Victory in the Wilderness

[This message was shared this morning during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Luke 4:1-13

Today’s gospel lesson, for this First Sunday in Lent, is Luke 4:1-13. This is Luke’s account of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness by the devil. 

The most important thing to remember from this incident is that Jesus, the Son of God, succeeds where Adam in the garden of Eden and ancient Israel in the wilderness failed. And He did this for us, despite the unneeded and unwanted suffering and death it brought to Him.

So, let’s look at what happens, starting at verse 1: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.”

Jesus has just come from being baptized in the Jordan River by his relative, John the Baptizer. There, Jesus heard God the Father tell Him, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22) 

We know from the rest of Scripture that when Jesus is described as “the Son of God,” it means more than I mean when I speak of our son and our daughter. Colossians 1:15-17 says of Jesus that He is “...the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Jesus is both God and human, “the Word [made] flesh” (John 1:1, 14).

Others in Scripture have been portrayed as God’s sons, but in different ways. 

For example, in Hosea 11:1, God recalls, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” 

And, in the passage just before his account of Jesus’ temptations, Luke traces Jesus’ genealogy back to “Adam, the son of God (Luke 3:38).” The meaning here is that Adam was generated from God’s creativity. God looked on Adam and Eve in much the same way parents look on their children, with love. 

But in the garden, lush with everything he could possibly need, Adam, the son of God, fell prey to the temptations of the serpent, feeling the impulse to stuff his face with the very fruit God had told him not to touch. 

Similarly, about 1500 years before the birth of Jesus, God led His people Israel out of slavery in Egypt and, taking them to the promised land, oversaw the testing of their faith in the wilderness. Israel, even its leader Moses, didn’t pass with flying colors. A whole generation of Israelites, save for two--Joshua and Caleb--died on a forty year journey that should have taken eleven days because it fell prey to temptation, worshiping other gods, rebelling against God.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus, the Son of God, is led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Jesus spends forty days there and is, like Adam and Israel, tempted to sin and to rebellion against God the Father. Jesus goes there to begin the process of erasing the sin and death that had enslaved humanity since Adam and Eve fell into sin and to fulfill the mission of Israel to bring light and life to all nations.

Verse 3: “The devil said to him, If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.’”

The word devil translates the word in Luke’s original Greek text, diabolos. We get the word diabolical from this. The word itself means one who slanders, defames, accuses falsely. The devil likes to slander, defame, and falsely accuse human beings, especially those who seek to follow Jesus, because of his deep resentment toward the human race. 

The devil is a fallen angel. And angels, aren’t as important in God’s creation as human beings. Only humans are created in God’s image. This is why the devil set out to lure the human race away from God. 

Jesus says that the devil is the father of all evil and lies in the world (and of everyone given over to lying and evil as their way of life) and that he has been a liar, a deceiver from the beginning. People who make lying their way of life are of the devil. 

The devil, the liar and slanderer, calls Jesus’ place as the second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, into question. He’s challenging Jesus to prove Himself. He tells Jesus to take care of His hunger by turning stones to bread rather than fulfill His mission of enduring temptations sinlessly so that He can offer Himself as the perfect sacrifice for human sin.

Verse 4: “Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’”

Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 8:3, in which Moses recalls when the people of Israel went hungry in the wilderness, wanting bread to eat, and when God, by the power of His Word, created something called manna for them to eat. God gave the people of Israel exactly what they needed from day to day, their “daily bread.” Moses said that we can’t live just for the bread we plant, harvest, mix, and bake. We must rely totally on God. Jesus did. And, unlike Adam in the garden, who ate fruit he didn’t need and so dishonored his relationship with God, Jesus refused to create food He could have used for Himself. Jesus lives for God and for us. Who do we live for?

Verse 5: “The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.’”

In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve wanted to “be like God.” In the wilderness, ancient Israel erected a golden calf to worship and manipulate for its own purposes. Jesus could have taken the kingdoms of this world without saving us. But He refused to do this. He knew that only His death and resurrection could allow us to become part of His kingdom. Our eternal life with God was more important to Jesus than His temporary comfort. That’s a measure of the depths of His love for each of us. Without relying on the God we meet in Jesus, it's impossible for us to dismiss taking the easy path and opt for doing the will of God as Jesus did.

