Let this be one part of our daily contending with God—that he would preserve our souls, and keep our hearts and our ways, that we be not entangled; that his good and wise providence will order our ways and affairs, that no pressing temptation befall us; that he would give us diligence, carefulness, and watchfulness over our own ways.
Store the heart with a sense of the love of God in Christ, and his love in the shedding of it; get a relish of the privileges we have thereby—our adoption, justification, acceptance with God; fill the heart with thoughts of the beauty of his death—and you will, in an ordinary course of walking with God, have great peace and security as to the disturbance of temptations. … Lay in store of gospel provisions that may make the soul a defensed place against all the assaults thereof.
Meet your temptation in its entrance with thoughts of faith concerning Christ on the cross; this will make it sink before you. Entertain no parley, no dispute with it, if you would not enter into it. Say, "‘It is Christ that died’— that died for such sins as these."
Suppose the soul has been surprised by temptation, and entangled at unawares, so that now it is too late to resist the first entrances of it. What shall such a soul do that it be not plunged into it, and carried away with the power thereof?
First, do as Paul did: beseech God again and again that it may "depart from you" … you shall certainly either be speedily delivered out of it, or receive a sufficiency of grace [so as] not to be foiled utterly by it.
Second, fly to Christ, in a peculiar manner, as he was tempted, and beg of him to give you succor in this "needful time of trouble." … Lie down at his feet, make your complaint known to him, beg his assistance, and it will not be in vain.
Third, look to him who has promised deliverance. Consider that he is faithful and will not suffer you to be tempted above what you are able.
Owen says that God may bring relief by sending affliction to mortify the heart, by some act of providence, treading down of Satan under one’s feet, supply of grace or comfortable persuasion of good success or the utter removing of it.
Owen writes that the person "having a due acquaintance with the gospel in its excellencies, as to him a word of mercy, holiness, liberty, and consolation, values it, in all its concerns, as his choicest and only treasure—makes it his business and the work of his life to give himself up unto it in universal obedience, then especially when opposition and apostasy put the patience of Christ to the utmost—he shall be preserved from the hour of temptation."
"He that keeps close to Christ is crucified with him and is dead to all the desires of the flesh and the world (as more fully: Gal. 6:14). Here the match is broken, and all love, entangling love, dissolved. The heart is crucified to the world and all things in it."
Owen warns against the "liking and love of the things proposed, insinuated, commended in the temptation" that "be living and active in us". He warns believers "not so much employ your thoughts about the things whereunto you are tempted, which oftentimes raises further entanglements".
He that makes it his business to eat daily of the tree of life will have no appetite unto other fruit, though the tree that bear them seem to stand in the midst of paradise.
source: John Owen, Of Temptation: The Nature and Power of It (1658)
Andrew Groves 
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