1 Corinthians 10:12-14
You can be seated. Please turn in your copy of the scriptures to 1 Corinthians chapter 10. We’ll be looking today at verses 12 through 14. I wanna take a little side trip into the nuts and bolts or the anatomy of temptation. And my hope is to encourage you to see what is true for the Christian believer. And understanding those realities, knowing our enemies and our weak spots, living more intentionally in light of the fact that Christians, to be a Christian is to have a life of temptation.
And so the big picture of where we are in Corinthians, chapters eight, nine, and 10, I believe Paul is saying to the Corinthians, you may have liberty in Jesus to do lots of things. It’s okay in the sense if you don’t have an issue with the meat offered to idols thing it’s in a sense okay to eat that meat because idols are nothing but there are weaker brothers and sisters who Believe the idols are something and so to eat meat is to eat meat that was really offered to a god And so he says you may have Liberty, but your love Would limit your life in Liberty and then he got went on to say As an apostle, I give up my rights of apostleship in order to love and serve others. So that’s the big picture we’re in.
Next week, he’s going to connect idols and the Lord’s Supper. It’ll be the first Sunday of November, so we’ll be serving the Lord’s Supper. So that passage will be really appropriate for that day. But today, a little side excursion into temptation. And we want to look at 1 Corinthians 10, verses 12 through 14. And Paul writes this, therefore, let anyone who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability. With the temptation, he will also provide a way of escape that you may be able to endure it. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.
Let’s pray together. Lord, we ask for your help and blessing now that this word would encourage us, that it would build us up in our faith, and that it would strengthen us for the Christian life. Probably no greater enemy that we face than our own trials and temptations. So help us to live out of your grace. In Jesus’ name, amen.
When I was, I would say about four years old, I remember walking down the hill from our house. Dad was a minister and we lived in the manse, the church-owned house. And just down the hill from the manse was a grove of, I don’t know if you’d call it a grove, but it was a grove of bamboo trees. Someone had built a house and in order to, protect their privacy from us, you know, peasants. They grew some bamboo, which got really high and gave them privacy.
Well, I remember Dad kept a Swiss Army knife in his car and it had a little saw on it. We walked down the hill and we took that little thing out and hacked away at some bamboos, and I think we maybe hauled away three. I guess we didn’t get caught because we didn’t go to jail for stealing. But we tied them on top of the car and the next morning, I don’t think I slept that night, but the next morning we drove down to Baden Lake where my grandparents had a cabin, a shack, probably more like it.
And I was so excited, we tied some string on that bamboo pole, we put an old rusty hook on there, and we went in the refrigerator and we had some liver. My grandfather had bought this cabin in the 50s, and he and his brothers would get together, it was their place of reunion. And since they were Great Depression kids, they ate liver, nasty. We thought it was good catfish bait.
So, liver went on the hook and that thing dipped in the water and before you know it, a catfish on there. And I remember hauling that thing out, it swung at me and dad was trying to take a picture and that thing with its big long, you know, fish is this big and their whiskers are that long. Thing was coming at me and, you know, having to stand back a little.
Mom, who grew up with an outdoorsman father, cleaned that fish, breaded it with cornmeal, cooked it in the frying pan, and she ate it herself. But after that, as happens with a little boy, you get hooked on fishing and you go buy a real fishing pole. You learn how to untangle the thing, but then you’ve got to get a box, and you’ve got to get lures, and you’ve got to get other things with which you can attract and dupe and catch fish.
Somewhere down in my cellar, I still have my high school fishing pole. It still works. And I’ve got a box of old lures, and most of them have the little shiny spoon, and the thing swims along in the water. You jerk your rod a little and make it dance. And what happens is man having dominion over the creatures and making these fishing lures and learning all these techniques and buying $100,000 fishing boats and whatever else. We figured out how to entice fish out of their place of peace and onto our nasty hook. And we eat. We mount them on our walls and all the rest.
