Different pastors have different tendencies and temptations. Some are tempted to let urgent relational and practical issues keep them from giving enough time to prepare a solid sermon. Other pastors hide in their study, using sermon preparation as an excuse to keep people and their pesky problems at a safe distance.

This article is far more for the latter than the former, and its point is simple: pastoring is more than preaching. This article is also for men who aspire to pastor, as well as men who do pastor, but who serve as associate or assistant pastors, and perhaps preach less than they’d like.

Not only is pastoring more than preaching, but a key thread connects preaching to every other major part of the job: bringing the Bible to bear on the messy details of people’s hearts, minds, and lives. Pastoring is more than preaching, and preaching is more than dropping truth bombs from a shock-proof height. If you want to be a pastor (or you are a pastor but don’t preach as much as you want), you can grow as a preacher by constantly practicing that triple-B in every other area of your ministry — bring the Bible to bear.

So, in addition to preaching, what else does pastoring entail?

Pastoring Is Discipling

By “discipling,” I mean developing personal relationships in which a primary goal is to help someone else grow more mature in Christ. The way the apostle Paul did this in his evangelistic, apostolic ministry provides a standing pattern for pastors today.

Paul so affectionately yearned for the Thessalonians to come to Christ and grow in Christ that, as he reminds them, “We were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves” (1 Thessalonians 2:8). He didn’t just preach to them in large groups, but, “like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:11–12). Paul didn’t just bring the Bible to bear in a big meeting, but in countless personal conversations.

In the course of a regular week, whom do you personally exhort and charge? With whom do you share not only the gospel but your own self?

Pastoring Is Counseling

Counseling aims at the same goal as discipling, but focuses on more acute sins, struggles, and suffering. Counseling is like an eddy in the stream of discipling; we step aside for a time to help someone re-enter the stream sounder and stronger. And, of course, the difference here is much more of degree than kind. Counseling is a key part of how you “shepherd the flock of God” (1 Peter 5:2), a necessary means by which you fulfill Paul’s charge: “Pay careful attention . . . to all the flock” (Acts 20:28).

What Paul charges the whole Thessalonian church to do applies doubly to pastors: “We urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all” (1 Thessalonians 5:14). The more severe the malady, the more crucial it is to dispense the right medicine. And the more hours you spend in the counseling chair, the more skilled a spiritual pharmacologist you’ll become.

In my first few years as a pastor, I learned that it can be surprisingly difficult and delicate to turn a counseling session toward Scripture. Someone has come to you with a big issue. Maybe he or she is struggling to trust God or care what he says. Maybe she feels like she’s heard it all before (and maybe she tells you so). Maybe so much pent-up pain and frustration pour out of him that it’s tough to get a word in edgewise. In such situations, patient listening and evident compassion go a long way — but not all the way. Your job includes helping that struggling saint learn to see his or her life the way God sees it, which means you need to find a light from Scripture that can make it through the crack in the blinds.

I don’t know if I’m an outlier among pastors here, but when I’m counseling a member who’s in acute difficulty, it feels like a third of my effort goes to listening and learning, and a third to trying to find appropriate expressions of compassion and encouragement. The last third is claimed by a program running constantly in the back of my mind, silently asking, “What passage or passages of Scripture can offer this person the most help, right now?”

Pastoring Is Leading in Discipline

If you’re a pastor, you don’t need me to tell you that hard cases will find their way to you — cases that might keep you up at night or crowd your mind all day. When a church member’s sin proves so severe that the church may need to act to exclude him or her, it is natural that a church’s pastors take the lead in addressing the erring member, assessing the situation, and recommending how the church respond.

Taking the lead in discipline can bring headache and heartache. It can bring insult and slander. It can threaten fatigue and frustration and distraction. But when you leave the ninety-nine to go after the one (Matthew 18:13–14), when you look others in the eye and confront them with the flat contradiction between their actions and God’s directions, know this: you are smack in the middle of the bull’s-eye of God’s will for your ministry.

God’s love is a holy love, a love that rescues from destructive self-deception, and in that moment you are a vessel of God’s love pursuing a desperately endangered soul.

Pastoring Is Watching Your Own Life and Doctrine

Paul charges Timothy, “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Timothy 4:16). You have to put the mask on yourself, and benefit from its oxygen flow, before you can safely serve others. Pastoring presents a standing temptation to professionalize your Christianity, and therefore outsource your piety. As a pastor, you have to study the Bible — for others. You have to pray — with others. You have to meditate on spiritual realities — on behalf of others. But do you still study and pray and meditate for your own soul? If you don’t, you are putting yourself and your flock into a deeply dangerous position.

“Pastoring presents a standing temptation to professionalize your Christianity, and therefore outsource your piety.”

Keep a close watch on yourself. Study Scripture not just to encourage and correct others, but to encourage and correct yourself. Whatever your stated office hours are, I would encourage you to maintain regular devotional habits outside those hours, just like you would expect a teacher or banker to do. And make sure that you are continually bringing the Bible to bear on your own fears and frustrations, your own thwarted ambitions, your own disordered desires. “Jesus, Jesus, how I trust him, how I’ve proved him o’er and o’er!” Are you proving Jesus in private, in ways none of your people will necessarily see, but from which they will indirectly benefit, as your confidence in him deepens daily?

Parlor Preaching and Pulpit Preaching

Maybe you wished you preached more, or you yearn to preach to more people. If you are frustrated about quantity, focus on quality. You usually can’t do much about the former, but you can do a whole lot about the latter. Focus on the quality of your relationship to Christ, the quality of your efforts as a discipler and counselor, the quality of your care for members who are straying into sin. The better a Christian you are, the better a pastor you’ll become.

“The better a Christian you are, the better a pastor you’ll become.”

And not only that, but your investments in all these other, non-preaching areas of your ministry will bear fruit in your preaching. By digging deeper into the depths of individual members’ struggles with sin and suffering, you’ll learn how to apply Scripture with greater nuance and precision. That’s why Richard Baxter called pastoral visitation “parlor preaching.” When you can enter deeply into one person’s struggles, in a way that informs your application without exposing their situation, it’s more than likely that a dozen people will say to themselves as they listen, “How did he know that’s just what I’m going through? Who gave him a readout of my thoughts from the past week?”

