Killing Sin, Pursuing Holiness

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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If you haven't already, turn with me in your Bibles to 1

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Corinthians chapter 10 and verse 1. And as you do that, I want to begin by asking you a question.

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It's a question that requires honest self -examination on your part.

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It's a question that requires that you take down your guard, that you let down your defenses for a second.

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At least your guard against personal offense, to stand exposed before God and before His Word.

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I want to ask you a question that has eternal implications. It's a question that every wise, every smart, every reasonable person will ask often of themselves.

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And this is the question I want to ask you. What is your relationship with sin?

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Or if I were to rephrase it slightly, what is your attitude towards sin?

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Perhaps, for the sake of clarity, it might be helpful, good for me, to create some personality profiles.

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We hear all the time about personality profiles. And I'm a gold, and I'm a blue, and I'm a this, and I'm a that.

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Let's create some sin personality profiles for a second. If I were to ask you, what is your relationship like with sin?

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For some people in this room, very likely, some people here, right here, right now, sin isn't really a consideration on your mind.

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It's not something that you think about. If you're honest, you've never really thought about sin or its effects.

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When it comes to your view of the world, sin is not your great existential problem.

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You hear people talk about it. You hear them talk about it at church. You hear them talk about it at home.

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But it doesn't really, really enter into your mind. For others here, sin might be a mere theological concept.

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You might prize yourself at being a great systematic theologian, or at least a budding systematic theologian.

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And you love to study the nuances of doctrine. And so, for you, sin is hamartiology, the study of sin.

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You think about it with your mind. It's a doctrine that is to be studied and understood and explained, maybe put up on your wall of theological achievements.

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But it's not something, the reality of sin doesn't really enter into your mind. For some of you in this room, sin might be something that you're all too aware of in your own life.

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If you're aware of your own sin problem, you know, you know deep down in the recesses of your heart that you are plagued by sin.

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Maybe even a slave to sin. And it goes everywhere with you.

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It harms everything that you do. Your relationships, your work, your life with your family.

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It hinders your time at church. Sin is the problem of your life in this category.

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You know it, and yet you don't know how to escape its mastery over you.

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Is that your profile? For others, there's two more profiles, just so you know.

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For others, perhaps you're a Christian, and you once thought about sin. You thought about sin often.

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You had deep convictions about sin. And when you grieved the Holy Spirit, it grieved you.

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You felt it in your soul. And it was your desire to earnestly conform yourself to Christ in every nook and cranny of your heart.

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Every aspect. And you even had victory over sin at times.

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Besetting sins in your life. But now as you look at it, you realize that your conscience is less sensitive to sin.

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You're less moved. You're less grieved. And if you actually scrutinized your behavior, you'd admit that you're more willing to tolerate sin in your life.

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That sin on YouTube. That sin on Netflix. That sin in my mind. Those words that used to make me blush, no longer make me blush.

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Sin doesn't grieve you the way it once did. And then, the last profile.

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Perhaps for a few of you, you see sin for what it really is.

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It's vile. It's evil. It's wretched. It's abhorrent. It's an affront to a holy

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God. Your conscience is sensitive to sin. And while you still find yourself, as we all do, stumbling and falling into sin, at the very core of your being, even while you stumble, you hate sin.

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You hate it. The sweetest thing about heaven isn't the lack of illness. It isn't even living forever.

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It's Christ and a life without sin. Perhaps for some of you, that describes you.

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A person who, when you were saved, the gospel came as pure water, as medicine for your soul.

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And sin is like poison. God's precious remedy is the gospel, and sin is poison in your life.

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So friends, that was a long description. I don't know if you can remember that, but which profile describes you?

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If you were to maybe mark yourself down on the spectrum from dead in sin to dead to sin, where do you find yourself on that chart?

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And what does that say about your spiritual health? Big introduction.

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What I want you to do is hold on to that thought for a second. Where are you?

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Have you grown cold to sin? Are you sensitive to sin? Where are you? And then what we're going to do, what

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Paul does in 1 Corinthians 10, verses 1 to 22, is he helps us to see sin for what it really is.

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And so I want you to hold on to that thought in your mind, and then we're going to take that personality profile, your sin profile, and we're going to hold it under the microscope, the exacting microscope of God's word, and see where you are, either in line or out of line with the scriptures.

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And so I have us turn to 1 Corinthians 10, in verse 1. We're going to start there.

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And this is what we find. We find the Apostle Paul, he's been dealing with idolatry.

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You'll remember, if you can remember a few weeks back, in chapter 8, food offered to idols. Then in chapter 9, he used himself as a positive example for the wise, the loving exercise of Christian liberty.

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And now in chapter 10, Paul is going to hone in on the

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Corinthians attitude towards idolatry specifically, the context of chapters 8, 9, and 10, and also sin specifically, or in general, sorry, idolatry specifically, sin generally.