Verse 8: “Jesus answered, ‘It is written [again citing words from Moses’ words in Deuteronomy about Israel’s wilderness experience]: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’” Jesus is ready for temptation not just because He’s the Son of God, but also because He knows God’s Word and through God’s Word, He knows Christ. If Jesus needed to know God and His Word to get through the wilderness, how much more do we need God and His Word?

Verse 9: “The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down from here. For it is written: “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully;  they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”’”

The devil is a cunning jerk. 1 Peter 5:8 tells us, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” The devil would have liked nothing better than to have devoured Jesus, gobbling up our chance for life through faith in Jesus in the bargain. He cunningly uses God’s Word from Psalm 91, twisting the promise God gives to help His people into a magna carta for human stupidity, a blank check for believers to do any lame-brained thing that comes into our heads in order to prove that God is good for His word. That’s why in verse 12, Jesus cites another passage from Deuteronomy: “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Jesus turns each of the devil’s temptations away. Ambrose, an ancient church father, said that in the three temptations with which the devil tried to trap Jesus, the temptation to turn stones to bread, to worship the devil, and to take the kingdoms of this world rather than institute the kingdom of God for all who trust in Jesus, there was “every human transgression...for the courses of our own [forbidden] desires are the delight of the flesh [taking care of ourselves without regard to others], the pomp of vainglory [our love of being number one], and the greed for power.” The temptations with which Jesus contended in the wilderness are the same ones that confront you and me every day. One contemporary New Testament scholar calls them “the normative seductions of our...culture.”

And they always have been. But unlike Adam and Eve and ancient Israel, who were defeated by the seductions--the temptations--to sin, Jesus succeeded in resisting them and so, has was able later to win everlasting life with God for all who turn away from sin, as He did in the wilderness, and follow Him. 

But if it’s our intention to follow Jesus to life, we need to watch out. The devil is still looking, in the words of verse 13 of our lesson, for “opportune times” to trip us up. Referring to the gospel--the good news of forgiven sin and new life for all who trust in the crucified and risen Jesus, the preacher in Hebrews tells a people flirting with defection from faith in Christ, “We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.” (Hebrews 2:1-3)

Jesus won a victory in the wilderness because His eyes were turned always to God the Father and His purposes. Isaiah 45:22 tells us, “Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.” 

In Lent and in all of life, our call is to keep turning to Jesus so that He can give us life with God. That’s what Jesus died and rose to make possible, so that we can, day after day and into eternity, turn to Him and live. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Transfiguration: Glory Through the Cross (AUDIO)

Here.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Transfiguration: Glory Through the Cross

[This message was shared during worship earlier today with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]

Luke 9:28-36
There’s an old Paul Simon song called Learn How to Fall. The bridge contains these lyrics: 

Oh, and it's the same old storyEver since the world beganEverybody's got the runs for gloryNobody stop to scrutinize the planNobody stop to scrutinize the plan

Artists, I believe, receive inspiration from the Holy Spirit even when they don’t know it. And I believe that in these words and in the entire song from which they come, Paul Simon, who isn’t a Christian, is saying more than even he realizes.

The truth to which Simon points is this: All we human beings who, though made in God’s image, have inherited the condition of sin from our ancient grandparents, Adam and Eve, want “glory.” We want, in our sinful hearts, “to be like God” (Genesis 3:5). (This is a distortion of the true glory God has in mind for us as the only ones God created in His image [Genesis 1:26].)

But, again like Adam and Eve who grabbed hold of the fruit that God told them would bring them death, things like glory or transformation or righteousness or joy or life or any truly good thing cannot be grasped by human effort. All of these things--glory, transformation, righteousness, joy, life, or any “good and perfect gift”--come to us as gifts from God. They are to be received, not achieved. 

Whatever this world has to offer will die. Whatever God has to offer is eternal. 

God operates by a different plan from the ones offered by the world, the devil or our sinful selves. Today’s gospel lesson, Luke 9:28-36, containing Luke’s account of Jesus’ transfiguration, will allow us, again in Simon’s phrasing, to “stop and scrutinize the plan,” God’s plan.