Paul exhorted the Thessalonians as a father does his children: one by one, attending to their unique abilities and struggles and situations (1 Thessalonians 2:11–12). The more you do that outside the pulpit, the more effective you’ll be in the pulpit. The more diligently you pastor people throughout the week, the more effectively you’ll pastor them in the pulpit.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15469289/was-the-apostle-paul-anti-semitic

Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning, and welcome back to a new week, number 499 in our history. Amazing! And we start week 499 with a question from a listener named Elizabeth, who has an interesting question about the saving work of Christ. “Hi, Pastor John. I am studying 1 Peter, going through your LAB videos, and digging deeper to share with my fellow stay-at-home moms at church. My question pertains to tauta in 1 Peter 1:11, translated ‘subsequent.’ I’m trying to tie together ‘the sufferings of Christ’ and his ‘subsequent glories.’ It does not seem to simply refer to a chronological progression. Peter very often ties suffering and glory together (1 Peter 1:6–7, 10; 2:12; 3:9, 14; 4:12–15; 5:1, 10).

“So, here’s my question: Did Jesus have to suffer in public for God to give him those glories? Couldn’t Jesus have lived a perfect, law-abiding, substitutionary life for us in total isolation or at least in obscurity? I know he underwent his formal temptations alone. So, could he have died serenely, then risen, and defeated death and sin, but not by suffering in public? Or if he had done this, would he have not received the ‘subsequent’ glories? Was it required for him to suffer publicly and die early? So then, again, what’s the ‘subsequent’ relationship between his public sufferings and his eternal glory?”

I’m drawn to answer this question, even though in one sense it’s the kind of a “what if” question that the Bible doesn’t really address directly (“What if Jesus had lived a perfect, sinless life and died a natural death at age 85 — could that life and death save us?”). The Bible doesn’t spend a lot of time reflecting on that possibility. And so, you might think, “Well, why would you even go there?” Nevertheless, in trying to answer this particular question and questions like that, we are led to ponder the wonder that God did it, in fact, a certain way — he planned for his Son to suffer agonizingly, publicly, extremely — and why he did it that way. And that’s worth our serious meditation.

Christ’s Public Payment

So, as I have pondered the question of whether our redemption could have been accomplished by the perfection of Christ without the public suffering of a crucifixion, I see at least six reasons that the Bible gives for why this could not have happened — in other words, why Christ’s public, horrific suffering by crucifixion was absolutely necessary for our salvation.

1. Predestined Plan

The first and perhaps the most obvious reason is that these particular sufferings were predestined by God before the foundation of the world. It was God’s eternal plan that his Son suffer in this way. Acts 4:27: “Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”

So, everything that Herod, Pilate, those Gentile soldiers who drove the nails and the spear, and the crucifying mobs — everything they did to Jesus in those last hours was God’s plan. It had been predestined to take place. It was not up for grabs. The alternative of a leisurely life and an 85-year-old death was not in the plan. That’s the first reason. It couldn’t have happened.

2. Fulfilled Scriptures

Second, these sufferings were prophesied in God’s word — the Old Testament scriptures that cannot be broken. Over and over again in the Gospels, the details of the final sufferings of Christ are said to be “that the Scriptures might be fulfilled” (Matthew 26:56; Luke 22:37, 24:26; John 13:18; 19:36). For example, “He was pierced for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5). Pierced. Not cancer, not old age, not cardiac arrest. He was pierced for our transgressions.

“The horrific public shaming and sufferings of Christ were scripted down to the details.”

In other words, the horrific public shaming and sufferings of Christ were scripted down to the details of what would happen to his clothing in the Old Testament. If those writings cannot be broken, then the sufferings could not be avoided.

3. Fitting Sufferings

Third (and this gets closer to the heart of the matter), Hebrews 2:10: “It was fitting [underline that word; put a big red circle around that word; it’s an amazing word] that he for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.”

This is very profound, and it is worth much study and hours of meditation. God’s eternal decision to achieve our salvation through the sufferings of Christ is not arbitrary or whimsical or meaningless, but is owing to a profound fitness, appropriateness, suitableness as God considers all things. It is appropriate; it is suitable; it is ultimately, you might say, beautiful. That is, it’s in perfect harmony with all of God’s other acts and plans. We can spend a lifetime probing into why it is fitting, but let Hebrews 2:10 fly like a great banner over the sufferings of Christ. It was fitting — right, good, suitable, beautiful — in the mind of God for our salvation to be accomplished this way and not another way.

4. Sacrificial Lamb

Fourth, the death of Jesus was an intentional sacrifice given by God similar to the sacrificial offerings of a lamb in the Old Testament. Jesus, Paul says, is “our Passover lamb” (1 Corinthians 5:7). So, just as in the Old Testament, allowing a sheep to get old in the flock and die from mange was not a sacrifice. That’s not the way it worked. You took the sheep and you handed him over with your heart and with an intentionality.

So, Christ growing old in some remote village and dying would not have been a sacrifice of God slitting the throat of the precious Lamb of God. The word slaughter is used in Revelation for what happened to the Lamb and how he accomplished our salvation. There was an intentionality to the sacrifice. Jesus was offered up on the cross as a sacrifice. Hebrews 10:12: “When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.”

5. By His Blood

Fifth, over and over in the New Testament, Christ is said to accomplish his saving work by means of his blood. For example, Romans 5:9: “We have now been justified by his blood.” Hebrews 9:22: “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.” I think that’s another way to draw out the significance of Christ’s death as a sacrifice.

6. Even Death on a Cross

And then finally, number six, Philippians 2 describes the humiliation of Jesus from the highest point of equality with God, to the lowest point of death — and then he adds, “even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8), as the path from the highest to the lowest, as the path that God rewards with the exaltation of Jesus, not only to new life in resurrection, but to the acclamation of all the nations as Lord of lords.

Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death . . .

And then these words are not throwaway words, because it had to be the lowest point to accomplish our redemption:

. . . even death on [the most despicable, shameful, painful instrument of execution] a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him a name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6–11)

“There is, in God’s mind, a path to glory for his Son, and this path was a painful, humiliating death by crucifixion.”

There is, in God’s mind, a path to glory for his Son, and this path was a painful, humiliating death by crucifixion. It was the depth of the suffering, it was the ignominy of the cross that he endured that was the lowest point that he had to reach for God to reward him with the highest office of lordship as a Redeemer.

Worthy to Be Lord

Perhaps one last passage to point to the fact that the slaughter of the Lamb was what made Jesus a fitting ruler of all the peoples of the world — namely, Revelation 5:9–10:

Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals [in other words, “Worthy are you to be the Lord of the unfolding of history”], for you were slaughtered [esphagēs, not died in a remote village at age 85], and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.

So, for those six reasons at least, I would say, we can say that the glorification of Jesus Christ and the achievement of our salvation did indeed require the kind of sufferings he endured, and we will sing the song of the Lamb, the slaughtered Lamb, forever and ever as a tribute to those sufferings and our salvation.

Does theology serve doxology? It ought to. God means to be worshiped, but not in ignorance. He wants to be known and enjoyed and praised for who he is. Which is why he doesn’t just demand the worship of his creatures, but first reveals himself to us so that we might know him, and therefore delight in him. Theology, our study of God, serves doxology, our worship of God.

Jonathan Edwards, known for both his Reformed orthodoxy and his creative expression of it, helps us with a fresh way to approach God’s attributes, in service of our worship. From a few basic truths — God is simple, God is incomprehensible, God is happy, and God creates — we see more of what God is and, by his grace, are freed to marvel at him even more.

God Is Simple

Begin with the statement, “God is simple.” Understanding divine simplicity is not simple; it’s complicated. Think of it this way: created things are made up of parts; we can break them down into things more fundamental than they are. A person is composed of body and soul. We can distinguish what you are (your essence) from the fact that you are (your existence). We can distinguish things that are essential to what you are (like being a rational creature) from things that are non-essential or accidental (like having red hair). We can do the same sort of composition with all sorts of attributes and qualities.

Divine simplicity essentially says, “God is not like that.” That is, he is not composed of parts. You can’t break him down into things that are more fundamental than he is. There is nothing behind God that makes God what God is. He simply and absolutely is. Even his old-covenant name, revealed to Moses at the burning bush, testifies to this: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).

A popular theological way to express divine simplicity, both in Edwards’s day and our own, is “everything that is in God is God.” In other words, God doesn’t have attributes in the way that you and I have attributes. He’s not composed of attributes or qualities or excellencies or perfections. Whatever God has, God is.

God Is Incomprehensible

Now, this is difficult for us to comprehend. That’s why theologians also say that God is incomprehensible. Simplicity and incomprehensibility go hand in hand. Because God is simple (and we are not), we can’t comprehend him. That is, we can’t wrap our minds around him. Our knowledge of him is always creaturely — finite, limited, and partial.

“We can know God truly, though not fully.”

Of course, we can know him, because he reveals himself to us. And he reveals himself to us in ways appropriate to our creaturely limitations. To put it simply, God speaks human to humans, and humans always speak about God according to our way of conceiving. We can know God truly, though not fully.

God Is Happy

Not only is God simple and incomprehensible; God is also happy. In fact, he is infinitely, eternally, unchangeably, and independently glorious and happy. He is free from all need, want, and lack.

This happiness is an infinite happiness in himself. From all eternity, God has perfectly beheld and infinitely rejoiced in his own essence and perfections. He has known himself with perfect clarity and loved himself with perfect delight.

“From all eternity, God has known himself with perfect clarity and loved himself with perfect delight.”

Thus, God has always beheld a perfect, full image of his perfections. This image is so perfect and full that a second person stands forth in the Godhead. In other words, God’s knowledge of himself is so rich that by eternally thinking of himself, a second person is eternally begotten. This is the Son of God, the image of the invisible God and exact imprint of his nature (Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3), the eternal Word who is with God and is God (John 1:1), the eternal Son who is always at the Father’s side (John 1:18).

More than this, the eternal and mutual love between Father and Son is so rich and full that this love stands forth as a third person in the Godhead. In other words, God’s love for himself is so rich that by loving and delighting in himself, a third person eternally flows forth from the Father and the Son. This is the Holy Spirit, the breath of the living God (Psalm 33:6), the supreme joy and delight of God in God (Luke 10:21), the infinite river of his eternal delights (Psalm 36:8).

And each of these persons is truly and fully God. The whole divine essence truly and distinctly subsists in each, and yet there is only a single, simple divine essence. This too is incomprehensible: one glorious and happy God eternally subsisting in three distinct persons.

God Creates

Thus far, we have spoken of the simple, incomprehensible, and triune God as he is in himself. The triune God lives in himself, knows himself, and loves himself, and thus possesses unchangeable happiness in himself. But the living and triune God did not remain by himself. In his perfect freedom, he chose to communicate himself outside of himself by creating the world from nothing.

With creation in view, we can now speak of God in himself and his triune being (as we’ve done above), as well as God in relation to his creatures. This relation to his creatures generates a myriad of attributes, perfections, and excellencies, according to our human way of conceiving. Thus, God’s “absolute (or real) attributes,” as Edwards calls them, flower into God’s “relative attributes.”

In this way, we may now speak of God’s power, which is simply the fullness of divine being in relation to the things God does and can do. God’s wisdom is simply God’s own knowledge directed to finding appropriate means to accomplish God’s purposes. God’s love for his creatures is simply God’s love for himself as it is brought in relation to the creatures who reflect and image him.

Flowering of Divine Excellencies

This flowering of relative excellencies continues as God creates, sustains, and governs the world. God’s faithfulness is his love as it bears upon the promises that he makes. God’s righteousness is his knowledge and love as they rightly order and structure reality in fitting proportion, according to the proper value of every created thing. God’s mercy is his supreme love for himself as it encounters weak, pitiable, and broken sinners. God’s wrath is this same supreme and holy love as it collides with stubborn, stiff-necked, and idolatrous rebels.

