Ego and Glory

If you think you are standing strong, be careful not to fall. The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, He will show you a way out so that you can endure. (1 Corinthians 10:12-13 [NLT])

Many people look at these two verses and read, “God is faithful and won’t give you more than you can handle.” That is all they recall. I believe that is what Satan wants them to recall. But there is more to this passage. We must begin at the beginning of the chapter to understand fully what God wrote through Paul.

In the first eleven verses of this chapter, Paul reminded the Corinthians of the Israelites’ history. He reminded them how God had guided them by a cloud and how He had parted the sea so they could walk on dry ground to escape Pharaoh’s army. Paul recalled for them how the Israelites ate and drank the food and water God sent for them each day. Then he explained anew how these same people whom God rescued displeased God. The Israelites worshipped idols, complained about food and drink, celebrated with feasting and drinking and pagan revelry that included sexual immorality. God responded to these people with faithfulness and disciplined them and removed the ones who led others astray. He sent snakes to bite the sinners and the angel of death to remove them from among the Israelites.

The point Paul made with this recollection of the history of Israel is they put God to the test. He told the Corinthians they should not put Christ to the test. They should not test God’s patience and faithfulness to us just as those who died from snakebites did. What God did to the Israelites for discipline purposes were examples to the Corinthians and us so we would not challenge God with our rebellion. Paul said in verse eleven, “These things happened to them as examples for us. They were written down to warn us who live at the end of the age.”

Of what does this warn us? Paul explained this in the rest of the chapter, but he gives the how in verses twelve and thirteen. In verses fourteen through thirty, he said not to give offense to others who possibly are weaker in the faith or who are not Christians by your actions. Don’t create temptations for yourself by the freedom Christ gave you and so put your guard down when you eat things that you knew people offered as sacrifices to idols. And don’t anger God by your freedom by saying “all things are permissible.” (vs. 23) Paul warned the Corinthians and us of this. You notice in these three things, each action would affect a relationship - yours with others, yours with yourself, and yours with God.

With this understanding, Paul told them how to withstand temptation. Before we understand that, we need to understand human ego. Most people think they are strong enough to stand against temptation, but if that were so, all the addicts over the history of time and wouldn’t be addicts, whether addicts of alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, porn, abuse, food, shopping, or whatever. Yet, if we truly look at human history and ourselves, we recognize, we are not strong enough to stand against all temptations. We are not Christ who stood strong against Satan’s temptations in the desert. Humans eventually collapse when faced with certain temptations in their lives. We each have weaknesses. Our egos tell us we are strong enough and can do this or that without failing, and sometimes we can. Most of the times, though, we cannot.

At this point is where Paul’s statement in verses twelve and thirteen come to play. He said, “If you think you are standing strong,” when often we are not standing strong. Paul knew humanity’s weaknesses because he recognized his own weaknesses. He had been a self-righteous Pharisee. “If you think you are standing strong, be careful not to fall.” Paul knew at some point each person succumbs to temptation and warns them not to think too highly of themselves and their capabilities. Again, with verse thirteen, he reminded them that the failures of others we see around us, their weaknesses and falling to temptations, could be us, too. We are like every other person who walked the earth. We are weak and cannot stand up to every temptation.

Paul didn’t stop at that point and cause the Corinthians or us to despair. He reminded us about God and His characteristics. Paul continued, “God is faithful. He will not allow temptation to be more than you can stand.” Notice, God is the One who is all-knowing, always faithful, and all-powerful. Paul reminded the readers of this letter they are no stronger than any other person who’s lived, but God is stronger, is strongest, is faithful, and loves us. Because of God’s faithfulness, love, and knowledge of each of us, “He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand.” Don’t stop at that point, though. If you do, you will interpret this passage as many secular Christians and non-Christians do, with an off-the-cuff faith. It’s like the saying you hear from people, “God’s got my back.” It requires no faith in God is required to say that. That saying doesn’t give you the strength to walk through a situation. It’s just a saying, like when people say, “God won’t allow me to experience more than I can handle.” With those statements by people, no faith or covenant with God is required to say it. Paul reminds us instead that God’s wisdom, strength, faithfulness, and love, His covenant with us as His children, that sees us through the situation.

