A Way Out

A Way Out

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

The title to this morning’s sermon raises an interesting point. It is always easier to get into something than to get out. The title is lifted out of the 13^th v. of 1 Corinthians 10 and was put that way, I suspect, because the writer wanted to convey the idea that because you are plagued by temptation, you are not necessarily TRAPPED by temptation. You are not in BONDAGE to temptation, even though you can’t shake it entirely.

A “way out” suggests an open door. I have had the experience of trying to get out of something once I have gotten into it a number of times in my life. I will get an idea, go for it and, when it has run its course, try and get out. It is like putting toothpaste back into the tube.

I have a cousin who is a very popular Maine artist – gets tens of thousands of dollars a painting. He spent time in industry as an engineer and a product manager for two large corporations. His take on getting out of something you’ve gotten into is a chapter out of the addictive system – “they give you enough room to wiggle around, but don’t try and pull out!”

We get into marriages we shouldn’t get into. We get into relationships where discretion would have been the better part of valor. Becoming an alcoholic is a whole lot easier than recovery. We work for people or companies that we dislike intensely, and we stay for too long.

Christians are not immune by any means. Becoming a Christian is easy enough, once you have hit bottom. You don’t become a Christian out of some logical thinking process. Logical thinking offers no room for a broken heart and a contrite spirit. David tells us that it is a broken heart and a contrite spirit that is honored by God. Logic doesn’t get you there.

But once you come to the realization that your sin has broken you, reaching for a liferaft is an easy step if the HS is there to call you into fellowship with God through Jesus Christ. For the Christian, that liferaft is Jesus.

Again, though, praise God, you can’t get out of the Kingdom once you are in. That is the one condition that you can’t escape, no matter how hard you may want to from time to time. The oldtimers didn’t call the HS the Hound of Heaven for nothing. If you are truly born again by the Spirit of God, you cannot go back into the womb of the world without being dragged back. That is true, even though you may be tempted to do so.

A common mistake for new believers to make is to assume that now that they have climbed onto the liferaft Jesus, it will be clear sailing into port. So they set sail, looking for other drowning people, forgetting that it was a broken heart and a contrite spirit that turned their lives around and booked their passage on the lifeboat Jesus. They want to persuade others to jump aboard on the basis of logic, forgetting the role of the HS in convicting of sin. It may APPEAR to be working, but it doesn’t work.

Logic brings weeds and junk into the church, and those who have booked passage by the grace of God alone can’t tell the difference anymore because they have institutionalized their faith – have joined the crowd. Try getting out of that one! It can’t happen without a crash. I suspect that is why God permits church splits. The only way He can get His people out is to blow them out with a stick of dynamite.

I recall how relatively easy it was to get this church going. It was full for the first couple of years. Then we had that split, and it felt like we were going to crash and burn. But what happened was quite the opposite.

God had other plans. There has been spiritual growth here for all of us that never would have happened in that world of strawberry festivals and parades. I tell people that we have a quarter of our congregation, twice the money, 1/10 the aggravation and 10 times the spirit. Go figure!

I think Paul, in this letter to the Christians at Corinth, had in mind this matter of the difficulty of getting out of something once you have gotten in. Remember that Paul had been a Pharisee and had and had followed the way of self-righteousness by preserving the institution. He was convinced it was the right thing to do. Temptation had blossomed into dominion for Saul, and it felt natural to him. His mission was to save God’s religion by destroying the believers in the Son of God. He was bent on obliterating the New Way because he was certain that that was what God would want him to do.

That is a perfect example of the difference being tempted and being under the DOMINION of temptation. And it is the difference between the believer and the non-believer in Jesus Christ.

On the Road to Damascus, God had to literally hit Paul over the head with a baseball bat to get him out of that addictive environment he was in. He became blind and broken. The only way out was over the wall in the middle of the night. It was a lot easier to get into that mess than to get out. All he needed was credentials to get in. What he needed to get out was humiliation and defeat.

In the course of building up the search engine base for the CPI website, I have been doing a lot of writing lately. I have to do a blog or two a day, and we post at least 600 words a day. There are places where you can get those words out to the general public and get hits on your website, which is the objective.