Isn’t this reminding you of what James, the half-brother of Jesus says in James chapter one, sin occurs when we are by our own desire lured into sin. and enticed, that shiny spoon of sin, the Turkish delight like Edmund in The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe causes our desires to grow. And that desire then conceives and gives birth to sin. And then sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death, temptation, being lured, being duped, being enticed. is the thing we want to think about.
Genesis chapter three begins with these ominous words. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field. One of the great enemies of the believer of the Christian is the devil. What does Jesus say? What do the writers of the scripture say about the devil? He is evil. He seeks to deceive and destroy and devour you. The devil is our greatest enemy in the spiritual realm.
But also the world is an enemy to the believer, the world and its system, the world and its ways, the world and its contrariness to the word of the living God. And the world offers us so much, the shiny stuff. But what’s always behind the shiny stuff? It’s the terrible hook. It is the thing that will get us.
But then there’s also what Paul calls the flesh. Not meaning our skin, but when you see the word flesh in the New Testament, generally speaking, when it’s not talking about your skin, it is speaking when it says flesh of your remnants of corruption, remnants of sin.
Today we read from the shorter catechism on what is justification, adoption and sanctification. If you graduate up to the larger catechism, which guess what? It’s larger, more words. It asks a question. What is the difference between justification and sanctification? And I don’t know if you caught the word. Justification is an act. Adoption is an act. Sanctification is a lifelong process. So justification is a judicial act where God hammers his gavel and says, you are righteous in my sight. Adoption is an act. You are now my child with all the rights and privileges of the son. Again, another gavel bang by the judge of heaven and earth. But sanctification is a lifelong process whereby we die to sin, live to righteousness, and rinse and repeat.
But when you get to the larger catechism and it asks, where do justification and sanctification differ? It says this, in justification our sin is pardoned, and in sanctification our sin is subdued. And so when we think about the enemies of the Christian, the devil, the world, but our flesh or remnant sin, we must understand that there lives within us, yes, sin that is pardoned and subdued, but it’s still with a little nurture and fuel, a little desire, giving birth to sin, fully grown, brings forth death. It can rear up its ugly head.
And so the life of the believer is a life of sanctification. We live out of our justification. and we lean into our sanctification, the word and the spirit, but also our habits and disciplines of grace. Get us there.
Sin or temptation is often broken up like this. Simply put, it’s desire and opportunity meeting. Sometimes you’ll have desire, but no opportunity. Sometimes there’ll be opportunity and no desire, but desire and opportunity, when they meet, will wreak havoc. It’s why we’ve got to be careful. What is it we sing? Be careful little eyes, what you see. Be careful little ears, what you hear. Remember that little childhood song?
Remember Lot. Abraham and Lot come back from Egypt. And Abraham says to Lot, you know, we got lots of sheep and cattle, servants. need more room to spread our tents and to water and feed our livestock. And Abraham said to Lot, if you go this way, I’ll go that way. And if you go that way, I’ll go this way. And the Bible says that Lot looked towards Sodom. And then we’re told later in Genesis, Lot lived near Sodom. Now y’all know about Sodom and Gomorrah, right? Okay. And then we find out Lot lives in Sodom. and then he’s sitting in the gates of Sodom.
And when the angels come to Abraham to tell him and Sarah, you’re going to have a baby next year, finally Isaac, they also say, by the way, we’re on the way to destroy Sodom because their sins have risen up into the ears of God and he’s coming to take care of business. And that’s when Abraham pleads, you know, there’s whatever righteous and he whittles it down to just a few. God says, yeah, I would save Sodom. Well, there’s none there, but God rescues lot.
And remember, uh, what happened with, Lot, he really didn’t want to leave. He loved his Starbucks. He loved his new microwave oven he just had installed the day before. His recliner was comfy. The view out his window was great. And why did Lot not want to leave Sodom? Well, he looked toward it. He lived near it. He lived in it. And then he was a leader in it. Of course, you wouldn’t want to leave home. Well, what happens when home becomes a place of unrighteousness? You’re in big trouble.
