You Overcame Temptation So I Could be Free
Are you ready to spend some time with the Lord? If you are new to mental prayer, we invite you to visit our guide on how to pray to learn more.
We begin Week 1 of our Sunday Lenten Challenge with this opening prayer:
Trust And Believe
Lord,
I believe you want to give me the grace to go deeper in prayer this Lent. Help me to be present to you so that I’ll intimately pray these next 15 minutes with my heart fully open and willing to receive that grace. Please help me open my heart and pray with more intensity. I want to be able to visualize myself with you so I can feel your presence more intimately in my life this Lent. Lord, give me the grace I need as I strive to complete these 6 days of Sunday Lenten meditations. I am choosing to take up my cross and humbly follow you all the way to Calvary and I want to do it with my whole heart.
AMEN.
Overcoming Temptation to be Free
Let’s contemplate the message of freedom from our vices through the grace of God this Lent. What does it mean to be free? To overcome with the help of Christ? Let’s meditate on these things in the presence of Christ and offer ourselves to the Holy Spirit in prayer.
Prayer to the Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit,
I believe you are truly here and present to me right now. I desire to be present to you.
Thank you for your loving presence, especially when I am tempted to sin. Help me recognize your voice and give me the grace to obey it when I am really struggling with my feelings and my desires.
You are faithful to me even when I am not. Please help me overcome temptation especially for the things that I struggle with daily. Do not let me forget the price Jesus has paid for my soul.
I am grateful to you for sustaining me through every trial in my life. Please help me listen to your gentle convictions and help me obey your advice.
Breathe on me as I spend these next 15 minutes fixated on today’s Mass readings. Holy Spirit, help me pray with humility, honesty, love and affection. I want to grow in virtue and holiness.
Thank you, Holy Spirit, for every consolation, desolation, time of silence, difficult trial, and temptation of the evil one. I understand that you love me and that everything in my life happens by God’s holy will, whether it be divine providence or God’s permissive will due to my sin and negligence.
Please humble me as I walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem. Help me listen to my conscience and overcome the temptation to sin this Lent.
AMEN.
Say Nothing Just Take Him In
Spend 1-3 minutes in silence gazing at the Lord with love and gratitude, in a prayer of silent contemplation.
Make a Movie in Your Mind
Now we will contemplate the first reading. Imagine warm, damp soil between your fingers. You’ve just seen the miracle of creation. The Spirit of God swirling the dust, shaping it, breathing into it, and suddenly a man is standing before you, breathing on his own. Around you stretches an eastern garden unlike anything you’ve seen: fruit trees heavy and low, water branching into four rivers you can hear without having to see. The air is thick with the smell of green growing things and there is no sign of death or decay, not a brown leaf, rotting fruit, nor wilted flower. You notice a tree at the center, taller than the rest, its fruit catching the light strangely. Then you hear a voice, low and sly, coiling up from somewhere near your feet…
Tempted By The Serpent's Lie
Gen 2:7-9,3:1-7
Then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made grow every tree that was delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Now the snake was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the LORD God had made. He asked the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden’?”
The woman answered the snake:
“We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, or else you will die.’”
But the snake said to the woman:
“You certainly will not die! God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil.”
The woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
Let us take a moment to reflect on the message in the first reading.
Do you see the root cause of Adam and Eve’s downfall? The very first temptation involved two things: distrust of God and desire for physical pleasure, and a belief that they could have the wisdom in in themselves to be their own gods— controlling their own lives outside of intimate relationship with God. The forbidden fruit disrupted intimate union with God.
“The woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom.”
Be Completely Real
Take a moment to contemplate the forbidden fruit in your life that is separating you from intimacy with God.
Be honest with the Lord. Self-reflect on your faith and whether you completely trust in his promises.
In our first reading we clearly see that Eve’s first mistake was a lack of trust in God. Do you struggle with trusting the Lord? Have you been doubting a promise of God? Or struggling lately in your faith? Is something going on in your life right now that is causing sly thoughts and feelings of distrust toward God?
Can you recognize the source of these temptations after reading about Eve’s experience?
Give the Holy Spirit time to respond.
Let us continue our mental prayer with today’s Gospel:
Visualize Christ
Imagine yourself in the desert with Jesus. The beautiful garden in the east is gone. You look at your feet. Your toes are covered in dust and the skin along your heels is dry and calloused. Beneath your sandals is cracked limestone— bone-dry—and you are looking for Jesus. It’s been forty days since you’ve seen him. The Judean wilderness stretches around you in every direction — jagged, sun-bleached hills with no shade, no water, nothing green. By day the heat presses down like a forced hand; at night the cold bites just as hard. You finally see Jesus. His face is gaunt, and he looks hungry. Then you notice a sly contorted figure has slithered out from behind a boulder and joined him on the rock. It’s the same voice that spoke to Eve. Now this hideous creature speaks connivingly to Jesus! He even holds out a stone shaped almost exactly like a loaf of bread…
into the Desert to Pray
Matthew 4:1-11
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry. The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.”
He said in reply, “It is written: ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city, and made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: ‘He will command his angels concerning you’ and ‘with their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.’”
Jesus answered him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.’”
Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, and he said to him,
“All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.”
At this, Jesus said to him, “Get away, Satan! It is written: ‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.’”
Then the devil left him and, behold, angels came and ministered to him.
Let us meditate on this first response of Jesus:
“It is written: ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”
We have two encounters with the devil. In the first he comes to tempt Eve to distrust God’s words and eat something forbidden. He tempted her desire to taste something good and to have control over her life. In this second encounter Jesus shows us how Adam and Eve should have responded. He puts the will of God above his own fleshly desires. Even though he is literally starved for bread, he is able to resist the devil.
The devil offers Jesus the world in the same way he offered it to Adam and Eve. Yet Jesus rejects his false promises and tells Satan to get away.
Paul makes the connection explicit in his letter to the Romans: just as one man’s disobedience brought sin into the world, one man’s obedience — Christ’s, in this very desert — brings life. “Just as through one transgression condemnation came upon all, so through one righteous act, acquittal and life came to all” (Romans 5:18).
Paul draws a direct line from the garden to the desert: one man’s disobedience brought sin into the world, but one man’s obedience undoes it. Where Adam gave in to temptation and lost paradise, Christ resists it and wins back what was lost. As Paul puts it, “the gift is not like the transgression” — grace outweighs the fall.
Are You Listening?
Are you struggling with a particular temptation? Are you currently losing the battle like Adam and Eve? Have you asked the Lord into your struggle?
Go back to the desert in your imagination for a moment. Look at Jesus, gaunt, yet resolute. He knows how hard it is to resist the devil. He knows what it means to struggle with hunger, thirst, and the desires of pleasure. Yet he has overcome through obedience.
Ask Jesus to give you a resolute mind and the gift of grace to overcome your attachment to this thing that is holding you back. Once and for all, ask Jesus to heal this weakness in you.
Ask the Holy Spirit to walk with you and speak to your heart with every tempting moment you encounter. Proclaim this truth for yourself and your current situation as Paul wrote, “where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more” (Romans 5:20).
Take time to speak to the Lord about your sin and your trust in Him to give you overflowing grace to overcome it in imitation of Christ who overcame temptation in the desert even though his body was weak.