On Near-Occasions of Sin

There is an old story told among the desert fathers about a young monk who came to his elder in distress. “Father,” he said, “when I pray in my cell, thoughts of the marketplace assault me. When I go to the marketplace, thoughts of my cell trouble me. Where shall I go to be free?” The old man smiled and answered, “The problem is not the cell or the marketplace. The problem is that you have not yet learned to guard your heart.”

Most of us, at some point in our spiritual lives, have heard the wise counsel to avoid the “near occasions of sin.” It is a phrase that carries the weight of centuries of pastoral experience, and rightly so. There are places we should not go, screens we should not open, conversations we should not entertain, relationships we should not nurture. Scripture is emphatic on this point. "Flee from sexual immorality" (1 Corinthians 6:18, NRSV-2CE). "Make no friendship with those given to anger, and do not associate with hotheads" (Proverbs 22:24). Paul tells Timothy to "shun youthful passions" (2 Timothy 2:22). The verbs are strong, deliberate, and physical. Flee. Shun. Run.

And yet, there is a subtler danger that hides behind the very good counsel of avoidance, and it is a danger that the enemy of our souls has learned to exploit with remarkable cunning.

It is this: what begins as prudence can slowly, imperceptibly, become retreat from the very places God has called us to stand.

 

The Devil’s Favorite Disguise

The evil one is not always crude. He does not always tempt us toward the obvious. Sometimes his most effective work is done not by pulling us into sin, but by convincing us that faithfulness requires us to withdraw from good things, to shrink our world down until nothing can challenge us, and, not incidentally, until we are of no use to anyone.

Consider a scenario I have seen play out more than once. A man goes to Sunday worship and finds himself distracted by an attractive woman across the aisle. His gaze wanders. Thoughts arise that have no place in the presence of the Lord. He leaves the service troubled, and rightly so.

But then comes the temptation dressed as wisdom: Perhaps I should not go to that church anymore. Perhaps I should worship from home. To avoid the near-occasion of sin, I should stop going to church.

Do you see what has happened? The man has been given a real spiritual problem, and he has been offered a false solution.

The problem is not the church. The problem is not the woman, who is going about her own business of worship.

The problem is the discipline of his eyes and the disorder in his heart. And if he accepts the counterfeit wisdom, he will not have conquered the temptation. He will have merely surrendered the battlefield, and he will have surrendered it precisely where grace was most available to help him fight.

This is what makes the enemy’s strategy so devious. He is willing to lose a battle over lust if he can win a war over communion. He will happily let you feel virtuous about your withdrawal, so long as you withdraw.

 

Two Kinds of Occasions

Several moral theologians have made a distinction that is worth recovering. They spoke of proximate occasions of sin and remote occasions of sin.

A proximate occasion is one that, given who you are and what you struggle with, almost certainly leads you into sin. A remote occasion is one where sin is possible but where, with ordinary vigilance and grace, you can stand firm.

The recovering alcoholic with thirty-days sobriety who walks into a bar to “just have a Coke and see his old friends” is placing himself in a proximate occasion. The temptation is not incidental to that environment; it is the environment. Scripture’s counsel is clear: flee.

But for the recovering alcoholic who has ten years under his belt, who feels no desire to drink, to attend an event where friends are drinking is purely remote. He is on solid footing, he does not feel the pull to drink, even though the same situation might have been necessarily avoided years before.

The man who goes to church and encounters the ordinary reality of a world that includes beautiful people, or the woman who works in an office where gossip is common but not required, or the young person who cannot avoid every image on every screen in a visually saturated world, these are facing remote occasions.

They are confronting the ordinary friction of a fallen world against a soul being sanctified. And the response cannot be endless retreat, because retreat, at some point, becomes its own sin.

Jesus prayed for his disciples in that great high-priestly prayer: "I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one" (John 17:15). The Lord did not pray for our extraction. He prayed for our protection within the field where he had placed us.

 

The Custody of the Eyes and the Discipline of the Heart

Job made a covenant with his eyes. "I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I look upon a virgin?" (Job 31:1). Notice what he did not say. He did not say, “I have made a covenant to never leave my tent.” He said he had disciplined his gaze. He had accepted responsibility for what his eyes did, rather than blaming the world for having things in it that eyes could see.

