Episode 292: Be Careful That You Don't Fall | Dave Sloop

Good morning. It's great to be together this morning.

Just a few weeks ago, on May 19, Tim Keller, perhaps the godliest and most influential man in our generation, went home to be with Jesus. On the heels of his death, social media erupted with testimony after testimony of people who had been impacted by his life and ministry. Some of those testimonies were from people who knew him well—his children, his friends—and others were from people who, like me, only knew him through his teaching and his writings. But the common thread among all these testimonies was something like this: "I know Jesus Christ differently today because of his life and his witness and his ministry."

Tim Keller exists for you and me as an example, a picture, a living picture of what it looks like to spend your life for one thing: to know Christ and to make him known. He had a massive impact.

Ironically, on the very same day, on May 19, something else happened. FX, the TV network, released a four-part documentary series called The Secrets of Hillsong, which follows in part the rise and the moral fall of a celebrity pastor named Carl Lentz. We're not going to dig into the details of that story, and it is not my purpose today to explore whether or not Carl Lentz has sincere faith in Christ. I suspect that he does. It is also not my purpose today to remind us of the overwhelming grace of God, which covers all of our sin and failure no matter how public or how extreme. While that is true, and while that is a topic I am far more comfortable teaching on, it is not where our text leads us today.

The reason that I'm putting this contrast on display is this: If you're here today and you have a relationship with Christ, it is possible that you could have a story that plays out like Tim Keller. To the degree that you give God access to you—your affections, your mind, your heart, your soul, your strength—you will know him better, you will love him more deeply, and at the end of your life, people will say, "I know Jesus differently because of him, because of her."

However, we are equally capable of having a story that plays out a little bit more like Carl Lentz. Is it possible to be saved by his grace, filled with his Holy Spirit, adopted into his family as a true child and heir, having all of the benefits of one of his children, and yet to live as if none of those things were true? And in so doing, make some decisions and choices that completely blow up our lives and the lives of the ones that we love the most.

We might be tempted to look at Carl Lentz like the Pharisee looked at the tax collector in Jesus' famous parable and say, "God, thank you that I'm not like that man." If that is our attitude or our instinct, let me share with you today 1 Corinthians 10:12, which is the punchline of the passage that we will be studying today:

If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall. — 1 Corinthians 10:12

If we don't realize that we are equally capable of either one of those two outcomes, then we are not paying enough attention to the flesh and the sinful nature, and we might just be making ourselves unnecessarily vulnerable to that precise attack.

Paul is going to write in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 a warning to the church at Corinth. My hope this morning, as we look at these 14 verses, is that we will hear this not merely as a warning for an immoral first-century church—which they were—or as a warning for failures like Carl Lentz or for people who fail. Rather, we would see this for what it is: a warning for you and for me, as God's word to us.

So let's take a look at what he says, starting in verse one:

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. — 1 Corinthians 10:1

Let me stop right here. Paul says, "our forefathers." It would be easy to read right over that, but in those two words, Paul is making a massive point. Paul is a Jew among Jews. That's how he describes himself. Paul is part of the covenant nation of Israel, and he is writing to a group of Greek, Gentile, immoral Corinthians. And what does he say? "Our forefathers."

The message there is: you, Corinthians, have been grafted in. You are not something new and different. You are a continuation of what God has been doing since Genesis chapter 12, when he set Abraham apart and said to him in Genesis 15, "I will be your God and you will be my people." That promise extends even to the people at Corinth. Paul is being very intentional about his language here.

He says our forefathers were under the cloud and they all passed through the sea. "Under the cloud" refers to the presence of God that followed Israel as they wandered in the wilderness. It was his visible, manifest presence, and it guided and led them.

They all passed through the sea, which of course refers to God's parting the Red Sea through Moses. And they, the people of Israel, passed through on dry land, and in so doing, they went from captivity to freedom. And then he says this: they were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea. And this is unusual language that Paul uses here, but he intentionally uses new covenant language to make a point about what was happening in the Old Testament. He says, you were baptized into Moses. You went down into the water with Moses, which should have been your death, but you rose up on the other side to safety. You came up onto dry land. You were baptized into Moses, who, by the way, was the mediator of the covenant people of God. He went to God on their behalf.

And then he says this in verse four—or in verse three: they all ate the same spiritual food and they drank the same spiritual drink for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. He said, you had they had a spiritual meal that they experienced in the wilderness. It was bread from heaven. And then he tells us something, and this is not Paul just being cute with his words, this is Paul, by divine revelation, telling us that the rock in the wilderness was a pre-incarnate appearance of Messiah. It was Christ himself. He says, and the water that came from the rock nourished Israel in the wilderness.

