Companionship in Temptation.
I. St. Peter evidently thought that the conviction of companionship in temptation was meant by God to be a source of strength. We are hourly and daily assailed by sore temptations. Let us then remember that our case is not an isolated one. Other persons, our fellow-Christians, are being tempted in like manner, not, indeed, all by precisely the same temptations for the tempter understands character and knows how to adapt and adjust his snares but still in the like manner, by the engine best fitted to break down each individual's attempts at defiance.
II. Regard a man as suffering in the same way that you suffer yourself as labouring under the same illness, disabled by the same accident, wounded in the same battle. How the heart opens to him! What an entirely different interest he inspires! He is no more a man merely, nor an acquaintance merely, but a brother. Suffering creates families. It is the great adopter. And does not the analogy hold in spiritual suffering? Some biographies which tell us of religious struggles that have been very terrible move us to a certain awe. We recognise the sufferer as greater than ourselves, because he has suffered more. And that which we do instinctively feel of the very greatest spiritual wrestlers, we ought to feel in due degree of all those among whom we live. What a sacredness will they thus acquire in our eyes! Our temptations are their temptations, and a tempted soul cannot be uninteresting. Christ died for it. Christ's death gives once for all a solemnity to all human lives.
III. The thought that others are being tempted like ourselves leads us (1) to render justice to them and (2) to be ourselves upon our guard. The recollection that we are not alone in temptation, but that others are yielding to it and causing unhappiness by yielding to it, may well warn us of the great power, the widely extended domain, of the common enemy.
H. M. Butler, Harrow Sermons,p. 320.
References: 1 Peter 5:8; 1 Peter 5:9. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vii., No. 419; F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. i., p. 299. 1 Peter 5:9. W. Arnot, Good Words,vol. iii., pp. 125, 127; A. P. Stanley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xviii., p. 292; J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity,Part I., p. 74. 1 Peter 5:10. Homiletic Magazine,vol. ix., p. 65; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vi., No. 262; vol. xxix., No. 1721; Ibid., Morning by Morning,p. 193; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty,vol. ii., p. 26. 1 Peter 5:14. W. Peacock, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxii., p. 153.