4 Releasing Perfection for Progress: Temptation

4

Releasing Perfection

for Progress

Temptation

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

To repent is not to look downwards at my own shortcomings, but upwards at God’s love; it is not to look backwards with self-reproach but forward with trustfulness; it is to see not what I have failed to be—but what by the grace of Christ I might yet become.

I REMEMBER DRUMMING MY FISTS against the mattress. It was dark inside my college dorm room, and my face was buried inside my pillow. I kept repeating “Why?!”—hoping it wouldn’t reach my roommates’ ears.

It began earlier that day in an Intro to Philosophy course, when a seemingly random thought—a dark and seductive thought—entered my mind. I brushed it away pretty easily, but remember feeling ashamed it showed up there.

In those days, I hadn’t learned to distinguish my thoughts from the alien thoughts that sometimes appeared there.

I thought all thoughts were my thoughts.

Late that afternoon, I left campus and returned to my apartment. I had a few idle hours before I needed to start delivering pizzas and something about that triggered the thought again. This time it came with more force and I didn’t just push it away. I could feel myself wanting to entertain it.

I hated temptation—I still do.

I hate the way it makes me feel, the way it tears at me, the way it drives a wedge between the person I am and the person I want to become.

Temptations: What They Are and How They Work

Temptation is an essential part of purgation. Unlike spiritual practices, which we take up by choice, temptation is thrust upon us. We don’t seek it out—it seeks us.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, temptations are called logismoi (pronounced lo-gee-smee). These aren’t just passing thoughts; they are persistent, intrusive urges that distort our God-given desires. They work by bending something good just enough to twist it out of shape—like a bent screwdriver that becomes barely useful for what it was made to do. For example:

We could name a thousand more ways temptation twists our good desires, but we don’t need to. We all know what they feel like. They bombard us every day.

My Latest Tactic

To avoid my temptation that afternoon, I tried one of my newest tactics.

I dug out of my backpack a beat-up index card and read: “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13). I remember reciting that line aloud in my empty apartment—again and again. I had other tactics too:

The index card tactic created a little relief, and I managed to get the thought out of my mind long enough to get a few things done before changing into my pizza delivery uniform. Of course, I was still thinking transactionally, treating temptation as something I could outsmart or overcome by quoting Bible verses or getting an accountability partner or listing off pieces of the “armor of God” (see Ephesians 6:10-18). In other words, all I had were tactics—which wasn’t bad, just limited.

That five-hour shift buzzed by.

I remember getting back to the apartment late, catching up with my roommates, and calling it a night. Entering my room, I shut the door, unfolded the tens and twenties from my pocket—and the thought returned.

I looked for my index card but couldn’t find it.

So I grabbed the Bible off my desk and thumbed to 1 Corinthians 10, my eyes racing to verses 12 and 13. In the dim light of the small room, I sat spinning in one of those cheap 360-degree office chairs reading and rereading—wanting to escape, desperately wishing the thought and all of its accompanying feelings would disappear.

On the third reading, I felt myself hand over consent. I couldn’t take it.

I closed my Bible—and gave in.

And that’s why I was drumming my mattress: How could I have betrayed the life I longed to live? What was going on inside me?

The Cruel Cycle

The writers of Scripture use two Greek names for our adversary. The first is diabolos (the devil), which is derived from the word dia-balein, “to throw apart, to scatter.” It suggests one who casts things around, who craves disorder, disarray, and division.

The second is ho satanas (Satan), meaning “the accuser”—the one who seeks to expose all the darkness and shame and weakness within us. Satan delights in pointing out every little fault, every mistake, every way in which we go wrong and stray.

Because of the work of diabolos—the one who divides—we all enter the purgative stage with desires pulled out of alignment. These distortions are negative habits, or what the old writers called vices.

Looking back, it’s easy to see that the enemy had been tempting me to disorder my God-given desires for a long time, seducing me to misuse them. Which, as Basil the Great teaches, is really what sin means: the misuse of powers given us by God to do good.

Sin is not a thing, but the misuse of good things. And the deeper these misuses take root, the more natural they begin to feel, trapping us in ways we barely recognize.

Every time I fell into the first disordering temptation, the enemy would follow it up with a second, more subtle and cunning one. In the midst of my frustration about my first stumble, I would welcome his second temptation in the form of accusations and condemnations:

“If you were stronger, this wouldn’t even be a temptation.”

“You should’ve overcome this by now, others have.”