I recalled this week that some 15 years ago I had written a book that was about divorce recovery. It was called, “Beyond Failure: Abundant Life after Divorce.” I never did anything with it but was able to dig out some floppy discs that were written on a Microsoft platform that was long ago extinct. I managed to extract the words all run together.

This book is about the process of getting out of a marriage once you have been divorced. That may sound strange, but those here who have been divorced, like I have, know exactly what I mean by that. There is, I suspect, nothing tougher than that assignment. I have counseled divorced people who are still emotionally back there, while the old boy has gone blithely on to greener pastures. Getting in was easy. Getting out emotionally takes some people decades.

I had the book edited by a divorced woman in Austin, TX who had been a pastor’s wife. She had been divorced something like 12 – 15 years and was still back there. Her comment to me was, “I wish I had had this book back then. It would have made a huge difference.” I tried to tell her that it was never too late, but she had gotten into another system of living as a victim. She would have to get out of that in order to get out of the emotional attachment to someone who hardly remembered her name anymore. “Breaking up is so very hard to do!” So is getting out once you have broken up.

Paul offers a way out that is available only to the person who trusts God completely. His example is getting out of temptation.

We are plagued with temptation – every one of us. There is something deep inside us that we stumble over every so often, reminding us that we are not as disciplined as we should like to think.

Temptations cover the landscape. They come in all sorts of sizes, shapes and forms. They are triggered by all kinds of circumstances. I have my own temptations to deal with, just as do you. They are extremely complex issues. What triggers them, few of us will ever understand. But we may be offered a way out of them without necessarily becoming immune from them. That is the angle, we need, is it not? When Paul suggests that there is a way out, he may not be suggesting deliverance. He may be pointing us, not to the times we fall into temptation, but to the big time gaps in between. He may be pointing us to the fact that, while we continue to be plagued by temptation, we no longer are slaves to it, even though we fall off the wagon every now and then.

There is suggestion here that Paul may be telling us that God uses the fires of temptation to refine us, while all the time it is His purpose to deliver us: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

What is insidious about temptation is that it keeps cropping up and spoiling our comfort zones. Worse still, is that we get caught when we find ourselves in some addictive environment that requires a devotion that we ought to be reserving for God.

v.12: So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! 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 may be able to bear it.

If we read this carefully, we are taken with how it speaks to our needs. First, temptation is likely to come to that person who thinks that he is ABOVE temptation – has conquered it. We all get that way from time to time. We become confident and sure or ourselves for a day or two. If I were to make a guess, it would seem that God wants us to live in HIS light and not our own. The minute you think that you are immune from temptation, be careful; that you don’t fall.

Just when we think that we have conquered some sin in our life and are squared away, we fall off the wagon. God wants us to remain in a state of dependence on Him. To think that we stand is to decide that WE have it all under control. What that says to me is that so long as we rest in Him, there is protection. But once we congratulate ourselves that we have it licked, bang – up pops the Devil.

What we learn from that is that there are things in our lives that make us proud and vulnerable to temptation. Find out what those things are and stay away from them. Perhaps, then, God allows us to fall in order to bring us back. If that is so, then we ought to reflect more on the times that we have been temptation free and thank God for those times – focus on the times of victory rather than the times of defeat.

It is to our peril that we should be clueless about temptation – its reality and its power over us. But it is also to our peril that we feel a self-confident presumption that we can overcome temptation by force of the will. As anyone in AA will be quick to tell you, will power doesn’t work. If it did, there would be no AA. A person who is afraid he will fall will take heed and protect himself. But a person who thinks he stands seldom will take heed. Up jumps the Devil! We become seduced by our own desires.

The other thing that I notice is that our temptations are not special. We are not permitted to make excuses for ourselves: “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man.” We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that our temptations are unique; special; peculiar to US. It is a common thing to think that we cannot help yielding to temptation – that it is impossible to me to resist MY temptation.

