Sermon: “No Test Beyond Your Strength”

Text: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13

3^rd Sunday in Lent (C)

March 7, 2010

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading is from the apostle Paul’s first letter to the church he founded in the city of Corinth, which is in Greece.  Paul wrote his letter to encourage the Corinthian Christians, but also to correct what he perceived to be errors in the beliefs and practices of some of the church members.  The tone and structure of Paul’s letter suggests that some of the church members were emphasizing too much their new-found freedom in Christ Jesus.  Rather than understanding their freedom as the first step toward becoming servants of Christ and of each other, these church members lived as if everything was permitted to them. 

For example, they ate meat that had been sacrificed in pagan temples.  While Paul agreed with them that the idols were not gods and that, therefore, they were unable to affect the meat, nevertheless Paul taught that for new Christians—who had just been converted from paganism and idolatry—it was disturbing to see other Christians eating the meat that had been offered in pagan temples.  Thus, Paul criticized the more sophisticated Christians for being insensitive to their brothers and sisters.  Moreover, he accused them of being arrogant—believing that their freedom gave them a license to do whatever they pleased.

In our passage today Paul uses specific examples from the Old Testament story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt as an illustration of how easy it is, even for persons who have a special relationship with God, to become puffed up with self-importance and then to fall into sin.  Making heavy use of analogy and typology—a style of biblical interpretation that was common in Paul’s day (but that is not familiar to us!)—Paul re-told this Old Testament story as if the Israelites had been the church and as if Christ had been explicitly present in the Old Testament text.  Even our modern ears can grasp that Paul is warning the Corinthian Christians—especially those who thought they were the most upright—how easy it is to fall down.

Then Paul follows up his warning with a measure of hope.  We all are subject to temptation, he writes, but God will not test us beyond our strength.  How we should understand this teaching is the point of the sermon that follows.  But first, let’s read this part of Paul’s letter.

Sermon.  The other day I was talking to a good friend, who asked me whether I had read the book Come Be My Light, a spiritual biography of Mother Teresa of Calcutta that is based on her own memoirs.[1]  I had not read it, but I had heard about it.  The book was disturbing to my friend and to many others because in her memoirs Mother Teresa reveals a surprising fact about her life.  While her early ministry with the desperately poor people of Calcutta was marked by a warm spirituality and a supporting sense of Christ’s presence and light with her, yet her later years were characterized more by darkness and emptiness of spirit.  Mind you, this spiritual condition did not cause her to slow down one bit in the ministry to which she felt called.  But it must have been very challenging for someone who had become accustomed to a warm spirituality to continue the path of Christian discipleship after her spiritual life had grown cold.  We might even consider that spiritual state of emptiness and darkness a test of her faith.  If so, it was a test that continued to the very end, for the memoirs record no change even as she approached her last days. 

We don’t have to be Mother Teresa to feel that God’s presence is distant at best.  Many persons experience temptations and trials that seem far to outstrip their own inner reserves of strength.  Here is a person who has battled disease for twenty years and finally loses the fight.  Here is a person who, because of an economy in the doldrums, has lost his job and is now destitute.  Here is a family whose home was bombed or burned or bulldozed as a result of wartime conditions.  Here is a mother in Haiti whose home and family have been destroyed by the earthquake. 

As we consider such persons and many others whom we know—indeed, as we think about our own lives and the challenges we face—we must be careful how we interpret Paul’s assertion that we will “not be tested beyond our own strength.”  Perhaps you have seen the broadest statement of Paul’s assertion in cheery chain E-mails and on Christian websites.  The commonest formulation would go something like this: “God will not put on you more than you can bear.”  I suggest to you that this broad statement goes further than Paul intended in his encouragement to the Corinthian Christians.  As I will explain, this over-broad statement can lead to our blaming the victim.

To properly understand Paul’s point, we need to pay close attention to the language he used—what he actually wrote.  He wrote that God would not allow us to be tested beyond our strength.  The word that is here translated as “test” is the Greek word peirasmos, which can also be translated with the English word “tempt.”  Other modern translations of Paul’s letter do use the word “tempt”—God will not allow us to be tempted beyond our strength.  By the way, it’s the same word that was central to the story in Luke’s Gospel, which we considered several weeks ago, of Satan testing or tempting Jesus during forty days in the desert.  Whether we translate the Greek word as “test” or “tempt” the fact remains that Paul is not speaking of every negative thing that might happen to us in our lives.  Bad things that happen to us are not necessarily temptations or tests.  If there is a widespread famine, or if the economy falters, or if a drought threatens our crops, this may simply be a fact of human existence and not in any sense God’s judgment or testing.  Paul probably di not intend to comment in his letter on all the problems of human existence.  He had just pointed out some temptations the Corinthians were experiencing, and he wanted to encourage them: “Come on—these temptations are not extraordinary; with God’s help you can overcome them.”

