Please turn to 1 Corinthians 10. Three Sundays in, we can still say we’re entering a new year. And it’s good to make the transition under the Word of God.
We’re going to look at 1 Corinthians 10:13, a foundational verse for the Christian experience, and because it’s so foundational we’re going to spend a couple of weeks in it, before returning to the letter to Philippians. I want to discuss a grim reality of what the new year will bring: temptation.
1 Corinthians 10:13 – 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, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
Temptation will catch up to you in 2024. You can go through periods of easy sailing, where it’s easy to get up and do the good thing, your relationships are peaceful and warm, you’re saying ‘no’ to everything that you need to. Easy!
In these times you can trick yourself into thinking that you’ve finally got a handle on things, you’ve reached the maturity where you’re no longer enticed by what used to entice you. Wrong!
I remember my son Kai as a junior in high school running a 1000-meter race where he was ahead of the team almost the entire race. But there was one guy, a senior, who was trailing just behind him all the laps, and when Tonia and I saw how effortlessly he was loping behind Kai, we both said, uh-oh, he’s just waiting until the last 75 meters. And sure enough, he did pull out in front of Kai at the end.
That’s a good representation of temptation, always trailing us, waiting for a certain moment that, perhaps we should’ve predicted, but we are never able to anticipate. You never outrun temptation.
That’s one thing that I appreciate about Alcoholics Anonymous – the participants never stop referring to themselves as alcoholics. They’ll say things like, I’m an alcoholic who’s been sober for 12 years, six months. Well, then, shouldn’t you stop calling yourself an alcoholic?
No, because of what Paul has just written in the previous sentence: “Let anyone who thinks that he stands, take heed lest he fall.” Whatever trust in God is, it’s not cockiness. It’s not “I got this; I’m just not tempted anymore.” It’s certainly not, “I’m just not tempted anymore and I don’t understand why you would be.”
So temptation will catch up to you in 2024. Let’s name some temptations.
Active temptations: Lasciviousness or speaking in a sexually perverted manner. Concupiscence or sexual desires that are disordered. Drunkenness. Abusing prescription or recreational drugs or any substance. Gluttony or being obsessed with food. Mouthing off or otherwise being disrespectful to parents. Complaining. Hatred. Gossip. Slander. A mindset of rivalry toward your siblings. Anger. Lying. Stealing. The partying life. Raising a ruckus.
Passive temptations: Laziness. Procrastination. Self-pity. Sloppiness. Disorder. Sneakiness. Jealousy. Covetousness. Littering. Coldness. Cowardice. Spiritual drowsiness.
Proverbs 18: 1: Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire/ he breaks out against all sound judgment. The temptation to back away from people.
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard believed that we moderns are more prone to sins of passivity. And I tend to agree, which is another reason I was against legalizing marijuana, which tends to act as a depressant in most people. Do young men, whom public education and popular culture have so effectively emasculated, discouraged, really need more encouragement to relaxation?
But I digress. Active and passive temptations.
Of course, the actual experience of temptations is rather involved. Different temptations and different kinds of temptation come one after another and are very often related. They’re causes and effects. For example, one could be scared of starting a project so instead he eats a bunch of sugary breads which bends him toward sluggishness, then concupiscence, and so he looks at pornography which throws him into sneakiness and then defensiveness and then coldness and in the wake of all that…a low-grade cynicism settles on him.
Or someone is always dully afraid of the stock market crashing or the money running out somehow…and the fearfulness saps energy and so she doesn’t feel like keeping up with the duties of her life – doesn’t clean, doesn’t iron, loses all ideals for rearing her children. All she has energy for is browsing -Facebook, YouTube videos, superficial news. Over time she forgets how to get down to work… and over the years someone who would have accomplished, been one of the sharpest knives in the drawer becomes shallow, petulant…
Or, finally (and we could keep going for months), you text so-and-so on her birthday, perhaps even buy her a Starbucks card; But then she doesn’t recognize your birthday. You would never bring up your feeling slighted up to her – you’ve never had courage for any type of confrontation – but what you’re practiced in is treating people a little frostily. So you do. And wait, that felt kinda good, so you do it again. And the little hoar frost becomes a deep freeze, and soon the relationship is as brittle and lifeless as annuals in the dead of winter.