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And what he's going to use, he's going to use himself as a positive example in chapter 9. Look what

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I'm doing. Imitate me. Do what I am doing. And now in chapter 10, he's going to use the negative example of the nation of Israel.

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He's going to say, look at what they did and how that turned out for them.

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And so, you know I like to give a big idea of these first 22 verses of the text.

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And if I were to do that, the first 22 verses, if it could be summed up in one sentence,

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I would borrow from John Owen. John Owen said, be killing sin or sin will be killing you.

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And that really is the theme. I'm not sure if John Owen got it from this text, but that is the theme of this text.

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Paul's big idea is this. He illustrates in this passage the grave danger of sin, of rebellion, of evil, the deadly consequences of disobedience.

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He shows us that sin is deadly, serious. And then for those of you who are seeking to be free of sin, that should be all of us, seeking to be more free of sin,

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Paul does this. He shows us how we are to resist temptation, how we are to kill sin, perhaps even why we are to kill sin.

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Paul, you could say, gives us a motive for sin killing, and then he gives us a battle plan to carry it out, one temptation at a time.

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And so that's what the text is about in full. We're going to zoom in now on chapter 10 in verse 1.

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Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10, he says, I know we've looked at this a lot, but every time we see that word for, that conjunction, conjunction holds two things together.

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Every time we see that conjunction, we know that the text has something to do with something that has already been said.

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And that's exactly what Paul is doing here in chapter 10 in verse 1. He is building on what he has already said.

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And if we remember back to what Steve had preached a couple of weeks ago, Paul was talking about discipling himself, living a self -controlled life, laboring, yes, laboring for the salvation of others, but then also ensuring that he too, or that he doesn't, lose that salvation, or go without that salvation, might be a better way to put it.

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Paul was telling us at the end of chapter 9, essentially only one life will soon be, only one life will soon be passed.

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Only what's done for Christ will last. And now he's going to show us what it means to run the race, to win, to fight the good fight, to finish strong, and to receive the prize.

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And so in 1 Corinthians 10, 1, Paul begins with this word for, because he wants to know the dangers that lurk ahead as he runs the race.

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He wants us to see the things that are going to trip us up as we imitate him, as we seek to lay hold, not just of that perishable wreath that he was talking about at the end of chapter 9, but the eternal crown, the imperishable crown that God has prepared for him.

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And so we're going to learn as we go through five lessons. It's a five -point sermon, five lessons that will help us to see the deadly nature of sin and how we can kill it in our own lives.

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These are from the text. So the first lesson I want us to see is this. Brothers and sisters, remember that presumption kills.

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To presume is deadly. And Paul writes this in verses 1 to 5. He says,

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For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea and all were baptized, that's peculiar, into Moses in the cloud and in the sea and all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink.

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For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them,

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God was not pleased for they were overthrown in the wilderness.

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Lowell, you said earlier, this is an interesting passage. What does all of this mean? Anytime a preacher says that this is an interesting passage, that's a dangerous statement because you know it can go too long.

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I'm going to try, try as I may, to not go too long on these things. But we're going to look.

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This is a passage that's full of Old Testament allusions. Paul uses the nation of Israel, this nation, and their wilderness wanderings as a cautionary tale of those who enjoyed the benefits of God's blessings.

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Those that knew all of these good things from God but ultimately presumed upon God's grace, rebelled against Him, and died in their sin before entering the promised land.

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So these Israelites, he's saying they didn't run with endurance. They didn't finish the race.

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And what Paul is trying to teach us is that we cannot have a casual, a flirtatious, a presumptuous attitude towards sin.

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This type of attitude has deadly consequences for anyone that would entertain that idea.

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And so Paul is writing, this is interesting if you like to look at covenants and nations, but Paul is writing to the

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Gentile Corinthian church and he says in verse 2, he says that our fathers were under the cloud.

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So he's writing to people that are not Jews by heritage and yet he's saying that the Jews are your fathers.

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And here what Paul is connecting right away is the same thing that he's taught in Ephesians 2 and in other places that God has made one man out of the two.

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So God has grafted the church into the nation of Israel. Every individual believer is grafted into that olive tree.

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He's broken down the dividing wall. He's made the two one. And so in a sense, in a real sense, the church has joined the

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Old Testament people of God. As the true people of God, they are their fathers.

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He says fathers. And what Paul does is he shows now the striking similarities.

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He does this intentionally between the nation of Israel and the Corinthians. So follow along with me.

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This is a little bit more technical because of the Old Testament illusions, but I'll try to explain it and slow down when

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I need to. So God led Israel, he says by a pillar of cloud. If you like the references, that's

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Exodus 13. And then they passed through the Red Sea. That's Exodus 14.

