Every temptation is an invitation to worship. This has probably not crossed our minds lately but it is true. I believe the reason we know so very little about real worship is because we have destroyed it in our incorrect response to temptations. Typically we have believed that the right way to react to temptations is to stuff our feelings, exercise strong will-power, fight to suppress all our urges and force our external behavior to conform to religiously correct norms. If you have very strong will-power you may be able to look good and perform correctly, but actually without realizing it you may have wounded your own heart even more. When we build walls around our hearts to shield us from temptation those same walls prevent us from experiencing and expressing what our hearts were originally designed for. Religion has become so devoid of heart experience today that many people turn to other sources to try to keep their hearts alive. In effect, they fall for the second-best notion that because their heart actually can be felt during temptation then giving in to temptation may be a way to enhance being in touch with their heart. Innately we all know at some very deep level, even if we have spent years of training contrariwise, that we were designed to live from our hearts primarily. That is simply the way human beings are wired. It is unavoidable but also a great source of consternation for religionists and pain for everyone. We have developed all sorts of programs and alternatives to satisfy this need, but most only end up crushing us even more and causing further damage and pain. After it gets too intense to endure we then switch in desperation to another technique that promises to nourish our hearts and free us from bondage only to be further wounded and crushed, shamed and devalued. The heart was designed to find its fullest fulfillment and joy in abandoning itself in creative and unique expression to another heart. It craves the reception of the same for itself – another heart that abandons itself in complete trust and transparency to my heart. The result of two or more hearts taking this kind of ultimate risk is called joy, something very few of us know much about. But we have tasted just enough to know we don't want to live without it. In fact, life is really pointless unless we can figure out how to connect with it. But how does temptation relate to this? Temptation is an invitation to abandonment, promising in return some kind of satisfaction and nourishment for our heart. Temptation is an invitation to trust someone or something to bring us a little bit of life and fulfillment of the cravings we naturally feel in our heart. Unfortunately, if we view the cravings themselves as the problem and try to attack, shame and suppress them, we only end up crushing our heart instead of experiencing growth in an opportunity to worship. Worship, if correctly understood, is an invitation to the very same experience as temptation. To really worship our hearts must be drawn out into an experience of freedom and abandonment to another heart. In that freedom the heart wants to receive love that is secure and unconditional and forever reliable. In that atmosphere trust can begin to flourish and quickly expand. Affection is received and expressed, awakened and deepened. Joy begins to appear and motivate us pursue deeper relationships. Joy is the emotion and experience of being cherished and valued by another heart and it quickly multiplies exponentially in this environment. The heart is satisfied, strengthened, it can rest and be at peace. It can experience boldness and be courageous in the face of anything. In short, real worship will produce what was briefly seen in the history of the early New Testament believers but is seldom seen authentically today. So how should we respond to temptation? If suppressing our heart is counter-productive and death-producing, what should we do with our emotions and urges? If we understand these feelings as actually desires to worship and not sources of sin, then instead of suppressing them we should instead redirect them. We must understand that our heart needs sources of life and will always seek for them, even more intensely if it has been starved and beaten into repression by intellectualism or formal religion. If we come to understand that our heart cravings are not wrong, we can begin to respect our heart's needs and desires and encourage their expression both in ourselves and others, which is in fact an act of worship. Worship is simply choosing a source from which we desire to receive life and pleasure and then surrendering control of ourselves to that source to receive what it has to give, be possessed by it and be transformed to become more like it. The problem always comes in surrendering to sources that cannot give us real life. Obviously many sources promise to be life-giving, some with much fanfare and exhibition. Many sources carefully package themselves to look very genuine or reinforce their claims to be reliable sources by assembling impressive credentials and endless arguments in their favor. Many proposed sources of life claim to be God-endorsed and compile great ramifications of scripture and other quotations to enforce their claims. They also use the carrot/stick approach and threaten that if you do not accept their claims and demands that you will suffer unimaginable amounts of pain, possibly for eternity, if you do not subscribe to their beliefs and submit to their control. So how do we know what is life-giving and what is not? For too long we have tried to rely solely on left-brain arguments and methods to condense the answer to this dilemma from endless amounts of research or attempts to determine which “authority” can be trusted among the myriads of competing voices. Or we may turn to “emotionalism”, a technique of simply throwing ourselves into any emotional experience that offers itself and hoping that by trial and error we will discover the true source of life for our heart before it runs out of life in the process. That's what Solomon tried and reported his findings in the book of Ecclesiastes. Both of these solutions eventually leave us damaged, confused and more deeply hurting than before we started. This is the condition in which most of us find ourselves. Identifying the true source of life to nourish our heart is something that has to be guided by the heart, not just by the head (left brain). Our hearts function very different than our