Telling the Truth

Guest (Male): Today on Telling the Truth, Jill Briscoe teaches from the series Triumph over Temptation and shares how you can dodge the snare of temptation and keep your spiritual edge sharp. We want to help you grow strong in your faith as you conquer temptation by sending you Triumph over Temptation, a powerful four-message series by Stuart and Jill Briscoe.

We'll send you a copy of Triumph over Temptation as thanks for your gift today to help continue Stuart and Jill's legacy of helping others experience life in Christ. So call today to request your copy of Triumph over Temptation: 1-800-889-5388. That's 1-800-889-5388, or you can give online at tellingthetruth.org. Now, here's Jill Briscoe with her powerful message, "Getting Off the Roof."

Jill Briscoe: By the age of 20, David, battle-ready, had killed his first giant. What made him a giant-killer? Well, all his young days, he was alone, a shepherd on the hills of Galilee. He learned quietude. He learned solitude. He learned to love God and obey him. He did well for about 20 years. He made his mistakes, of course, but he battled on and God blessed him and prospered him and empowered him and honored him and put him on the throne of Israel.

He fought and won battles with the giants of pride, greed, fear, and despair, and he wrote Psalms that today go around the world. Time sped. Youth and young adulthood passed by and God's heart smiled. David's mighty men joined his forces in government and in the army. They who'd risked everything to share his exile while Saul was hunting. They were given places of prominence and quite rightly so, and there was none so loyal as Uriah the Hittite, one of his closest friends, whose father too was one of God's mighty men with David in the stronghold, and whose father was Bathsheba's grandfather, one of David's most trusted counselors and friend.

David's on the throne and the giants continue to fall left, right, and center. Sometimes David fought and was wounded and sometimes he very nearly died. Then came middle age. The giants of wrath conferring which of their number to send out to face David next chose one of their most trusted and best: Giant Temptation. "Let's see what you can do," they said as they sent him on his way from the dark places. Giant Temptation hunkered down to wait his opportunity and it was not long in coming.

It was at the time that kings went forth to war, David stayed in Jerusalem. Giant Temptation camps our homes a happy hunting ground. We're going to read about that for the first six verses in 2 Samuel chapter 11. "In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab. He sent him out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army, and they destroyed the Ammonites and they besieged Rabbah, but David remained in Jerusalem."

"One evening, David got up from his bed and he walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof, he saw a woman bathing and the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to find out about her and the man said, 'Isn't this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?' Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, he slept with her. She'd purified herself from her uncleanness, then she went back home. The woman conceived and sent word to David saying, 'I'm pregnant.' So David sent word to Joab, 'Send me Uriah the Hittite.'"

Giant Temptation comes to all of us. All of us know him. Sometimes we don't recognize him. All of us know what it's like to be on the roof, to be faced suddenly with a temptation that we're not prepared for. Giant Temptation knew that David shouldn't have been on the roof in the first place. He should have been out fighting the battles of the Lord. He'd always been at the head of his army. He'd always led Israel to conquer and to fight. First the Philistines, now the Ammonites, etc., etc.

In the time that kings went forth to war, David stayed at home. That sounds as if there's a season for war, and in a sense, there was. It was springtime. Why? Because they didn't have concrete on their roads. They got stuck in the mud. They had to wait till the rainy season was over. They had to wait till the fields had food, because how else could they supply the army and keep them fed? And so in the springtime, that's when kings went forth to battle in those Old Testament days. David was captain of the army of the Lord and he should have been there. So why did he stay home?

Every Middle Eastern house has a flat roof. It's wonderful. Stuart and I have been many, many times in Israel and the Middle East, and in Arab homes and in Israeli homes, and we have been invited in the evening to go up on the top of the roof just to get out of the stifling heat in the tiny little streets around Jerusalem and to get a breath of fresh air. You wander around or you sit and you talk and you have refreshments up there. There are steps up to the roof on the side of the house. When you think of the little square house, you can think of the steps.

