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A Way Out

                 No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. 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 endure it. (I Corinthians 10:13)

          Are you as disappointed by the first line of today’s passage as I am? It’s comforting in a way, but the drama queen in me wants my temptation, my drama to be award winning. I simultaneously want to be invisible, but to have others notice and value me. If my temptations are mass produced on an assembly line, I’m just a cheap bit of refuse rather than something to be repurposed, reused, recycled, reclaimed, redeemed, rescued, or otherwise valued.

          Of course, if my temptations were one-of-a-kind, they wouldn’t be relevant or relatable. The fact that they aren’t may be part of what makes me real.  But, putting the drama and the rolling Rs aside (as much fun as they were,) there are two things in today’s passage that deserve attention.

The first isn’t necessarily reassuring. God seems to have more confidence in us than we do. He won’t let us be tempted beyond what we can bear. How often does it seem as if the temptation is beyond what any mere mortal can resist? I mean, that treat, or that person who seems determined to fray that last nerve, or whatever the that is, it can’t possibly be the hum-drum sort of stuff that everyone else faces every day. It can’t, because then our failure to resist doesn’t seem tragic. It seems trivial or trite, and that means we are, too.

On the other hand, the reason our temptations can be resisted is because God is faithful even when we’re traitorous to ourselves and to Him. He will provide a way for us to endure. That’s the second thought. Not only will He provide a way, He is the way. But as I’ve said before, this isn’t magical, at least not all the time. A writer I follow on social media mused about two characters that I suspect  weren’t hers. The idea is that they’d been told that if they did the “horizontal tango,” terrible things would result, like the end of the world. Why, oh why was is so hard for them to just not do it? I note that the author probably got more sales if they did, but we face the same question. If God says “Bad idea. Don’t do it,” His love for us and ours for Him should be sufficient for us to not give in.

In the movie War Room, the husband of the main character goes with a woman to her hotel suite. He is prevented from sinning with her because he threw up. In one of the Left Behind books, a character struggled with the idea that he was going to meet the Antichrist, and didn’t want to lie to him, even though he was the enemy. He was saved from having to do so because - you guessed it – he threw up on the Antichrist’s shoes. (Oddly, he was the only character I met in those books who had any problem with lying to the enemy. That seems to be the sort of “way out” that we want: something that prevents us from doing what we think we’re too weak not to do. God can do that, but we tend to learn less from His interventions than from our own experience, which is sad because we often don’t learn from our experience, either. But if we acted toward that voice and chose not to do the thing we think we’re too weak to refuse, I suspect we’d find strength in that choice.

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