Again and again, God’s absolute excellencies — his being, his knowledge, and his love — are brought into relation to all aspects of the world, its creatures, and its history, and thereby generate God’s relative excellencies, according to our way of conceiving.

Many of these relative excellencies identify the perfection of qualities that we know in and from creation. Thus, as creatures, we come to know goodness in the world and then follow this created goodness back to the God who is the Supreme Good. So with wisdom, majesty, mercy, grace, faithfulness, justice, power, and other positive relative excellencies. We see the creaturely echoes of these divine properties all around us, and we follow them back to their ultimate source, where they dwell in their fullness and eminence.

Negative Attributes

On the other hand, some of God’s relative excellencies are “negative attributes.” If “positive attributes” take creaturely goods and trace them back to their infinite divine origin, negative attributes take creaturely limitations and deny that God is limited in this way. Consider the negative terms that we ascribe to God: infinite, immutable, eternal, and the like.

Each of these speaks of God by denying to him some creaturely property. Divine infinity denies that God is limited and finite as creation is. Divine immutability denies that God changes the way that creation does. Divine eternality denies that God is bound by time. Divine ubiquity (or omnipresence) denies that God is limited by space. Even the two attributes that began this essay — simplicity and incomprehensibility — are negative attributes, the first denying that God is composed of parts, and the second denying that the infinite God can be contained by the finite mind of man.

God and No Other

God’s attributes aren’t merely qualities that he happens to have. They are essential to him. They are our descriptions of his being, his essence, his very nature, his God-ness. Because he simply is who he is. Everything in God is God.

God is light — pure, simple, white light. God is. God knows. God loves. More specifically, God is himself, God knows himself, and God loves himself. He is the triune God, absolutely full and happy in himself.

Then, this God, the living God, freely creates the world. And when he does, the pure, simple, white light of his being, knowledge, and love shines through the prism of his creation. The white light is refracted into all the colors of the rainbow, as God himself is brought into relation to every aspect of the world he has made. This refracting is what enables us to know him. The flowering of God’s relative excellencies in creation is so that clay pots can have some idea of what the Potter is like. Like Moses, we see the glory of God “from the back.” We grope and we strain and we labor to find words to describe our Lord, who is God and there is no other.

Infinity Clothed in Flesh

And then, wonder of wonders, this God — infinite, eternal, and unchangeable; simple, incomprehensible, and happy — does the unimaginable. The God who lacks every creaturely limitation freely chooses to clothe himself with such limitations, uniting his infinite and eternal being to finite and temporal human nature.

If the excellencies of the simple, incomprehensible, and happy God blow our minds, how much more when this God takes on flesh and dwells among us? And not only dwells among us, but loves among us, suffers among us, dies among us?

The heights of God’s absolute and relative attributes, and his positive and negative attributes, lead us to the depths of his love as the Son comes down from heaven for us and for our salvation. The glorious excellencies of his deity are united to the diverse excellencies of his humanity so that, in Christ, the full range of perfections, both human and divine, are united in one person, Jesus of Nazareth, who is worthy of all worship.

And so, our theology — careful, rigorous, and detailed — leads to doxology — full, overflowing, and abounding with joy.

Occasionally, as I lie down to sleep, a restlessness bends over my bed. A vague uneasiness. A nagging sense of some tension unresolved. Some door in the soul swinging on its hinges. The stirring of an unquiet conscience.

As I relive the day, I see why. Prayers hurried or skipped. An evangelistic opportunity avoided. Grievances nourished. Self-promoting words snuck into conversations. The “prayer request” that was probably gossip. Precious time squandered. Encouragements unthought and unspoken. As the old prayer book says, “I have left undone those things which I ought to have done; and I have done those things which I ought not to have done.”

Was this a fitting response to your God? I ask myself. Was this “walking in a manner worthy” of him? Sometimes I drift off with such questions unresolved, fitful and self-reproaching yet tired enough to succumb to sleep.

But not always. Some years ago, I found unexpected help in the poem of a long-dead pastor, who asked the same questions, felt the same guilt, yet found in Jesus a rest far sweeter than sleep.

‘Even-Song’

George Herbert’s (1593–1633) “Even-Song” closes a series of three poems in his collection The Temple, beginning with “Mattens” and continuing with “Sinne (II).” The titles “Mattens” and “Even-Song” refer to morning and evening prayers in the Anglican church. And “Sinne” — well, that captures what often happens between those morning and evening prayers.

“Even-Song” is not a prayer for every evening. Herbert does not assume we only ever end the day self-reproachful, with sin having wrecked the day’s resolves. But he does assume we sometimes do — and that, often, even the most faithful Christians kneel beside their beds deeply wishing they had walked in a manner more worthy of their God.

What do we say at the end of such days, when we feel the gulf between God’s kindness and our unworthy response? More than once, “Even-Song” has met me at my bedside, speaking clarity and comfort to my troubled conscience. It has become a faithful nighttime friend.

As Night Draws Near

    Blest be the God of love,Who gave us eyes, and light, and power this day,  Both to be busie, and to play.  But much more blest be God above,

    Who gave me sight alone,  Which to himself he did denie:  For when he sees my waies, I dy:But I have got his sonne, and he hath none.

As night draws near, Herbert looks back, remembering God’s morning gifts of “eyes, and light, and power this day, / Both to be busie and to play.” Our Father, “God of love” that he is, opens the storehouses of his heart from the day’s first moment. As Herbert celebrates in “Mattens,” “I cannot ope mine eyes, / But thou art ready to catch / My morning-soul and sacrifice.” “Yours is the day” (Psalm 74:16), the psalmist says. And Herbert, surrounded by God’s gifts, feels it.