Do you see what Paul is doing here? He is saying, they were the people of God, you are the people of God. They experienced his presence in the cloud, and you experience his presence by virtue of his Holy Spirit that lives inside of you. They went through the sea. You have crossed over from death unto life. They were baptized into Moses, and you are baptized into the one to whom Moses pointed, the true and better Moses, who is the final mediator of the new covenant. And they had a special meal, a spiritual meal by which they were nourished by Christ himself, and you, Corinthians, have a special meal. His body and his blood represented in the wine and the bread in which Christ nourishes us himself.

You see what he's doing? It is very obvious, unmistakable that he is saying, you are the real deal. You are the covenant people of God. Look at what God has done for you. He has been faithful. They would have swelled up with pride, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them. When Paul reads in verse five, listen to this:

Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them. Their bodies were scattered over the desert. — 1 Corinthians 10:5

This is like a punch to the gut. You can almost hear the record scratch. God, verses one through four, has been unconditionally faithful. However, Israel was not. Verses one through four, God's faithfulness. What does verse five teach us? It teaches us that God's faithfulness does not guarantee that we will be faithful. The question is, how in the face of God's overwhelming goodness, kindness, presence, power, and provision did they completely blow it and ignore him and fall in the wilderness?

Paul is going to give us the answer in verses six through 14. Paul is going to give you and me a playbook for how we can wreck our lives. And it can be distilled down into one word that we read in verse seven and in verse 14, and that word is idolatry. In the next eight verses, we are going to see what idolatry is, how it traps, the damage that it causes, and how we can escape it.

And here's how we can remember it. In verses six and seven, we see the definition of idolatry. In verses eight through 10, we see the deceptive and the destructive nature of idolatry. And in verses 12 through 14, we will see our defense against it.

Let's read what Paul says in verse six:

Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. Do not be idolaters as some of them were. — 1 Corinthians 10:6-7

It's very clear. Paul says, don't be idolaters. And if you want a good definition for what idolatry is, verse six gives us a perfect one. He says, don't set your hearts on evil things like they did. Now that word, to set your hearts, is an interesting one. It's actually the only time in all of scripture that that word is used. It is taken from a more frequently used word, which is the word to lust, which is epithemeo. It's Greek. I don't know Greek, but I can read a dictionary. Epithemeo is the word to lust, and that word actually does mean to set your heart upon. The word Paul uses here, and it might be a word that he makes up, he turns that verb into a noun, and it's epithumates. And what it means is a craver, a luster. He says, don't be a craver of evil things.

If we want to understand something about the nature and essence of idolatry, we have to understand something about the nature and essence of the heart that God has put inside every single one of us. And it's this: you have a heart that was made to crave. You are a craver. That is a fact.

It is part of being human. From the time you were born, instinctively, you know something's not quite right in here, and we go looking to fill it. We look to satisfy it. We are joy seekers. In his book, You Are What You Love, James Smith says this: you can't not bet your life on something. You can't not be headed in a direction. We live leaning forward toward the place that we long to arrive. What he's telling us is that part of being human is that we are pulled in the direction of our desire.

Desire is a good thing. God gives us desire. The goal is not to squelch desire. The goal is that we might point desire and aim it at its intended target. Jesus would put it this way. He says:

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be. — Matthew 6:21

What Jesus is saying here is that what we choose to ascribe worth and value to—and by the way, it is a choice. It might be a subconscious choice, it might be a conscious choice, but we decide what we value. That is a fact. And what we value, what we ascribe worth to, our hearts will follow us there. That is how we end up setting our hearts upon different things.

Idolatry is when we set our hearts upon anything other than the one who made our hearts. I want to give you guys a picture of this, and if you grew up in Young Life, you've seen this a hundred times, but there are some things worth seeing over and over again, and this is one of them.

The Bible tells us that we were made by God and we were made in his image, kind of like this glove was made in the image of a hand. It is not a hand, but it looks like a hand. In fact, of everything that God made, you and I are the only thing that he made to look like himself, and he said it is very good. But that's not the best thing that God says about us. He doesn't just say that we were made by God, but that we were made for God, kind of like this glove was made for a hand. God has made you and me with an empty space that he longs to come and fill.

Now, a glove does not have to be filled with a hand to still be a glove. Still a glove. But I'll put that glove over there, and it will stay there all day. You see that glove is powerless, and that glove will never fulfill its purpose until it is filled by the one in whose image it was made. And when it is, it works like a glove is supposed to work.

But you and I, we have said, "God, I'm not interested. I think I can do better." And we go off looking for other things to be filled by. And you can imagine the laundry list of things we try to put in here: other human relationships. It can be a healthy relationship or it can be an unhealthy one. It can be your spouse, it can be a child. Maybe we put in here our career advancement, success at work, our net worth, a number on a spreadsheet that we think will make me feel fulfilled and secure. Whatever it is, it can be good things. It can also be bad things.