If you could boil these and many other temptations down and find a common pattern, it’d be this: fear, then avoidance and then stubbornly doing what you feel like.
So.. we’re preparing ourselves: these or things similar are coming in 2024. If you’re free of temptation on January 21st, thank God. But I bet you could look over 2023 and remember some rough patches. Well…they’re coming again.
From this verse ,there are two things to bear in mind when you encounter temptation:
1. The temptation you will experience, or are experiencing now, is common to man.
In a way, the arrival of temptation is humbling, because being tempted you discover that, for all you thought you were, you’re not so special after all. Temptation is the great equalizer, and we realize that, for all our attainments or prestige, we’re only human.
Someone once said that when you pass by one of those unlucky people on the street who are dependent on charity and handouts, disheveled, mumbling to themselves – whatever you say or don’t say to them, you should whisper to yourself, “There go I but by the grace of God.”
Common to man. You’re still human. you can be a sensitive reader, a deep thinker, a refined aesthete, and still be sorely tempted by concupiscence. This is so dark, this is so disgusting, why can’t I think myself past this? Why when I have filled my mind with such refinement do those salacious images from the past make their way to the front of the mind?
You can be old and biblically literate believer and for all your years and bible reading you’ve never gotten a handle on rage or bitterness. You can be successful or rich and yet never have been able to get past your insecurity that people close to you are looking down at you.
Temptation alerts us to the fact that we’re nothing special, but there’s a comforting side to that too. The effect of much temptation is to make us seem to ourselves that we are alone in strong urges to sin. My heart is so black; why can’t I be like _______________ who I’m sure never had a dark desire cross his mind.
But no – we look across the millennia to the cave-dwellers and forest-dwellers; we look across the world to those in the heartland and those on the coast; urbanites and suburbanites – they have each and all had temptation take hold. Those scenarios that I imagined would be understandable by every occupant of every hamlet, castle, ranch, shelter, condo.
You’re not above it all. You’re not alone. Being tempted is a common problem. And also a common solution.
2. Second thing to bear in mind is that God is faithful. Not just generally, God is faithful. But In view of, alongside of your temptation, God is…faithful. Maybe one of the biggest problems of temptations is that they tend to block our view of God. When the urge to lust enters, when we are intimidated by someone, we find it hard to see God. He must have left me, disgusted that I would be the type to even be susceptible to this sin. But God has not gone; you’ve stopped looking at Him.
That God is faithful is a truth that is introduced early in the Old Testament. With the Hebrew word chesed, translated variously as “loving kindness” – this was Miles Coverdale translation – or “loyalty,” “mercy,” “goodness.”
When chesed is referring to God it has to do with His commitment to His original stated intentions. God had something in mind when He made the world and He remains committed to that. Specifically, God has a particular plan to reclaim and renew the world that he’s created – and He’ll remain faithful to that plan. In carrying out that plan to renew the world, God intends to both reclaim and renew people… and use those people to further his plans to renew other people, and the world. God calls a people and he’s loyal to them. God sets out a plan and he’s committed to that plan. God is chesed. God is Faithful.
I remember in my undergrad years when I studied religion, I was given the assignment to write a paper identifying the theme of Genesis 24. Genesis 24 recounts the time when old Abraham sends his servant to look for a wife for his son, Isaac. Abraham was adamant that the servant find his son’s bride from among his ancestral people and not be taken from the Canaanites. So the servant heads hundreds of miles back to modern-day Iraq with a tall order – bring back an estimable bride who is willing, sight unseen, to travel back with him and marry a stranger.
I thought I’d handed in a pretty good paper on finding love at the local watering spot, until the professor of the class – after all the papers had been turned in – said something like, I hope you picked up that the theme of this chapter was chesed. The word is used over and over in this chapter.
Oh, shoot. Another “C.”
