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1. Paul has been reminding the Corinthians that Israel had religious privileges which might have been blessings if they had used them rightly, but which, being abused, did them more harm than good. So with them. Hence the conclusion of the text.

2. The men whose fall the Bible has recorded for our warning, fell just when they seemed most strong. Moses was the meekest of men, and yet he sinned unadvisedly with his lips. Peter was brave, and yet for want of moral courage he denied his Lord. John was the apostle of love, but he desired to call down fire from heaven against his enemies. Elijah was not afraid to rebuke a king to his face, but he fell into such a fit of cowardly despondency that he asked God to take away his life. When a man commits some great sin, his friends often say, "Well, I never would have thought of him doing that. He is the last man in the world to have done it." And that is just why he did it, because he thought that he was quite safe, and as a consequence he took no precaution against falling.

3. Our subject, then, is the danger the best of us are in of falling into sin if we are not forearmed by being forewarned, and how much further a sin yielded to will carry us in the ways of wickedness than we thought at first that it would. In both these respects "let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." A man was being served with a writ for debt. Knowing that if he got beyond the boundary of his county he could not be obliged to take it, he ran from the bailiff, and escaped. On coming up to him the bailiff said, "You have given me a good run, and no mistake, but don't let us part enemies, let us shake hands." The man did so, and the bailiff pulled him over the fence and then arrested him. That is what sin does for us if we are not on our guard against it.

4. Consider the character of the first and last in a series of temptations. The first time the temptation occurs, there is a shudder and a feeling of impossibility. "I cannot do it," we say. The next time it is treated with greater civility. We begin now to reason with it, and ask, is it really so bad after all? At last the evil thought passes into the evil act, and the second transgression becomes easier by recollecting the pleasantness of the first. We now plunge daily down the precipice on the brink of which we once trembled. The power of habit "first draws, then drags, then hauls." That temptation which in the beginning was no stronger than a cobweb, was so strengthened by indulgence that it became a cable, and we were forced to "draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope." This is every day illustrated by the liar and the drunkard. But, indeed, all sin approaches in the same gradual way. George Eliot gives in "Romola" the picture of a man, good, generous, handsome, with all the appliances and means of doing good, who, "because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing so much as his own safety, came at last to commit some of the basest deeds such as make men infamous."

5. The holy man who exclaimed, as he saw a criminal led to execution, "There goes me but for the grace of God," was not exaggerating, but only speaking from observation and experience. All men who know themselves are conscious that a bias towards evil exists within them. When we see a man fall from the top of a five-storey house, we say the man is lost. We say that before he has fallen a foot; for the same principle that made him fall one foot will undoubtedly make him complete the descent by falling other eighty or ninety feet. The gravitation of sin in a human soul acts precisely in the same way.

6. In the Zulu and Afghanistan wars some of our forces suffered disaster, not because they were weak or cowardly, but because they felt so strong and brave that they thought they might be careless.

(E. J. Hardy, M.A.)

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KJV: Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.

WEB: Therefore let him who thinks he stands be careful that he doesn't fall.