minds. The heart is even baffling to the logical mind and defies explanation in verbal language. The heart was created to find satisfaction in intimate connection with other hearts, not in formula-based, rigid, intellectual strictures and controls. The heart longs to be felt and understood to some extent by another heart. It longs to experience and express boundless affection. It wants to thrive, to expand, to feel, to sense, to live in real reality. God has placed eternity in our hearts and we are always dissatisfied with anything less. If we learn to cherish and value and love our own hearts the way God does, then we will be empowered to love other people's hearts and connect with God's heart thereby receiving the life and energy and fulfillment that our heart was created for. When Jesus said we were to love our neighbor as ourself, He was stating a maxim as much as a command. Our ability to love our neighbor's heart is predicated on how much we acknowledge and care for our own heart. This is not selfishness and self-serving. That is the counterfeit. Selfishness seeks to appease and satisfy the false gods that live in us, not our true heart. Those gods are parasites that clamor for more and more nourishment while robbing our true heart of life-giving needs. These gods purport to be our identity, but in fact are foreign to our true selves. They are like cancer that grows and wraps itself around more and more of our internal organs, but should never be mistaken to be a legitimate part of our being. The God of heaven is a very jealous God and will not share space with any other gods. He is fighting for the life of our true heart, our true identity, our true self. He created it to start with. Then He redeemed it on the cross, earning the right to receive back what was taken away from Him at the fall of man in the garden. He is the only source of real life that fits our heart's cravings and He is doing everything possible to reconnect the supply line and begin resuscitating our dying souls. His heart is hurting worse than ours and is also desperate, passionate to be understood, shared and joined back into unity with our hearts. The appropriate response to temptation in the light of the above then is to give in to our truest heart's desires and acknowledge them and accept them. When we carefully uncover the root of every desire we feel when we are tempted, we will discover that the desires are not bad or evil but are symptoms of emptiness and hunger. We must expose the truth about our heart's needs and recognize that the offer of the temptation will not satisfy as promised. The need felt in our heart is legitimate and is really a desire to worship, to receive and give life. We must resist the notion that our cravings and needs, the deep desires of our hearts are the problem. We must avoid attacking and condemning the desires of our true heart or of those around us. Instead of worshiping (indulging in a false source of life) the little gods that cannot deliver real satisfaction to us as promised, we must redirect our hearts attention and emotional energies to the channels God has provided for us to receive life from Him. These channels may be our spouse, our friends who are sharing the journey with us, and of course a direct communication to God's heart and mind through prayer and receiving His messages from the Word and the Holy Spirit. If any of these channels are clogged or broken we will experience pain and reduced growth. Clogged and damaged channels are often found in lack of heart connectedness between spouses, dysfunction and pain in families and churches, isolation in the community and the presence of prejudice and bigotry. Pride glazes over our perceptions and blinds us to the true nature of our restricted sources of life. Over the years our hearts slowly shrivel and waste away and we accept our condition as “normal” since the people around us are not much different. We medicate the painful symptoms, deny them, repress them or whatever other gimmick we can employ to avoid them. We insist that we are fine and continue the charade of the walking dead. Our description is well defined in the Revelation message to the church of Laodicea. Salvation is the process of restoring (salvaging) us to a fully-functioning rhythm of living from the heart as God originally created us. “Until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.” (Eph. 4:13 Message) Salvation is God's method of restoring us to living in reality, having openly expressive hearts, living transparently and not avoiding any emotions. Being fully alive involves knowing our maturity and living in community to increase our maturity. Temptation is any diversion that tries to derail and subvert us from experiencing being fully alive. Accept the offer of temptation to express worship. Go ahead and give in fully to the desires of your heart. Just redirect it from the false source that temptation offers to the true source that it is counterfeiting. Then through every temptation we will find fresh opportunities to release worship and experience increased life. “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.” 1 Pet. 4:12,13. Jesus was the only man who lived fully from His heart. This caused Him untold suffering but also freed Him to experience unrestricted joy. “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” Heb. 12:2,3. The primary tool of the enemy against us is shame. Shame is devaluing our worth and identity. Shame sets us up for temptations and the result of giving in to temptations is more shame. Jesus despised shame by focusing on joy. This is how He dealt with temptation and is our example of how to successfully do the same. The definition of joy according to our nervous system is the experience one has when someone is genuinely glad to be with us, when we are cherished and special to someone's heart irregardless of our performance or feelings. We experience joy when our spouse, our friends, our family values and affirms us, especially when we don't appear or feel valuable ourselves. That is exactly why Jesus emphatically stated He would never leave us or forsake us. Joy is our strength for meeting temptation. And instead of running and hiding from temptation and repressing our heart's pleas for recognition and expression, through the strength of joy we can redirect our heart's desires to the channels that connect us to the ultimate Source of pleasure and life. “Until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.”