Shortly before the incident recounted in the lesson, the apostle Peter confessed his faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, God’s anointed King, the One come to make the fallen world right. Peter said that Jesus was, “The Christ of God” (Luke 9:20). 

This was the right answer, but Jesus might have had good reason to doubt whether Peter understood exactly what that meant. 

The Old Testament repeatedly promised the Christ. But popular culture in first-century Judea envisioned the Christ as a triumphant warrior king who would enter Jerusalem, throw out the Romans, the latest in a long string of foreign overlords to have conquered God’s people, and let the Jews conquer and be prosperous and comfortable. This popular version of the Christ bears little resemblance to the real one prophesied in the Old Testament by the prophet Isaiah.

This version of the Christ or Messiah would demand no transformation, no surrender, and no faith of His followers. They could be just as selfish and heedless of the Word and the will of God as they’d always been. All that mattered was that their names were on the church membership rolls of First Church of Self-Righteousness and Entitlement.

All of this may be why Jesus said what He said after Peter had confessed Jesus as the Christ: “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” (Luke 9:22) And then: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) 

Life with God in His eternal kingdom is a free gift to all who repent and trust in Christ. But if we are to receive the gift God wants to give to us, we must stop grasping for the prizes offered by this dying world.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus shows us the path to glory that we all seek, even if that’s not the word we might use for it. So, please take a look at our lesson, starting at verse 28: “About eight days after Jesus said this [that is, eight days after the words of Jesus we just talked about], he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray. As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.”

This is a remarkable moment. On top of a mountain, the kind of place where God had once interacted with Old Testament figures like Moses, the bringer of God’s law, and Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet, Jesus prays. 

When Moses encountered God on a mountaintop, you’ll recall, his face reflected the glory of God into whose presence he had come. 

But it’s different for Jesus here. Jesus once said of Himself: “I am the light of the world.Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life (John 8:12).” 

You see, on the mount of Transfiguration, Jesus isn’t reflecting the glory of God. Jesus also tells us, “The one who looks at me is seeing the one who sent me” (John 12:45) and “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). 

Jesus Himself is the source of the light. 

He glows in the radiance of Who He is: God the Son. 

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory,” the preacher in Hebrews says, “and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word... (John 1:3).” 

This is what Jesus wanted His three closest and most intimate disciples to understand, that though the way to His kingdom went through a cross, through the surrender of self and the crucifixion of our old sinful natures, as God, the Author of life, Jesus could offer new and everlasting life to those who would faithfully follow Him no matter what. 

When we’re going through tough stuff in our lives, this can be our comfort and hope. Christ is God and He is the One Who can lead us to life beyond the pain and challenge and death.

Verse 30: “Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus. They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem.” 

Neither Moses nor Elijah had walked on the earth for centuries. But here they are, in Jesus’ reflected glory, talking with Jesus about his departure. 

In the Greek in which Luke wrote about this incident, the word translated as departure is exodos, exodus. The Exodus is the event in Old Testament history in which God delivered His people from slavery in Egypt, took them through the wilderness, and into the promised land. 

Jesus was about to accomplish a new exodus, this one not just for the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, but for all who trusted, believed (and believe now) in Him. Jesus was going to endure the wilderness of suffering and death, then rise from the dead, so that He could meet us in our wildernesses and lead us into the presence of God, today in this imperfect wilderness and beyond the gates of death in the eternal promised land.

Verse 32: “Peter and his companions were very sleepy [just like they would later be in the garden of Gethsemane on the night of Jesus' betrayal and arrest], but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’ (He did not know what he was saying.)”

Peter makes at least two mistakes here. 

First, despite the evidence before him--Jesus allowing the three disciples to see Him in the full glory of His deity, Peter equates Moses and Elijah with Jesus. He wants to erect three shelters or tabernacles to honor Jesus and the two Old Testament figures, as though each were on equal footing. 

Second, like the grasping world, Peter wants to capture God’s holiness, rather than be captured by it. Peter has yet to learn that human beings cannot be saved from sin and death by the things they do, or strive for, or control, but solely by surrendering faith in Jesus the Christ. 