For sinners like us, though, one gift rises above the rest. The God who gives us “eyes, and light” for daytime labors also gives us another kind of sight, “Which to himself he did denie: / For when he sees my waies, I dy.” Alluding to Psalm 130:3, Herbert remembers that God, in Christ, does not “mark” our iniquities, even when we do; in a sense, he does not see the sins we see.

And why? Because “I have got his sonne, and he hath none.” God gave up his Son at the cross — and at the same time, he gave up the sun that would otherwise shine upon our guilt. Jesus buried our sins in darkness on Good Friday, and on Easter Sunday, they did not rise with him. And so, in the glory of the gospel, God no longer “remembers” the sins of his people (Hebrews 8:12); he no longer sees them. They are buried, hidden, unseen, kept forever in darkness.

But they do not always feel buried, hidden, unseen. And so, Herbert takes us back to his “troubled minde.”

Troubled Mind

    What have I brought thee homeFor this thy love? have I discharg’d the debt,  Which this dayes favour did beget?  I ranne; but all I brought, was fome.

    Thy diet, care, and cost  Do end in bubbles, balls of winde;  Of winde to thee whom I have crost,But balls of wilde-fire to my troubled minde.

Like a good father, God meets us with favor morning by morning; his “diet, care, and cost” send us into the day strengthened and renewed. But all too often, as we approach home in the evening, we dig in our pockets, wondering how we could have taken so much and brought back so little. “What have I brought thee home?” Herbert asks. “I ranne; but all I brought, was fome” — or, a few lines later, “bubbles, balls of winde.” Insubstantial nothings.

Approaching God with fists full of wind may not trouble the spiritually nominal, who care little whether they please God or not. But for those who have tasted the kindness of God, and have seen the cross as its cost, such wind can become “balls of wilde-fire to my troubled minde.” The sun has set on the day’s regrets, with no time now to remedy them, leaving us with a thorn-pricked soul. A pillow of self-reproach. A smoldering conscience.

On nights like these, some simply try to sleep their guilt away. Others search for some rationalization. Still others pray, but not in a way that douses the fire in their minds. What does Herbert do?

Closing Our Weary Eyes

    Yet still thou goest on,And now with darknesse closest wearie eyes,  Saying to man, It doth suffice:  Henceforth repose; your work is done.

    Thus in thy ebony box  Thou dost inclose us, till the day  Put our amendment in our way,And give new wheels to our disorder’d clocks.

Herbert, with wild fire burning his troubled mind, turns to God and says, “Yet still thou goest on.” The “God of love” has yet more love stored up, more favor to offer. He began the day by giving us “eyes,” and now, as night overtakes our burdened souls, he “with darknesse closest wearie eyes.” And not just with sleep: God, in mercy, closes our eyes to our sins, just as he, in Christ, has already “closed” his.

“In response to our weary, day-end regrets, God gives not more work, but rest.”

As God closes the soul’s eyelids, bidding them be blind to the day’s confessed sins, Herbert imagines him “saying to man, It doth suffice: / Henceforth repose; your work is done.” In response to our weary, day-end regrets, God gives not more work, but rest. Our work, however pitiful, can be done at day’s end because God’s perfect work of redemption is done (John 19:30; Hebrews 10:12–14). And we, by faith, “have got his sonne.”

Thus God “incloses” us in “thy ebony box” — surely a reference to a coffin. The biblical writers saw sleep as an image of Christian death (John 11:11; 1 Thessalonians 4:14), and Herbert, tapping into the theme, treats nighttime as a daily rehearsal for the moment when our ebony box will be made of wood and not of night. On that last twilight, some of God’s true children, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, will look back and ask, pained, “What have I brought thee home / For this thy love?” Our troubled nights teach us how to answer that question, readying us to lie peacefully upon our final bed as we wait for God to close our eyes, put us to sleep, and keep us for the resurrection day, which will “put our amendment in our way” — which will raise us sinless and whole, children of the everlasting morning.

Until then, we live like old timepieces, “disorder’d clocks” whose hour and minute hands begin the day aligned with God yet often slowly get off track. And every morning, God rewinds us, no matter how disordered from yesterday, and once again strengthens us to run.

Rest Deeper Than Sleep

    I muse, which shows more love,The day or night: that is the gale, this th’ harbour;  That is the walk, and this the arbour;  Or that the garden, this the grove.

    My God, thou art all love.  Not one poore minute scapes thy breast,  But brings a favour from above;And in this love, more then in bed, I rest.

As God carries us from morning to evening, we move from favor to favor, mercy to mercy, kindness to kindness. By poem’s end, Herbert muses which of the two, day or night, “shows more love”: The gale that sends us through day’s waters, or the harbor that holds us at night’s shore? The walk that takes us through day’s labors, or the arbor that receives us into night’s rest? The garden of daytime strength, or the grove of nighttime forgiveness?

“In Jesus, we find a rest beneath our rest, a pillow under our pillow.”

The question cannot be answered. In Christ, God gives us power to work for him, and he gives us pardon to rest in him. Both have their peculiar favor; God’s children prize them both. And so, “not one poore minute scapes thy breast, / But brings a favor from above.” Not one minute of the day is unadorned by the love of God — whether daytime love or nighttime love, strengthening love or forgiving love.

Herbert closes, “And in this love, more then in bed, I rest.” In Jesus, we find a rest beneath our rest, a pillow under our pillow, comfort of soul surrounding the comfort of sleep. Such rest and comfort depend, ultimately, not on what we give to God (though we long to give him much and more), but on what he has given to us: “his sonne.” And so, even the frustration and futility we feel toward day’s end can become a mercy, delivering us into a deeper rest than sleep can give.

I love the old word equanimity. It’s almost fallen out of use today. Perhaps that’s because, in part, the reality has become increasingly rare. Equanimity is a term for composure, for emotional calmness and presence of mind, particularly in trying circumstances.

We’re living in times that condition us to overreact and explode, in a society that rewards outrage and outbursts. It’s never been easy for sinners to keep even tempers in trial, but present distresses summon us afresh to learn composure under pressure, how to “hold our peace” when the moment requires it, and give release to emotion in its proper time and place. Our families and churches and communities need leaders who have learned to keep their heads when others are losing theirs, to not lose control in anger or self-pity but keep a sober mind, and be, like our God, “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6).

