Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
I want to throw out three names of people you may know—first names only. These three names may jog a memory for at least a handful of you out there. Are you ready? Larry, Moe, and Curly. No, just kidding… those aren’t the three names I’m talking about. These names are more obscure than that: Colby, Ozzie, and Malcolm.
Ring any bells? These are legendary former contestants on the reality/game show Survivor. They each were known to be “challenge beasts”—meaning, they each won many immunity and reward challenges. They each were incredibly gifted—with physical strength, stamina, athleticism… They each were popular with fans. They each were well-liked. They didn’t get on other people’s nerves—as people deprived of adequate food, water, and shelter so often will. And despite their many gifts, they were relatively humble about them.
And they each have one more thing in common: Each of them… lost… Each failed to win the million-dollar prize.
In fact, this usually happens on Survivor. “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” as Ecclesiastes says. 1 Again and again, physically strong, athletic, and likable contestants end up losing to their physically weaker, less athletic, and more annoying opponents. And oftentimes, the difference comes down to some small mistake. They lost their focus for a moment. They took their eye off the proverbial ball or whatever the object of the game was. They made one small miscalculation. And they got voted out.
And I guess one moral of that story is, Don’t let this happen to you… Don’t be overconfident…
Or, as Paul says in verse 12: “Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.” And that’s the theme of today’s scripture, except the stakes are much, much higher than winning or losing a reality TV show. We’re talking instead about winning or losing one’s very soul. So I want to make three points in today’s sermon: Number One, “Overthrown in the Wilderness.” Number Two, “Examples to Avoid.” And Number Three, “God Is Faithful.”
But first, Number One, “Overthrown in the Wilderness”…
As a reminder, we Methodists—along with many other Christians today and throughout history—believe that “backsliding” is possible. Backsliding means that it’s possible to be justified—that is, to be brought into a right relationship with God, to have all of one’s sins forgiven—to be born again, toget off to a great start on living a Christian life, only to find… in the end… in Final Judgment… that we are no longer children of God through faith in Christ.
I need to begin with this reminder because you may have noticed that we Methodists are outnumbered pretty badly by Baptists in our community… And Baptists famously don’t believe in backsliding. They believe in “once saved, always saved,” or what’s often called the doctrine of “eternal security.” I grew up in a church that believed this. But here’s the most important thing: whether we believe in the possibility of backsliding or in once-saved-always-saved, it ought to make little practical difference in the way we live. Why? Because we all know people who at one time professed the Christian faith and no longer do. We all know people who at one time in their lives seemed to be on fire for Jesus but no longer are. And we all know people who say they’re Christians—who’ve walked down the aisle and prayed a sinner’s prayer, or gone through confirmation class, or who’ve been baptized church members—who would even say they’re Christians today, but who live as if Christ makes no practical difference whatsoever in their lives.
Whether they were saved at one time and lost their salvation, as we Methodists may say… or whether they were never saved at all, as Baptists would say… the end result is the same… They need to repent and trust in Christ!
But I believe in the doctrine of backsliding because I’m persuaded that that’s what God’s Word teaches, including Paul’s words in the verses leading up to today’s scripture: in chapter 9, verses 24 to 27:
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.
Lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified…
Paul is open to a frightening possibility: that even he himself may yet backslide and lose his salvation apart from the hard work of faithful Christian living… He recognizes that backsliding is possible for him in spite of his encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, and his many successes as an apostle and missionary, and the miracles he’s performed, and the visions that he’s seen!
Am I a better, more faithful Christian than Paul? Am I more spiritually fit than he was? Am I less susceptible to backsliding than he was? Are you?
Therefore we must heed the warning…
Christians who reject the idea of backsliding must surely admit that Paul’s words here in chapter 9 are deeply confusing: because it’s not like Paul says, “lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified—not that that would ever happen, because of course authentic believers could never fall from grace and be disqualified.”
No… Paul understands that being a disciple isn’t mostly about something that happened in our past: It’s about having a living relationship with Christ in the present. It’s about having a faith that changes us, right now,through the power of the Holy Spirit. And it’s about seeing it through—persevering—to the end. It’s about finishing well. That’s why Paul himself can say, near the end of his life, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” 2
Anyway, Paul wouldn’t deny for a moment that these Corinthians have gotten off to a great start in their Christian faith. They are a spiritually gifted church. The power of the Spirit has been evident within them.
Yet Paul reminds them—and us—in today’s scripture that the Israelites also got off to a great start as God’s people. And we are not so different from them… Verses 1 and 2: “For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers [and sisters], that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.”
This cloud, as we saw in last week’s scripture in Genesis 15, is an image for God’s presence—it’s the cloud that formed a pillar above the Ark of the Covenant by day and a fire by night. It’s the cloud that descended upon Mt. Sinai when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. Indeed, it’s even the cloud that descended upon Jesus and three terrified disciples in the Transfiguration: In today’s scripture it represents the Holy Spirit, which all of us believers receive. We believers in Christ have been baptized both with water and the Holy Spirit.