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And then under Moses, as they passed through the Red Sea, this is interesting. What does it mean to be baptized as he says into Moses?

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Did you know that the Old Covenant people were into baptism? What he means by this is that as they passed through the

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Red Sea, under Moses, it was as if they were baptized, much like the

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Corinthians. And you'll remember back to the very early chapters of Corinthians that Paul was addressing this issue of baptism.

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You see these themes that are re -emerging. And they were baptized into Moses in this way, that under Moses, the nation of Israel entered into a covenantal relationship with God.

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So Moses was the mediator of an Old Covenant. Christ now is the mediator of a new and a better covenant.

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Paul is showing that they are both covenantal people. These Old Testament Israelites, they were

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God's covenantal people. You as believers in the Corinthian church, you are covenantal people.

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And then notice Paul's emphatic use of this word all in verse 3. I'll pick it up there.

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He says it before that. But in verse 3, he says all ate the same spiritual food. In Exodus 16, we read about God's provision of manna.

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Children, I want to ask. Do you guys know what is manna? Yes, Noah. It's like an inch of bread.

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Very, very close. That's right. The Israelites would wake up in the morning and it was almost like flour from heaven.

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Like flakes that they would collect from the ground before the sun rose up and they would use that to bake cakes and essentially their kinds of loaves of bread.

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God was providing food for them in Exodus 16 through this spiritual food.

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And he did it without fail for 40 years. Six days a week for 40 years.

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He was faithful. He says all drank the same spiritual drink. Near the very beginning of their wilderness wanderings in Exodus 17, the nation drank from the water from the rock at Meribah.

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And Meribah is a translation that means quarreling. You'll remember the

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Israelites were complaining. They were quarreling. And so God told Moses, strike the rock.

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And when Moses struck the rock, water gushed out of the rock and provided water for the whole nation of Israel.

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And so early in their wilderness wanderings in Acts 17, they were drinking from that rock near the end of their wilderness wanderings.

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In Numbers 20, God again provided water at Meribah. It's like Paul says, as if the rock were following them.

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And not only does Paul intend to show us that this is a foreshadowing of the Lord's Supper, which it is.

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He's going to talk about the Lord's Supper in a little bit. But this rock that kept the nation of Israel alive, that gave them sustaining water, he says, was actually

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Christ. Now this can be a very confusing passage if you don't know. What does that mean?

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Did Christ become a rock? Did he incarnate as a rock before he incarnated as a man?

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No. What it means is this. Has anyone ever heard of the study of typology?

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The study of typology is essentially a study of the anticipation of the foreshadowing of something.

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In biblical typology, the foreshadowing of Christ. And so what Paul is saying is that this rock was actually a type of Christ.

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It anticipated Christ. It foreshadowed Christ. And Paul made this point clear actually in Jude when he wrote his letter to Jude in Jude 5.

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He said, Now I want you, although you once fully knew it that Jesus, sorry, I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, Jesus was there in Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.

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And so when the Israelites, kids, I don't know if you've ever thought about this when you're listening to the story of Moses and the nation of Israel crying out to God.

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Jesus was with the Israelites in Egypt. Jesus saved the

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Israelites from Egypt. Jesus sustained the Israelites as they traveled through the wilderness.

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Christ was there the whole time. And yet for those who did not believe, as Paul writes in Jude, we read about it in verse 5 here, 1

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Corinthians 5, Nevertheless, with most of them, God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.

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So what is Paul trying to do here? Paul is saying that here you have these Israelites. They're in the wilderness.

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They're God's covenantal people. It's like they were baptized. They've participated as it were in the sacraments or the ordinances of God.

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They had the bread and the cup. They had the drink and the food. They followed

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Christ. Christ was leading them along and yet, even though they were the outwardly identifiable people of God, outwardly identifiable people of God, they did not believe.

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They did not obey. They presumed upon God's grace. They presumed that because they were part of the throng of God's people, they were safe.

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I bet you there are people that come to this church that feel that they are safe because they come to church.

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Paul is saying that is not the case. As a matter of fact, if you come,

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I would hope, Lord willing, that we could count ourselves as a good church, but if you go to a good church, you are more accountable, not less.

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Paul is saying what God did here is that these people presumed upon God and yet, because they were not in Christ, because they did not believe, because they did not have a righteousness that was by faith,

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God overthrew them in the wilderness. And that word overthrew, you know

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I'm a Greek word guy, it comes from the Greek word katastronomai, which means to strike down.

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It's actually a very graphic word. To strike down, to spread out, to lay low, to lay low.

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And what it essentially pictures, one Bible translation renders it like this, that is a picture of corpses littered across the wilderness.

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There's a trail of bodies behind the Israelites' camp. It's an ugly picture. It's a picture filled with death.