We need to bring equanimity back.

Non-Anxious Presence

The road-tested wisdom of Proverbs 16:32 whispers to those with ears to hear,

Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty,and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.

“Our families and churches need leaders who have learned to keep their heads when others are losing theirs.”

Count “he who rules his spirit” as a biblical phrase for equanimity and holy composure. Note well, the wise man neither smites his spirit nor takes orders from it. He neither stuffs his emotions nor lets them play king. Rather, he rules his spirit. He learns how to keep his spirit cool, his temper even, in moments when fools get hot, weak kneed, and their passions carry the day.

This is not stoicism. Christians have long called this “self-control.” We aim not to be men without spirits but those who keep “a cool spirit” under duress, when the immature lose control. We do not discard our emotions (as if we could) or suppress them, but by God’s grace we seek to bring our spirit increasingly under the control of his Spirit.

Holy Calm

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) commends the “holy calm” of godly strength and praises the Spirit-empowered composure to which God calls his people and provides — and all the more in times volatile and easy agitated.

The strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ appears in nothing more than in steadfastly maintaining the holy calm, meekness, sweetness, and benevolence of his mind, amidst all the storms, injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts and events of this evil an unreasonable world. (Religious Affections, 278)

Foreign as “holy calm” and equanimity might seem in our frenetic and furious age, we are well aware of the present challenges to our composure — which Edwards names in language we could hardly update more than two hundred years later: “storms, injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts and events of this evil and unreasonable world.”

Superlative Meekness

Yet Edwards not only commends “holy calm” in Christ’s soldiers. He presses deeper. He celebrates it in our captain and Lord himself. “In the person of Christ do meet together infinite majesty and transcendent meekness,” he writes, which are “two qualifications that meet together in no other person but Christ.”

Only God has infinite majesty; only in becoming man does Christ have meekness, “a virtue proper only to the creature.” In this meekness, Edwards says, “seems to be signified, a calmness and quietness of spirit, arising from humility in mutable beings that are naturally liable to be put into a ruffle by the assaults of a tempestuous and injurious world. But Christ, being both God and man, hath both infinite majesty and superlative meekness” (“Excellency of Christ”).

Who among us has not felt the temptation “to be put into a ruffle by the assaults” of our lives and age? And what comfort might we take that God himself, in the person of his Son, entered into our same “tempestuous and injurious world” and exhibited such an unusual and admirable “calmness and quietness of spirit”?

Sinless as he was, Jesus had his emotional moments as he dwelt among us. We do not presume he was “calm” when he took up a whip and cleared the temple with zeal, or when he wept at Lazarus’s tomb, or when he prayed, in anguish, in the garden, with loud cries and tears. Yet apart from a few exceptions, the Christ we encounter in the Gospels is strikingly calm. A man of equanimity indeed — a model of the kind of composure that we his people want to grow in, and can grow in, by the power of his Spirit.

Severely Injured and Remarkably Calm

For Edwards, such equanimity wasn’t theoretical. It was all too real, in fact. Years of injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts in this evil, unreasonable world came to a head in the spring of 1750. His trial was his own congregation, the church he had pastored for twenty-five years. His own people dismissed him after a week of painful proceedings. However, from all surviving accounts, he never lost his composure.

Even though the church dismissed him for his spiritual views about church membership, they couldn’t help but commend his “christian spirit and temper.” As biographer George Marsden reports, “Edwards’ demeanor during these proceedings apparently was remarkably calm and helped earn him this affirmation even from his opponents. His supporters viewed him as simply saintly” (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 361). One observer of the long, gut-wrenching process wrote,

I never saw the least symptoms of displeasure in his countenance the whole week, but he appeared like a man of God, whose happiness was out of the reach of his enemies, and whose treasure was not only a future but a present good, overbalancing all imaginable ills of life, even to the astonishment of many, who could not be at rest without his dismission.

Even as Edwards, before his God, received “these afflictions as a means of humbling him” — and he did suffer deeply, and had his own failings — he held his peace. He showcased an equanimity under strain that could not be pretended, a composure arising from decades of grounding and a happiness “out of the reach of his enemies,” from a treasure that was “not only a future but a present good” — that is, from looking to Equanimity himself, the preeminent man of God, and God-man, seated at his Father’s right hand.

Edwards — like Stephen, whose “face was like the face of an angel” (Acts 6:15) before his accusers — looked to that same face as church’s first martyr, who

full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” (Acts 7:55–56)

Asleep in the Storm

No doubt, Edwards, like John Owen (1616–1683) before him, would have us “study Christ more,” not only to “recover spiritual life” when we find ourselves to have “decayed” spiritually, but also “to have an experience of the power . . . in our own hearts” that would feed composure and produce equanimity in trying times.

As we look habitually to Christ, as we find him communicated to us in the Gospels, we observe a man who is stunningly calm. What composure, what self-control, what holy equanimity he demonstrates again and again when failed by his disciples, interrupted by the infirm, imposed upon by the well-meaning, challenged by the sophisticated, and disrespected by the authorities. He even shows us what calm is possible in our own storms by what he did in a literal storm: he slept.

And when they woke him, he was not frantic but spoke stillness into the wind: “Peace. Be still.” And so the calm of his own spirit settled over the raging sea: “the wind ceased, and there was a great calm” (Mark 4:39).

Face of Composure

So too, as we look to Christ at the right hand of the Father, in glory, we see the one who not only modeled such composure in our own skin and setting, but now, with all authority in heaven and on earth, he upholds us and makes it possible for us to find the feet of composure.

“We cannot study the real Christ too much. We cannot look to him too often. We cannot meditate on him too much.”

Christ, as man, is not only our example of Christian equanimity. Seated on heaven’s throne, he is now God’s mediatorial king who, by his very reign, makes our progress in equanimity to be holy, rather than delusional. We not only follow him, imitating his calmness; we have faith in him as the world’s only unshakable footing for real and lasting composure. We can scarcely even begin to estimate what healing there is for the flighty, ruffled soul, what health and strength and stillness may be found in “the frequent actings of faith upon the person of Christ,” as Owen says.