In fact, sometimes when the good things don't seem to be satisfying—and they never will, by the way—we might turn to some numbing behaviors. Maybe we just scroll the phone, social media, and we don't realize that what we're actually doing is numbing the pain of existence. We're just distracting ourselves. Or maybe we turn to something more dark and sinister. Maybe we stumble into pornography just to get a little rush of excitement, exhilaration. Maybe we turn to substances. Maybe it starts with a beer or two after work, and eventually it's every single night, and what we're doing is medicating, numbing.

It can be good or it can be bad, but here's the deal: whatever you put in here, it becomes your god. It becomes the thing that you worship. Martin Luther said this: what our heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God. Whatever we set our hearts upon, whatever we fill our life with, that's idolatry if it's anything other than the God who created us.

Can you imagine being the nation of Israel, having the benefit of seeing God literally part the Red Sea, and every day when you wake up, there is breakfast on the ground, manna provided from heaven? Time after time after time, God shows up to deliver them and to be faithful to them. How in the world, how petty could Israel be to chase after other stuff? Can you imagine being that petty? I hope you're catching my sarcasm. We are no different. We do the very same thing.

Three Examples of Idolatry

And in verses eight through ten, Paul is going to give us three examples of idolatry. And in the interest of time, we're not going to go into them specifically, but I'm going to tell you two things that all three of these stories have in common.

The first is this: their idolatry deceives them into believing that there is someone, something, or somewhere that can more fully and finally satisfy their deepest need and longing. They're deceived into believing, because of their idolatry, that they can do better than God, the one that created them. It is the heart of the prodigal son that looks at his dad in the face and says, "I don't want you. I want your stuff."

Give me my inheritance. And he goes off to a distant land because he thinks he can do better. Idolatry is deceptive because idols always promise something that they never will deliver on.

Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. — Jonah 2:8

He calls them worthless because it's precisely what they are. They're vain and empty and hollow. We chase after them, and right before we think we're going to get what we want and we need, it slips through our hands. It was a mirage. It was an illusion. Idolatry deceives us into thinking that we can do better than God.

Idolatry deceives us in a second way. Idolatry deceives us into thinking that it's just not that big of a deal. My suspicion is that there's some of us in here that are dancing a little too close to the edge of some things that we should be nowhere near. We just think it's not that big of a deal. What could go wrong? What could happen? This is what Israel thought too. It's just not that big of a deal. And I would suggest to you and me that our idols are most dangerous when they seem small and insignificant to us.

Do you remember the story of Cain? God comes to him and he says, be careful, Cain. Sin is crouching at your door, and its desire is to have you. You must rule over it. The picture there is a predator lying in wait. And right before he pounces, what does he do? He crouches. He makes himself appear smaller than he is, and that is when he's most deadly and dangerous. Tim Keller points out that our sin has a way of making itself look smaller than it actually is. And it is at that precise moment that we are most vulnerable and that it is most deadly.

Sin, idolatry, it deceives. The other thing about idolatry is that instead of actually giving us the thing that it promises, it actually delivers the exact opposite. All idolatry—and this is the second thing that is true about all three of these stories—all idolatry ends in destruction. We pursue it thinking that we will get a reward, and what we get instead is ruin.

And in these three stories, we see some pretty extreme cases. It says their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. God just snuffed out their lives. And I am of the opinion that this is not God condemning people to eternal judgment. I think this is God snatching his kids home in the same way that a dad might go grab his kid by the arm at a party where he's making a fool of himself, ruining the reputation of the father. He just takes him home. I think God is bringing his kids home so that they can't poison the water anymore and drag the nation down with them. This is not the normative way that God deals with our idolatry, but he reserves the right to do it.

What is more frequently the case is that God just lets us have what we want. The language of the Bible is he gives us over to our evil desires. He lets us drink from the cup that we think we want. Eventually, God withdraws. He says, go ahead. And we drink from it, but instead of tasting sweet, it tastes bitter. What Karl Lentz is experiencing is the natural byproduct of the idols he was chasing. There's destruction in the wake of his choices.

The question is, how do we avoid idolatry? What is our defense against it when we have a craving heart and it's so deceptive and deceitful and subtle? We don't even know sometimes that we've stumbled into it. What is our defense? Paul is gonna tell us in verse 12.

So if you think you're standing firm, be careful that you don't fall. — 1 Corinthians 10:12

That word "be careful"—it is actually the word "to look." It is used 135 times in the New Testament. In almost every case, it means "he saw," "to see," "behold," "watch out." Paul is telling them, open your eyes. Watch your step.

One of the greatest gifts of moving to Roanoke for the Sloop family is our neighbors. We live just a few feet away from Brian and Julie and Charlie and Noah Wright, and we love them. They've become like family to us. And often, especially during the warmer months, we'll just sit out on their front porch. They got a great front porch. We'll talk and laugh, and the kids will play in the driveway.

