Prep for Ministry – Jesus’ Temptation

What does it look like to be equipped to face temptation?

So I’m on Facebook recently using my time very wisely, and I’m scrolling past all of the really important things that people post on there. When what do my eyes see off to the side bar, but an advertisement for lingerie. Now, unsurprisingly, I don’t wear much lingerie. I don’t shop for it. I don’t research it. But somehow the algorithm down at Facebook read me as a 44-year-old dude and said, You know what this guy is going to want to see? He’s going to want to see some lingerie. And so, I did what I do in that situation. I clicked the little tab that says, “hide this ad” in the hopes of teaching my robot overlords that I have no interest in this product. And then I go back to scrolling through everybody’s selfies and political nonsense because it’s really important. And a few seconds later, Facebook said to itself, this guy closed an ad. Hold on a second. We can’t have this. We need to replace this. Let’s see if we can come up with something that he’s surely going to want. And so, seconds later, that space was replaced by an ad for women’s swimsuits. Now I’m thinking, did I do this somehow? Is this me? Because I know these ads are generated at least partially by my viewing habits. I bought deodorant from Amazon a year ago, and the Internet will not let me forget it. It consistently thinks I need more of this. And so, I’m thinking, did I do this? I hid that ad. Seconds later; pantyhose was right there in that spot. And at this point, I was thinking I was being punked. Because, you know all of these ads are wildly inappropriate. Right? They’re inappropriate. Every one of these is selling their product with sex. Every one of these is designed to stir lust in my heart that will get me to click. And finally, after closing enough tabs, they replaced it with an ad for hot tubs. And there was nobody in the hot tub. And so, I decided to let Facebook think that I was interested in hot tubs. I’m not interested in hot tubs. I tell you this story because you know exactly what I know. You know that temptation is everywhere. It’s absolutely everywhere.

What ad agencies and cable news channels and sports teams and websites and radio shows and every other form of media have figured out is that sin sells. You can sell things with sin. And I’m not just talking about sexual temptation. That’s a big part of it, but every temptation known to the sinful human heart has been marshaled by our world to ensnare us. You know that temptation that you have to be angry with people and to call people names and feel superior and right about everything that you could possibly think? Cable news figured out how to wire into that. They figured out how to get into your heart on that. You know that temptation to want the bigger, the better, the brand-new stuff that feeds your greed and your pride, and it gives you a little shot of happiness? Everyone who sells stuff has tapped into that desire for you to have something. It’s tapped into and is using discontent. But it’s not just media. Media is a very easy punching bag. I could stand here and give you examples of media all day. It’s not just that. Temptations to give into the passions of our heart actually come from every direction. Tension and disagreement in marriages causes spouses to treat each other with either silence, or with anger, depending on your personality. Some parents control their adult children, and they meddle in their lives because of the temptation to maintain power over them, that comes from a misplaced understanding of love and protection. Some people hide their sin from their families because the temptation is to maintain a false facade of respectability, and it’s greater than the pain that would come from confession and repentance. I could go on with all sorts of examples. It’s not just media. It’s every single direction. It’s all coming at us from different places. I used an example earlier where I had succeeded in overcoming temptation, but I could give you examples and stories even just from this week where I’ve failed, and you probably could too. Two things should be abundantly clear to all of us by now as we think about the world, and we think about temptations in the world. The first is that the world is filled with them. They’re everywhere. The temptations are everywhere to dishonor the Lord. Temptation calls out from every corner. And the second is that we have succumbed to those temptations. Not every time, we don’t always succumb, but consistently we do.