Beholding the glory of our Lord — in his striking Gospels calmness and his present imperturbable equanimity — we are “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). We cannot study the real Christ too much. We cannot look to him too often. We cannot meditate on him too much.

In coming as near to him as we can, and abiding in him as much as we are able, we will in time learn more of that holy stillness of soul, that godly composure, that glorious equanimity, and a thousand other graces besides.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15464575/how-does-the-word-produce-new-preferences

Few realities in human life are as captivating, fulfilling, and elusive as friendship. Most of us have tasted its deep and dynamic potential for good at some point along our journeys, and yet most of us can also testify to having neglected friendship, maybe for years. Maybe for decades. As Drew Hunter observes, “Friendship is, for many of us, one of the most important but least thought about aspects of life” (Made for Friendship, 23). How much time do you spend thinking about your friendships?

Many of us give our friendships less attention than they deserve, and we suffer for it. The absence of good friends slowly starves everything else we do. A husband without good friends will be a worse husband. A mother without good friends will be a worse mother. A pastor, a doctor, a teacher, and an engineer will all be less effective at their callings without the support and camaraderie of friends. And this thread weaves quietly through Scripture. How many saints can you think of who do something worth imitating while friendless?

To be sure, Jesus stormed the grave by himself. It had to be so. And yet even he spent most of his life and ministry with a handful of guys. And as the cross drew near, he said to them, “No longer do I call you servants . . . but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). He may have died alone, but he lived among brothers, because friendship is an essential part of being fully human.

Unnecessary and Vital Love

That being said, friendship is an unusual relationship because it’s not essential to existence. It’s why friendship is so often neglected — and, ironically, why it holds so much power and potential.

C.S. Lewis writes, “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival” (Four Loves, 90). We spend tens of hours a week on work because we would die without food and shelter. Friendship isn’t feeding the kids or paying the mortgage. But it can make parenting richer and more bearable, and make a home feel a lot more like home.

We may be able to live — to eat, drink, work, sleep, and survive — without friends, but what kind of life would that be? The truly good life, we all know by experience, is a shared life. Lewis goes on,

Our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels. (98)

“We may be able to eat, drink, work, sleep, and survive without friends, but what kind of life would that be?”

Unnecessary and angelic — this describes the mysterious reality of friendship. It raises, or even removes, the ceiling on all our other experiences. Most of what we love to do, we love to do all the more with friends. Those who find meaningful friendship experience a nearly super-human life. Why? Because they get to see more of God, and because they get so much more done, together.

Personal Windows into God

How does Christian friendship raise us above the unremarkable rhythms of our humanity? First, by intimately introducing us to more of God’s creativity and supremacy. Those who see him together will see more of him. Lewis captures this capacity of friendship when he writes,

Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. . . . The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have. (79)

The beauty and worth of God cannot be exhausted by one pair of eyes, by one finite mind and heart. Therefore, two really can see more than one. The more we share of him, the more we have of him. Surely, this is one reason why God plans to redeem people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, right (Revelation 7:9). Because whatever makes each of them unique prepares them to notice and treasure dimensions of Christ that millions of others might miss.

So it is in friendship. As we gaze at God together, over months and years and longer, walking through joys and sorrows, victories and losses, blessings and adversity, we get to see him through each other’s eyes. Worship is communal and contagious. Every human life has the potential to be a unique window into the divine. Because that’s who God is — Father, Son, and Spirit forever adoring and glorifying one another.

Courage in Flesh and Blood

As friendships help us see more of God, though, they also unleash us to live more radically for God. What good have any of us done in the world without the help or encouragement of friends? As you take yourself back through anything you’ve accomplished in life and ministry, and then allow yourself to look around for a minute, what do you see? For many of us, we see faces. The most defining moments of our lives have been most defined not by addresses, degrees, or promotions, but by people — often, by friends.

Hunter highlights the unusual and spiritual productivity of friendship:

One of the greatest gifts we can offer our friends is sheer encouragement. As we listen and light up to their ideas, we stir their souls into action. We lift their hearts and spur them on. Much of what is truly good in the world is the fruit of friendship. (71)

Why did Jesus send the disciples out in twos (Mark 6:7)? Perhaps he was concerned for their safety on the road (a kind of grown-up buddy-system). It seems far more likely to me that he wanted them each to have built-in, by-their-side courage to keep going when ministry got hard. He knew they would do far more good as twelve pairs than they would on twenty-four different paths. He knew they would conquer sin and Satan together in ways they couldn’t alone.

Friendship Isn’t About Friendship

These two insights about friendship — that friends helps us see more of God and that they free us to do more for his glory — explain what makes friendship precious. And what makes it possible. Good friendships, after all, aren’t about friendship, which means we won’t experience them by focusing on them. Again, Lewis, wisely observes,

Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly every about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some interest. (78)

“Good friendships aren’t about friendship, which means we won’t experience them by focusing on them.”

Lovers often find one another looking for love. Friends find one another while chasing something else. They providentially collide while striving after God, while studying his word, while loving their families, while meeting needs in the church, while discipling younger believers, while pursuing the lost. “The very condition of having Friends,” Lewis continues, “is that we should want something else besides Friends. . . . Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers” (85).

If you want to experience real friendship, go hard after God, take bigger risks to glorify him with your life, and then look around to see who’s running with you.

Audio Transcript

We end our week together talking about trials and temptations. It’s a sobering topic, but one relevant to each of us at some point, maybe with some of you right now. We start with what we know for sure. God tests us. He does. That’s clear in texts like James 1:3–4 and 1 Peter 1:7. But then comes the question: Does God ever tempt us? James 1:13 says no, God never tempts us. But what really is the difference between being tested and being tempted? Here’s a sharp Bible question from a listener named Mike: “Dear Pastor John, in APJ 694 you said that the word for ‘temptation’ and the word for ‘test’ are the same word in the Greek, peirasmos. So how are we to understand the differences in meaning of the two words in passages where it talks about God testing us (James 1:3–4; 1 Peter 1:7), and then in James 1:13, where it says, ‘God does not tempt anyone’? How do we put those together?”