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And so Paul is saying, Corinthians, brothers and sisters, Christians, he says, don't be unaware.

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The Israelites, they took comfort. They took comfort in their outward position. They presumed upon God.

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They presumed that because they were part of the visible people of God, they would receive grace regardless and that God would overlook their unbelief.

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That God would overlook their sin. That God would overlook whatever it was that they wanted to bring into the picture.

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And to that, God said no. He said most of them fell into the wilderness.

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That is a massive understatement. All of them but two were laid low in the wilderness.

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We had Caleb and Joshua that survived. And here Paul says, remember

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Israel, brothers and sisters. Presumption kills.

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Presumption kills. Like I said, if you think that you can be right with God, that you can finish the race strong simply because you go to church, if that is not accompanied by faith, if that is not like we preached a few weeks ago from the

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Reformation, Martin Luther said that salvation is by faith alone but not by faith that is alone.

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That faith is going to have a real impact on your life, a real sin -killing effect on your life.

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And if you think that you can come to church without a faith that both saves and that transforms you, without the new birth, you're lying to yourself.

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If you think that you can make an outward profession of faith and even be baptized like the Israelites, or even to take the bread and the cup like the

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Israelites and yet you live a secret life of secret rebellion against God, you're presuming upon His grace and you will be laid low in the wilderness.

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If you think that you can honor Christ with your lips while your heart is far from Him, you will be one of those who is spread out.

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I recently read a story that's a perfect illustration of this kind of idea. It was during the

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American Civil War. There was a general by the name of John Sedgwick who was inspecting his troops.

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He was a general. He was the man in the

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Union forces and he was inspecting these other soldiers and there was an open area in their defenses that he would walk by and some of the officers and some of the soldiers would come up to him and say,

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General, please as you come through this area, duck your head.

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This is an undefended spot and the general said in an arrogant kind of way, they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.

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He barely finished the word distance and he was dead on the ground. He presumed, he presumed that sin was far away, that the shooters were far enough.

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He didn't think he was susceptible to the enemy's devices and because of his presumption, he paid with his life.

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And so how do we go? How do we not presume upon God? If I can just say, we need to study the doctrines of God.

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In Psalm 50 verse 21, one of the chief issues that the Israelites dealt with is that they thought that God was like them.

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And God says, do not be mistaken. God is not going to wink at your sin.

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God is not going to wink at your unbelief. Don't presume. Presumption kills. Okay, second point.

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Paul tries to help us learn this next lesson beginning in verse 6.

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And it's this, heed God's warning. I'm going to try to move up faster because I'm already slow.

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Heed God's warning. Now these things took place, Paul writes, as examples for us.

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They weren't just written down but they actually took place as examples for us. That we might not desire evil as they did.

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Maybe I'll stop there. We'll read verse 7 in a minute. The wilderness experience is meant to teach us, amongst other things, not to desire sin.

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They desired evil. We're not to desire sin. We're not to coddle it.

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We're not to hide it. We're not to protect it. We're not to nurture it. We are to hate it and to kill it.

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And verse 6 really is instructive of where sin starts. Friends, if you want to kill sin in your life, do you want to kill sin?

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Is that actually something that you want to do in your life? To see sin go, to see wickedness go, to see disobedience toward God out of your life, you need to recognize this from verse 6.

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Sin rarely, if ever, originates spontaneously.

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Nor does it ever originate spontaneously outside of you, from the outside coming in.

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Long before sin rears its ugly head in a word or in a thought or in an action, it's first conceived in the heart, in the desire factory of your soul, even in the idol factory of some.

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Evil actions begin with evil desires. And so, friends, monitor, watch, keep a fierce watch on your desires.

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Watch when your desire for God wanes. Recognize when a desire enters your mind and heart that's clearly opposed to God and His Word.

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We've all had those ideas. They might even start innocent, but we see where they're going and their desires that take us away from God and His will for our life.

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I'll give you a good example. I'm not a married man. I'm married, but let's say

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I'm not a married man. And I have been waiting for and praying for and longing for a godly wife.

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And then one day I meet someone and she's not a believer, but she's a nice girl. And I can feel myself being tugged in that direction.

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I can feel my desires being tugged in that direction. And I look at the outcome of this.

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Am I on the straight path, walking in the center of God's will? Or am I now looking for a

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Hagar in my life? Am I looking to do something that is outside the will of God?

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Even before that sin becomes a temptation or that desire becomes a temptation or gives birth to sin, we need to keep an eye on our desires and shut down those desires.

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We need to kill that desire. This is a graphic image. Kill that desire before it gives birth to sin.

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And you might think that is a vivid word picture, but that's a biblical word picture.

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James 1, 13 -15. James writes, Let no one say when he is tempted,

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I am being tempted by God. God does not tempt you. God does not want you tempted. For God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.

