Sermon for January 11, 2004 - Deal with Temptation
1 Corinthians 10:1-15; Acts 2:1-5; Psalm 139:7-12
A survey in a Christian magazine asked readers a very personal question. What in life presents you with the greatest spiritual challenge? So those who answered ranked areas of greatest spiritual challenge to them. And once the survey totals were tallied, this was the order of those challenges:
1. Materialism. 2. Pride. 3. Self-centeredness. 4. Laziness. 5. (Tie) Anger/Bitterness.6. (Tie) Sexual lust. 7. Envy. 8. Gluttony. 9. Lying.
Discipleship Journal, 11-12/92
Oscar Wilde said, “The best way to deal with temptation is to yield to it”
Mark Twain said “There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice”.
Benjamin Franklin said, “It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it”.
T.S. Eliot famously said, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality”.
My topic tonight is a tough one and an important one. It’s actually one that brings us all onto the same page. My topic is Temptation, and our scripture this evening speaks to this topic in some very interesting and challenging ways. You may not find this message the most comforting you’ve ever heard, but I want to try and deal with this area because it is so hugely important for us to learn to be real with ourselves about. It’s one thing ever getting the courage to talk to others but our temptations - our real temptations. Something that may be harder still is facing them ourselves.
Janet Malcolm, an American author said, and I’m paraphrasing, “There are a few among us...who...(are able to) block out the unpleasantness of self-knowledge. Their lies to themselves are so convincing that they are never unmasked. These are the people who never feel in the wrong, who are always able to justify their conduct, and who in the end...
cause their fellow-men to turn from them”.
Most of us want to understand ourselves better. Many of us sometimes scratch our heads at our own behaviours. For a Christian, self-knowledge is one of the big KEYS to being students of Jesus, to being disciples of our Saviour and God. So we need to pause and think. And tonight our focus is the whole issue of temptation, and our text, as you’ve heard is 1 Corinthians 10:1-15. Let’s have a closer look at our passage tonight.
1 Cor 10:1 For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. 1 Cor 10:2 They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. 1 Cor 10:3 They all ate the same spiritual food 1 Cor 10:4 and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.
Paul is making an important statement here. He’s really saying that these folks were just like us. He builds what he’s saying as you’ll see because he wants to protect us from trying to distance ourselves from the ones who have gone before us by saying we’re cut from a different cloth.
Paul really does emphasize this. He says that their source, unbeknownst to them, was Jesus, the Christ. He is speaking about the pre-existent Christ, the Son who has always been with the Father; the Son who is the second person of the holy Trinity. The cloud and the parting of the sea were evidence of God being with them. That which nourished their spirits also was God in Christ. Paul is saying that like the Corinthians, the people of Israel were in relationship with
God.
In the book of first Corinthians Paul is writing to a pretty motley crew of a church. They had all kinds of really, really bad behaviours. If you want to know what I mean in detail I encourage you to read the book this week. They were participating in all kinds of sin and damaging behaviour and thinking that this was perfectly normal and healthy. They thought that way because they were a young church made up of folks who were part of the culture of ancient Corinth.
In the pagan religious practices of that day, what we understand as sin was very often celebrated in their pagan worship. Each and every one of the believers in the church in Corinth had come out of that setting where these behaviours were commonplace, normal. So when Paul wrote to this church, he was teaching them a new normal, new behaviours that were honouring to God and not destructive to them.
Discipleship is really about learning a new normal, God’s norms. The wisest way to live our lives. The healthiest way to relate to one another. So here in vv1-4 Paul emphasizes the sameness of the people of Israel, God’s chosen people. They are just like us. After making this connection between the Corinthian church and the people of Israel, Paul goes on to say some hard things:
1 Cor 10:5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert.
Ouch. That seems a little harsh, eh? There were consequences to their actions. There was action and reaction. “Every action leads to an equal and opposite reaction”. We don’t like that in particular. We want God to shield us from the consequences of our actions? Isn’t that what a loving Father would do? Well...sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes we can only learn by seeing the consequences of what we do, by experiencing things. Sometimes we only learn by error. Sometimes the worst thing a parent can do is shield their child from experience. There are
consequences to our actions and part of maturing in our faith is learning to accept that there are consequences to actions, that sometimes we may suffer as a result of our actions. In all of this God is not absent. Rather, He is intimately present with us in our learning.