Starting today in the final passage in Luke, before Jesus begins his public ministry, we’ll see Jesus endure temptations in the world. Last week we watched as Jesus was endorsed by the Father as his beloved son, in whom he’s well pleased. And when he does this, he receives the Holy Spirit. And we face the question of whether Jesus would be like us, or whether he would be different. If he would be like the Kings, David and Ahaz before him, or Adam, the first son of God, fallen, failed, in need of repentance, in need of God’s forgiveness. Or would he be different? I want us to discover the answer in this final step of Jesus’ ministry preparation. And in answering this question, in seeing Jesus wrestle with temptations to sin, we’ll discover whether Jesus can be trusted as the Son of God that you and I have failed to be. And we’re going to learn something about the nature of temptation itself and how to overcome it in the way that Jesus overcame him. So please open your Bibles to Luke Chapter 4. We’ll be in Luke 4 today. I will have it on the screen as well. The first half of Luke 4 is one of those passages where I feel like we need to slow down and see it. So, I broke this passage, Jesus’ temptation into two parts. I really don’t want us to race past all of what God has for us in this very important passage. And so, we’re going to start with looking at what temptation is, and what it takes to overcome temptation. What does it look like to be equipped properly to face temptation? And then we’re going to watch as Jesus faces one of the temptations today. And we’ll look at the other two next week. Let’s begin by looking at what temptation is and the overcoming of it. “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil.” Now, I need to start this morning with a distinction. Not a single one of us here who loves Jesus faced a single day this past week where we were not tempted to act in disobedience against God. You felt it this week, right? You felt that pull away from God, and just like me, you failed this week in some ways. You probably had some victories over temptation. I hope you did. You probably spent some time praying. You saw God work in your heart, and that caused you to walk in righteousness and to do the right thing. But there were also plenty of moments when you gave in to your impulses and your habits and you sinned against the Lord. When I say the word temptation, your mind probably goes to those times this week when you failed. When you hear that word temptation, you go specifically to the places where you failed. And that’s a normal way for a Christian to think. We have a tendency to dwell on the places where we’ve sinned when we think of temptation. But what that does, though, is it tends to cause us to conflate two things that are really distinct from each other.

Temptation is not the same thing as sin, okay? Temptation and sin are distinct things. Sin is rebellion against God. Temptation is the opportunity to sin. It’s the invitation to sin that tries to take advantage of our human impulses, what Scripture calls the weakness of our flesh. Temptation tries to take hold of that weakness. But to be tempted to sin is not the same thing as sin itself. And this is such an important distinction because one of the most wonderful things about new life in Jesus is that when you have Jesus, you are set free from the bondage of sin, from the requirement of sin. Temptation will always be there because of the world we live in. As long as we live in this world, there will be opportunities and invitations to turn away from the Lord. But if you meditate on this passage, this verse and a half we just read, if you just meditate on this, you will understand what is happening to you when the temptations come this week. You’ll get a sense for what is happening to you in your walk with Christ this week, if you really understand what we just read here.  Jesus goes to the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. This is the battleground, the wilderness. It will help if you remember the encounter that Adam and Eve had in the garden with Satan. Remember that? When Adam and Eve were in the garden, Eve was tempted. We just read it here just a minute ago. Luke just got done telling us in the genealogy that Jesus is the son of Adam. So, he wants us thinking about Adam. He actually wants us to be picturing what took place in that first sin. Adam was in the garden, protected from the wilderness. Adam could eat from any tree in the garden except for one. Right? Jesus, by contrast, is in the wilderness. He’s not in the garden, protected from the wilderness. He’s in the wilderness, and he has nothing to eat. Nothing there, which we’ll see in a minute. Adam lived in a world perfected by God. Jesus lives in a world broken by sin. So, in effect, Adam’s failure threw the world into the wilderness. They were kicked out of the garden, and now they’re in the wilderness. And so, the whole world, in a sense, is this wilderness.

