Sermon - The temptation of Jesus
The Temptation of Jesus Matthew 4:1-11
A minister once became very annoyed with his wife for always coming back with a new dress each time she went out shopping. He told her she must be more concerned about the finances and resist any more purchases. She said it was very difficult as the Devil was always tempting her. Her husband replied �You must say to the Devil next time�, �Get thee behind me Satan��. The next week she came back from shopping with yet another new dress. Her husband was furious! �Didn�t you tell the Devil to get behind you as I said?� His wife replied, � I did, but when he went behind me he whispered in my ear, �It looks just as good from the back as it did from the front�.�
A three-year-old entered the kitchen when his mother was busy elsewhere in the house. He pulled a kitchen chair over to the counter and climbed up on it. Then he took the lid off the biscuit jar and had just got the biscuit to his mouth when his mother entered the room and demanded to know what he was doing. The three-year-old looked at her with big, innocent eyes and said, "I just climbed up here to smell the biscuits, and my tooth got caught on one of them."
We laugh at these stories and the child's innocence in the second one, but temptations in little things only lead in later life to temptations in big things. The pattern of lies and deceptions we tell others and ourselves only becomes more elaborate in adulthood. I remember a period of time when our daughter was young when she suddenly began to tell lies; it took a while to bring her out of that period.
There are several sermons one could preach from this part of the life of Jesus, but we will look at what we can in the short time we have. The purpose of the scriptures is to show us the reality of things in the world and teach us how to get through them. We need to keep this in mind as we look at these temptations Jesus experienced.
Rest assured, I come at this teaching having probably fallen to temptation as much, if not more than any of you this week. It has not been a good week in that respect for me so I need to take on board my own sermon!
It is interesting to read that the Spirit of God led the Son of God into the desert to face Satan's temptations. It is also noteworthy that these temptations took place immediately after Jesus' baptism and before He began His public ministry. One great saint of God once commented that he found that temptation and testing seem to come just before any great blessing and soon after. The Devil wants to spoil the blessing and God allows it, as he wants to keep us on our toes!
Why was it so important for Jesus to face these temptations from Satan? What role did the forty days of fasting have in the temptations? What was the issue that had to be settled in the temptations? And how do His temptations affect us today?
Let's examine these issues one by one. Matthew 4:1 says, "Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil." His ministry begins with testing. When God created man and placed him in the Garden of Eden, he tested him. He had made us with free will and not as robots, and he wanted to see if we would freely choose to follow him. The first Adam failed and we see the consequences in our lives and this world today. Jesus, whom the bible calls the second Adam, does not fail his test and in so doing is able to bring fallen mankind back to God to freely choose again to follow him and his ways.
The Spirit of God led the Son of God into the desert. There was nothing accidental about the encounter. It was an issue that had to be settled and the sooner it was settled the better. It is the same for us: the sooner we realise that like Jesus, testing will come and is part of God�s plan for us, the more it will help us face it, even welcome it! God allows temptation. Think of Job in the Old Testament. God allowed it, and who has been tested as he was tested?
After his baptism Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to face his adversary. The confrontation was over the issue of obedience. Would the Son of God try to do God's work in a way that pleased himself or would He do God's work God's way? This was no small issue that had to be decided. Sin is rebellion against doing the will of God. And sin always separates the sinner from God. If the Son of God sought a shortcut to being the Messiah, the Saviour of the world, it would be rebellion against the Heavenly Father and He would take his place alongside Adam and Eve as sinners. So, the first issue that had to be settled as He began His ministry was whether He would be obedient to the Heavenly Father's will or whether he would rebel against that will. God allows testing and temptation to check out our obedience. The bible tells us that it was through one man�s disobedience that sin and death came to all of us, but through one man�s obedience there came grace and eternal life as a free gift! (Romans 5)
The bible says that, "After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry." Two things can be seen from this verse. Firstly, the desert was a place away from people. The Son of God was alone in his temptations; he had no help, no support, and no encouragement from family or friends. Satan had him on his own. The second thing we are to understand is that the terrible hunger of the forty-day fast left the Son of God at his weakest point; he was very vulnerable. You do not need me to remind you that Satan will attack you at your most vunerable moment. Every follower of Christ will face a time of testing of his or her faith. The testing will usually come at the time of our greatest vulnerability.
People have become Christians and soon after lost his jobs. They have left the church and have never come back because they felt God had let them down. Satan caught them when they were vulnerable and put them to the test. People have had their feelings hurt through some things that have happened at church. They dropped out of church and harboured bitter feelings toward the congregation. Satan catches them at a vulnerable moment in their lives and puts them to the test. Couples have gone through divorce. It was a bitter time for them. They had perhaps been active in the church, but when the divorce was over, each sought comfort and healing away from God. Satan found them at a vulnerable moment in their lives and tested their faith and it failed them. If you think that Satan is going to be nice to you, you are mistaken. He knows no mercy. He will catch you when you are alone and vulnerable and will test you severely. We are in a battle as God�s people and the battle is hard. We must keep close to Jesus and keep our hearts righteous toward God. You may remember in our studies on maturity in Christ that we looked at our weapons of spiritual warfare and in particular the �breastplate of righteousness. It's useless holding up our shields of faith to ward off the darts of temptations from the Devil if your hearts is unrighteous due to sin. The darts will get through!