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But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by what? By his own desire.

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Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.

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We need to find sin. We need to find sin at the root, at the point of desire.

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The psalmist in Psalm 36, 1 and 2 says, Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart.

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That's where it starts. Deep in his heart. There is no fear of God before his eyes, for he flatters himself in his own eyes that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated, and hated.

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That needs to be your relationship with sin. If you're going to kill sin in your life, it needs to be hated. And it needs to be hated at the root level.

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I remember as a child, my neighbor hired me to pick dandelions in their yard.

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I think they gave me a penny for every dandelion that I picked. And boys and girls, what's the easiest way to pick a dandelion?

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Yes, Scarlett. By just picking it up from the top. Right from the top. That's not the best way to go, because it's a big one.

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That is exactly right. And so I made a lot of pennies that day because it's very easy to pick dandelion heads.

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But what do you think happened a week later? They were all back. I guess that's called job security, right?

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But in the Christian life, we need to find it at the root, deep in the heart, and we need to hate it, and we need to kill it.

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Thomas Chalmers. Now, how do you hate? How do you kill a sin? When you have a sinful desire, is it kind of like, don't think of a white elephant?

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Don't think of a white elephant. Don't think of a white elephant. Thomas Chalmers, he was a pastor in the 1700s and 1800s.

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He preached a sermon titled The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. There's a lot just in that title.

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The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. You can listen to it on YouTube. And in it, he rightly points out the best way to uproot a sinful desire is by replacing it with an even better desire.

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He says this. He says the most effectual way, written like a 17th century or 18th century person, the most effectual way of withdrawing the mind from one object, that sinful desire in your life, is not by turning it away upon desolate and unpeopled vacancy.

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It's not by trying not to think of it, but by presenting to its regard an object still more alluring, namely

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God. What's the best way to avoid presumptuous sin, of dying in presumption?

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Studying the doctrines of God. What is the best way to build, to develop an earnest, a desirous view of God?

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Study the doctrines of God. Study His excellencies. Study His perfections.

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Read the Psalms. Ladies, go to the women's group and hear about the doctrines of God.

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Meditate on the Gospel. Read even biographies of other men and women that desired

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God. I like what Martin Lloyd -Jones said. Martin Lloyd -Jones was a preacher in the 1900s.

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Some say he was the best preacher in the 20th century, and he said that when he became weary, when he got tired, he would travel.

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But he didn't travel to another city or another country. He traveled to another century, and he said he loved to spend his time in the 17th century and in the 18th century reading about the people of God during that time, thinking their thoughts after them and finding himself helped and strengthened and his

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Godward desires renewed by looking at their life. Paul says, getting back to our text in verse 7,

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Paul lists some of Israel's sins in the wilderness. I'm sorry, I can't exhaust it, but he says in verse 7, do not be idolaters.

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This is likely in reference to Israel's golden calf incident, Exodus 32.

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They made a golden calf out of their jewelry, and they were eating and drinking and playing, and this is a typical pagan festival, making sacrifice, eating the food, and sometimes even these feasting and orgies that would result from that.

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In verse 8, he says, do not indulge in sexual immorality. Pornuo, he uses that word, not pornea, but pornuo in this case, and you can see the root word where we get some of our

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English words from, and this is in reference to Israel's idolatry and sexually immoral behavior toward the women in Moab.

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Numbers 25, if you want to look there, somewhere between 23 ,000 and 24 ,000 people died as a result of what

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God calls whoring with the daughters of Moab. In verse 9, we must not put

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Christ to the test. That's in reference to complaints against God. A reference there is

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Numbers 21, 5 and 6. It says there, and the people spoke against God and against Moses, and then it says later in that verse, then the

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Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people so that many people of Israel died.

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Verse 10, nor grumble as they did. It's probably in reference to the rebellion of Korah against Moses in Numbers 16.

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Do any of our children know who Korah was? He led, if you can picture this, kids, he led a rebellion against Moses, and when that rebellion was discovered, they had

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Korah and all the people that had rebelled, they all stayed in one spot, everyone backed up, and the ground swallowed

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Korah and the people that rebelled with him. And Paul says that it was the destroyer that did this.

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I really wish I could talk more about this, but Exodus 12 is the story of the

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Passover, the angel of the Lord. And then in Hebrews 11, 28, by faith it says, he kept the

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Passover, sprinkled the blood so that the destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them.

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The destroyer is the angel of the Lord. It's God intervening in human history.

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And again, Paul writes, all of these things happened as an example, and they were preserved as a record of Israel's evil.

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Sorry, a record of Israel's evil was preserved for our instruction, for us to take note and to be warned.

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And then Paul caps off this whole section in verse 12 with this.