Now, remember Lot’s wife. She didn’t want to leave either. She was more in love with Sodom than her husband. And remember, she looked back and what happened turned into a pillar of salt in JC Ryle, Ryle’s book on holiness. on sanctification, he has a chapter and the title is simply Remember Lot’s Wife. You don’t even have to read the chapter. You get it right there, don’t you? Our sanctification, our growth in holiness is really difficult when we look towards Sodom, live near Sodom. live in Sodom and are sitting in the gates of Sodom. We become reluctant to put to death, therefore, what is earthly in us. You know this struggle. I know this struggle. It is daily. And it’s why we’ve got to desperately ask God to pry our fingers off of our idols and to give us greater affections for greater things so that the lesser things fade into the background,
but desire an opportunity, simply put, lead us into sin. Or if you want to, I don’t know, have a few more words. There’s suggestion, suggestion of the thing. There’s delight in it. It looks pretty good. You know, what did Eve do? She held the fruit. And what is, what does Genesis say? It was a delight to her eyes. Well, where was God? He was no longer a delight to her. The God of the universe fellowshipping with her. The fruit that he said, don’t eat, was a delight to her eyes.
And then there’s consent. I’m okay with this. We justify our sin, don’t we? We’re good at it. And then there’s the act. And then there’s the persistence in it. Now we read in first Corinthians chapter 10, 12 to 14 about temptation and God is faithful, it says. He gives us a way out. The believer may persist in sin for a time, but there is a way out because of who we are in Jesus. And there’s a way out because of the gifts of grace that we have.
But it can be that a Christian loves the suggestion because Satan is so beguiling. We delight in the thing, the sinful thing, and we consent to it because our minds justify sin. And we act and we persist in it until we are awakened from our stupor. It could be today that you’ve come to church struggling with sin. There is something in your life and it is nagging at you. You love it, yet you hate it. You know that you should not be doing it, yet you do it, as Paul says in Romans chapter 7. You know the right thing to do and don’t do it. You know the wrong thing to do and you know you shouldn’t do it, but that’s what you do anyway.
And what does Paul exclaim in Romans 7? Oh, wretched man that I am. And what I’m trying to tell you today is as believers who have the world and everything in it, the devil and all that he throws at us, but our own flesh, our own sin nature, we’re in a pickle, aren’t we? And it’s the way God has designed the Christian life. I don’t know why. I don’t understand it, but he has done it that way. And so we struggle with sin.
Our confession of faith Says this about sanctification. It says they who are effectually called and regenerated that is born again Those who have a new heart and a new spirit created in them are further sanctified really and personally through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection by his word and spirit dwelling in them and The dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed. We read that in our assurance of pardon. It was crucified with Christ at the cross. But the whole dominion, the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified.
Remember, in justification, sin is pardoned. Sanctification, it is subdued. It can rise up, though, and we know that it does. But we are more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces to the practice of true holiness without which no man shall see the Lord. OK, that’s that’s pretty good so far. It’s going to get worse.
This sanctification is through the whole of man. Yet imperfect in this life, that’s that’s the rub, isn’t it? It’s imperfect in this life. There abideth still some remnants of corruption, that’s the flesh, in every part whence ariseth a continual and irreconcilable war, the flesh lusting against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. There is in each of you believers, there is in me. The Bible teaches it, our theology affirms it, but we have also experienced it. There is a perpetual war in us and it will not be reconciled until we are dead and glorified. That is a harsh reality.
But why does God do this to us? Why is this a reality? Thomas Boston, one of our reformed Scottish Presbyterian forebears, he had seven reasons that God left the flesh, the remnant sin, in us. And if you’ve been in the Confession of Faith class, The men or the women you’ve heard me talk about this a million times and here goes a million and one Some of this may be new for some of y’all because you haven’t been in the confession I probably and said the whole thing on a Sunday, but but you need to hear this. This is good stuff
Thomas Boston says God has ordered the whole matter of the believers Sanctification that sin is left to be active in their souls while here on earth for their further humiliation. It’s to humble us. For example, God gave Paul a thorn in the flesh to keep him low. And so we find David after his grievous fall, he grows in the grace of humility. Why does God leave remnants in us? It’s to further humble us. And that is utterly hard for us to bear, but it’s in God’s wisdom.