Paul completed his thoughts on this with, “When you are tempted, He will show you a way out so that you can endure.” God is the One who makes a way. He won’t give you more than you can handle, and He will show you the way out so you can endure. The ability to withstand temptation is all about God. Paul made sure we understood that. He showed the frailties and weaknesses of humanity in verse twelve. We bring nothing to the table by which we can go through difficulties other than our faith in God, our covenant relationship with Him. God brings everything to the table for us to get through these times. He brings His knowledge, power, wisdom, love, and faithfulness that gets us through hard times. God is faithful to His covenant with His children. He will show us how to get through situations in our lives. What we bring to the table in these situations is our faith in Him and our obedience to His direction. We have no power and wisdom to get us through every trial.

God’s covenant with His children and their covenant with Him affects their relationship, and it affects their relationships with the people around them, and their relationship with themselves. Paul made sure the Corinthians and later readers understood this. When we stand strong because of God and give Him the glory, it strengthens our resolve and grows us to be more like Christ. It affects the people around us who see our trials and watch how we walk through them. When you testify and live a life of testimony to God, others grow, too. Our relationship with that person grows. This is the overarching learning point for the Corinthian Christians. Their lives should be a living testimony to the people watching them. This is what Paul meant when he said in verses thirty-one and thirty-two, “So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Don’t give offense to Jews or Gentiles or the church of God.” Live a life of testimony giving God the glory for everything you do and all that He does in your life and it will affect other believers, non-believers, and your own life.

Paul ended this chapter with, “I don’t just do what is best for me; I do what is best for others so that many may be saved.” (vs. 33b) Satan wants to make us think we are unable to do things or that we can face things without God’s help. Satan lies.

Be faithful to God. Be true to your covenant with Him. He is always faithful to you. He will not allow a temptation to be more than you can stand and will always show you a way out so you can endure.

Whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.

If you are not yet a child of Yahweh God, you can be by believing in Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord. Admit you are a sinner. Believe in Jesus Christ. Confess your sins to Him. God loves you and wants to save you from your sins and death. He wants to have an eternal relationship with you.

Understand, therefore, that the LORD your God is indeed God. He is the faithful God who keeps His covenant for a thousand generations and lavishes His unfailing love on those who love Him and obey His commandments. (Deuteronomy 7:9 [NLT])

God, who has called you into fellowship with His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful. (1 Corinthians 1:9 [NLT])

Lord, so often I just push through a difficulty in my own strength and forget to ask You for Your wisdom and help. I think, “I’ve got this!” In that thinking, I have rebelled against You. Please forgive me for thinking better of myself than I am. Help me remember, You are the reason I live and am saved from sin and death. Not of my own strength, intellect, or reasoning have I survived, but only because of You. Help me to seek You and then to give You all the glory. Help me to remain totaled devoted to You. Use me to share about Your love and faithfulness to people around me. Amen.

Knowledge, a Noisy Gong

1 Corinthians 8

Vs. 6-7: “Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him. However not all men have this knowledge…”

Paul is confronting the Corinthian Christians about their disunity again. This time it seems the disunity arose because the Corinthians consider themselves more knowledgeable and wiser than they do other people. Paul has dealt with them about this issue before. The example Paul speaks to them about is the act of eating food offered to idols. Is it head knowledge that should lead when we interact with people or heart knowledge?

Knowledge, solely as knowledge for knowledge sake is worth nothing. Knowledge without the acknowledgement that all knowledge comes from God makes one boastful and proud, arrogant. This knowledge does nothing for others except possibly put others down, beneath one’s feet in the knowledge holders mind, actions, and attitude. Knowledge acknowledged as being from God carries with it the love by which God imparts/shares the knowledge. This is true knowledge, that which shares not only the head knowledge/information, but shares the love from which it was derived, for the purpose of sustaining and improving life and for showing God’s love and care of humanity. Knowledge without this love is, as Paul later says, “a noisy gong and a clanging symbol” (1 Corinthians 13:1).