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there...If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,"even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you”
Ps 139:7-8
God never leaves us or forsakes us, even when helping us learn the hardest of lessons.
1 Cor 10:6 Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. 1 Cor 10:7 Do not be idolaters, as some of them were; as it is written: "The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in pagan revelry."
Paul makes a very strong and strange statement here. He says the trial of the people of Israel in the desert, when they were freed from slavery in Egypt and liberated by God, when they grumbled at Moses and were faithless and ended up wandering in circles in the desert for 40 years until each one of them died off and a new generation was ready to enter the promised land... he says that their trial was an example and in v. 11 he says as a warning for us. We need to be
careful, apparently, what we do with our freedom. When we are born again and delivered from the kingdom of
darkness to the kingdom of God’s dear Son, we need to be careful what we do with our liberty. We need to not, as Paul says, “Set our hearts on evil things”.
And then Paul makes a list of sorts. He speaks of participation in pagan worship, he speaks of sexual immorality, of testing God, and of grumbling in vv 7-10.
Then this:
1 Cor 10:12 So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!
1 Cor 10:13 No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.
But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.
Temptation is an interesting subject. How it works itself out in our lives leaves us in a real dilemma often enough. Jesus was tempted. In the desert Satan presented Jesus with three clear choices. When he was starved after being in the desert for 40 days, Satan tempted him to turn rocks into bread. Satan tempted Jesus to show off by jumping off the church steeple. Jesus was offered by Satan all the kingdoms of the world, if he would just bow down and worship Satan. Jesus is familiar with every temptation known to man.
Heb 4:15 For we do not have a high priest (Jesus) who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet was without sin.
C. S. Lewis said this about temptation: “No man knows how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. That is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is....Christ, because He was the only Man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only Man who knows to the full what temptation means.””
So Jesus sympathizes with us...and he challenges us as well. Sometimes we can be content with being sympathized with. Sometimes that’s what we think it means to be cared for. “What I really need is for someone to know me and to sympathize with me”. That’s fine, but that’s just Jesus’ starting point. John 8 is a good example of this. A woman is caught in the act of adultery. She is brought to Jesus to be stoned.
Jesus challenges those who would kill her for her sin that whoever among them was without sin could cast the first stone against her. All her accusers walk away, their heads hanging in confusion and I suspect in shame. And Jesus turns to the woman and with great compassion and sympathy says to her, “"Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" "No one, sir," she said. "Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin."
Jesus starts with compassion...not as a strategy, but because he is truly compassionate and compassion is part of love. And since God is love 1 John 4:16, and Jesus is God, he is compassionate. But holiness is also part of love. So Jesus calls the woman to leave her life of sin. He doesn’t tell her to live as sincerely as she can within her sin. He doesn’t
say he’s about to take away her temptation to sin either, he simply tells her to make the choice to live in a holy way, and that means to deal differently with the temptation she had just faced and failed at...temptation that will surely
come again.
So how does temptation come to us? Well, we see in Jesus example that Satan is the tempter. What does that mean? Well, when we’re presented with a moral choice, with the desire to do something that we know is wrong, Satan first says, “O, just do it! Once never hurt anyone. You owe it to yourself. God will forgive you. You’re only human after all”.
Then, after we fall, Satan says, “That’s who you are. A miserable sinner. Isn’t that always what you’ve known deep down inside. God knows that better than anyone”.
Sound familiar? So that remorse that we feel after we’ve blown it, that sense of utter failure and despondency that we sometimes feel, that is the work of Satan. Lies. Entrapment.
There are Two Lies Satan Wants Us to Believe
1. Just once won’t hurt. 2. Now that you have ruined your life, you are beyond God’s use, and might as well enjoy sinning.
1 Cor 10:12 So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! 1 Cor 10:13 No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.
There is great comfort in this part of Paul’s message. It’s preceded though by a warning.
1 Cor 10:12 So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!
Don’t be overconfident, Paul tells us. If it’s been a while since you fell into sin, if you’re feeling good about your recent rack record...be careful. Careful of what? Well, pride for one thing. And looking sideways at others who are struggling right now for another.
It was F. B. Meyer, a Christian writer, who once said that “when we see a brother or sister in sin, there are two things we do not know: First, we do not know how hard he or she tried not to sin. And second, we do not know the power of the forces that harassed him or her. We also do not know what we would have done in the same circumstances”.