Jesus� being tempted at his most vulnerable moment was deliberate. Hungry and alone, the Son of God faced his greatest trial. If he withstood this test, he would be able to withstand all tests yet to come. It had to be this way and God would not protect his Son from these trials. It was the way it had to be!
Jesus faced three temptations. The first temptation was to turn stones into bread. A Messiah who feeds people and who heals their diseases can be a popular Messiah. God had sustained Jesus through forty days without food, he could do it for another forty days, and Jesus knew that.
It was a test of his trust as well as teaching us that we cannot live, that is have the God life that was really meant for all of us, by eating only physical food, we need the spiritual food of God, his Word! We firstly need Jesus, who is the Word of God, in our lives as our Saviour, and then we need to read the bible, which is spiritual food for our spirits. Having a really good meal spiritually means being strong for our battles and testing times in life!
The second temptation was to jump from the pinnacle of the temple in
The third temptation was to worship Satan. Satan promised that if Jesus would worship him, he, Satan, would give Jesus the loyalty of the whole world without Jesus having to struggle for that loyalty. Each of these temptations offered Jesus a way to be the Messiah and gain the acceptance and loyalty of the world without having to suffer! God's way for him to be the Messiah was for Him to be the �Suffering Servant� that the prophet Isaiah had predicted (chapter 53).
We should consider again his suffering as we approach Easter. At the end of his ministry, Jesus retreated to the
The temptation to find an easier way to be the Saviour of the world was still there, but by now there was no question of the obedience of Jesus, "'� not as I will, but as you will'" he prayed.
The temptations of Jesus were recorded for the benefit of all of us who are his disciples. We study the temptations because they give us insight into Jesus as the Son of God, God in flesh and blood, and because they reveal to us the path we must follow.
We have this promise that the temptations we experience are the same temptations everyone else experiences; that God will never allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to withstand the temptations; that God will always provide us a way to escape the temptations, if we truly want to escape them. �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.� (I Corinthians 10:13).
We should be comforted in our testing times by the fact Jesus went through the same. The source of the testing is always Satan. The reason this information is important to us is so that we will recognize the true source of our temptation when we experience it. If we know that Satan is behind it, we will be less inclined to fall for the temptation. I remember when I was seriously ill in hospital many years ago and recovery was uncertain. I was fearful and waking in the night, my night cloths soaking with sweat. I was also seeing dark figures closing in all around me. The night nurse was a Christian, but I did not know it. As you may know, medical staff are not aloud to witness whilst on duty, but knowing I was a Christian, she whispered in my ear one night, �Its just the Devil having a go at you, you know.� Whether it was the Devil or not, I do not know, but it helped me immensely to see things in a different light and this comforted me, I rebuked the Devil and began to recover.
The purpose of our testing is to prove the genuineness of our faith. The issue is whether or not we have really surrendered our will, to do the will of God. Are we going to live like the world or are we going to live the way Christ taught us to live in the scriptures?
The Bible says, �Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade--kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith--of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire--may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.� God, like any good father, has to discipline us from time to time to keep us on track!
The victory in the testing is to make a radical commitment to do God's will. Half-hearted Christians live sometimes like a Christian and sometimes like the world. Sold-out Christians renounce living for the world and commit themselves to living for Christ. We may be under severe attack just now; we may be saying to God, �Why me?� If it�s because of sin, go to the cross and find forgiveness. If your conscience is clear, don�t despair. Ask God this, �What do you want me to learn, Lord?
�When the going gets tough, the tough get going�, that�s an old saying that needs to be true of every believer! It�s hard, I know; that�s why our Christian family is so important to have and share with. That is why we need to focus on Jesus. Corrie Ten Boom, who suffered greatly under the Nazi regime and in the death camps of the Second World War, reminds us that there is power in correct focus, power to raise our spirits and aid us to press on.
Corrie writes, �If you look at the world, you�ll be distressed. If you look within, you�ll be depressed. But if you look at Christ, you�ll be at rest!� That�s the way for the tough to get going, by looking at Jesus! The easy way for life is to go with the flow. That path is wide and many travel on it. The path to life is narrow and at times very hard, but the rewards are beyond our imagination, stored up for us as treasure in heaven where no moth can eat it or rust ruin it! So God tells me in his word and I believe him!
Through temptation and suffering Jesus recovered
�I, who erewhile the happy garden sung
By one man�s disobedience lost, now sing
Recover�d
By one man�s firm obedience fully tried
Through all temptation and the tempter foil�d
In all his wiles, defeated and repuls�d
For
Through temptation and the suffering of the wilderness, Jesus won
Let me close by reminding you that our Jesus meets us in our hour of temptation, in our moment of trial and testing and difficulty, as the one who has defeated evil and overcome temptation. Because of that he is able, if we let him and have faith in him, to help us overcome our temptations through the way he overcame his temptations.
As we come to the communion table this morning, let us come with thankful hearts remembering the words of Hebrews 4:15, �Our High Priest is not one who cannot feel sympathy for our weaknesses. On the contrary, we have a High Priest who was tempted in every way as we are, but did not sin. Let us have confidence, then, and approach God�s throne, where there is grace. There we will receive mercy and find grace to help us just when we need it.�
Make a radical commitment to live for Christ today. Determine that with God's help, you will be sold-out for Christ no matter what it costs or how hard the road of testing.
6/3/05
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