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Let's look at chapter 10 and verse 12 together. He says, And so this is a real warning.

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I have friends, lovely friends, well -meaning brothers that say, what this means, take heed, because if you don't take heed, you could stumble.

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You could stumble, you're going to get back up again, but you don't want to stumble. You tell me in the context of this,

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Paul's talking about not being disqualified. He's talking about Israel dying in the wilderness.

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He's talking about all these people in all these different rebellious, wicked, evil, vile situations dying.

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Do you think that he means take heed, lest you stub your toe. Take heed, lest you fall.

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That's a military expression that he's using there. And what it means is this, take heed, because there's two options.

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You're going to survive like a soldier on the battlefield, or you're going to die like a soldier in the wilderness.

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It's a real warning. Now you might say, Shane, why would God issue a real warning to real believers?

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Well, for one, he says this, therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed.

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He's not saying that a believer, every believer, would fall away. Scripture does not teach that.

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Scripture teaches actually that God gives us his Holy Spirit as a guarantee of our inheritance, that he who began a good work will bring it to completion.

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Scripture teaches that we are safe. In John 10, as another example, that the evil one cannot touch us.

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That's not what he says. That they will never be snatched from his hand. John 10.

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The believer will never perish. But friends, look at this. What Paul is trying to do here, and what

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God is doing, God has an end in mind, in his will for you, but he also has means.

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And one of the means that God uses when you encounter these hard verses, it is okay for God to say, if you do this, you will be removed from the

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Lamb's book of life. Because what that ought to do to every true believer is to make us tremble, to make us fear.

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I don't want to be that person. And it is okay, it is God's prerogative to use warnings, real warnings, to say, take heed, lest you fall.

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Because if you fall, you thought that you were standing. You thought, we thought, that you were a believer, but by your falling away, it has proved otherwise.

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So we read things like Hebrews 4 .1, Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear, lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.

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The fear of God is a good thing. I'll quote John Owen one more time. In his book,

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The Mortification of Sin, he says, Sin will always be acting. If we are not always mortifying our sin, putting it to death, we are lost creatures.

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If you don't heed the warning, you're lost. I remember

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Charles Spurgeon using an example one time. It is a living fish that swims against the stream.

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If you're going along with the crowd, if you're not encountering any opposition, are you alive?

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Are you alive? And sin is destructive, friends. We need to put it to death.

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Charles Spurgeon used an example in one sermon that he preached. This is right at the,

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I guess, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, or maybe kind of on the tail end of it.

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And he says, You read sometimes a dreadful story of a man being entangled in machinery. We still read about that today.

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Perhaps it was only one cog in a wheel that caught the corner of his coat, but it gradually drew him in between the works and rent him limb from limb till he was utterly destroyed.

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If only that piece of cloth could have given way so the man's life might have been spared, but it did not.

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And though he was only held by the tiniest part of a garment, just a little piece of the garment, that was sufficient to drag him in where the death -dealing wheels revolved.

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And it is just so with sin, he says. You cannot get in between the wheels of iniquity and say,

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I shall go just so far, but no further. No, if you once get in, you will be ground to pieces as certainly as you are now alive.

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There is no way of escape but to turn yourself right away from the evil things that God hates.

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There is a warning on that machine. This is the warning. Turn away from sin.

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Hate sin. Put it to death. Do not presume. Heed God's warning. Paul says next in verse 13,

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Look to our faithful God for help when you are tempted. I'll read verse 13.

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He says there, No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.

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God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability but with the temptation.

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With the temptation, he will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it.

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Sometimes, Satan is going to lie to you and tell you that the sin, that the temptation to sin that you are experiencing is unique to you.

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Sometimes, but more often than not, your own heart, your own desires, your own flesh will tell you.

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No one understands this. If God was tempted in this way, he would understand.

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And so I use that example of the unmarried man wanting a wife, praying for a wife.

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And you might think to yourself, God would understand if I compromised because no one has truly experienced this level of temptation.

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You might be an unmarried man or an unmarried woman and think, If I was only married, this sin wouldn't be a problem in my life.

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This urge for sexual gratification that I act on.

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If I was married, I wouldn't experience this. That married man could never know what this is like. No temptation is unique.

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If Jesus had my boss, if Jesus had my boss, he would have complained.

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If Paul worked under these conditions, he would have quit. Paul's words are clear.

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There's not a single temptation that you have ever experienced or given into that is an uncommon temptation.

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They're common. They're common. Everyone experiences them. Don't believe the lie and then don't give yourself permission to fall into sin.

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In fact, there's only one person. You want to know, Okay, there is a unique temptation, but it was only ever experienced by one person.

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And it's not Sam. It's not PJ. It's not me. It's not Paul. The only person that's ever experienced a truly unique temptation is the

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Lord Jesus. Even he is acquainted with our temptation.