And not only that: Just as Israel was fed with what Paul calls “spiritual food” and “spiritual drink,” so we Christians are fed spiritually with the bread and wine of Holy Communion. In verse 4, Paul says that the “spiritual drink” refers to the way God gave Israel, on two occasions, miraculous water from the rock. Paul even says in verse 4, “For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.” This is Paul’s poetic way of saying that Christ was with ancient Israel, leading, guiding, and nourishing them, just as he is with us today.
And yet… verse 5: “Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.” We recall, tragically, that with only two exceptions—Joshua and Caleb—no one of that first generation of Israelites who left slavery in Egypt made it into the Promised Land. “They were overthrown in the wilderness.”
And in a sense, we Christians, like the Israelites, are also living in the wilderness between two worlds: We’re in between our past lives in slavery to sin and our future lives in God’s kingdom—when we will be resurrected into a redeemed world, where heaven and earth become one, where we will know God in all his fullness, where we will be made perfect—with glorified bodies incapable of suffering from the effects of sin, sickness, or death. That is our Promised Land. We haven’t arrived at our destination yet. Consequently, the New Testament tells us, we are “exiles” and “sojourners” in this world, on our way to the better world to come. 3 Hebrews 13:14 tells us, “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.”
When the days of our life in this world are accomplished on earth, will we be able to say, with Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
Or… will we be overthrown?
That’s Point Number One…
Number Two, “Examples to Avoid”…
Verse 6: “Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did.” And in the next four verses Paul identifies specific sins that Israel was guilty of, which also posed a threat to the Corinthian church as well… and poses a threat to us.
Verse 7, idolatry… And here Paul recalls that during that first 40-day period when Moses went up on Mt. Sinai, his brother Aaron, under pressure from his fellow Israelites, created the golden calf, which the people worshiped. Paul quotes from that event in Exodus 32:6: “The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.”
The Corinthians, of course, were in a culture saturated with idols. And one of Paul’s main concerns in this letter, you may recall, was to address the church’s question about whether it’s safe and appropriate for Christians to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols.
Paul’s handling of the question is nuanced and compassionate. His takeaway is that while idols are nothing, there are demonic forces at work in these temples where idols are worshiped. Idolatry therefore is not something for any Christian, at any level of maturity, to play around with.
What about us? Is idolatry any less of a problem in our day than it was in Paul’s? Of course not… It’s just idolatry has gone “underground.” Our idols are often invisible. They’re less obvious… less conspicuous. We can make an idols, for instance, out of money and possessions, out of career, out of worldly success, out of health and beauty, out of romantic relationships, out of sports and hobbies, out of screens and smartphones and devices… But an idol can be anything that we depend on—outside of a personal relationship with Christ—to make us feel good about ourselves.
And do I need to say that another potential idol in our culture is sex? Paul himself apparently needs to say it, and he does so in verse 8—making reference to a specific episode of sexual immorality in Numbers 25, which you can read about on your own time.
But Paul has already had much to say on the topic of sex in chapters 5 and 6 of 1 Corinthians. Corinth had, among other temples, a temple to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and fertility. And prostitutes would famously solicit clients at or near this temple. Prostitution was very much “out in the open.” It was a perfectly acceptable part of their culture. So much so that in chapter 6 Paul has to warn members of this church, “You can’t have sexual relationships with prostitutes.” It seems so obvious, right? But Paul says this because members of this church were sleeping with prostitutes! Please, for the sake of your soul, repent, Paul says.
While prostitution isn’t, I hope, a serious problem here in Toccoa, we all know that a kind of prostitution is available in all of our homes, on all of our devices, by way of the internet. It is wreaking great havoc on young people, and on marriages… Speaking of which I ran into a wealthy acquaintance a few weeks ago—a fellow Georgia Tech alum… I love this man so much… He is a Christian who confessed many years ago to having a $10,000-a-month habit related to internet pornography. And for my friend, the internet was like a gateway drug to even more kinds of sexual sin. At one point, he even checked himself into a rehab place out in Arizona, which cost him $75 grand for a one month stay. And it didn’t take… within only a few weeks of returning home, he fell off the wagon, fell back into his destructive lifestyle. The danger is real, brothers and sisters… as many of you know from experience…
Verse 9 and 10: “We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer.”
Over and over again we see Israel grumble. Despite experiencing daily evidence of God’s mighty works—manna from heaven, the pillar of cloud and fire that rested above the tabernacle, many miracles that God performed both in Egypt and since then—the people still weren’t satisfied with God… They spoke as if God weren’t enough for them… Many would prefer to go back to Egypt. And so they grumbled against Moses and God.
