Bobby Bosler: No More Excuses

Verse 12 says this, "'Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.'" There hath no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man.

But God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will with the temptation also make a way to escape that ye may be able to bear in.

So these two verses here We're given in a very specific flow of argument by Paul to the Corinthians.

And I don't have time to go through all of what I've been talking about literally for the last several months here at our church, except to say the Corinthians were struggling with a unique temptation.

And that temptation was to engage in idol meets or the matter of idol participation.

They'd had it in their mind that there was nothing wrong with these idols, that these idols didn't even really represent actual divine beings.

And therefore, hey, meat is meat.

There's no issue with this.

There's no problem here.

So we think we ought to be able to engage in it.

In a certain sense, they felt like they had a right to engage in it.

But Paul in this letter has been kind of going a roundabout way to get to the heart of the issue.

He talked about the fact that, you know what, okay, so maybe let's just grant for a moment that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this.

But you got to ask yourself the question, how is it affecting other people? And of course, you know, in chapter eight, he made it very clear, listen, if me cause my brother to offend, man, I ain't touching it, he says.

Chapter nine, he says, okay, so you think you have a right to this matter? Well, you know what? I have my rights too.

And he talks a lot about some uncomfortable rights that he had.

The whole point of it was I'd gladly give it up for the sake of my mission.

I don't want to be running a race and find myself missing out on the win because I can't control my appetites.

When we get into chapter 10. uh chapter 10 is where he takes this specific issue and goes a little bit deeper into it he talks about the example of israel at the beginning of the chapter and the fact that all of them experienced god's unique divine blessings from his deliverance through the red sea whether it was the matter of him providing manna in the wilderness or water out of the rock all of it was blessings from God.

And yet he said, yet with all of them, God was not well pleased for they were overthrown in the wilderness.

And the reason why he's saying this is all of these folks had been blessed by God and yet all of them fell as carcasses in the wilderness.

And the reason why they fell is is because they disobeyed God specifically in this matter of engaging in idolatry.

He went on right after he talked about that and said, essentially, neither be ye idolaters, right? Okay, that's kind of the point that he's talking to them about.

He said, neither let us commit fornication.

That was all intertwined in idol worship.