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Hebrews 4 .15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

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Tempted in every respect as we are. And listen to this. And yet without sin.

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Jesus' experience of temptation it is deeper. It is broader.

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It is more trying. It is more challenging than anything that you or I have ever experienced in the sense of temptation.

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I'll tell you why. Because we regularly give in to our temptations. We find what

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I would call sinful relief with those temptations. You know, they talk about when you board an airplane about not tampering with the smoke detectors.

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We sinfully tamper with the pressure control valves of temptation and we let a little bit off from time to time.

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We feel justified doing it. It's wrong. It's evil. Christ never did that.

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Never once. We have never known temptation the way that Christ has known it.

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And what do you think Christ does with that experience? This is amazing.

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Brothers and sisters, I know I'm preaching long but just stay with me. This is amazing. What does He do with this? Jesus doesn't lord it over us that He was tempted in all things and yet without sin.

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Jesus does not flaunt this around. He doesn't sneer at our failures. He doesn't even cast angry judgment in that moment necessarily.

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But what does He do? Hebrews 4 .15, it says that He is able to sympathize.

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He has sympathy for our weakness. And then Paul writes here in 1

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Corinthians 10 this, that God is faithful and that He will never allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to resist.

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But with the temptation in tandem with every sinful impulse He will provide the way of escape that you would be able to endure it.

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Isn't that interesting? That you would be able to endure it. And again, just to revisit another word, that word escape, ekbosis in the

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Greek, it means to get out, to get out of there.

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In Paul's context, it was also used to describe a mountain defile. I don't know if anyone's ever heard of a mountain defile but essentially it's a gorge.

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It's a pass in the mountains. And so the picture that Paul uses is this. Imagine that you're in an army.

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Children, imagine that you're in an army. You're in the mountains. There are cliffs on every side.

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There's one way of escape and at the mouth of that escape there is your enemy army.

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They're bigger than you. They're stronger than you. You're cornered. You're in an impossible situation.

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That's the imagery. That's the word picture that Paul is drawing here with this word ekbosis.

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And what he says is this. When you feel like all hope is lost, when there's no way out, your army's there.

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You're ready to die. What happens? Boom! The rock splits and God makes a pass.

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He makes a gorge. He makes a mountain to file. He's faithful.

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He's immutable. That means he doesn't change. He will do this every time, every temptation.

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He will help you to endure. Brother, on a Friday evening, you've had a long week at work.

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You're on your computer. There's that clickbait in the corner of the screen. Look for the way out.

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You're at work. You're feeling bitter. Your boss is hard on you. Maybe he is even unjust.

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You want to backbite and slander and complain and gossip. Look for the way out.

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Stop mid -sentence if you have to. Get out of there every time.

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He will make an ekbosis, an escape. Kids, we're almost done.

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I want to ask you. You're in that mountain range. The enemy comes toward you.

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And then God opens up the mountains. What do you do?

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You take it? Yes, you take it. That's the fourth point. That's the fourth lesson

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Paul wants us to see. Verses 14 and 15. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.

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Run for your lives. That's my point. If you're looking in the bulletin, run for your lives.

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There's no hidden meaning in verse 14. If God gives you a pass, if He gives you a way of escape, then take it.

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When you encounter sin, when you encounter temptation, run. He says in verse 15, I speak as to sensible people.

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Judge for yourselves what I say. The Corinthians prided themselves in being wise, right?

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We are wise. We live in this center of philosophy We're very capable thinkers.

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We're very sensible people. Paul says this. He says, if you're sensible people, run.

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Go. Get out of here. He's already given that counsel in 1

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Corinthians 6. Flee from sexual immorality. He wrote in his last letter to Timothy in 2

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Timothy 2 .22. So flee, same word, youthful passions and pursue righteousness.

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There you go. Where are you fleeing to? You're fleeing to the source of righteousness.

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You're fleeing to Christ. You're fleeing to God. You're pursuing righteousness. You're not just fleeing from something into nothing.

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But you're fleeing by the expulsive power of a new affection to the righteousness of God.

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You guys have heard me talk lots about my deer hunting lately and I apologize for that. But I was thinking about it.

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This is a perfect illustration and so I'll use it. I've been going out hunting and one of the things that I have realized is this.

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That the reason why people like to hang big buck mounts on their wall when they catch one, it has nothing to do or maybe very little to do with the size of the horns.

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It has everything to do or the antlers, excuse me. It has everything to do with the challenge of hunting an animal like that.

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And what I mean by that is this. When you have a deer that's one year old or two year old, they're immature.

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They're unwise. They're easily killed. They will just walk right into the middle of danger.

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They'll hear danger. They don't move. You make a sound and instead of running, they stand still and let you shoot them.