The implied question is here, can Jesus do what Adam couldn’t do but under the opposite conditions? Will Jesus be able to bring us back into the garden? And here’s why this is important. You and I face temptation to sin under the same conditions that Jesus faces here. We face the same conditions. We live in a sinful wilderness of sorts. Our environment, particularly the relationships that we have and the culture that’s developed by sinful people, it’s just filled with temptations to sin. As I mentioned earlier, it’s all over the place. If you reflect on Scripture, and you see the culture around us through its lens, you know that this is a place where Satan has, to a degree, some allowance to prowl and influence and tempt. That’s what this wilderness with the devil represents. It’s the same broken creation, heavily influenced by demonic presence and evil that we experience. But there’s something important to see here before we look at the temptations themselves. Because the weapon that Jesus had at his disposal to conquer this environment is the same weapon that you and I have if we have Christ, if you are in Christ. Do you see how it says Jesus ended up in this place? Do you see how he got here? It says the Holy Spirit put him there. The Holy Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness. The same Holy Spirit that came upon the son in his baptism is the one who takes him into the wilderness to face temptation. See, it’s mentioned twice there. You see that? He’s mentioned twice. He’s full of the Spirit, and then he’s led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Luke does not want us to miss this point. The Holy Spirit is totally in control at this moment. You say, But, Kyle, I thought if we had the Holy Spirit, we won’t face temptation. Are you saying that not only will we face temptation, but that God may even lead us into places where temptation will be? That temptation will get to us in those places? That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s what it did for Jesus. See church, God has you in places like your secular work environment and your bickering family and your school full of bullies and your contentious friend situation and every other place that you face adversity and temptation, he has you there on purpose. He’s brought you there. God himself is not tempting you, and you should certainly avoid going to situations where you will be tempted to sin. But the fact that temptation comes where you are sent to represent Jesus carrying out his mission and living for the glory of God is not an accident. He’s brought you there. And the key to overcoming the temptations when they come is then to walk in step with the Spirit.

Now there are things that Christians can do. There’s things that Christians can do and should absolutely do, and have in their lives, as methods for combating temptation. You should have those things. You should have a good church community. You absolutely should have a church community of brothers and sisters around you to build you up, to hold you accountable, to pray for you, to walk through life with you, to help you face those temptations. And you have one. Here you are. Good, check, you’ve already got that one. All right? You should have an active devotional life. You should be praying and reading God’s word and investing and infusing your mind and your heart with God’s word and praying actively that the Lord would guide you. You should have good habits that’ll help you avoid places where you are prone to fail. You should put up guardrails in your life in the places where you know that you are more tempted to sin. So you should have things like internet filters and watch your free time closely and guard your family time well. There should be guardrails in your life. But hear me now church, that’s just tools. That’s just methods. That’s just stuff that you can have. These are not in themselves the power to overcome temptation. It’s the Holy Spirit who gives strength to overcome temptation. He uses these tools for sure, but just as Jesus himself used discipline to grow in his spiritual life, we saw that when he was in the temple, but without the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence that comes only by God’s grace, we would not stand up to temptation. We would fail. And this is what we see at work in Jesus. The Holy Spirit is guiding and upholding Jesus as he goes through this temptation.

So, let’s look at the first temptation. “And he ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, ‘If you’re the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.’ And Jesus answered him. ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone.'” This first temptation is so slippery and so, so subtle. The guy goes 40 days without food. He can’t even make a snack. Are you kidding me? Why can’t? Why can’t? He’s hungry. How is it sin to feed yourself when you’re hungry? Answer: it’s not. It’s not sin to feed yourself. I got up actually in the middle of writing this sermon and went and got myself lunch, and I’m like, I felt kind of bad about it, actually. I’m like, Lord, is this hunger from you or is this the devil? You know? This first temptation is hard to see. You can’t see it very well because it just like, wow, why not? Why not go ahead and have some bread? Because when you’re hungry, eating is a natural thing to do. And we all know food is a gift from God. Some of us thank the Lord before every single meal. How come Jesus just can’t make some bread, thank the Father for it, and be satisfied? What’s so sinfully tempting about that? Well, there’s more going on here. There’s more that’s happening here. And the key to understanding this sin and this temptation, what’s happening here, is the quote from Deuteronomy that Jesus uses to combat the devil. Let me read it for you here. This is the full passage. This is from Deuteronomy 8. “The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what is in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” See God had Israel wander in the wilderness for forty years to humble them and to test them to see if the humility he was trying to teach them had taken hold. You might remember that the reason why they had to wander forty more years is because they doubted that God would give them the strength to conquer the promised land. The people were kind of shaking and scared, and they didn’t want to go in. And so, he said, Go in there, I’ll be with you. And they balked at that, and they didn’t enter into the promised land. And so, God made that entire generation pass away. Okay, you’re not going to go in? We’re going to wait forty years, and then your sons and daughters are going to be the ones that will go in. An entire generation passed away. And the whole time that they were out in the wilderness, wandering around in circles, waiting for the moment that they could go in, that whole time was a proving ground to form and to shape the hearts of these people into the kind of God-dependent people that they needed to be.

