Peter declared to Him, Though they all are offended and stumble and fall away because of You [and distrust and desert You], I will never do so. – Matthew 26:33, Amplified Bible (AMP)

I have committed many a horrid sin in my life. In reflecting upon the most egregious (very bad and easily noticed) ones, I made the same mistake each time before succumbing to temptation: I trusted in my own power, rather than God’s, to resist the temptation.

Like Peter in Matthew 26:33, I was so confident in my devotion to The Lord that I was totally unaware of this fact: human devotion is powerless against Satan’s wiles (deceptions). Before long, my overconfidence led to my failures, and my failures grieved the heart of my Savior.

Thankfully, failures have a silver lining. Through our failures we learn valuable life lessons, and through failures of sin I have learned never to trust myself to overcome any temptation, either large or small. We all must learn this same lesson if we are to keep sin at bay in our lives, for as even the Apostle Paul acknowledged, the power to overcome temptation is found in Christ alone.

Beware of trusting in your own strength to beat back temptation. Don’t be lured into a false sense of security by your devotion to The Lord. If you don’t cry out to God for help when the temptation comes, you may be able to fend it off in your own power for awhile. But before you know it, you will be conquered by the temptation, and you will lose the battle because you used the wrong weapon – human will power – against the enemy.