As the servant sets out on his seemingly impossible tasks he prays and appeals to God’s chesed, or faithfulness. God – you called my master Abraham in order to bless the world. You promised to carry out that work of blessing through this son of his, Isaac. You care about this blessing, this son of Abraham who carries the blessing forward, the family line that goes out of him. God, this is your project. Your people.
Here I am in this strange land. I’m hot. I’m thirsty. I’m at a well. I don’t even know where to start to look. This is so weird! But in this hot, dry, weird space, You’re here too. Let me see chesed. Be faithful to your stated priorities.
Chesed/ Faithfulness is the word that opens up our perspective onto a big truth: In our creation and salvation and history God is the Primary Actor who has invested everything He could. It’s His project. We are His enterprise. Regarding the lives of His people, in their decisions, in the direction of their life, in their character formation – God is the One who has most skin in the game.
Which is why in the most well-known psalm, as the writer looks over his life, he observes, Surely, the goodness and the chesed of Lord pursues me all the days of my life. I wander off. I get bored. Bitterness threatens to settle in. Bad habits start to cement. To all this God doesn’t stand way off shaking His head. No, after all that junk here comes God after me with what one commentator called God’s two sheepdogs: God’s goodness and God’s faithfulness.
The faithfulness of God to His commitments is always the carrying theme in any situation…even when it doesn’t seem like it. 1200 years after Abraham, when the writer of Lamentations sits down before the smoking city of Jerusalem – chaos and destruction and judgment surrounding him – and attempts to explain this moment in the history of God’s people, this is what He says. “The chesed of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness…”
A particular problem coming with many temptations is the tendency to become myopic, you become nearsighted. Before the looming temptation you lose the bigger picture… and you forget about God and His faithfulness. Another way of saying that is that most temptation have an idolatrous component to it – they come with an enticement to stop trusting God.
When you are being tempted, in the moment with, for example, looking at pornography; or over a period of time with, for example, with fixating on another person’s offenses or faults and drawing back from them – here’s a recommendation: go outside. That’s not a metaphor: get outdoors. If the temptation strikes over a period of time, spend much time outside, and once outdoors say out loud: “The LORD is my Shepherd; I shall not lack anything.” Remind yourself of the bigger purposes of God. Get out of your thoughts and speak aloud of God’s commitment to His people.
Surely goodness and chesed will follow me all the days of my life, including when I want to gossip so badly or when my whole self is consumed with lust or when all I want is to drown my boredom or frustration in drink.
So…we’re outside. Quoting Psalm 23. Then as we hear ourselves say that beautiful sentence, we then remind ourselves that this particular chesed/faithfulness follows a specific route – starting with Abraham. Yes, the plan of God to reclaim failed image bearers and bless them and the world through them begins with Abraham, passes through his descendants and reaches its climax in a certain Descendant of Abraham.
Recall a couple of specific scenes of that particular history of God’s specific chesed – any you like.
And then land your historical review of God’s chesed on that certain Descendant of Abraham. It is the blood of Jesus shed at His death that opened a new covenant between God and men, when God re-committed Himself to re-claiming and renewing sinners, and by virtue of which He faithfully sends out grace and help and mercy to those in Jesus Christ. The old Welsh hymn celebrates the fact that the chesed/lovingkindness of God moves forward into the world through Jesus:
Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Lovingkindness {chesed!} as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our Ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Get outside! “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” Consider a couple of scenes from the history of chesed. Bring that history to Jesus’ cross. And then, here’s another sentence to say out loud: “I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live within the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
Finally, spend time considering God’s chesed in your life, and let yourself fill up with gratitude.
Go outside. “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” Review the history of chesed come into the world. Make your way to its great culmination and renewal in the blood of Jesus. Galatians 2:20. Gratitude for specific presentations of chesed.
…Then back inside you go.
We need to get to the nitty-gritty of handling temptation, which we’ll do next week. But before the details, we should be sure that in our temptation – in our struggles with so much shabbiness and tawdriness and nastiness and selfishness – yes in our struggle with temptation we need to know that God, the Father of Jesus Christ is committed to us by the covenant that came through the blood of Calvary.
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