It seems to be a universal tendency to think that people who are in different circumstances than ours, whose background is different or whose surroundings are different, do not have strong temptations. But the reality is that, while all of us are tempted differently, our temptations are just common occurrences. The temptations that you and I face, though they be different from each other, are just garden variety, common temptations that have no excuse other than our innate love of sin and self.

Notice that Paul is talking about temptations that SEIZE us. That is a pretty strong word – seize. Christ teaches us that the New Way erases the line between temptation and YIELDING to temptation. lust becomes adultery, and hate becomes murder. There is no difference between the desire and the carrying out of that desire. That is a novel thought, is it not? Because common, garden-variety temptations SEIZE us, we are already on the slippery slope. When we entertain the desire, we can’t congratulate ourselves because we didn’t succumb to the desire. In fact, we did succumb by entertaining the desire.

Finally, we have that last part of v. 12 – “And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will provide a way out so that you may be able to bear it."

Consider the possibility that God is not in the business of keeping us from slipping on a banana peel. Consider that He is not keeping score of how many times this year you drank too much, or gambled, or ate too much chocolate, or gossiped, or lied, or cheated, or hated your brother – whatever you may see as your secret stumblingblock. Consider, instead, that God has already provided a way out.

Look back over your life, if you can do it without becoming ill at certain points. Can you not look back and see how, when God’s providence brought you into temptation, He also provided a way out? Somewhere, somehow, a door opens, and we escape. If I look back on my own life and its crises – and I’ve had a number of them – I marvel at the escape hatches that God has opened for me.

In some inexplicable way, God is controlling even those forces of EVIL that swirl around us, so that even our temptations sometimes counteract one another. This tells me that although I may be inclined to think that I haven’t gotten anywhere in the Christian life because I still entertain temptation, God opens escape hatches. We call that “luck,” but Paul calls it Providence.

The fact is that many of you, and certainly I, would not be here this morning if God had not found a way out of our temptations. We are not lucky; we are loved; we are forgiven; we are redeemed.

“Happy is the man,” says the Apostle James, “that ENDURES temptation. For when he has stood the test, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to them that love him.” Endures temptation! Doesn’t let temptation destroy his confidence in Christ!

“Standing the test of temptation” is to know that, while God may not REMOVE the temptation, He HAS promised that He will make a way out. I would bet that there is not a person in this room this morning who would not say with me, “How in the world did I get here?” God provided a way out!

James goes on: “Therefore, my brothers, count it all joy when you fall into temptations.” If we trust God’s providential help and His gracious Spirit, we can see how temptation may be the means of making us BETTER. Those temptations that get us down when we go back to them were the very thing that God used to bring us to this point in our lives and in our walk with Him. Once we grasp this concept, instead of going into a funk because we fell, we can thank God and rejoice and learn to trust Him more.

Can you imaging falling off the wagon and thanking God for the temptation? Or, can you imagine even THINKING about going off the wagon and instead of congratulating ourselves because we didn’t, thanking God for His help? Falling off the wagon is not the same thing as deciding to become a slave to pleasure. While the temptation may seize us, it doesn’t CONTROL us or dominate us. While the temptation may be as sinful as its fulfillment, God is in the gaps, between the temptation and a life of LIVING for that temptation. We tend to think that He is in the gaps BETWEEN temptation and succumbing. But no! God is in the gaps between temptation and its ability to have DOMINION over us.

James goes on: “Let patience have a perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. If any person lacks wisdom (wisdom to find the way out of temptation; wisdom to see the meanings of temptation and gain from its lessons) let him ask of God, who gives to all men liberally, and condemns not, and it shall be given to him.”

Comforting words, are they not? Troubles are a part of life – even the life of the Christian. A pain-free life is not something that we should seek or for which we should ask God. We are told that “who the Lord loves, He disciplines.” It is a law of nature that we will be tempted. But ask for yourselves that you may have the grace to help watch and strive against temptation – grace to trample it underfoot; grace to conquer it, and grace to avoid condemning ourselves because of it.

For God gives to all men liberally and does not condemn. If God does not condemn us, what right do we have to condemn ourselves?