This forty days for Jesus in the wilderness parallels the forty years that Israel spent in the wilderness. It’s designed to be a time when Jesus would demonstrate what was in his heart by fully relying on the Father to provide for him. You see, there’s no food in the wilderness. There’s no food in the desert. The Father has only provided Jesus the Holy Spirit to sustain him. And the key thing is, the Father has not chosen to provide manna to feed Jesus, the way he did for Israel. And in this moment, at the end of the forty days, the devil comes to him and is basically saying, well, looks like the Father doesn’t care about you. Looks like the Father forgot about you out here. Why don’t you just go ahead and provide for yourself? Why don’t you just go ahead and give yourself the thing that you need the most right now? That’s the temptation. That’s the temptation. The sin, temptation, is not to be full, but it’s to make yourself full apart from God. When we sin, we are in effect saying that we don’t need God to be our provider. Sin is the act of providing for yourself. It’s saying, I want what I want on my terms. I don’t need to listen to the word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord to determine how I go about getting what I want. I want my word to guide me, my word. I want that on my own authority.  Do you know why sex outside of marriage is wrong? Do you know why it’s wrong? It’s not just because of all the problems that can come from it. If the only problem with sexual immorality was unwanted pregnancy and STDs or broken marriages or feelings of guilt, then all we’d have to do is figure out a way around those things. Then that’s of course, that’s what our culture does. The problem isn’t the result. The problem is the act of defiance. By going the route of sexual immorality of any kind, we are saying, God, your word on what you’ve designed doesn’t matter to me, I can give myself something better than that. I can choose a better path for myself. I can give myself a better gift. I can go my own way. You know why arguing with your wife is a sin? You know why that is a sin? It’s not just because of all the tension and the tears. Again, if the result was the problem, then you just have to learn new ways to think about your relationship. You know, just think of your spouse as an opponent and yourself as a victim, and then suddenly you have permission to argue. Now, arguing makes sense in that context. Right? The problem isn’t the result. It’s the rebellion against God’s Word that tells us to live with our wives in a way that models how Jesus loves his church. We think that we can get a better result through yelling or the silent treatment than we can get by listening to God’s Word. So, is bread bad? Well no, of course it’s not bad. There’s nothing wrong with bread. But as soon as we cut ties between the good things that we find in the world and what the Lord has said about those good things, we begin to live according to every word that proceeds from our own mouths.

Many theologians have seen a parallel between Jesus’ three temptations and the three thoughts actually that Eve has when she is considering eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that God told them not to eat. And I do think that those parallels are there. Do you remember Eve’s first thought? First thing she thought. Go back to Genesis 3 at some point, maybe this afternoon, and read it. It says that she looked at the fruit and saw that it would be good for food. Well, this would be good for food. I would like to eat this. That seems innocent enough, doesn’t it? The problem was it doesn’t matter what it looks like. It was one bit of food that God told them not to eat. The one bit of food that God’s Word, when he spoke, said, do not eat this. The word that came from his mouth was to eat from any and every tree in the garden except this one. And yet Eve thought the fruit looked like it would be good. What’s the problem with that? Well, in her mind, in her reasoning, what it looked like is what it is. What it looks like to me is what it actually is. Church, when temptation comes, it’s going to seem fine. When temptation comes into your life, it’s going to seem fine. It’s going to seem normal and natural. Sin is going to feel like it makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t come with a big danger sign hanging around its neck. It’s going to come, and it’s going to look attractive and sensible. Because if it didn’t, you wouldn’t do it. Right? There is no temptation in things that seem radically out of line with everything you ever think and do. You’re not going to do insensible things. You’re going to think that makes sense to me. You’re not going to get ensnared in sins that are wildly out of line with your current thinking. See, sin aligns itself with the pattern of the world in a way that makes it feel like it’s a perfectly normal, sensible way to live. Or it’s a sensible solution to your problem. It’s going to look like bread when you’re hungry. That’s what temptation looks like. It looks like bread when you’re hungry. Yeah, it’s bread you shouldn’t have, but what’s the harm in eating it?