“If people knew the real you, they’d walk away.”

Without realizing it, I began agreeing with him, eventually embracing what I thought was humility—worthlessness. Maybe you have too. Sometimes you’ll hear it in church, of all places. Being humble, they say, is about being dung—a wretched sinner. Dallas Willard diagnosed this belief as “Worm Theology,” which equates humility with self-loathing. It’s a doctrinal perspective rooted in the misuse of biblical language. It mistakes outward displays of self-deprecation for true humility. That is, the more someone wallows in their unworthiness, the more humble they believe they are. But this is not humility. Not even close.

And that’s what I was experiencing that night: Not only did I have to bear the burden of living with disordered desires, acting in a way that I didn’t truly want; I had to bear the second burden of feeling worthless for it.

I call this the cruel cycle of diabolos and ho satanas: I do something I really don’t want to do—and then I condemn myself with disparaging thoughts of valuelessness and uselessness and shamefulness for doing it. That double burden leaves me more wounded, more divided, and more susceptible to the next temptation.

A Peculiar Kind of Progress

I remember understanding that God forgave my past sins—and perhaps my one-off mistakes—but how could he continue forgiving the ones that were so premeditated and deliberate? The ones I kept repeating? The ones I kept saying yes to?

Here I was, living out both sides of my mouth. It’s hard to build a relationship with someone like that, I thought. What I never dreamed at the time, was how God would use my chronic sins to powerfully demonstrate his nature to me.

I think it was the alcoholic priest Brennan Manning who finally convinced me. I recall listening to one of his audio cassette tapes in my car for the first time. His voice had an incredible range, seamlessly shifting from tender whispers to fierce shouts. I can still hear him passionately yelling:

Do you believe that the God of Jesus loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity—that he loves you in the morning sun and in the evening rain—that he loves you when your intellect denies it, your emotions refuse it, your whole being rejects it? Do you believe that God loves without condition or reservation and loves you this moment as you are and not as you should be?

That was a foreign thought.

I could understand how God might love someone who walked away, realized their mistake, and came back—the prodigal son made sense. But what about someone who kept coming back only to turn away again? That I wasn’t sure he could stomach. I know I couldn’t.

But my picture of God was small.

I imagined him as a perfected version of the best people I knew—a bigger and better version of Billy Graham or Mother Teresa, perhaps. But even those two, in all of their rich saintliness, divided their love. They chose when and when not to love. God doesn’t do that.

God is love, Saint John said.

I have love—he is love. His love isn’t merely something he does; it’s who he is. Herbert McCabe put it this way: “God never changes his mind about you. He is simply in love with you. What he does again and again is change your mind about him.”

And that’s exactly what was happening to me in my purgative stage.

God was changing my mind about him, undoing my small, distorted image of the petty god I had imagined. The god whose patience always seemed to wear thin. But that wasn’t him—not even close.

I was letting go of the belief that my weakness exhausted him.

It was illuminating. God was introducing himself to me, not as a God of limited mercy but of infinite mercy. I thought his first act would be to purge my obvious vices. Not so. His first move was to purge my misconceptions about who he was.

This was a surprising step.

My biggest obstacle wasn’t sin—it was the way I saw God. And that, it turns out, was a peculiar kind of progress.

A Subversive Strength

As all of this began to sink in, I noticed a paradox about temptation: The more I seemed to lose, the more I gained. Beneath the surface of my overt struggles, a deeper kind of victory was unfolding. François Fénelon, a seventeenth-century spiritual director, saw it long ago: “Temptations are a file which rub off much of the rust of our self-confidence.”

For me, that “rust” was the illusion that true apprenticeship to Jesus meant overcoming temptation on a predictable timeline. Somehow I had absorbed a strange perfectionism—the belief that real devotion would produce steady progress. If I was serious about following Christ, I wouldn’t struggle for long.

It’s not that I expected to become flawless overnight, I knew that was a mirage. But I did expect to see quicker progress, to resist more successfully, to overcome temptation with increasing ease. I believed that kind of steady improvement would prove my apprenticeship to Jesus was real.

But my repeated failures shattered that illusion. The rust was coming off.

It turns out God wasn’t just changing my mind about him; he was changing my mind about me. He was dismantling a self-confidence so deep I didn’t even know it was there. As that happened, I began to see my struggle differently—not as proof that I was a failure but as evidence of how deeply the work of sin had wounded me.

