The three temptations

One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency.  Religious complacency is encountered almost everywhere among Christians these days, and its presence is a sign and a prophecy.   For every Christian will become at last what his desires have made him.

The world system uses three devices to trap Christians :

a) the lust (desire) of the flesh; also commonly known as "sex"

b) the lust of the eyes; also commonly known as "money"

c) the pride of life; also commonly known as "power"

These same devices trapped Eve back in the Garden of Eden. "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food [the lust of the flesh], and that it was pleasant to the eyes [the lust of the eyes], and a tree to be desired to make one wise [the pride of life], she took of the fruit" (Genesis 3:6)

a) The lust of the flesh refers to the basis nature of unregenerate man that makes him blind to spiritual truth.  It is a disordered desire for pleasure, such as gluttony, disordered sexual acts, drug & alcohol abuse, etc. 

In First Corinthians 2:14, "The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness,and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit."

b) The lust of the eyes operates in a more refined way.  It is a disordered desire for possession, such as theft, covetousness, and materialism in general.  The context is loving the things of this world more than loving God.

c) The pride of life is the desire to be like God but apart from God.  This happens whenever we put ourselves in the place of God by failing to recognize that He is God, and we are not.

Any sin you can think of will have its origin in one of these three and in a way, the first two stem from the third.  Pride is also known as the root of sin.

In James 4:13-17, it says this about boasting "Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.”  Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.   What is your life?  You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.  Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”  As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes.  All such boasting is evil.   If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.

"Contentment with earthly goods is the mark of a saint; Contentment with our spiritual state is a mark of inward blindness". - A.W. Tozer 

Philippians 3:13-14 "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." KJV