Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2912
“There hats no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able; but will, with the temptation, also make a way to escape, that you may be able to bear it.” 1 Corinthians 10:13.
THIS verse immediately follows the warning to “him that thinks he stands” to “take heed lest he fall.” None of us know what stuff we are really made of until we are tried and tested. It is a very easy thing to imagine yourself to be strong, but it is a very different matter to find that you have sufficient strength when you actually need it. It has even been found possible, in these modern days, for some Brothers and Sisters to believe themselves to be perfect—to believe that sin is entirely conquered within them—but I will guarantee you that you will find that the practice of perfection is not nearly so common as the profession of it—and nothing like so easy. And I will venture to go even further and say that if you watch those in whom sin is said to be dead, you will find that if it is dead, it is not buried—and that it smells remarkably like other dead things which ought to be buried! It is possibly worse than when it was alive, for it has become alive again in an even worse sense with a double putridity. Let no one of us imagine himself to be perfect, or to be immune against the temptations of Satan or even the grosser vices to which the flesh is prone. It may only need for you to be attacked at a certain point and in a certain way and you will be overcome even as others have been. Your wisest way is to believe yourself neither to be wise nor strong and, therefore, to lie humbly at His feet who can make you both wise and strong—and to look away from yourself up to Him who will keep the feet of His saints. It ought to cool the hot blood of self-conceit in any man to remind him that although he thinks that he stands, it is simply because he has not been tempted as others have been who have fallen! Or if he has been tempted in a way which overthrew them, while he has stood fast, yet, if the temptations were still further increased and he were left to himself, he would find that at the last the fierce wind from the Pit would sweep him off his feet even as it has swept off other men who thought that they could never be moved.
After the Apostle Paul had, by this warning, rebuked the boastings of these who thought they were standing securely, he thought of the far larger number of persons who never think that they can stand, but who are in constant terror lest they should fall. They say they are not the people of God yet, in almost the next breath they say they are afraid that they will lose what they just said they did not have! They sometimes hope that they are saved, yet they quickly doubt if it is so with them—and they are troubled with the fear that even though they are saved, they may yet fall and perish! Their feelings are a strange mingle-mangle of incorrect caution and incorrect doubt! And Paul seems to me in this verse to give them a cordial by which their fainting spirits may be revived. And I would like to pass it on to any of you who also need it. You may be tried in two senses—trial will come, and the trial will often be a temptation, while the temptation will always be a trial
I. Now comes in the comfort—and the first comfort, even in great trouble, is that WE HAVE NOT, AFTER ALL, BEEN TRIED IN ANY VERY UNUSUAL WAY—“There has no temptation (or trial) taken you but such as is common to man.”
You may think, my dear Brothers and Sisters, that you have been tried more than others, but it is only your lack of knowledge of the trials of others which leads you to imagine that your trials are unique. There are many others besides
you in the furnace and in quite as hot a part of it as that in which you are now placed. Note what Paul says—“There has no temptation taken you but such as is common to man.” It is a human temptation, not a superhuman one, which has assailed you. That is to say, one which can be withstood by men—not one that must inevitably sweep them away. You have never been tempted with an angelic temptation. Satan has tempted you, young man, but not with the same temptation with which he allured the angels who kept not their first estate. There may be other orders of intelligence for whom there are other forms of temptation because their intellects are superior to yours—but God has allowed you to be assailed in a way which is suitable as a test to you as a man. The trials that have come upon you have been moderated to your capacity as a man. The Lord knows that you are but animated dust, so He has not permitted you to be treated as if you were made of steel or iron. He has, Himself, dealt with you as an earthen vessel—a thing of clay in which He has caused life to dwell. He has not broken you with His rod of iron as He would have done if He had struck you with it.