That is an utterly crucial question. We so need to get that clear, for God’s honor and for our own peace of mind. So let me set the stage as best I can so that everybody can get on board with what the problem really is as Mike has presented it here.

Trials, Tests, Temptations

In 1 Peter 1:6–7, it says, “Now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials [and the word there, peirasmos in Greek, could be translated ‘temptations’ or ‘testings’], so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

And then, similarly, in James 1:2–4, it says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet [testings or temptations or] trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” And then in James 1:12, he adds this amazing promise about the outcome of tested faith. He says, “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial [same word], for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.”

Now, all these testings are merciful trials from the hand of God in the way he disciplines and purifies and stabilizes and preserves his children. We know that Jesus tested his disciples (John 6:6). We know that God tested Abraham (Hebrews 11:17). So we set the stage for this problem first by establishing from 1 Peter and James that God does indeed test people. He does. He “tests” people — and the word there, peirasmos or peirazō, is the same as the word for “tempt.” There’s the problem. He puts us through trials.

Double Problem

Now, the second part of setting the stage for the problem is to observe that in James 1:13, James uses the same word for testing, peirazomai, and we translate it “tempt.” He says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” It’s the same word as the word for “test.” So, that’s the setting of the stage.

Here’s the double problem:

When James says, “God tempts no one,” the word tempt is the very same word in Greek for test, and we know God does test people.
He says that God cannot be tempted, and yet we know that Jesus was tempted (same word) in the Gospels in the wilderness. In Matthew 4:1, the Holy Spirit drove him out to be tempted. And Jesus is God in the flesh.

So, James expects us to make a distinction in the meaning between the testing that God in fact does bring into our lives righteously, and the tempting that God never does, even though he uses the same word for both of them. He expects us to make that same distinction in order to show that God is never tempted himself and yet Jesus, who was God, was in some sense tempted.

Now that’s the challenge that Mike sees in these verses and is asking about, and he’s right to see them. I’ve seen them for years and wrestled over and over again with how to understand this. James is not tripping up here. He knows exactly what he’s doing, since he puts the two words together back-to-back in two sentences. It’s not like he forgot that ten years ago he used the word one way.

Four Steps of Temptation

I think the key to solving both of these problems is found in the next two verses (James 1:14–15) and the way James carefully defines temptation. It’s probably the nearest thing we have to an analysis of temptation in the Bible. He is talking about our experience of it and how God doesn’t experience it and doesn’t perform it. Here’s what he says in James 1:14–15: “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” So, there are four steps in this process of what James is calling temptation.

There’s desire, which may at first be innocent. In fact, I think, at first, most of them are innocent.
There’s the desire becoming an enticement and an allurement across a line into sinfulness and sinful craving and sinful desire: like the desire of hunger, which is innocent, crossing the line into gluttony; or the desire of natural sexual appetite, which is innocent, crossing the line into lust; or the desire of your paycheck — it’s not wrong to want to be paid so you can pay your bill — crossing the line into greed. That’s the second step.
Then there’s the act of sinning itself, in which the sinful desire is put into action.
And then finally, when that pattern of sin goes on without repentance, it results in eternal death.

God Is Not Tempted

Now, I think the reason that James says God is not tempted, even though Jesus was tempted, is that the innocent desires like hunger, or the desire for sex, or the desire for our paycheck are the beginnings of being drawn toward what could be a sinful desire of gluttony, lust, or greed. And in that sense, the awakening of that desire is a kind of temptation, but it has not become a full-blown temptation. For example, in the life of Jesus, he hungered (an objective allurement toward bread) when he was fasting, but it didn’t cross the line into an evil desire of rebellion or disobedience or undue craving for what God had told him not to have. In fact, none of Jesus’s desires in his whole life ever crosses the line into evil desire, and therefore never gives birth to sin.

“None of Jesus’s desires in his whole life ever crosses the line into evil desire, and therefore never gives birth to sin.”

So, we can speak of him being tested or tempted in the sense that he’s presented with objective allurements, like bread when he is hungry, so that he experiences hunger or desire, and in that sense, temptation, but it’s never taking him captive by allurements and enticements that cross the line into sinful desires.

God Does Not Tempt

And in the same way, I would say, God does not tempt, because — now this is really delicate, so listen carefully — at that point in the human life where we cross the line from experiencing objective allurements (say, like food: you smell a steak or see an ice cream cone), at that point of a legitimate desire crossing the line into sinful desire (like the second helping, or something the doctor told you shouldn’t have, or something that’s really part of gluttony or lust), at the point of crossing that line, the Bible ordinarily describes God’s action as handing us over or giving us up (Romans 1:24, 26, 28) — giving us up to our lust, giving us up to a debased mind.

In other words, God is not described as the positive, creative, active agent at the point where our desires become sinful. If you’re going to involve God by providence here, which I do, his action is a negative action, in the sense that he hands us over, he lets us go, he gives us up to our sinning at that point.

Crucial Distinction

So I don’t think James is contradicting himself. I think he expects us to make a distinction between temptation understood, on the one hand, as objective allurement that need not involve sin, and temptation understood, on the other hand, as the movement of that allurement across a line so that the desire becomes sinful. And the line between desire as a thankful, God-dependent desire and desire as an assertive, self-indulgent desire is crossed when the temptation happens, which he is saying God never experiences and God never performs.

“Our faith in God and our love for God are being tested with every temptation.”

And if we step back and ask the question of why the New Testament would use the same word for testing and temptation, perhaps part of the answer is that every test really is a kind of temptation. And every temptation really is a kind of test. Our faith in God and our love for God are being tested with every temptation. And every test, if we do not act in faith, can result in our falling into temptation. So when James says, “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life” (James 1:12), that same promise applies to resisting every temptation as well.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15461102/how-the-word-of-god-brings-about-faith