“Flee fornication … “ ~ 1 Corinthians 6:18
“… Flee from idolatry” ~ 1 Corinthians 10:14
“Flee also youthful lusts …” ~ 2 Timothy 2:22
“… having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” ~ 2 Peter 1:4
Two verbs stop us here in these terse “purple stone” warnings from God: flee and escape. Temptation can come like a sudden wind-driven fire. We are not looking for it. In spite of the warnings of Jesus. We are preoccupied with Christian service or our families or our work. “Watch and pray.” But we do not. We’ve been busy. And the temptation-bolt strikes and we are set aflame with a quick new desire to take or to become or to possess!
We have not “escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” We have walked right into it and we are more surprised than anyone else. We hadn’t even been thinking about it.
That’s the whole trouble. Had we been watchful, we would have carefully obeyed the other verb so prominent in our “purple stone” fragments above. We would have fled this thing. “Flee from… flee from… flee.”
But we were busy or lonely or tired. We were unwatchful and “our adversary, the devil” knew it and sruck when his time was right. We mistook him for someone else and followed him.
This thing just couldn’t have happened to us, but it has! And our hearts are broken at what we’ve done to Christ. This is a peculiar kind of suffering known only to those who can know Christ personally. This kind of suffering we can avoid only by fleeing temptation in the strength of God. You may want to stay and nurture it just a moment or two, but turn to Christ deliberately and say:
“I will GO in the strength of the Lord God.”
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