Let me give you some examples that may or may not hit home. This is the problem with examples, right? Because I don’t know where all of you are at in your life and what you’re facing right now, but feel free to adjust these examples accordingly to fit your needs. People get divorced all the time in our world. Marriages fall apart and cause a lot of harm. So, what’s the obvious solution to this? What’s the obvious solution? Well, let’s just normalize divorce for any reason on one hand, and let’s stop getting married on the other. Okay? Let’s normalize divorce on one hand, let’s stop getting married on the other hand, problem solved. Right? Of course, that doesn’t solve anything. The problems of wrecking the family unit are pervasive. Our one sin has led to a host of other problems. And all of those other problems, by the way, when we face them, when we come to them, when we haven’t solved it, really, and we get to those problems, you know what they’re going to get? They’re going to get their own make your own bread type solutions as well, as we work around them to constantly try to give ourselves something that we think will be better. But we’ve gone so far in this direction that when I talk to young couples getting married, this is crazy but when I talk to young couples who are getting married, and they’ve decided that they’re going to wait until they’re married for them to be intimate together, you know what they sound like to their friends? They do not sound old fashioned. You might think, well, they probably sound old fashioned. They don’t even sound old fashioned anymore. It’s so far removed from that, that they just seem odd. Like, why would anybody do that? Why would anybody make that choice? It makes no sense in our current cultural context.

The Lord tells us not to set our hopes on the uncertainty of riches. Did you know that? I hope you know that. The Lord tells us not to set our hopes on the uncertainty of riches, and that the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil. And yet, what does our culture do? Our culture has moved so far past that warning that it has actually flipped greed into a virtue. We are so far beyond that we flipped greed into a virtue, and it’s ensnared Christians who make their life goal to become as rich as possible because they selectively read around the warnings in Scripture. We don’t even see them anymore. Let me ask you something. When was the last time that you both read and prayed anything like Proverbs 30:8-9? Let me read Proverbs 30:8-9 to you. And just ask yourself, when was the last time you prayed like this? Lord, “remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.” If you have only ever prayed one half of what we just read, just the poor half of what comes from Proverbs 30, then you are not living on every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. Do you understand? These are challenging things. God’s Word, it wants us to conform to it. God is calling us to think like him, not like ourselves. Church, Jesus passed this test. He saw the subtle attempt by our adversary to gain a foothold in his heart, to grab hold of his heart, by simply giving himself a solution that his Father had not provided for him. But Jesus shows us that he will remain faithful to God’s Word, even when it’s hard, even when going his own way would have given him something that would have satisfied him in the moment, that would have that would have filled him up literally in that moment. He said, no, I want to live for the Lord here. I am going to only take what the Father gives me. I’m not going to listen to Satan tell me what I need, or tell me how to provide for myself, or tell me that there’s a better solution in a different direction, and that I can actually create a life that’s better for me than what God would have for me. Jesus said, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to live the life that the Father would have me live. I want to listen to what the Father says, and then I want my life to match up with that. And in doing so, Jesus is both our Savior and our example. See, his victory over temptation makes him eligible to be the Savior of failures like us. See, we’ve done this over and over and over again. In fact, we’ve done so many times, we don’t even sometimes understand where the temptations are because we’ve succumbed to them so much. We’ve hardened ourselves against them. Jesus has not. Jesus has given us a perfect life that can then take the failure that we’ve mounted up in our lives on his own shoulders and to go to the cross for them. Those of us who told ourselves the lie that we can fill our needs better than the Lord, we have a Savior who can take those sins to the cross for us. And if you trusted Jesus to bear that sin for you, if you said, Yeah, I know I am a failure, I have gone after my homemade bread, I have tried to give myself a life that I thought was better than the life God had for me, but now I’m submitted to Christ and now Jesus is showing me every single day how much more I need to conform to His Word. If that’s you, you now have the same Holy Spirit at work in you that Jesus had at work in Him. And with the Spirit’s guidance, you can stand up to the temptations that can easily entangle you. More on this next week. Would you pray with me?