And one particular afternoon, I saw Brian and Julie sitting on their front porch, and they were sharing a romantic moment. And I thought, you know, I'm gonna go interrupt that. And so I started walking over to Brian and Julie, and I was walking somewhat carelessly because this was a path I had walked dozens of times before. And on this particular day, I stepped in something in their yard. Brian and Julie have three dogs—Rue and Jill and Scotch—and one of them had left something in the yard, and I stepped in it.

I don't blame Brian and Julie for their careless behavior. I take full responsibility. But I'll promise you this: the next time I went to that front porch, do you think I watched where I was going? Every step, I made sure I was in the clear.

Paul is saying, open your eyes. Watch out.

His first instruction to them to avoid idolatry is this: you have to see. You have to see idolatry for the lie that it is. You have to see that you are susceptible to it, and you have to see where it leads every single time. You have to see.

And secondly, in verses thirteen and fourteen, Paul's gonna give us a promise and a second command. And here's what he says:

No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will provide a way out so you can stand up under it. — 1 Corinthians 13-14

Do you hear the two promises? There will be no temptation that you face in your entire life that you cannot look at and say, I can overcome that. That is a promise. God will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. You cling to that promise.

But then secondly, he says, I will provide a way out. God will give us an escape route. And most frequently, that escape route is going to be verse 14: "Therefore flee from idolatry." The first whiff or sight that you get of idolatry, you turn and you run.

Paul's first command is: you have to see. His second command: flee. That is not quite enough though, because the reality is if our heart is not pointed at our intended target, then when we flee, we will just flee to another idol.

What Does It Look Like to Flee Well?

Paul gives us a perfect, beautiful picture of how to do it. In the four verses preceding chapter ten, first Corinthians nine twenty-four to 27, Paul gives us the same two directives with a different metaphor. Listen to what he says:

Don't you know that in a race, the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Athletes who compete in the games go into strict competition, and they do it to get a crown that won't last. But you and I, we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore, I do not run as a man running aimlessly. I do not fight as a man beating against the air. I beat my body, and I make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified. — 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

What is he saying? He's saying the same thing. He's saying you have to see the battle that you're in. You have to see who your enemy is. Did you catch that picture? He said, I'm not like a guy who's fighting with his eyes closed or in the dark—a man who is swinging in the dark, who knows there's an enemy out there somewhere, but he doesn't know where he is, and he doesn't know who he is. Paul says, I know where he is. I know who he is.

The number one reason that I will fall is not some idol out there that's tempting me. It's me. Paul says, I've gotta beat my body into submission. I have to subdue my flesh because I am a craver. And there will be times when I want to do some things that I have to tell my body no, and I have the power to do it. Paul says, you have to know your greatest foe, and it's you. Subdue the flesh. You have to see.

But then he gives us a picture of what it looks like to flee. Paul says, I don't run like a man running aimlessly. Paul knew the direction of his race. He knew where he was headed, or maybe more appropriately, he knew to whom he was headed. Paul ran his race with his eyes fixed on Jesus Christ. Paul knew that if he ran his race with his eyes focused on the one for whom he was made, he would be filled and satisfied no matter what life threw at him. And at the end of his life, he would be face to face with Jesus, and he would enter into his master's joy, and he would receive the crown of life.

When we flee, we flee to Christ.

But do you know something? When we run to him, do you know what we discover? He ran to you first. He ran out of heaven. He made himself appear smaller than he was. He became one of us. He walked in our shoes. He lived the life that we couldn't live but we should have. And at the end of his life, he got a crown, but it was the crown we deserved. It was the crown of thorns.

As Tim Keller said, at the end of Jesus' life, he didn't get a crown of life. He got a crown of thorns. He took the death that you and I deserved so that at the end of our life, we could get the crown that he deserves. We get to spend forever with him.

Do you know what happens when you see Jesus for who he is? You begin to see your idols for what they are. They are vain and hollow and worthless.

Do you wanna beat idolatry? You have to see, and then you have to flee. But when you do flee, flee into the arms of the one for whom you were made.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for the chance to look at your word, to be instructed by it. I pray that we would let you do your work. I pray for those of us here who might be battling with some of the things that we've discussed, God, that are struggling with idols that we know that we have. Deliver us from the lie that believes some idol will fulfill us in a way that you won't or that it's not a big deal. God, we cast them down.

If you are here today and God is speaking to you, I invite you to come forward at these rails. Whether this is the thousandth time that you have confessed your idolatry to him or if it's the first, He will receive you the same.

He ran towards you. He died for you because He knew that you would keep doing this over and over again. Come to Him. And at these rails, we'll have people from our prayer team who would love to pray with you.

It's in Christ's name that we pray. Amen.