There is nothing that forces us to face our addiction to control quite like our inability to change the heart of another person.
Temptation
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
When Satan cannot get a great sin in he will let a little one in, like the thief who goes and finds shutters all coated with iron and bolted inside. At last he sees a little window in a chamber. He cannot get in, so he puts a little boy in, that he may go round and open the back door. So the devil has always his little sins to carry about with him to go and open back doors for him, and we let one in and say, ‘O, it is only a little one.’ Yes, but how that little one becomes the ruin of the entire man!
Thomas Scott
No affliction nor temptation, no guilt nor power of sin, no wounded spirit nor terrified conscience, should induce us to despair of help and comfort from God.
John Owen
The indulgence of one sin opens the door to further sins. The indulgence of one sin diverts the soul from the use of those means by which all other sins should be resisted.
Vavasor Powell
If thou least fallen into sin through violent temptations, seek speedily for repentance for it, recovery out of it, and reformation from it.
John Owen
How mistaken people are who think they can play over the hole of an asp and not be stung, or touch tar without being defiled, or set their clothes on fire and not be burnt. So if something in your business, your lifestyle…suits your lusts, you have already entered into temptation. If we have a propensity for unclean thoughts, ambition in high places, sexual passion, perusal of bad literature, or anything else, temptation will use various things in our society to entrap us.
Peter Marshall
We are too Christian really to enjoy sinning, and too fond of sinning really to enjoy Christianity. Most of us know perfectly well what we ought to do; our trouble is that we do not want to do it.
Charles Bridges
The person without self-control is easy prey to the invader. He yields himself to the first assault of his ungoverned passions, offering no resistance… Having no discipline over himself, temptation becomes the occasion of sin, and hurries him on to fearful lengths that he had not contemplated.
Juliana of Norwich
He said not: thou shalt not be troubled–thou shalt not be tempted–thou shalt not be distressed. But he said: thou shalt not be overcome.
John Owen
Being steadfast in belief does not exclude all temptations from without. When we say a tree is firmly rooted, we do not say the wind never blows upon it.