The truth is, we’re all born into a world marked by a billion broken choices, where evil and temptation have been at work long before we arrived. For decades, our desires are formed within this chaos, in ways that we do and do not consent to—all of which makes sin feel natural to us.

Recognizing this shouldn’t excuse our stumbles, but it should take some of the pressure off. If years of formation in sin have shaped us, then it will take years of transformation in Christ to unshape us.

None of this means we aren’t transforming. Transformation still happens, even in our failures to resist temptation. Again, I had assumed every stumble meant my transformation was stagnant.

But what if transformation isn’t about overcoming all of our obvious vices first? What if God, in his patient, maddening, and inconspicuous way, is subverting those very vices in a way we can’t yet understand? What if he is doing deeper, more transformative work that we can’t see or feel in the moment?

In other words, what if our failures aren’t disqualifying us but somehow playing a role in deepening us?

The Eleventh Chip

You can do this, I repeated to myself as we crossed the restaurant floor. The hostess was leading us to our usual table. And I had a plan this time. I knew what to do. You can do this, Jon.

“Welcome,” the waitress said as we slid into our familiar U-shaped booth. “What can I start you with?”

“Water for the kids, please,” my wife said, opening a crayon pack. “Oh, with lids!” she remembered to add. The kids were young, ages two, four, and six.

“And for you, ma’am?” the waitress asked.

“I’ll have a margarita on the rocks, with salt.”

“And for you, sir?”

“Frozen with salt, thanks.”

The waitress smiled, jotting on her miniature notepad. “Okay great, I’ll get that started for—”

“Oh ma’am!” I interrupted, remembering the thing I really wanted. She grinned—she wasn’t a ma’am at all, she was a college student—but that didn’t stop me from using my manners. “Can we get an order of queso blanco?”

“Sure, I’ll get that right out for you.”

I smiled. “Thanks.”

Queso blanco is my all-time favorite appetizer—warm, melty cheese topped with guacamole and a sprinkle of fresh cilantro. Now’s a good time to confess I have a portion-control problem and have been working unsuccessfully at it for years. I know I need to make a change. I hate the way overeating makes me feel—bloated, gluttonous, and guilty. On this particular evening, my plan was to eat only ten chips. Just ten, no more.

“Want to play Tic-Tac-Toe?” my six-year-old asked.

“You’re on!” I replied.

The game began, and I started in on the chips. My son placed his O.

“Going for the three-corner-strategy, aye?” He giggled. We’d been working on this for a few weeks. Let’s see if he can pull it off. I kept eating, still on pace with my plan, but I could feel my will weakening.

My son drew his O in the opposite corner. “I know what you’re doing!” I said. More giggles. I was forced to block, placing my X in the middle space at the top. I glanced at the chip basket and felt a tinge of sadness because I knew I’d have to stop eating soon. Why do I feel sad about that? It is just queso, right?

My son placed his next O in the correct space, securing his victory. I was proud he was going to beat me. My hand went back to the basket.

What chip was that? Seven? Eight? Just call it eight.

Then my son looked at me with a big grin, realizing he couldn’t lose. We both laughed as I futilely placed my final X in a random space.

My hand returned to the basket for the tenth time. Then came the temptation: Overeating would make it harder to overcome your portion problem—but on the other hand, it’s the weekend. You’re celebrating . . .

No, I interrupted. Stop rationalizing. Just take your final chip and break it into smaller bites. That will prolong things. So I dipped my final pieces.

“Can I play?! Can I play?!” my four-year-old shouted.

I remember time slowing down. I just sat there, staring at the basket. I had reached my limit. But there was so much queso left. And I just stared at the chips in a trance-like state.

“Can I play, Dad?” my daughter said, tugging my sleeve.

I couldn’t stop looking at the chips. Something was wrong. How could something so simple be so hard?

“Dad?”

My hand returned to the basket.

The Failures That Form Us

Gluttony is still with me. I haven’t conquered it yet, and God hasn’t taken it away. I’m not sure why. But it may have something to do with what we’ve been exploring.

Maybe some failures remain, not to condemn us, but to cultivate something deeper.

I once read in an old letter of spiritual direction—though I can’t recall where—that humility deepens as we learn to patiently tolerate our imperfections.

When I fall, I’m forced to face the truth about where I actually am. That kind of honesty strips away my illusions of control and pushes me toward dependence—dependence that becomes the soil of humility.