Peter didn’t know what he was saying, but God still loved him and Jesus would not give up on him, just as God loves you and me and, as long as we have breath, Jesus will not give up on enveloping us and the rest of the human race in His kingdom of grace and love.

Verse 34: “While [Peter] was speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. A voice came from the cloud, saying, ‘This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.’”

This is the same voice, that of God the Father, that told Jesus at His baptism: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased (Luke 3:22.)” At that time, the Father spoke to reassure the Son as He began His ministry. Now, at the Transfiguration, the Father speaks to encourage these three key leaders of Christ’s Church in the bleak days between Jesus’ death and resurrection, and later, in the remaining days of their lives. Even though Jesus would die, they would know that He was and is the Christ, and that they hadn’t been mistaken in following Him. 

Today, in the midst of both happiness and setbacks, we can live in that assurance, infinitely strengthened by the fact that after Jesus had taken the way of the cross, He rose from the dead, and that “the one who believes in [Jesus] will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in [Jesus] will never die (John 11:25-26).”

Verse 36: “When the voice had spoken, they found that Jesus was alone. The disciples kept this to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen.” 

There was no Moses, no Elijah. Religion may be about building shelters--or tabernacles--to dead saints. But faith in Jesus is about following and listening to a living Savior, about turning from death and sin and self-will, turning instead to Christ, our King. 

That Paul Simon song I mentioned earlier also has these lines: 

You got to learn how to fall Before you learn to fly

We’re all anxious to fly, high above the death and anxiety, the sin and the striving of this world. We want the resurrected life, the life of victory. 

But before we can fly, we must fall. 

We must lay aside all our pretenses of a righteousness born of our own goodness and see Jesus for Who He is: the Savior Who alone, amid all the competing voices, is the One to Whom we need to listen. 

Not money or security. 

Not tradition or change for the sake of change. 

Not fashion or habit. 

Not Buddha or Allah. 

Not sex or drugs. (Or rock and roll.) 

But Jesus. 

Only Jesus. 

In another place, Jesus calls Himself the good shepherd and His followers His sheep, and then says, the good shepherd’s “sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger (John 10:4-5).” 

Amid the din of voices screaming at us on TV and radio and social media, commercials, and political ads, may we keep listening for Jesus, through the wilderness and the cross, to the promised land and God’s glorious kingdom. 

May we always return to the One Who loves us more than we can either ask or imagine. 

May we always listen to Jesus. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church.]

Considering the Patience of God on This 'We Don't Get It' Sunday

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

John 16:12-15
Evangelist Billy Graham tells the story of a teacher who asked his class of fifth graders if they could explain electricity. One student raised his hand. “How would you explain it, Jimmy?” the teacher asked. The kid scratched his head and then answered, “Last night I knew it, but this morning, I’ve forgotten.” The teacher shook his head sadly. He told the class, “What a tragedy. The only person in the world ever to fully understand electricity and now he’s forgotten!”

Today is Holy Trinity Sunday on the Church calendar. Someone has pointed out that this is the only day in the whole Church Year devoted to a theological doctrine. The Trinity is a lot harder to understand than electricity. Anyone who claims to have it all figured out—this truth about the universe having been created, redeemed, and sustained by One God Who is three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—isn’t being honest, especially with themselves.

And it makes sense that we shouldn’t understand everything about God. If we did, we ourselves would be God.

But the word “Trinity” isn’t to be found in the Bible. If that's the case, then why do we Christians make such a fuss over it?

A Princeton professor of religion talked about this once. “There are probably a number of people who imagine that the idea of the Trinity was thought up by ivory-tower theologians who, typically, were making things more complicated than they needed to be and were obscuring the simple faith of regular believers,” the professor said. “In fact, it seems that the process worked pretty much the other way around. Practicing believers and worshipers were driven by their experiences of God's activity to the awareness that God related in several different ways to the creation. ... Thus what these believers came to insist upon was that God had to be recognized as being in different forms of relationship with the creation, in ways at least like different persons, and that all these ways were divine, that is, were of God. Yet there could not be three gods. God, to be the biblical God and the only God of all, had to be one God. This complex and profound faith was then handed over for the theologians to try and make more intelligible. They have been trying ever since.”

