About four times a year, I have a recurring dream in which I am tempted to commit adultery. Sometimes, in the dream, the temptation is so great that I abandon my husband and children to pursue it.
Last week I dreamed the dream again, and I knew what I was tempted to do was wrong. And I tried to justify it with that old warhorse: "But I feel this love so strongly...this must be God's will for me."
And then the dream took a new turn. Something that has never happened in the perhaps twelve times I've dreamed it. A beach appeared, and written in the sand with a stick were the words "God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one."
Wha?
In the dream, I was convicted, and could not go through with it. Faced with this message, I reluctantly turned away from the sin I'd been hell-bent on committing and returned to my husband and children.
When I woke up, I tried to find the passage in my concordance and online, but came up empty. I figured my dreaming brain had just made it up. Then, last night, I was reading James and stumbled on this in Chapter 1:
"No one, when tempted, should say, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one. But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death."1415
Whoa.
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