The Film Room — Answering The Call - A Redeeming The Time Blog

The Film Room

By Grant Gaines

Any football coach will tell you that the most important key to growing and improving as a football team is one simple discipline: watching film.

Sure, running drills and lifting weights are vital if you want to get bigger, stronger, and faster, but you can only improve so much in those areas of physical talent. But there are no limits to how much your knowledge and understanding of the game can increase. The possibilities to grow are literally endless. And that’s where watching film comes into play. Watching film helps a team accomplish two essential tasks: understand your opponent and understand yourself.

First off, any good football team knows that watching their upcoming opponent’s film will help them know what plays, tendencies, and formations their opponent will use against them come game day. This allows the coaches to make a game plan of how to attack the opponent’s weaknesses and be prepared for whatever packages their on-the-field enemies will throw at them. Certainly watching film on your opponent is essential, but equally important is watching film on yourself because just as you are scheming against your opponent in order to exploit their weaknesses, your opponents are doing the same with your film.

Watching film on yourself helps you stop up any leaks, shore up any cracks, and solidify any weaknesses so they won’t lead to your downfall when the game is kicked off.

I believe as Christians we do a decent job of “watching film” on Satan (through reading the Bible) to know how he attacks and what tricks he will use to make us stumble, but we do an awful job of “watching film” on ourselves to know our own weaknesses. Let me explain what I mean.

Luke 4 and Luke 22 are both popular passages that you’ve likely read or heard about before. Luke 4 tells of the time when Jesus was tempted three times by Satan in the wilderness after fasting for 40 days. Luke 22 records the story of Judas, who had been possessed by Satan himself (Luke 22:3), when he agreed to betray Jesus to the religious leaders of the day. The main character that appears in both stories is Satan thus giving us some “game film” we should study for just a moment to pick up on a tendency that he employs every time he tempts us.

Check out these two verses and see if you see a repeated theme:

“When the devil had finished this tempting, he left [Jesus] until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13, NIV)
“[Judas (who was possessed by Satan)]…watched for an opportunity to hand Jesus over to [the religious leaders] when there was no crowd present” (Luke 22:6, NIV)

In both circumstances we see Satan waiting for “an opportunity” to tempt or pester Jesus.

Do you grasp what that means? That means that Satan and his demons are watching you right now and waiting for an opportune time to come tempt you. Satan, for as evil as he is, is a really smart guy. He likely isn’t going to tempt you with cheating on your spouse when you’re a newlywed that is deeply in love. Instead, he’s going to wait to tempt you when you and your spouse are both busy, stressed, and frustrated with one another. This truth applies to every area of our lives-at work, at home, at school, or on the playing field-not just marriage. Satan is simply waiting for you to fall into one of those unfavorable situations where you’re tired, busy, stressed, prideful, fearful, etc. before pouncing on you like a roaring lion who eagerly awaits to devour his prey.

But enough about how Satan plans on attacking your weakness, it’s time to watch your “film.” Your film, in its most basic definition, is your life. And what I want you to specifically think about are the times when you’ve fallen for temptation. Do you have an example in mind?

Ok, now what you need to do as you replay this moment back in your mind is think about all the circumstances that were going on when you gave in. Were you tired, thirsty, late, bored, stressed, lost, or busy? What were those circumstances?

The reason it’s important to know what the circumstances were when you fell into temptation in the past is because that’s the exact same circumstances that Satan is going to attack you in again in the future. That’s what those verses in Luke 4 and Luke 22 were talking about when they said that Satan was waiting for an “opportune” time to attack Jesus. Satan knew Jesus’ film, His habits, and His human weaknesses so he was going to wait until Jesus was in one of those potentially crippling circumstances to attack.

Satan does the same to us. If you’ve fallen for lust in the past when you were tired, guess when Satan is going to attack you in the future? If you’ve given into gluttony when you’re lonely in the past, guess when Satan is going to attack you in the future?

In order to defeat temptation, you need to be aware of when you’re most susceptible to falling. For me personally, if I’m either tired, hungry, or cold I call that my “unholy trinity” because I’m way more likely to fall into temptation when I’m in one of those situations then when I’m well rested, full, and at a comfortable temperature. Knowing this helps me a ton because when I realize that I’m drifting into one or several of those unholy trinity conditions, I’m able to pray extremely specifically against certain temptations that I had been prone to falling for in the past.

When you know how your opponent is going to attack you on game day, you’re able to withstand their attempts to bring you down. This is true in football and it’s even truer in life. With that in mind, I want to challenge you today-before you get back to work or whatever else you have on your schedule, to take two minutes and write down what the circumstances are that you’re the most prone to falling into temptation. Keep these in mind so that the next time you find yourself in one of those “opportune” circumstances for Satan to attack, you’ll be on your guard.

What’s your unholy trinity?