The Communion Wine I Volunteered to Lock in the Closet After Service
I was the one who raised my hand when the deacon asked if anybody could stay behind and put the elements away, and I did it without thinking twice, the way you offer to carry a box before you remember how heavy it actually is. Everybody else filed out toward the fellowship hall for coffee, and I found myself alone in the little supply room off the sanctuary with a half case of communion wine in my hands and a closet door that locks from the outside. I stood there longer than it takes to put six bottles on a shelf. Nobody would have known. Nobody would have smelled it on me by Tuesday. I have handled far more dangerous things than that in twenty-two years of staying sober, and still that small quiet room did something to me that an open liquor aisle has not managed to do in a long time.
I used to think temptation would always announce itself as something obviously wrong, a bar sign, an old phone number, a bad crowd. What caught me off guard in that closet is how ordinary and even sacred the object was, and how little that mattered to the part of me still wired to want it. Paul does not act surprised by this. "No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it" (1 Corinthians 10:13, NKJV). Common to man. Not unique to me, not proof that two decades of sobriety had quietly failed, just the ordinary weather every person walks through, even inside a church closet with the lights still on from the service.
What struck me afterward is how precisely James describes the mechanics of what almost happened in that room, because it was never really about the wine sitting on the shelf. "But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death" (James 1:14-15, NKJV). The bottle did not tempt me. My own old desire did, reaching for something familiar the moment it recognized an open door and an empty room, and James is honest enough to trace the whole birth of it back to that first private invitation rather than to the object itself.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten me safely out of a room like that. I can tell myself accurately that I have twenty-two years of evidence proving I do not need it, that my grandchildren are waiting for me at the coffee table thirty feet away, that one sip would undo more than it could ever give back. Every sentence is true, and I have known all of them cold sober in rooms just like that one before, and the truth of a sentence has never once been what actually walked me to the door. Temptation was never a facts problem waiting on a better argument. It is a presence problem, and no tally of good reasons has ever substituted for Someone actually being in the room with me.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that my own willpower keeps running out of by itself. Jesus told His own disciples the night before His arrest, watching them drift toward sleep instead of staying alert beside Him, exactly what the real safeguard was. "Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41, NKJV). I had not prayed before I walked into that closet. I had simply volunteered, confident in my own flesh, and only remembered to watch once I was already standing in the one room built to test me.
Peter does not describe the enemy in that room as a vague bad habit either. "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world" (1 Peter 5:8-9, NKJV). Resist, steadfast, not by outrunning him on cleverness but by standing in a faith that is not mine alone to hold up. And David gives me the actual weapon I was missing that morning, the one I had left on the shelf instead of in my heart. "Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You" (Psalm 119:11, NKJV). I know that verse. I have simply not been hiding it anywhere I could reach it fast enough.
What finally moved my feet was not a better argument but a quieter one, a memory of a High Priest who has stood exactly where I was standing. "For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15, NKJV). He was not watching me fail a test from a safe distance. He had already stood in His own wilderness, hungry and alone, and He met me in that closet the same way, not with a verdict but with understanding that goes further than my own reasoning ever could. I set the case on the shelf, locked the door from the inside like I was supposed to, and walked out to the coffee that was already poured.
If you are standing in your own version of that closet tonight, closer to something than you want to admit out loud, know this. God is alive, and He already knows exactly which door you are facing and exactly how old the wanting is. He has a plan for you that includes the way of escape before you ever needed one, and a peace that does not wait for your willpower to prove itself first. He will never leave you alone in that room, not tonight and not the next time the door happens to lock from the inside.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): 1 Corinthians 10:13; James 1:14-15; Matthew 26:41; 1 Peter 5:8-9; Psalm 119:11; Hebrews 4:15.
I used to think temptation would always announce itself as something obviously wrong, a bar sign, an old phone number, a bad crowd. What caught me off guard in that closet is how ordinary and even sacred the object was, and how little that mattered to the part of me still wired to want it. Paul does not act surprised by this. "No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it" (1 Corinthians 10:13, NKJV). Common to man. Not unique to me, not proof that two decades of sobriety had quietly failed, just the ordinary weather every person walks through, even inside a church closet with the lights still on from the service.
What struck me afterward is how precisely James describes the mechanics of what almost happened in that room, because it was never really about the wine sitting on the shelf. "But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death" (James 1:14-15, NKJV). The bottle did not tempt me. My own old desire did, reaching for something familiar the moment it recognized an open door and an empty room, and James is honest enough to trace the whole birth of it back to that first private invitation rather than to the object itself.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten me safely out of a room like that. I can tell myself accurately that I have twenty-two years of evidence proving I do not need it, that my grandchildren are waiting for me at the coffee table thirty feet away, that one sip would undo more than it could ever give back. Every sentence is true, and I have known all of them cold sober in rooms just like that one before, and the truth of a sentence has never once been what actually walked me to the door. Temptation was never a facts problem waiting on a better argument. It is a presence problem, and no tally of good reasons has ever substituted for Someone actually being in the room with me.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that my own willpower keeps running out of by itself. Jesus told His own disciples the night before His arrest, watching them drift toward sleep instead of staying alert beside Him, exactly what the real safeguard was. "Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41, NKJV). I had not prayed before I walked into that closet. I had simply volunteered, confident in my own flesh, and only remembered to watch once I was already standing in the one room built to test me.
Peter does not describe the enemy in that room as a vague bad habit either. "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world" (1 Peter 5:8-9, NKJV). Resist, steadfast, not by outrunning him on cleverness but by standing in a faith that is not mine alone to hold up. And David gives me the actual weapon I was missing that morning, the one I had left on the shelf instead of in my heart. "Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You" (Psalm 119:11, NKJV). I know that verse. I have simply not been hiding it anywhere I could reach it fast enough.
What finally moved my feet was not a better argument but a quieter one, a memory of a High Priest who has stood exactly where I was standing. "For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15, NKJV). He was not watching me fail a test from a safe distance. He had already stood in His own wilderness, hungry and alone, and He met me in that closet the same way, not with a verdict but with understanding that goes further than my own reasoning ever could. I set the case on the shelf, locked the door from the inside like I was supposed to, and walked out to the coffee that was already poured.
If you are standing in your own version of that closet tonight, closer to something than you want to admit out loud, know this. God is alive, and He already knows exactly which door you are facing and exactly how old the wanting is. He has a plan for you that includes the way of escape before you ever needed one, and a peace that does not wait for your willpower to prove itself first. He will never leave you alone in that room, not tonight and not the next time the door happens to lock from the inside.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): 1 Corinthians 10:13; James 1:14-15; Matthew 26:41; 1 Peter 5:8-9; Psalm 119:11; Hebrews 4:15.
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