I want to talk about the steps up to the roof because David climbed steps to get himself where he shouldn't have been. That's what we do too. The first step, I believe, was laziness, laxness. He'd let his discipline slip, his physical disciplines. In the evening, he got out of his bed. What's he doing in his bed till the evening? Well, he had a nap, like everybody does in the Middle East if you're not fighting the battles of the Lord. You're supposed to get up about 3:00 and get on with your life.

This was well past 3:00. He's lazy. He's allowing his 50-year-old body to deteriorate, and spiritually he's middle-aged as well. That can happen to us. We can get so that we get lax, so that we get lazy. We can lose our elasticity. I think of a rubber band and how it can be stretched and stretched until it won't go back into shape. We can lose that spiritual edge just as David did. Giant Temptation waits and he looks and he's aware of when that happens in our lives.

How had David grown up? Loving the Lord and loving his word. Read Psalm 119. It's all about the law of the Lord and how he'd learned it and memorized it, how he had it in his heart. Did you know that in Deuteronomy, there are rules for kings of Israel? One of them has to do with the word of the Lord. Let me read what it says. In Deuteronomy it says, "When you are king of Israel, oh man, you must not acquire great numbers of horses for yourself. You must not take many wives or your heart will be led astray. You must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold," all of which David had done, and Solomon his son more so after him.

It goes on. "When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law. He must take it from the priests and the Levites. It is to be with him. He's to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees." Whoever became king—Saul, first king; David, second king; Solomon, third king—had to go and spend some time with the Levites and the priests. They gave him a clean scroll and a pen, and he'd sit there among them and he would copy the Ten Commandments on a scroll and the decrees that came out of them.

He was to carry it with him into his throne room, onto the battlefield, into his bedroom. It was to be with him all the days of his life and he was to revere the Lord our God that wrote those laws.

Guest (Male): That's Jill Briscoe on today's Telling the Truth. She's headed right back to God's word for more about how to avoid the snare of temptation. But before we dive back in, temptation is nothing new. It's been around since the dawn of mankind and it's not going anywhere as long as we're on the earth. You'll face temptation every day, but sometimes moment by moment. So we want to send you a special resource to help you stand strong in God's word when temptation does come along.

It's a four-message series from Stuart and Jill Briscoe called Triumph over Temptation, and they created it to help you not only conquer temptation but to grow stronger in your faith as you do. This series will give you powerful biblical tools to defeat sinful desires and encourage you with the truth that every temptation to do wrong is also an opportunity to do right. We'll send you Triumph over Temptation as our thanks for your gift today to keep sharing the life-changing truth of God's word with people across the globe through the resources and teaching of Telling the Truth.

So call today to request your copy of this resource: 1-800-889-5388. That's 1-800-889-5388, or you can give online at tellingthetruth.org. Now, let's go back to Jill.

Jill Briscoe: As I read the Ten Commandments that David had written on his scroll, it struck me that David had at least broken six of them by the time this story's through. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength and your neighbor like Uriah, like Bathsheba, as yourself." Put their interest first. "Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not lie. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."

Somewhere along the way, the scroll got lost or laid aside or other scrolls got read, just like happens to us. When is the last time you opened this word and you couldn't wait to read on and on and on and it gripped your heart? When did you last hang your heart over it? When was the last time you spent time with God? You say, "Jill, I read my Bible every day." I didn't say when was the last time you just spent time with your Bible. I said when was the last time you spent time with God, with your Bible, with him pointing out the points?

If you let God read his Bible to you, it's an altogether different thing. David somewhere had started divorcing reading the scroll from doing what the scroll said. He just began to do it, just like we begin to do it, and it gets rote and it gets a bit uncomfortable and we begin looking at the watch we have on our soul and seeing, "Oh dear, I've got 10 minutes left." Somewhere along the line, he lost his spiritual edge. He just lost it, bit by bit by bit. No wonder he was on the roof. It's the first step up to the roof.