But humility isn’t self-pity. It’s the clear-eyed recognition of how tangled my desires have become. From that recognition, something begins to shift. The same weakness that once filled me with shame starts to open me to mercy. I become a little gentler with myself, a little more compassionate toward the untransformed parts of who I am.

And that compassion doesn’t stay contained. It’s begun to overflow—into my wife and kids and coworkers. I’m less like a tyrant than I was. I’ve stopped trying to force people to grow on my timeline. Why? Because if I’ve been shaped by a billion broken choices, if my own desires are this tangled, if transformation takes time for me—then it will take time for others too.

That’s transformation.

It’s not what I expected. It’s not freedom from gluttony—at least not yet—but it’s real. It’s not the order I would’ve chosen, but that’s okay. I’m learning to let go of control. To be sure, my thimble-full of humility hasn’t made me invincible. I still stumble. But the difference is this: Some of those stumbles are becoming stepping stones.

This is the kind of failure that can form us: Progress in Christlikeness doesn’t come only from making the right choices; it also comes from responding wisely to the wrong ones.

Mercy Is Not an Escape

As my self-confidence slowly unraveled, I realized I could accept myself at any moment of my transformation—because God accepts me at every moment of my transformation.

Not that he lets me stay that way. God’s love woos and weans—it’s forgiving enough to receive me as I am and fierce enough to forge me into who he made me to be.

And maybe that’s the danger of everything I’ve shared so far. You might think I’m saying sin doesn’t matter, or that you can ignore it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Mercy is not an escape from sin.

We all live with the consequences of our choices, experiencing their inevitable outcomes. These consequences, however painful, are not designed to be punishments. They are designed to be purifying. As George MacDonald repeatedly taught, God’s fire is not meant to destroy but cleanse.

God’s love will not rest until we love as he loves. The consequences of sin, though painful, are a means of purgation. They are like warning signs urging us to stop, to turn back before going further down a dead end. Not because we risk falling beyond God’s redemptive gaze or grace (that’s impossible), but because the shortcut leads nowhere and the return journey is steep.

Receiving God’s mercy isn’t about escaping the consequences of sin. Forgiveness doesn’t remove responsibility. Like Christ, we must make an atonement—not to earn anything, but to freely participate in our salvation, to become one. To quote Willard once more: “Christ was not crucified so that we wouldn’t have to be. He was crucified so we could be crucified with him. He did not die so that we wouldn’t have to die; he died so we could die with him.”

Yes, we are forgiven. But we must work with him for the freedom we long for. Dying is hard work.

Do not make peace with sin. Do not grow lax. Vice is a hard master.

Saying Yes to Being Created

Even after coming to understand some of this, I still struggled with a deeper theological question: Why would God allow temptation to exist in the first place?

It echoed the question I was asking about affliction in the previous chapter: Why not create a universe where we could only choose what is good and never go astray? Why permit the possibility of wrong at all?

Why plant a forbidden tree?

Why let the serpent into the garden?

Why not intervene before the fruit was plucked?

The more I dug into those questions, the more I discovered that the world I was hoping for was really no world at all.

It was a fiction.

A world in which I follow a script and every danger is really no danger at all, just a carefully placed plot point to keep things interesting. No, I’m not a character in God’s divine story. My choices are not predetermined or meticulously planned.

I’m shockingly free. We all are.

God has gifted us with a staggering dignity—a grand nobility—the gift of freely choosing to be created. That may sound puzzling, but here’s what I mean. You weren’t given a choice to enter life; you were simply born. But you are given a choice to enter into the kind of life of which your current one is simply a shadow—a life of ever-deepening love.

God waits for your consent, for your yes.

He waits because that’s what love does. It invites and it waits. It doesn’t coerce. It doesn’t force. It beckons. When we give our yes, it sets in motion the creation of the divine life within us. Like Mary, we’re all asked the same question: Do you want to bear God in your body? Do you want Christ to grow within you?

God waits.

He waits for us to freely say, “Yes,” to join Mary’s chorus, “Be it unto me” (Luke 1:38 KJV). But he not only waits for our first yes—he waits for a thousand yeses still, and a thousand more. Because it takes all of our finite yeses, combined with God’s one infinite yes, to form Christ within us.

This is the kind of flourishing freedom we’re given.

But if we have freedom to flourish, we also have freedom to flounder, warp, and construct a contorted kind of life. Good things can go bad. They can lack something—or as the old writers put it, they can suffer privation.

A cavity exists only because of the tooth.

A shadow only because there is light.