The fact is that we could just as easily call Holy Trinity Sunday, We Don’t Get It Sunday. That’s because the doctrine of the Trinity describes a truth that Christians have experienced over the centuries, yet still don’t understand.

But it isn’t the idea of a single being having different roles that’s so mysterious or unfamiliar to us. I am, among other things, a son, a husband, a father, and a pastor, for example. We all have different roles and may relate to each other in multiple ways.

But what we see in the Triune God—three Persons, one God--is something altogether different from that. Thumb through the pages of the Gospels in the New Testament, for example, and you’ll find God the Father affirming Jesus as His beloved Son, the exact image of Himself. You’ll find the Son speaking to the Father, even crying out to Him from the cross, asking why the Father has abandoned Him to bear our sins, sins He never committed. And yet, Jesus said, “The Father and I are One.” And, “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father.” “I am in the Father and the Father is in Me.” In the Father, we see God fully. In Jesus, we see God fully. Yet they are different persons.

So, where does the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, come in? Jesus talks about Him, the Holy Spirit, in our Gospel lesson for today. It’s just four verses that are part of what’s called Jesus’ farewell discourse. Jesus knows that He’s going to the cross. After that, He’ll rise from the dead and after a period spent with His disciples, He’ll ascend back to the Father. In Old Testament times, God the Father had led His people through the Law and the Prophets. When Jesus was on earth, God related to people in the flesh. But what was to happen to them once Jesus had ascended to heaven? Who would lead people in the truth of this God of grace Who offers everlasting life to all who turn from sin and trust in Christ? Who would relate to believers to help the mature and grow up in their relationship with God? Who would assure believers of the certainty of their hope in Christ when the chips were down, when life got tough, when they faced persecution, disease, death, conflict, temptation?

These issues were on Jesus’ mind when He told the disciples in today’s lesson, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

One of my favorite movies is Back to the Future, the story of how Marty McFly went in a DeLorean equipped with a flux capacitor, back to his parents’ high school days. In one scene, Marty, played by Michael J. Fox, is invited to sing and play his guitar with a band at the high school dance. Marty starts performing Johnny B. Goode, the Chuck Berry classic, in a style that some people in the 50s, the era Marty is visiting, might have found a little daring, but most would have still thought harmless...at least as he began playing it. But as the song goes on, Marty, this power guitarist from the 80s, can’t help himself. He saunters around the stage like Eddie Van Halen. At first everybody seems to love it. But then he kicks over an amp. He slides across the stage on his knees. Finally, the guitar screeching a single high-note, he notices that the band has stopped playing and that the crowd is just staring at him. Marty stands up, hands the guitar over to the mystified band leader, and tells the crowd, “I guess you’re not ready for that yet…But your kids are gonna love it."

There were certain facts of life with Him, Jesus knew, for which His first followers weren’t yet ready. Until He had gone through the cross, they (and we) couldn’t understand that the call to follow Him means dying to ourselves and to our sins. Until He had risen from the dead, they couldn’t understand that His kingdom wasn’t about giving us the momentary advantages or pleasures of this world, but about the blessings of eternity with God. Nor could they understand how God might call them and their spiritual descendants, like you and me, to change and grow. All of these were truths that Jesus wouldn’t teach them (or us) face-to-face, truths for which God had to make them (and us) ready. “When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus says in our Gospel lesson from John, “He will guide you into all the truth.” And then, the Savior Who said that He and the Father are one, goes on to say that the Spirit and He are one as well: “He will not speak on His own…”

The Spirit speaks the same truth spoken by God the Father and God the Son, as we’re ready to hear it. But what does that mean?

Well, here’s an example of how the Spirit speaks truth that no one was ready to hear before Jesus' death and resurrection. To a first century church grappling with whether Gentiles needed to be Jews before becoming Christians, living in a world where men ruled the roost in a patriarchal society, and where at least 25% of the Roman Empire’s population were slaves, Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, probably not fully cognizant himself of the implications of his words, wrote in the book of Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” The Church is still being taught by the Holy Spirit the truth contained in those words. It wasn't until 1970, for example, that we Lutherans in North America caught up to one thing that these words surely meant when we began to ordain women into pastoral ministry.