We need to be careful to not judge others who are struggling, because as someone else once wrote, we are all one step away from sin. So, we need to be cautious. Then Paul says:
1 Cor 10:13 No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.
Let’s break this down. 1 Cor 10:13 No temptation has seized you except what is common to man.
Think about that for a second. This is talking about temptation. Temptation is not sin. Billy Graham says, “The sin is when we use the temptation for giving in.”” None of us should deliberately place ourselves in a position to be tempted. Satan will always attack where we are the most vulnerable. “But each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death”” (James 1:14, 15, NIV). A thought enters; we pamper it; it germinates and grows into an evil act.
Temptation is that which moves us to sin. John Piper says that sin (lust for example) "gets its power by persuading me to believe that I will be more happy if I follow it. The power of all temptation is the prospect that it will make me happier."
Our temptations are something that we have in common. Temptation is commonplace. At some level we need to
accept that we will be tempted. We also need to accept that we will at times fall. So we need to accept our fallenness. But we need to accept the regeneration by the Spirit of God as well. The Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost in part so that we would be given the strength to live holy lives. That happened 2000 years ago, and the power of the Holy Spirit is completely available to believers today.
Remember:
‘God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up
under it
But it will take time to learn to shield yourself from temptation; and this includes time to really grasp how truly damaging sin is to our whole lives, our relationships.
It will take commitment, ever deepening commitment to God reflected in the time you spend with Him. The
commitment spouses have to one another is reflected in the time the choose to spend together over other things they can do. Commitment is reflected in prayer and in reading and reflecting on scripture.
It will take grace. God’s grace. It is the Holy Spirit who sanctifies or makes holy our lives; it’s not that we wait for him to sanctify and in the mean time live like devils; the Holy Spirit is always sanctifying and waiting for us to respond positively to his sanctifying work. Seek forgiveness when you fall. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness”.1 John 1:9
It will also take your grace. You must believe in God’s forgiveness. That means don’t go around acting like you’re unforgiven. It’s not ‘forgive yourself’. That is a modern myth. Only God can forgive sin. We need to fully and deeply accept God’s forgiveness and choose to walk daily in that forgiveness.
You see, Satan wants to keep us focused on struggling with temptation so he can keep us focused on ourselves.
Another reason to learn the discipline of resisting temptation is so that we can more effectively be used by God. Satan knows that the feeling of God using us and working through us is truly one of the most satisfying feelings to humans.
I mentioned a survey when I began about the greatest spiritual challenges people faced. Survey respondents noted temptations were more potent when they had neglected their time with God (81 percent) and when they were physically tired (57 percent). Resisting temptation was best accomplished by prayer (84 percent), avoiding compromising situations (76 percent), Bible study (66 percent), and being accountable to someone (52 percent).
The Great Wall of China is a gigantic structure which cost an immense amount of money and labour. When it was
finished, it appeared that no enemy could ever get passed it.. But the enemy did breach it. You know how? Not by breaking it down or going around it. They did it by bribing the gatekeepers.
What can we do, then, to resist temptation so that we are more available to God, so that we are more ready to be a blessing to others? We can ask ourselves these questions:
What settings am I in when I fall? Choose to avoid them. What props do I have that support my sin? Eliminate them. What people am I usually with when I sin? Choose to avoid them.
On an old TV show a doctor is confronted by a patient who says he broke his arm in two places. The doc replies,“Well then, stay out of them places!” We cannot regularly put ourselves in the face of temptation and not be affected. When faced with the problem of temptation, we need to “stay out of them places.”
Our passage tonight encourages us that by the power of God’s Spirit, Christians have the ability to overcome
temptation. Temptation and sin is a universal problem, but we have the reality of God’s presence with us to strengthen us and to keep us ready for serving him. The issue is less about temptation than it is about being fully available to God that he might simply accomplish His will in our lives.
May we each use God’s wisdom as we seek to serve Him. May we each rely on His grace to overcome the struggles
that challenge us the most. Let’s pray.
God, we thank you for your presence with us. Minister healing and forgiveness to us tonight, we pray. Thank you for the wisdom that comes from your holy Word. O God. Teach us, we pray, to follow you and to obey you, and to rely on Your Holy Spirit to empower us for you work. In your name we pray. Amen.
