Matthew 26:41 NKJV
Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
When we want to win, it takes planning. When God gives us a goal, directly or indirectly, it is the devil’s job to try to stop us from succeeding. One way he does that is through temptation. There are temptations all the long the pathway to victory, on the path to our prize. We need to think about this and prepare for it. If we fail to plan, we plan to fail. We cannot deal with temptation as it comes. We must talk about, think about it, pray about it in advance. Jesus gave 3 of his disciples advice about the subject of temptation. He said, “Watch and pray so you do not fail.” “Watch” indicates that we must be on the look out.” “Pray” indicates we need spiritual strength to overcome. Jesus points out that there are 2 parts of us that are in opposition to each other - the spirit and the flesh. The part that is the strongest wins. So if we want to risk losing the war against temptation, in addition to being careless about it, we can feed our flesh more than we feed our spirits. On the contrary, if we want to guarantee winning, we must be sober and vigilant and feed our spirits more than we feed our flesh. When we know what our goal is, we need to ponder the possible challenges that may come to hinder us and plan with much prayer what we are going to do to win.