The second thing Boston says is the Lord allows sin to remain in his people so that they are stirred to the frequent exercise of prayer. I don’t know about you, but when I realize my sin, I have got nowhere else to go. And so if, if you’re not a praying person, Sin will rear up its ugly head and get you praying. That’s a terrible way to get you praying, isn’t it? But that’s one of Thomas Boston’s list here. The soul feels the continual need of pardon, and therefore there must be much lying at God’s footstool. Not telling fibs, but lying, laying. When his children grow remiss in their duty, the Lord sometimes allows them to fall into some grievous sin, to awaken them and wound their conscience, so they cry, to him like a child who falls into a small fire.
Third thing, Boston says, the reason for remnant sin, the sin left in us makes us more watchful of our hearts, which are still prone to wander. When a prisoner escapes and they catch him, they’ll put him in more close custody than before. We walk in a world filled with many snares, and if we were not watchful, we would be caught in them. You’ve probably heard people speak of fasting, You’ve probably heard people speaking of praying. You’ve heard people speak of some Christian disciplines that have fallen on hard times. Well, there’s a lost Christian discipline called watchfulness, where we are always looking at our feet and our lives to make sure we don’t trip up.
My dad lives out in the sticks and he has copperheads. He makes fun of me, but I haven’t been bitten yet. I carry a flashlight when I go over there at night. I’m deathly afraid of these things. I’m very watchful of my feet and my legs. Don’t want to be eaten alive by one of these monsters. Had enough run-ins with them before. I see what a snake bite had done to him, and so I’m watchful for the copperheads. Don’t care who makes fun of me. But here’s the spiritual flip side. We don’t bind being nipped. in the hills by Satan. We rather like it. We love indulging in the flesh. We love indulging in the things that were forbidden, like Adam and Eve. They are our first parents. And as Robert Murray Machine, the Scottish theologian, said, the seed of every sin is in us. The seed of every sin is in us.
And, you know, you look at the news or you read about King David or you read about Ananias and Sapphira or who else did God whoop up on, so to speak, Nadab and Abihu, and we say, never me. What does our passage say? Take heed, you who think you stand, lest you fall. The seed of every sin is in you, and so you must be watchful.
The fourth thing Boston says, this is really interesting. He says, just like God allowed some Canaanites to remain in the promised land, to try his people, so he has left remains of natural corruption for our exercise and our trial.
The fifth thing, through sin left in us, we are made more and more to feel our need for Jesus. If you are struggling with sin, you have a place to flee. should say since you are struggling with sin, you have a place to flee. And it’s Jesus who paid for it. He knows he was tempted like us in every way. And so if you are struggling with sin, let that be a push to pray, a push to be watchful, but a push to depend on Jesus more. No greater resource.
The sixth reason. He says, it’s God’s ordinary way to bring about a great work by degrees. God could have created the world in a moment, but he took how many? Six days. God could have sent Jesus immediately after Adam’s fall. Depending on who you ask, he took a couple thousand years. He could have cleared out the promised land of all the ites. but he cleared them out by degrees, and so he does so with remaining sin. As you grow older in the faith, and perhaps older in age, your struggle with sin and temptation differs.
Finally, Boston says, number seven, through the indwelling sin that remains, Christ is glorified. Okay. If it glorifies Jesus, so be it. While the enemy does dwell in us, Christ graced. Christ Holy Spirit are at work in us so that the enemy cannot overcome, domineer, or destroy us. Yes, you will struggle with sin. Yes, it will wreak havoc in your life. And yes, it may seem to have your last breath sucked out of you. But if you are in Jesus, Boston says it cannot overcome you, it cannot domineer you, and it cannot destroy you.