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But the wise deer, the older deer, the mature deer, when they hear trouble, they run.

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They get out of there. And if I can just bridge that gap, when you come across a mature

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Christian, a 60 year old, a 70 year old, an 80 year old, a 100 year old believer that has walked with the

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Lord for decades, the reason why they are still standing, while they're still fighting is because they have learned to flee.

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And those older Christians that we want to be like, it's because they've learned the art of the eye bounce.

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They've learned how to stop talking when they need to stop talking. They've learned how to listen. They're going to wrestle with sin on their deathbed, but by God's grace, they're learning to flee.

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We need to flee. And then lesson number five, verses 16 to 20, we won't do a justice, full justice today, but verses 16 to 20, the cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?

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The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many, are one body, for we all partake of one bread.

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Consider the people of Israel are not those who eat the sacrifices, participants in the altar.

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What do I imply then that food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice, they offer to demons and not to God.

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I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.

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You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the

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Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than Him? The last lesson contained in all of that, if I were to summarize all of that, is this, don't lose sight of your new life.

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Don't lose sight of your new life in Christ. How can you partake in the table of demons and then come to church on Sunday and partake in the table of the

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Lord? How can you use the mouth that God has given you, like James says, both to bless and to curse?

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God has given us through Christ a new life, new spiritual realities, a new framework in which we live and evaluate the world.

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We're to give up food offered to idols because we have a better table.

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We're to give up sexual immorality because we are the temple of God, the temple of the living

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God. How can we join ourselves to a prostitute when God dwells in us? We're not to grumble.

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Paul says to the Philippians, we're to rejoice in the Lord always. We have a new identity, a new life in Christ.

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We're part of one body, the church, and we're to live like it. You've heard me tell stories about David Brainerd.

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If you haven't had any Christmas gifts picked out yet and someone is asking you, what can

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I get you for Christmas? Say, get me the biography of David Brainerd. It's a 450 -page book, maybe.

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Something about that long. And that man's life, talking about creating Godward desires, it's going to lay you low for a bit before it picks you back up.

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And the thing about David Brainerd, he was a missionary to the indigenous tribes that surrounded the American colonies in the 1700s.

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And he tells a number of stories in his diary, this biography of David Brainerd.

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And one of the stories he tells is of this one man that was saved, this indigenous man who wore these rattles and would participate in the pagan worship, really worship to the unknown

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God. Worship to a God that was not the God of the Bible. And when

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God saved him from his sin, the very first thing that he did, he took all of those instruments that he used to worship

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God and he got rid of them. Get rid of them. Get them out of my life. I have room in my life for one

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God and it's not that God. And so anything that serves that God, it's out of here. He tells a story and I'm not sure how

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God used this man in such a way of the indigenous people that when they were saved, there was a group of them that were saved all at once and they were rejoicing that they had been set free from their sin.

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And yet at the same time, he said, they wept bitterly, prayed even that they might die because they never wanted to sin against such a good

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God ever again. And they knew that if they lived for another day or another week, they would sin against him.

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And how could they sin against the Christ who died for them, who died to free them from their sin?

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And that is what it means to live this new life, to have this new life, to have these new affections, to be holy as he is holy.

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I'm probably going to leave it there except this one final exhortation. J. I.

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Packer said that one of the things that people most noticed when they were in the company of Martin Lloyd -Jones, who's a prominent

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Welsh preacher. I've mentioned him already. One of the most impactful things about being in his presence wasn't his oratorical skill.

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He was a great preacher and people agree on that. But anybody who spent any amount of time with Martin Lloyd -Jones, one of the things that they sensed, they said that when they were in his company, they had a very real sense of the presence of God.

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Not because he was God, but because he spent so much time with God, abiding in God, that to be around him, in a sense, was to be around God.

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His scent was on his clothing. And someone said that Martin Lloyd -Jones was such an example of real personal godliness.

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I believe it was Ian Murray, his biographer, that wrote this, but I can't be sure. He said that whenever you spent time with Martin Lloyd -Jones, the very first thing that you thought or that you said to yourself when you left him is this,

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I need to be more holy. I need to be more like Christ. I need, whatever that man has,

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I need it. And my friends, when people are around you, when you think about your relationship with sin, your sin profile, what impression are they getting?

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When they're around you, do they think, I wish I could be more macho. I wish

01:00:00

I could be smarter. I wish I could talk better. I wish I could do this. Friends, let us be, let it be the motive, the inspiration, the drive of our heart that when people are around us, they would leave and they would say,

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I need more of Christ. I need to be more like Christ. More of him and less of me.

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So, and that is the remedy to the poison that is sin. It's Jesus Christ.

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It's the word of God. It's the gospel of God. And brothers and sisters, we get to do it together.

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We get to correct each other and encourage each other and let us do that. Let's pray.