This is the harder and more mature path. It is the path of interior formation rather than exterior escape. And it is, incidentally, the path that actually produces holy people.

The person who avoids every possible temptation may keep himself technically clean, but he does not thereby become holy. He becomes only untested. And an untested virtue is not yet a virtue at all, but a hypothesis about virtue.

Jesus taught: "It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles" (Matthew 15:11). He was speaking of ritual food laws, but the principle radiates outward. The problem is not primarily what enters our line of sight. The problem is what our hearts do with what enters our line of sight. And that is a problem no amount of external avoidance can finally solve, because we cannot avoid ourselves.

 

When Avoidance Becomes Avoidance of God

Here is where the trap becomes most dangerous. The man who stops going to church because of a wandering eye has not merely avoided a temptation. He has cut himself off from the Word preached, from the community of the saints, from the sacramental life, from the ordinary means by which God has ordained that his people be sanctified.

He has treated the medicine as though it were the disease.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. A young woman struggles with envy when she is around her more successful sister, so she stops visiting her family. A man cannot bear the honesty of his small group, so he leaves it. A believer finds that Scripture convicts him uncomfortably in certain passages, so he stops reading those books of the Bible. In each case, the avoidance addresses the symptom while entrenching the disease. And in each case, the enemy is delighted, because he has succeeded in isolating a soul from the very things that would heal it.

There is a reason the ancient monastic tradition insisted that the demon of acedia, that spiritual sloth which whispers, “This place, these people, this discipline is not for you; you would be holier elsewhere,” was among the most dangerous of all temptations. It sounds like discernment. It feels like humility. But it is, in truth, a slow leak in the tire of the soul.

 

The Courage to Stay

There is a courage required in the Christian life that is often overlooked. It is the courage to stay. To stay in the pew when your gaze has betrayed you, and to bring that betrayal to the Lord in the very place where it happened. To stay in the relationship where you have been hurt, and to learn to love without being consumed. To stay in the world that God so loved, and to be salt and light in it, rather than salt in a cellar and light under a bushel.

Paul writes to the Corinthians about their scruples over associating with sinners: "I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons, not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolaters, since you would then need to go out of the world" (1 Corinthians 5:9-10).

The apostle acknowledges, with a certain wry realism, that total withdrawal is neither possible nor commanded. We were not made for the cloister of complete separation. We were made for engagement, for witness, for love.

 

Practical Wisdom for the Path

How, then, shall we distinguish true prudence from disguised retreat? A few questions may help.

First, ask honestly: Is this a proximate or remote occasion? If you know, from repeated experience, that a certain place, person, or medium leads you almost inevitably into serious sin, flee. Do not negotiate. But if it is the ordinary friction of a fallen world, the answer is not flight but formation.

Second, ask: What am I being called away from, and what am I being called toward? True prudence usually leads us toward greater fidelity, deeper prayer, more robust community. Counterfeit prudence tends to leave us more isolated, more curved in on ourselves, less accountable, less exposed to grace.

Third, cultivate the interior disciplines. The custody of the eyes is a real practice, learned over years. So is the recollection of the heart, the habit of returning attention to God many times in a day. So is the examination of conscience, done gently but honestly each evening. These are the muscles that make it possible to stand where God has placed us without being overcome.

Fourth, tell someone. The temptations that thrive on isolation wither in the light of honest confession to a trusted friend, pastor, or spiritual director. The man tempted at church needs, more than anything, to name what is happening to someone who can pray with him and hold him accountable, not to change churches.

Finally, remember that the Lord who calls you to the battle also equips you for it. "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it?" (1 Corinthians 10:13).

Notice that the way out is a way through, not a way around. God does not usually remove us from the field. He gives us what we need to stand.

The fence has its place. But the fire in the heart, the disciplined and God-loving heart, is what finally makes a saint. Do not let the enemy convince you that faithfulness looks like a smaller and smaller life. It looks, in the end, like the shape of a cross planted firmly in the middle of the world, refusing to move.