Bipolar Disorder
Let’s now turn our attention to what it is that causes our life to be driven in such a way as to create the ups and downs that we have discussed.
In the text that we referenced in James, we see two driving factors: temptations and trials. These each work in a slightly different fashion.
Temptations are an attempt to draw you away from your faith by enticing your lusts. The lusts of the flesh are unrelenting, and even those things that we know are to be avoided are ever before us. When Jesus was tempted on the mountain, He faced the same three types of temptation that John warns us about in 1 John 2:16 “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” Temptation pulls on our lusts to draw us away from the Father and into the world. It is pictured here as the uprising of the wave not because it elevates us, but rather because it is the rising up of the rule of the flesh in our lives. It is saying that you can rule your own life, you can have your own desires, you can forsake the faith that you have in God, and let your flesh have control. Just as Adam and Eve reached upward toward the fruit of the tree in the garden, they were falling; so it is in our own lives. Temptation never produces the fruit of fulfillment in our lives that it promises, it always leaves us empty inside and destitute of satisfaction. Strangely, though, we continue to chase after its vain promise to the destruction of our souls. If only we had what our soul lusts after, then we would be happy, then we would be content, then we would be… Constantly chasing our lusts is a sure plan for continual turmoil in our lives and it will never provide stability because lusts are never satisfied; there is always something more to attain and we can never have it all.
