“No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.” - 1 Cor. 10:13.
How real are the promises of God in our lives? When God promises that we will not be tempted beyond what we can bear and that He will provide a way out, does He really mean it? Our friend C shares below a brave testimony of how God completely fulfilled this promise to her in her life:
I wasn’t initially going to write about sex. All sorts of thoughts ran through my head - what if this gets posted under my full name? What if my parents or my guy friends see it? Shouldn’t I, as the child of missionary parents, write about something “unique”, something not experienced by almost everyone? And maybe I will - next time (I certainly have more than enough issues to make more than just one post). But for now, this is what God has laid on my heart to write about.
I grew up the child of missionary parents and grandparents. I spent my childhood either in a foreign country as a missionary kid or traveling around the US visiting Christian friends and churches. You could probably say I’m about as Christian as they come. I didn’t date in high school, and I came into college pretty confident in my ability to resist romantic and/or sexual temptation.
My first two years did nothing to prove me wrong - secure in the certainty of my faith, I turned down the non-Christian guys who came my way - even one or two who were close friends whom I was drawn to- and as my crushes on Christian guys came to nothing, I decided that God probably didn’t want me to date in college (I received an actual conviction of this first year, but unfortunately it didn’t stop me from having crushes). By the time third year came around, I thought I had it down. I wasn’t going to date in college, in all likelihood, and even if I did it would be a Christian guy. I wasn’t worried too much about non-Christian guys because clearly by this point I was strong enough and experienced enough to know how to handle them - hadn’t I done it several times already? I was exactly like the young man “devoid of understanding” of Proverbs 7 - “passing along the street near [the harlot’s] corner, taking the path to her house”. Ignorant, confident.
And then someone entered my life - let’s call him Tim. We met in an unspectacular manner - I joined a new on-campus organization and he was one of the other members. I wasn’t on the look-out for romance, and for some reason I also labored under the delusion that since I didn’t expect and wasn’t looking for it, it wouldn’t appear. At the first party the group held, I noticed that Tim seemed nice and reasonably interesting,but that was it. That night, however, when I went to leave, I looked up as I was putting on my jacket and noticed that Tim was watching me. A little frisson of excitement ran over me - the guys who’d liked me in the past were, for the most part, good friends and didn’t treat me in a special way, and so get looked at by a stranger in a way that says “you are beautiful and sexy” was not something I was accustomed to, nor something I expected…[click “Read More” below to continue]
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