And so what of the Christian life? Uh, what of this struggle we have with sin and temptation? Uh, let me just throw out several practical things. Number one is you need to feed your mind with scripture. The mind is the starting place. The mind then seeks, uh, seeps down to the heart, which seeps to the hands. And so if we are feeding our minds, it will affect our heart and it will also affect our hands. Not saying you just read the Bible and all this will go away. Could be you read the Bible and it gets worse. But we need to feed our minds with the scriptures of God, the promises of God.
We need to name our sins and we need to name the opposite virtue. So we need to feed our minds. We need to watch our hearts. Proverbs 4.23 says, above all else, guard your heart for it is the wellspring of life. What does Jesus say? From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. What’s in a man’s heart will come out in his life. And that’s why we need to watch where our hands go and what we do. There’s a practical side to guarding yourself in the Christian life. Yes, protect your mind and feed it well. Yes, guard your heart and feed and nurture it well. But we also need to set boundaries around our lives. We don’t need to look towards Sodom, live near Sodom and live in Sodom because you’ll become a Sodomite, right? You will become one of those from that city. And so we’ve got to be careful.
Second set of encouragements. Be careful with our mind, heart and hands. We need to attend to the means of grace. What do we mean by the means of grace? Words, sacrament, prayer, fellowship and suffering. If you are suffering, if you are in fellowship, if you are in the sacraments and in prayer and in the word, those are the ways God works in you. If you’re out of fellowship with believers, it’s going to be hard to grow in grace. God will put suffering in your life and that will remove the impure things from your life. You need to be in the word, you need to be in prayer, you need to be under the sacraments.
Wednesday night, prayer time at seven o’clock. Um, we’ve been praying on Wednesday nights, pretty straight now for about three months, I would say, and it’s okay to say, amen. You can be Baptist for a moment. Wednesday night perhaps has been the most powerful prayer meeting I’ve ever been in. Because I think people realize the reality of God, the reality of sin, the blessings of Jesus, and we have no other place to go. And you dig into the means of grace. You don’t skip it. You don’t say, well, I got a fifth trip to the mountains this year. I know cheesy church signs are really bad and you shouldn’t have one. But there’s that church sign that says seven days without God makes one. Weak, right? But it’s true. We get out of the means of grace. That’s going to be bad for our souls.
What about the habits of grace? You got church, but what about reading and praying and maybe meditating yourself? What about fasting and watchfulness? The habits of grace. But also think about your life. A person ought to work. A person ought to worship. and a person ought to be in a family. Go back to the Genesis, go back to the Garden of Eden, work, worship and family. If you’re living within a family, you’re worshiping in a covenant community and in your own private life, but your work, you’re busy working, could be housekeeping, could be your day job, it could be your retirement years. But work, worship and family is a good set of environments to keep you safe.
So mind, heart, and hands, means of grace, habits of grace, work, worship, family. Let me give you a third set of encouragements. There are three deadly powers against the Christian. Martin Luther named them, the world, the flesh, and the devil. You can read it in 1st John and see it, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John and see it. But there are deadly powers that want you dead. And if you’re a believer, you’re married, you got kids, you’re trying to live a right life and serve the Lord, Satan is going to come at you with all he’s got. He’s going to throw everything he can at you. And we need to realize there are deadly powers seeking to deceive, destroy, and devour you.
Second thing to remember is what God promised Eve in the garden. You will bear an offspring, Eve, offspring ultimately Jesus, And then Satan, your spawn, as we like to say. And there will be this seed to seed battle. And we read in Revelation that the devil ends up getting finally and fully conquered. He’s cast out of this world and into everlasting darkness. But for now, yes, he’s on a chain. And yes, he can do lots of horrible, harmful things. But that promised battle in Genesis chapter three is what we’re living under. And you see the skirmishes in the scripture. Cain killed Abel. Why? It was over worship. Why did Herod want to kill baby Jesus? It wasn’t because he was king of the Jews and there couldn’t be another one. It was because you kill Jesus, there’s no cross. and there’s no salvation. That was what the picture, and we see all these cosmic battles, and brothers and sisters, we are in the midst of them.