And let me just say this: Grumbling, complaining to other people, gossiping about other people, slandering other people—which we can do even by tapping words on our devices and screens… these are all “sins of the tongue.” And they are deadly serious sins. What does James say:
How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. 4
We often—or usually—take sins of the tongue very lightly… even though we’re often hurt so badly by them… We take them far more lightly, for instance, than sexual sin and idolatry—yet here it is, listed alongside those things.
And let me say one more thing: There is an antidote to grumbling and other sins of the tongue. It’s called prayer. If you want to grumble and complain, you can… the Bible gives you permission to do so… So long as you do it in one direction only: So long as you direct your grumbling and complaining to God alone… in prayer.
Don’t grumble about some “middle man” who’s doing something you don’t like. Nothing is happening to you, after all, that God isn’t ultimately responsible for. When you’re grumbling about someone, you’re directing your anger toward the wrong person. Take it up with God! Ask him why he’s allowing this to happen to you. And ask him to intervene and change your situation. Ask him to show you what you need to do to better handle your anger, which is usually a serious sin.
That’s Point Number Two… “Examples to Avoid.”
Number Three… “God Is Faithful.”
And these three words—“God is faithful”—come from a very hopeful verse—the only hopeful verse perhaps—in today’s scripture. Verse 13: “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.”
Among other things, this verse is telling us something that I’ve been saying for many weeks: God wants us to overcome sin in our lives, so that it won’t continue to harm us and harm others… Indeed, so that it won’t cause us to fall away from faith, to backslide, to lose our salvation.
Remember, please, those men in the church who were soliciting prostitutes!
Remember that Paul is writing this letter to many Christians in the church who are committing all kinds of sins. And yet all of them, Paul believes, are still, at this very moment, saved. None of them, as far as he knows, has backslidden or lost their salvation.
After all, listen to what Paul says about them back in chapter 1, beginning in verse 4. Verses 4 through 8 are one long sentence. Let me just show you the first verse, verse 4, and the last verse, verse 8: “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus… who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
These Corinthians, Paul believes, will be guiltless. We know they’re not guiltless right now, but they will be!
Now listen to verse 9—this should sound familiar: “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
My point is, even as Paul is warning the Corinthians—and by extension, us—of the danger of backsliding, he is, at the same time, confident that in spite of the many ways in which these Corinthians are sinning right now… he’s confident that God will bring them out of this morass of sin in which they often find themselves… In other words, he’s confident—getting back to verse 13 of chapter 10—that not only does God want to give us a “way of escape so that we can endure temptation,” but that God will do so!
It may take time. We are works in progress… But as Paul says elsewhere, “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” 5
I had a “frenemy” in my Baptist church youth group when I was a teenager. His name was Rick. He was popular, athletic, good-looking, girls liked him… So naturally I hated him. But also… he was very conceited, and he picked on me… a lot. Anyway, Rick was very predictable: because every time we went on a youth group retreat or church summer camp—a couple of times each year—you could count on Rick, responding to the youth pastor’s altar call, walking down the aisle… to receive Christ as Savior and Lord in tears… very emotional.
I mean, the poor guy must have gotten re-baptized four or five times! He must have prayed to receive Christ as his Savior and Lord about thirteen times!
And each time he walked down the aisle to to pray to receive Christ, I wanted to say, “Rick, didn’t you do this, like, six months ago? And six months before that? And six months before that? Besides, Rick… maybe you’re just feeling guilty for picking on me so much. Stop doing that, and you probably won’t need to repent so often!”
Seriously, if I could go back in time, I would tell him, as a pastor, “Rick, literally no part of your salvation depends on anything you can do, or fail to do—other than reach out, in faith, and grab hold of this gift of forgiveness and eternal life that God offers through Christ. You trust in him completely for your salvation, and not your own personal righteousness.”
And this is the most profound way that we’re not like the ancient Israelites: We are no longer under a covenant in which we strive to be righteous under the law. We’re under a different covenant because of Christ’s atoning death on the cross. We’re righteous because Christ lived the life of perfect obedience to the Father that we sinful humans were unable to live… so that his righteous obedience counts as our righteous obedience. His guiltlessness becomes our guiltlessness. And not only that… even though Christ was completely innocent of any sin, he went to the cross and suffered the penalty for our sins—including hell itself—so that we wouldn’t have to. Galatians 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’”
Now, I promise I’m not contradicting what I said earlier in Point Number One: the Holy Spirit is changing us from within to make us truly guiltless when it comes to sin in our lives. That change is called “sanctification.”But there’s a sense in which we already are without guilt… At this moment, we stand before God as guiltless, because Christ’s righteousness becomes our own righteousness and Christ’s death for sin counts as our death because of sin.
Do we believe that? If so, we can be assured of our salvation.
And if we believe that, knowing what Christ has done to redeem us, how could we possibly take it for granted?