When I was converted, the girl who led me to Christ signed me up for what's called the Navigator memory system. She said, "I want you to memorize scripture." "Why?" I said. She said, "Because it will help you." And so I began to memorize scripture. In the end, she had me memorize and say to her, at different intervals, 500 verses from this Bible, including the context. To this day, hundreds of years later, I remember what I remembered when I memorized it.

For example, Psalm 119:9 and 11, David's Psalm about the Bible. "How shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to his word. Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee." For example, 1 Corinthians 10:13, "There has no temptation taken you but such as is common to man. But God is faithful and he won't allow you to be tempted above the ear able but will with the temptation make a way to escape so you can get out. Get off the roof. Bear it, deal with it, say no."

Second step: self-indulgence. He had power, success in every dimension of his life. Doesn't mean it's wrong to acquire material goods. The Bible doesn't say that money is evil. It says the love of money is the root of all evil. There's a little subtle difference there. Of course money isn't evil. Money is neutral. It's what you do with it. It's what you do with the horses and the houses and the accumulation of all these things.

When I was writing about Solomon, it's incredible. All the things Solomon, David's son, accumulated that he shouldn't have done. I wonder why. At the end of the long list of how he'd accumulated people and women and harems and lands and orchards and everything else, it said, Solomon speaking, "I never said no to myself." That's the problem with power. You get into a situation with power where you have control over people and over things.

You find yourself in a position where it seems legitimate to accumulate things. You think you have things, but things have you. The love of any of those things is the root of all evil and that's what happened to David. I have to tell you something. Temptation itself isn't sin. The first thought David had as he looked at Bathsheba wasn't sin. The second one was. All of us are tempted. To have a thought put in your mind, either from your computer where a porno thing pops up and you look—the first look isn't sin. The second look is.

If you don't push that delete button immediately and you allow that thought to take you to the next one, you're gone. You're gone. Temptation isn't only a possible seduction, but it has the possibility of strengthening you. It's not only a weakness, but it can show God's strength. Not only does the devil try to destroy us through temptation, but it's God's way of strengthening us.

The devil uses a three-prong attack: the world, the flesh, and the devil. Did it with Jesus. Jesus was hungry, a God-given appetite. "Well, you've got miraculous powers, Jesus," says Satan. "I know that. Turn those stones into bread. Satisfy your legitimate God-given hunger." Jesus said no. "If I satisfied my God-given legitimate hunger for bread, that would be illegitimate, for God has not given me permission at this particular time to satisfy that particular God-given desire."

Jesus said no and stayed hungry. Is it ever right for us to stay hungry when a God-given legitimate appetite, like for bread or for sex, says, "Eat, take, get her"? How can it be wrong if God has given us this? Why should we say no to it? I remember speaking at Madison when I first came over here. We'd been working with kids, street kids for 13 years in a youth mission, and I was delighted to be invited to go onto the campus and speak with the Christian Union.

I get there and I do my thing and I felt I was done and I was going home. They said, "I hope you don't mind, but we put on a little open-air meeting in Madison campus where everybody congregates." It was in the days, it was in the '70s, a long time ago, when everyone was marching for a cause on our university campuses. They said, "Everybody congregates to march for whatever cause it is, and we can't remember what it is this time, but that's a great opportunity to have an open-air meeting."

"And if we get a Christian speaker like you, then we put them up in this crowd at lunchtime and let you speak to them." I said, "Well, why didn't you tell me about this before you invited me?" By now, we were walking towards the middle of Madison campus where this crowd was gathering. Then they said, "Well, I hope you don't mind, but we gave you a subject and we advertised it." I said, "What's that?" They said, "Do Christians believe in sex?"

I said, "What? You gave me that to speak now to these?" I tell you, I don't do very well in those situations. I'm praying where's Stuart? He does marvelously thinking on his feet. It was too late. We were there and I saw ahead of me my opposition. When you're doing open-air work, it's always good to find your opposition in the crowd. He was a football player and he had girls hanging off him in every direction. I thought, "There is my opposition."

