Daily Manna · Day 23 · January 23
The Way Out
“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”
You know your own pattern well enough to predict it. It comes at the same hour, with the same argument, and it ends with the same click. Being able to predict it brings its own kind of shame.
In the summer of 386, in a garden in Milan, a thirty-one-year-old professor of public speaking threw himself down under a fig tree and wept. For years he had been asking God to make him pure, and by his own account he kept adding, "but not yet." Augustine had a mistress and a career. He had a fully worked-out theory of why he could not change, and a habit that had outlasted every promise he had made to himself. Then he heard a child's voice from a nearby house chanting, "Take it up and read." He went back to where he had left Paul's letters, opened them at Romans 13, and read the line telling him to "make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." Later he wrote that he did not need to read any further.
Set that beside what Paul says in today's verse: "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man." Your pattern is not unusual, and the shame of it being predictable is simply the shame of being human. Then Paul adds, "but God is faithful," and God Himself makes the way of escape. He builds it, and you still have to walk through it. Notice the sentences on either side, because this promise is wrapped in warnings. Just before it Paul writes, "let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." Just after it he writes, "flee from idolatry." Fleeing is something you do with your feet. Augustine's way out came through a child's voice and a book that was already within his reach.
So the fact that your pattern is predictable turns out to be good news. If you can predict a thing, you can meet it ahead of time. You know the hour it comes. Ask God for the way out, and put it in place before you arrive there. He is faithful, and He has promised to make one.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 23 is Too Many (Judges 7:2).