When we encounter persons who are going through such hard times, it is actually theologically destructive for us to quote the overbroad formulation of Paul’s statement.  If we see a farmer whose crops have withered under a punishing sun and say, “God will not put on you more than you can bear,” then in a way we are blaming the victim.  What if the farmer doesn’t feel that he can bear it?  What if he really is ruined and the crop lenders will be taking his land next month.  When we carelessly quote Paul to him, it is as if we are accusing him of not using the strength that he has inside.  In effect, we’re suggesting that it’s his fault that he cannot bear it because God is not supposed to put more on him than he can bear.  In fact, sometimes we do have more on us than we can handle.  As one preacher has pointed out,[2] many biblical characters—Elijah and David, for example, and even Paul himself—felt pushed beyond their breaking point.  So the first important limitation to observe when we interpret this verse—a limitation that Paul put in the original letter—is that Paul was referring to times of testing or temptation. 

“OK, pastor, I take your point about limiting Paul’s statement to its context—the realm of temptation and testing.  Is Paul promising me that God has put within me the power and strength to prevail against every temptation and test?  If so, then I should be able to resist every temptation, right?  And now I will no longer commit any sins!”  Well, let me make this response:  Paul surely did not mean to say that we Christians can be free of sin.  Remember, this is the same Paul who wrote to the church in Rome, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. . . . Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”[3]  As has long been observed by Christians in our Reformed tradition,[4] we do not suddenly become perfect—or even theoretically capable of perfection—the day we accept Christ.  Rather, our earthly lives are a constant struggle to overcome our selfish and idolatrous impulses.  In this struggle we are aided by the Holy Spirit, and we are assured in our struggle that by the grace we have received through faith in Christ, we already have been justified, despite our many failings.  So Paul’s language should not be interpreted as a guaranty that we will have the inner strength to overcome every temptation.

Again, a close focus on Paul’s actual words will help us interpret the passage.  In the same sentence where Paul promises that God will not allow us to be tested beyond our strength, he adds an important qualifying clause after the word “but.”  The Greek word has the sense of contrasting the two halves of a compound sentence.  So Paul’s Greek might be clearer if we use the words “but rather.”  Thus, God does not allow us to be tested beyond our strength, but rather with the testing he also provides the way out so that [we] may be able to endure it.”  The emphasis is not on the first clause, which refers to our internal strength to resist temptation.  It is on the second clause, which refers to God and to God’s provision for our needs.  Thus, our strength is not the issue; for all depends upon God’s strength.  The force of this point is even stronger when we see how Paul introduces the whole promise.  He writes, “God is faithful.”  When we are tempted or tested, God is faithful.  God intends good things for us.  God loves us and cares for us.  As my teacher Marty Soards has written of this verse, “God is trustworthy, and even if the situation seems impossible, nothing is beyond God’s power and grace.”[5]

We must also refrain from predicting or assuming how God will provide the “way out,” for Paul explicitly acknowledges that—even with a way out—we will have to “endure” the testing and the temptation.  Thus, Paul does not promise the Corinthians that God will make their way easy, only that as they rely on God he will not let them fall.  And what of the exemplary Christians who have relied upon God, and (at least to our eyes) God has not delivered them from severe testing?  What about Mother Teresa?  Did God provide a “way out” for her?  In considering these very hard examples, I appreciate what one commentator has suggested—that the “way out” in such challenging situations may be the way of justification and salvation in Jesus Christ that cannot be fully experienced in this life, but through which we will experience release from temptation and testing in the life to come.[6]  Thus, the final victory over temptation is ours in Christ, even if we lose some of the battles.

  The heart of Paul’s assertion is that “God is faithful.”  At any given time, we may not see God’s hand in our lives, but the essence of our faith is to continue believing in God’s goodness, love, and protection, despite the hardships we experience.  That is what Mother Teresa did, and that is what we are called to do.