Be Careful of Slippery Slope
But remember that the temptations that come into your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will keep the temptation from becoming so strong that you can’t stand up against it. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you will not give in to it. -- 1 Corinthians 10:13
We want to believe that once we’ve traveled a bad road, learned our lesson, and straightened out our lives we will never, ever travel that path again. And that thought is the beginning of a dangerous journey.
It’s one of the many reasons I applaud programs such as Celebrate Recovery. People gather together to celebrate their success and support each other as they continue their journey. We all need that support.
Not just for alcohol or drug recovery. We want to think that other issues are somehow different. They aren’t. We can easily slip back into the people we once were. We can become angry. We can lie. We can mess up our finances. We can make bad relationship choices. Again. And again. And again.
Satan knows exactly which buttons to push. He knows that when we start feeling sure of ourselves, when we begin to think that we’re in control, that’s when we are most vulnerable. Because the stronger we feel, the less we rely on God. And that can never be anything but disaster.
If you think you are standing strong, be careful, for you, too, may fall into the same sin. -- 1 Corinthians 10:12
Paul tells us that while God will never allow Satan to tempt us beyond what we can resist -- with God’s help. We can’t do it alone. No matter how much we want to believe that we can, we can’t.
Nor are we any better, any stronger, than those around us. We want to believe that we would never make the choices that someone else might make. Maybe not. Because my buttons are different from yours and yours are different from someone else’s. But buttons are buttons. And we can all fall when we think that we’re stronger than we really are.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be the person I used to be. I’m thankful for the experiences. I’m grateful that God used those experiences to draw me closer to Him. But I don’t want to go back. Ever.
So I hang on to God with all I have. I know how fragile I really am. But I also know how strong God is. I hang on to Him with everything I’ve got, knowing that He’ll never, ever let me go.