A lie only because there is truth.

And freedom to flounder is only possible because there is freedom to flourish.

So it’s true: Freedom allows us to warp—to hurt and be hurt in horrifying ways—but it also allows us to cherish and be cherished, to embrace and be embraced, to care and be cared for.

C. S. Lewis was right, “Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”

Standing on a Beach

But even now, after decades of walking with Jesus across this threefold path, I still fall into temptation and betray the life I long to live. The journey toward union, toward humility, is a long and winding road.

It’s surprising how self-loathing makes a comeback, tempting me to embrace worthlessness, trying to convince me that I’m disqualified to follow Jesus, seducing me to abandon the journey. It whispers that I’m an impostor, that my failures expose me as a fraud, that I don’t belong among the followers of Jesus, that my vices disqualify me from the grace I long for and write about.

It’s a powerful lie.

Nowadays, when I hear it, this is what I do:

I close my eyes and imagine I’m standing barefoot on a beach. A charcoal fire burns nearby. The sun is melting into the water. Jesus stands in front of me, eyes fixed on mine, his hands on my shoulders. And he asks me that familiar question:

“Do you love me?”

And I just stare back into his eyes and say, without any hesitation: Yes, I love you, Lord.

But then the betrayal and shame and embarrassment come tumbling back into my mind, and I start obsessing about my mistake—the foolishness and repetitiveness and immaturity of it. His grip tightens on my shoulders and he asks again:

“Do you love me?”

I try clearing the debris from my mind. The more I do, the more I recognize that loving him may be the only thing I’m absolutely sure of. So I say it again: Yes, Lord, I love you.

He smiles, and asks me one more time, knowing that each question is dismantling my delusion:

“Jon, do you love me?”

And a little water pools in my eyes and I manage to get it out: Yes.

Two Kinds of Yeses

I’ve come to see that this is the essential question after succumbing to temptation, the illuminating question. In moments of my deepest clarity, sobriety, and sanity, my response is always yes!

Yes to love.

And there’s this—it’s been so important for me to understand that not all of my yeses are created equal.

There is a yes I offer when succumbing to temptation, no doubt, but that yes is always hesitant, timid, torn—like a weed subsisting at the surface of my life. It isn’t wholehearted. It comes from confusion or craving, sometimes just fatigue or boredom.

But there is a deeper yes.

Do I love Christ? Yes.

That yes comes from the core of my being, from the part of me that longs for union with God. That yes isn’t about avoiding sin; it’s about wanting God.

It’s that yes—the deeper yes—that I’m building my apprenticeship around, that I’ve come to see is my truest identity.

The shallow yes is part of me, I know that. But it’s not the deepest part. The deep yes says:

Yes to the Spirit’s transforming work.

Yes to being made like God.

Yes to loving Christ.

Purifying Preparation

There is much more we could explore about temptation. We could note that temptation itself is not sin. We could face the difficult truth that we cannot rid ourselves of it entirely. We could describe it as something we suffer, much like affliction. We could even dissect logismoi into its stages—suggestion, deliberation, and choice—or dive into resistance techniques to strengthen our no muscles.

But none of that really matters (and may even mislead us) if we don’t first have an accurate picture of God and ourselves. Without that understanding, the ground of our soul remains untilled, and the seed of humility withers.

The purgative stage, in all of its forms of training, affliction, and temptation, accomplishes that groundwork.

It’s the purifying preparation that steadies us to plant for illumination.

A story from the Desert Fathers captures the heart of that preparation. When a young man asked what life in the monastery was like, an old monk replied, “We fall down and we get back up. We fall down and we get back up.” That simple rhythm resonated deeply with the struggle I faced in those purgative days. If monks fell, then so would I. Growth wasn’t about never falling—it was about learning to stand again.

I had been pounding my fist against the mattress all those nights ago because my transactional mindset couldn’t process imperfection. But I slowly learned that if I was going to make progress, I had to embrace that rhythm: falling down and getting up, falling down and getting up.

This is progress.

And from there, I began to find strength. The saints have always known this, the longer we live in the pattern of Christ, the more grace reshapes and transforms us. Temptation doesn’t disappear, but it loses its grip, its appeal, its power to fascinate.

That’s the promise of following Jesus through purgation. It doesn’t guarantee a life free from struggle, but it does promise a life free to struggle—with hope, not fear; with mercy, not condemnation.

It’s progress, not perfection.

In Sum

↑ Back to top