He is carried away (1828) (exelko from ek = out or away + hélko = draw) means to draw out, drag forth, draw away, like a fish is drawn out from its retreat. So just as in hunting and fishing the game is lured from its hiding place, so too man is allured by temptation allured from the safety of self-control (even Spirit enabled self control - Gal 5:23-note) to commit acts of sin. Bengel says that initially "we are drawn away from truth and virtue." Here are a few "proverbial like" thoughts on temptation all from anonymous sources... Following the lines of least resistance makes men and rivers crooked. He who avoids the temptation avoids the sin. It takes two to make a successful temptation, and you are one of the two. Most people who fly from temptation usually leave a forwarding address. Never invite temptation—it always accepts. No one can be caught in a place he does not visit. There is no merit in abstaining from what one is not tempted to do. We are never strong enough to risk walking into temptation. Temptations, like foul weather, come before we send for them. Temptations are everywhere, but so is the grace of God. If you would master temptation, you must first let Christ master you. Every temptation is an opportunity to get nearer to God. (Most of these are from a resource I highly recommend as one of the best sources of quotations currently being published = The Complete Gathered Gold A Treasury of Quotations for Christians by John Blanchard) Cole - The fish sees the bait and it lures him toward it, thinking that he will get a meal. Instead, he gets hooked and carried away, where he becomes the meal. The temptation to sin is like that. We think that sin will satisfy us and get us something good that we’re missing. But instead, it hooks us and drags us to destruction. There is always that deceptive element to temptation. It is strengthened by the powerful emotions involved. As believers, we are not to live by our feelings, but by faith and obedience (Ed: see the good old hymn -Trust & Obey), based on the knowledge of God’s word of truth. We need to follow it, no matter how strongly our feelings pull us in a different direction. One time Marla and I were hiking off trail up on Mount Agassiz. It’s an area where we’ve hiked often, but we’ve often gotten turned around. On this occasion, we came out under some power lines, and I sensed that we needed to go uphill to get back to where we started. But when we had crossed the lines the first time, I had looked at my altimeter. When we crossed the lines again, my altimeter said that we were 500 feet higher. So, I trusted the altimeter, not my feelings, and we went downhill. Sure enough, we came to where we needed to be. God’s Word is like that altimeter. Temptation makes us feel like heading toward sin, but we need to follow God’s Word, no matter what we feel. (James 1:13-15 The Source, Force, and Course of Temptation) D L Moody - Temptations are never so dangerous as when they come to us in a religious garb. (Amen or oh my!) Kent Hughes has the following illustration of the process of temptation... One summer recently my wife, Barbara, and I and our boys spent a week fishing in northern Maine. In the final hour of the final day my boys caught the biggest smallmouth bass I have ever seen—five pounds, one ounce! Those are cosmic dimensions for a smallmouth bass! That old bass, the best I can tell, was over ten years old. For 3,650 days he had resisted every ploy known to man around Grand Lake Stream, Maine—until August 1989. On that fateful afternoon my boys were slowly trolling a salmon-colored, soft plastic, spinner-bladed jig, innocuously named “Little Fishy,” when it passed by the lair of the monster bass. The combination of the speed of the lure, its depth, the slant of the sun, and the refraction of the light ineluctably dragged the old bronze-backed bass away from his lair, just as the Greek words “dragged away” (Ed: "carried away" in NAS) in our text describe. Then he began to follow the lure, “enticed,” as our text has it, by its peculiar wiggle and the delicate fibrillations, so that he opened his mouth wide and in a sudden burst engulfed the jig. My boys’ shouts echoed across the lake, and today that fish’s grand, painted, mummified form graces my sons’ wall. It was a remarkable experience, but not unique, for it is universal among fishermen. The ancient Greek Oppian used these same words to describe drawing a fish from its original retreat under a rock, so that it succumbs to the bait. James, in using these words, has graphically painted a picture of how we are tempted by our own illicit desires (lusts). (Hughes, R. K. James : Faith that works. Preaching the Word. Crossway)