Last Thursday Bobby Petrino gave his first interview after being fired from his head coaching job at the University of Arkansas.

Bobby Petrino is an offensive genius and excellent play caller. You can see this everywhere he has coached but nowhere better than with the Arkansas Razorbacks. Over the last two years, he won 21 games while only losing 5. During that time he coached in the most difficult division in the most difficult conference in America. Many people believed that the Arkansas talent and the Petrino coaching would produce a team to vie for the National Championship this year.

Petrino’s firing had nothing to do with his coaching. It had everything to do with decision making and his behavior off the field. Petrino had an affair with an employee in his office half his age. The affair become public when the motorcycle they both were riding went in the ditch–an apt metaphor for his life.

But this isn’t about Bobby Petrino. We can only pray and hurt for the Petrino family as a whole, especially his wife and his children.

He asked what so many people have asked: “How could I put what we had in jeopardy? This is what I wake up early every morning thinking about, what I lay in bed thinking about. Why?” He added: “I just don’t understand how I could do it. You put energy into the people that love you, that count on you.”

In his interview, Bobby Petrino told about having to tell his wife and then his children of what he had done. The hardest moment was sitting down with his wife and admitting his infidelity. “Looking at the look in her eyes, how I could possibly do something like this, to hurt her? The anger, the feeling of, ‘How could you possibly do this to me?’ ”

This is exactly what sin and temptation does to us. It seems to comes out of nowhere leaving us to ask “what was I thinking?” and “how could I do such a thing?”

Even in this kind of sorrow there is good news. God sent His Son to become the sacrifice for our sin. Then when Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father, God gave the Holy Spirit to be our constant companion, convincing us of sin and righteousness.

We are not alone, and we are not without help or hope.

We desperately need God’s Spirit abiding within us. We know temptation will come. It may come from any direction. We need the work of God’s Spirit to help us through the temptations and difficulties of life.

The Spirit helps us see the consequences of our sin and helps us be faithful to God and to others.

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