This passage appears to be about food offered to idols, and for the moment in which Paul is speaking to the Corinthians, this was an issue. The underlying lesson though is the acquisition of knowledge, the holding of knowledge, and the implementing of knowledge upon our fellow human so that they know they are not as knowledgeable or so that they are caused to falter in what they believe. The attitude in which this is done is not love or care for our fellow humans. God’s knowledge, as we saw in chapters 1-3 of 1 Corinthians is wiser than that of humans. His strength is stronger that humans. His power is stronger than humans are. He exercises all of these in means of love toward us because He created us to be in a love relationship with Him. Since true knowledge comes from God, to withhold the love, which was also a part of true knowledge, when applying knowledge corrupts the knowledge and drops the value of it to the levels of humanity. It makes it not as pure and useful as God intentioned. The attitude of the human who uses knowledge without love affects/corrupts its use so that it becomes a prideful thing that reduces the value of the other human(s) to which it was aimed.

Paul uses the situation of a follower of Christ eating meat that was offered to idols. For Christians, we know there are no other gods; therefore, the meat is uncorrupted. However, for a person who is either not a Christian or is a new or weak Christian, eating meat they considered sacred puts a wedge or stumbling block between you and them, and you as the Christian, lose credibility so that they will listen hesitantly and with ambivalence anything you may say about the true God. Your knowledge, though the head knowledge is correct, has lost its heart value and has become only as great as the person revealing the knowledge. The love that the knowledge was originally imbued with was not shared because the person eating the sacred meat did not care to concern themselves with the god-believing person’s culture and ideas of faith.

As believers in Jesus Christ who have received His love, forgiveness, and salvation, we cannot allow ourselves to run over people with our newfound freedom from the constraints Satan put upon us while we walked with the world. We must recognize continually that Jesus came to us in love and we must meet the people of the world with love. Jesus imparted the knowledge of God’s plan for salvation for humankind by words and by the extreme action, giving up His life to die for us. We cannot ignore nor negate this when we live in the world. That would mean we are not living as Jesus lived here on earth. We must at all times live our freedom in and through the love that comes from the Jesus' sacrificial living and dying for our salvation. You see, if God had only “known” how to save us and had not acted upon it, He would have shown Himself to be without love. We know this is not true of God. One of the strongest characteristics we see in God is His love. It is through this love that so many people throughout history have been drawn to God. Because of His love, which is His character, He created us. Because of His love, He had mercy upon humanity many times over the millenniums. Because of His love, He provided a final way for all of us to come into a perfect, sinless relationship with Him. This Way was through the life, death, and resurrection of His only Son, Jesus Christ. God did not divorce love from plan/knowledge. His plan was made because of His love.

With this example, when we divorce love from knowledge, we are saying that our plan is better that God’s plan. We are saying that we know best. The result is that we alienate ourselves from other people with our arrogance. We alienate others from God with our flawed wisdom. What did Paul say? “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21 NASB). It is only when love is the reason that knowledge has power. It is only when love is the motivator that knowledge is true knowledge and wisdom. Love was the reason God created us. Love was the reason that God made another plan for humankind to be in a relationship with Him. Paul goes on to say in 1 Corinthians 1:27-30,

God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, "LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD. (NASB)

When we interact with others and when we impart our knowledge, we have a question to ask ourselves first; am I speaking to be heard and thought to be knowledgeable? If our motivation is to build ourselves up in the eyes of others, love of humankind is not our goal. We have put love of our ourselves higher than our love for God or others. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul tells us what true love is.

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous ; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly ; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth ; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails; but now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. (vs. 4-8a, 13 NASB)

If we truly as living as Christians, we should be living with a heart knowledge. It should be evident in the way we interact with people. Our heart and God’s heart should be one and be visible as we speak and act in this world. If love is not in our knowledge as we act and speak, we are sinning against and harming others. We are also hindering their belief in God by providing a “stumbling block” (chapter 8:9). When we sin against another human, we are sinning against Christ, too (vs. chapter 8:12). We each must come to the point where we consider if what we say or do is imparting the love of God along with knowledge. If we are not considering the other person’s being and place in this world, we are not interacting with them in love. We could cause them to stumble in their search for God or in their growth as a Christian. The old saying carries some truth; it is more important to see and hear a person in their situation, since we have two eyes and two ears, than to speak, since we have only one mouth. The question then is am I relating with others just to be seen as more knowledgeable or as one who loves them and wants to impart true knowledge and wisdom, which comes with love from God?