The Spirit will never teach us anything contrary to what God the Father and God the Son have already revealed to us; God never contradicts Himself. But in these times between Jesus’ ascension and the day He returns to the earth, the Spirit will continue to unfold God’s truth for us so that we understand more deeply what it means to be part of God’s kingdom.

We’ll never fully understand the Trinity. Still, we have experienced how God has, through the centuries, patiently revealed Himself as one God in three Persons.

My Geometry teacher in high school, Mr. Allen, knew how difficult Mathematics was for me. I had flunked Algebra I the year before and had to take it again in the summer. But, intent on going to college, I registered for Mr. Allen’s class. It was tough slogging for me. But Mr. Allen wouldn’t let me give in to my penchant for laziness in subjects that failed to interest me. He would go out of his way to help me understand the lesson at hand. When we got to the unit on the Pythagorean Theorem, I remember him saying to the class, “Mr. Daniels is very knowledgeable when it comes to History. You might be interested in knowing…” And then, Mr. Allen told us a little about the sixth century-BC mathematician Pythagoras who came up with the Pythagorean Theorem. Mr. Allen was trying to hook me and students like me. After he’d explained the theorem and how it worked to us, he would look around the class room for the confused faces. Mine was always among them. So, he’d explain it in a different way. And if we still didn’t get it, he’d choose one of us to come up to the chalkboard to go through things step-by-step. His patience was amazing! And, miracle of miracles, I passed the class!

On this We-Don’t-Get-It Sunday, Holy Trinity Sunday, we can say that through the centuries, first through Israel, then through Jesus, and now through His Holy Spirit, God has patiently revealed Himself to all of us. He’s still revealing Himself to us.

• In the Father, we understand God is our Creator and that God calls us to turn away from sin and toward Him and toward others. 
• In the Son, we understand that when we turn, we can fall trustingly into the arms of Jesus for forgiveness. 
• In the Spirit, we receive new life and the power to move toward becoming the people God made us to be. 

We can never fully explain God. But we have experienced God, Who patiently and repeatedly reveals Himself and His will for our lives: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Temptations: Tests of Our Priorities

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Luke 4:1-13
There's a story that's only tangentially related to today's Gospel lesson. But I've decided to tell it anyway.

It's about a sheriff who had a vacancy on his staff. A guy in the community who wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the pack wanted to interview and the sheriff didn't feel that he could fairly refuse to give the fellow an opportunity. So, the sheriff sat down to ask him a few questions. "What's 1 and 1?" the sheriff asked. "11," the guy replied. That wasn't the answer the sheriff was looking for, of course, but he could understand how the guy came up with it. "OK," the sheriff went on, "what are the two days of the week that begin with the letter T?" Without hesitation, the guy answered, "Today and tomorrow." Again, wrong answer, but understandable. The sheriff asked a third question: "Who killed Abraham Lincoln?" The interviewee didn't say anything for a long while. He was stumped. "I tell you what," the sheriff said. "You go home and think about that." The man left his interview and out on the sidewalk, ran into some friends. "How did the interview go?" they asked. "Great!" he answered. "It's my first day on the job and I'm already working a homicide case!"

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus is really experiencing His first day on the job as the Son of God. As our lesson begins, He has just come from being baptized, where God the Father triumphantly declared Him to be the Son--the very presence of God--and the Messiah, when the Holy Spirit drives Him into the wilderness--the desert--to be tempted by the devil. In between the account of Jesus' baptism and our lesson, the gospel writer Luke inserts a genealogy that culminates with the designation of Jesus as "the Son of God."

But already during His first day as the Messiah, we find Jesus in a contest to decide whether, as God's Son, He will be faithful to the Father’s will or will go another way.

Each day of our lives, we confront the same choices Jesus faced in the wilderness: whether we’ll follow God’s will for our lives or we’ll walk away from God.

Like Jesus, we face temptations.

Interestingly, the words used in the Greek of the New Testament--peirazo or ekpeirazo--can be equally well translated as test or temptation. Like the two sides of a single coin, every temptation that comes from the devil, the world, or our sinful selves is also a test from God.