Other thing we gotta remember is the tactics of our opposition. The world tries to sell you shiny things. Satan hisses in our ear, did God really say? And our own flesh, our own remaining sin lies to us. Perhaps one of C.S. Lewis’s best known books is The Screwtape Letters. And it’s a description of what Satan does to deceive and destroy and devour God’s people. We need to know the opposition’s tactics and be watchful and be ready.
In our confession of faith, it speaks of sanctification as a trial, and it’s under the heading of God’s providence. So understand God, who oversees all things, has determined this to be the case. It says, the most wise, the most righteous, and the most gracious God, now this is going to hurt, does oftentimes leave for a season his own children to the manifold temptations and corruptions of their own hearts. That is scary. That is absolutely scary. Our experience tells us it’s so. The scriptures teach it. Our confession of faith affirms it. And he does so to chastise us for our former sins, to discover in us a hidden strength of the corruption and deceitfulness of the hearts. that they may be humbled. Starts to sound like Thomas Boston, doesn’t it? They may be humbled, or he sounds like this. He came later. And it raises us up to a more close and constant dependence for support unto himself to make us more watchful against future occasions of sin and for sundry other just and holy ends.
Friends, it’s in God’s plan to test you. And if you don’t believe that, read James chapter one. Blessed is the one who bears up under Trials. Trials and temptations are the same word in the Greek New Testament. And so when we are under temptations, it is a testing. It is a trial. You will never be tested like Jesus. You will never be tested like Peter. You’ll never be tested like Job, God forbid. But our passage says you’ll be tested with things common to man. For the Corinthians, it was to worship idols and try to love Jesus, too. And isn’t that our pickle? We’re in love with this present world. We’re in love with the desires of our flesh. And we often have things in our grip, idols. And even the clear word of God tries to prevent us, or we try to say, no, I don’t believe it. It’s not, you know, I love it too much. And so these trials will attempt to wear us down and wear us out.
So what are we to do? What does the scripture say? Jesus is our high priest and he knows us. He’s been tempted like us in every way. He’s tempted like us in every way, yet he did not sin. And so remember that when we undergo these things, Jesus has been there before us. And so we can run to him and say, Jesus, I am struggling. Jesus, I am tempted to set up this idol or to exercise this lust. I am tempted with desire and opportunity. My passion is going there. Help me. Deliver me from evil, we pray. Deliver me from the evil one. It’s good for us to remember God is faithful. And God will get us through the trial and there will be a way out.
One little story I read this week, which was very helpful for the way out is like a ship sailing on the rough seas and can’t see where the rocks are. Can’t see where land is. And then all of a sudden with all the darkness, all the clouds, all the tumultuous riding on the sea and perhaps casting things overboard and just trying to survive, suddenly the clouds dissipate. And there’s land and there’s sunshine and there’s help.
And so there’s always encouragement when we go through temptation, there’s going to be a way through it and a way out of it, but it’s why we should long to be glorified.
Yeah. I know some of us want to live forever, but we’re going to, some of us want to live forever on earth. I can’t wait to be glorified, I don’t know about you. The sin will wear you out.
But thanks be to God for the gift of Jesus and all the blessings and the tools of the church. Let’s give thanks to God, pray with me.
Father, we feel like a big bucket of cold water thrown on us. We’re told, come to Jesus and all your problems go away. It seems we come to Jesus and it just gets going. Lord, your law, your righteousness shows us our sin. Our sin drives us to Jesus. And so now at the foot of the cross, now at the mercy seat of Jesus, we say, help us, Lord, help us. Today, Lord, pry our fingers off our idols, causing each of us to think where our weak spots are, where we’re in love with this world, the flesh, or things the devil offers, and help us to hate it, and to forsake it and to put it to death, all for Jesus’ sake, and by the power of your Holy Spirit, help us, Lord, we pray in Christ’s great and gracious name, amen.
We want to sing one of my favorite hymns for watchfulness, Rise My Soul to Watch and Pray, and let’s rise to sing together.