I simply defined love. I defined the love of God, I defined Eros, sexual sensual love, and I defined human love. When I got to Eros and I defined it as the feeling too big for words, the young man interrupted me. He said, "That's right! It's a feeling too big for words! But if it feels so good, it must be right!" I said, "God, I need something to shut him up." I had no idea, and into my head came a fact I'd read somewhere.

I said, "Young man, listen to me. Are you aware that you have the physical capacity to populate a small village and feel good doing it?" He was not aware of this, and nor was anyone else. "Can this be right?" I asked him. What I didn't know was God's timing that day, for the march that was getting ready to go from that particular place in Madison campus was against overpopulation. Yes! God was on my side. Everybody turned and glared at this young man. "How dare he go about populating small villages?" Gave me a chance to speak into that.

Guest (Male): That's Jill Briscoe on today's Telling the Truth. We all struggle at times with sinful desires and selfish motives. When you do, you must remember that every temptation to do wrong is also an opportunity to do right. That's the empowering truth Stuart and Jill Briscoe want to help you grasp when they created their four-message series, Triumph over Temptation. This series will equip you with powerful biblical truth to help you triumph over temptation and grow your faith in the process.

Triumph over Temptation is our thanks for your gift to keep sharing the teaching and resources of Telling the Truth with so many people around the world. Generous friends like you keep broadcasts like this one going, reaching others with God's healing love so they can experience life in Christ and find strength to carry on with courage. If you haven't given before, consider a gift today to help keep God's word going out around the world to you and many others.

Remember to request your copy of Triumph over Temptation when you call and give. Just call 1-800-889-5388. 1-800-889-5388, or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org. Now here's Jill to answer a couple of questions on today's message.

Jill, what is the difference between just reading your Bible and spending time with God?

Jill Briscoe: It's sort of the difference between opening a letter and reading it, and having the door open and the person who's written you the letter walk in. FaceTime, where you can see the body language and get the message that isn't on the paper, maybe. I don't know if that's a good analogy or not. The Bible is a letter in a sense. It's God's word to us, written on paper, black words on white paper. It contains some very important things which actually you have to talk about. You can't just read it.

It's saying if you do this, then you might lose your life. Well, I'd want that explained. So the Bible is to read and then prayer is to talk about it. That's what you have to do. You can't just read what it says. You have to say, "You must be kidding, God. We need to talk about this," or, "Help me, Lord," or, "Do I understand this?" You have to have the conversation.

Guest (Male): Jill, we live in a world where no is almost a bad word. So how do we learn to say no to ourselves and our own self-indulgence?

Jill Briscoe: You learn to say no by practicing to say it. So just start. Look for opportunities to say no. How do you learn the piano? You practice. Maybe you need to just take a little alert test today. Get a paper and pencil, a little notebook, and carry it around with you. Every time you have to say no over something insignificant or something nonsense, but you have to say no—"I'm sorry, I can't meet with you. I have to go and pick up my child from school"—every time you say no, just write it down.

Then have a look at it at the end of the day and say, "Well, that was easy, it was obvious. But this was pretty hard. They wanted to meet with me and have coffee and it's important." Should you have said yes or should you have said no? Just start and look at your actions during the day and then talk about it in prayer at night. You'll figure it out.

Guest (Male): Thanks, Jill. Before we go, we want to remind you, when you give to continue Stuart and Jill's legacy of sharing God's word through Telling the Truth broadcasts like this one, we'll say thanks with the Briscoe's four-message series, Triumph over Temptation. These encouraging messages will help you defeat temptation and grow in your faith as you do. So please, request your copy when you call 1-800-889-5388. 1-800-889-5388, or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org. Thanks for being here today. Come back next time for more encouragement from God's word. Tune in and experience life here on Telling the Truth.