Temptation and Sin

All of us, as flawed humans, experience temptation and even choose to embrace this temptation and commit a wrongful act that is against God's will. I, like everyone else, choose to sin when I am tempted to go against the will of God and embrace an immoral thought. We experience these feelings because of the sin our parents Adam and Eve chose to commit when tempted by the Devil himself. The Devil tries to tempt us through fear and through the distortion of the truth in his attempt to pull as many of us as possible away from our loving Father in Heaven. Suffering, death, and concupiscence are all effects of their decision to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Because of this concupiscence, an inclination to sin, we are often tempted to make the wrong decision that ends up harming our relationship with God. We should be cautious and careful when facing temptation, for we do not want this temptation to lead us to sin and hurt our relationship with God and our neighbors. Sin  and temptation are not the same, but one can lead for the the other to occur. Temptation is the enticement to do wrong while sin is actually doing that wrong. So, by being tempted and thinking of an action that is immoral does not mean that you have sinned. For, even Jesus Christ was tempted by the Devil when he was fasting in the desert, but he did not sin because

he resisted the temptation and chose to follow his Father's will. There has to be a choice of falling to temptation and of doing the wrong thing for there to be sin. We should live in imitation of Jesus as he is a living example of how God wants us to live our lives. We should resist temptation and grow in our relationship with God as we avoid sin and seek holiness.

Also, your neighbors that surround you can heavily affect your decisions to sin. They can try to tempt you to commit an action that you may not be very comfortable with, but you decide to do it in order to avoid seeming different and being ostracized from the group. Those who fall into temptation and commit a sin may try to get you into doing the same thing so that they can feel better about themselves. But, you should remain true to God and realize if an action is wrong, not doing it if it is. I often see many wrongful actions that are committed in movies, and I hear much sin going around in songs. And, I often find myself thinking about wrongful actions and trying to convince myself that they are okay to commit because everyone else does them. Then, I remind myself to remain prude when watching and listening to these things, and I resist most temptations but end up falling to some of the temptations that I experience because of concupiscence and because I am not perfect. But, although we as humans are sinners and suffer from the action of our first parents, we should try our best to resist temptation  and avoid sin.

A good example to help explain the difference between temptation and sin is the expired bag of chips example. If you are looking in you pantry and see an expired bag of delicious chips on the ground, you remain healthy as long as you do not pick it up and eat from it although you may be attracted to grab it because you are hungry. In this example, the bag of chips is the object that has the potential to harm you physically, but you do not harm yourself unless you grab the bag of expired chips and commit the wrong action of eating them, going against the healthy and right decision. The bag of chips is the thought that has potential for sin, but you do not commit the sin as long as you resist the temptation of opening the bag and eating from it, which represents you executing the immoral thought and sinning, going against the will of God and actually harming your relationship with him.