for the times I have yielded, and free me from the guilt I have carried for temptations I did not obey. Teach me to recognise the bait early, to take the way of escape You provide, and to answer every lie with Your Word. When the pressure comes, let me run toward Your throne of grace and not away from it. Keep me, Lord, and deliver me from evil. In Your name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.