There were three major temptations that came to Jesus during His forty days in the wilderness. Each was similar to the temptations that God's people confronted in the wilderness between Egypt and the promised land during the days of Moses some 1500 years before the birth of Jesus.

Each of Jesus' temptations also reflects the major temptations that you and I face as we move through our daily lives.

The first temptation the devil sets before Jesus: Knowing that Jesus was hungry, the devil said, “Turn a stone into bread.” Out in the Old Testament wilderness, the Hebrew people had doubted that God would provide for them when they were hungry. Jesus has no such doubts. Quoting from the Old Testament, he tells the devil, “One does not live by bread alone.”

A famous third century saint, Augustine, prayed, “O Lord, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” Temptation can lead us to try to feed our hunger for the comfort and peace only God can give with other things. Jesus refused to make that mistake. That’s why He told the devil, quoting the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, “One does not live by bread alone.” We must instead rely on God alone for life!

In the second temptation, the devil challenged Jesus to worship him. If Jesus would worship him, he said, Jesus could have all the kingdoms of the world.

Truth be told, we all want to reign over our own little kingdoms. Jesus, in fact, had come into the world to take the very kingdoms that the devil offered Him in the wilderness.

But Jesus came to take them through a cross and an empty tomb, not through bowing down to evil and separating you and me from God and life forever. Jesus came to save us from sin and death. And He couldn’t do that if He only looked out for Himself.

So Jesus hung tough, telling the devil, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Turn on the television news on any given day and you see the consequences of a world caving into the temptation to put other things—especially themselves—above God.

The path to true joy is the one commended by Saint Paul in the New Testament book of Philippians:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God…humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

True living comes only to those who let God have first place in their lives.

The third temptation from the devil took place on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, where he told Jesus to jump. The devil did a little proof-texting from the Psalms to try to convince Jesus that it was okay. (You know what proof-texting is: It's taking an isolated piece of Scripture, without taking the witness of the whole Bible into account, in order to prove something you believe or want to believe is true.) Jesus could jump, the devil said, because, in Psalm 91, God promises that his angels will spare Him harm.

But Jesus quoted Old Testament words in which God warns us not to put God to the test. It’s one thing to be pushed from great heights; it’s another to throw ourselves from them and then expect God to rescind the law of gravity to protect us from the consequences of our own stupidity.

A Lutheran pastor friend of mine once bemoaned the size of his mortgage. With a sigh he said, “My life would be so much easier if I just remembered what Saint Paul says in the Bible, ‘Owe no one anything.”

In today’s world, of course, it’s tough to own a home and not have a mortgage. But I know people who pile up massive mountains of debt and then say cheerily that they’re sure God will take care of their finances.

That’s like jumping from a building and expecting God to catch us. People make the same mistake with all sorts of sins. They like to sow their wild oats and then count on God to bring a crop failure. Jesus knew that to depend on God and His grace is not the same as expecting God to wink at our sin.

So, what does Jesus’ encounter with the devil in the wilderness teach us? Three main things, I think.

The first is captured in an incident that supposedly happened a few years ago at an Oregon middle school. Some girls there thought it was fun to put on lipstick in the rest rooms and then press their lips against the mirrors, leaving little kisses all over them. This went on for several weeks when the principal called together groups of girls in one of the rest rooms. There, she explained that the lip prints caused the custodian major problems. She then asked the custodian, who was with them, to show the girls what she meant. So, he dipped a long-handled brush into a toilet and scrubbed the lip prints away.

Temptation makes sin look attractive. But if we could just understand that when we cave into sin, we're kissing filth, we might not surrender to it so easily. Jesus knew that caving into sin would lead to an ugly alienation from God. We need to know that too.

The second thing that Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness tell us is that being tempted isn’t the same thing as sinning. Even Jesus was tempted and because He walked away from sin, going through cross and grave, He won life for us. The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us that, in Jesus, we have an advocate, “who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”

When you young people are tempted to go against the directions of your parents, when you older folks are tempted to fudge a little when working on your TurboTax, when any of us are tempted to berate someone, remember these temptations to violate God’s law of love for Him and love for neighbor aren’t sins unless we wimp out and cave into the temptations.

And thank God, when we do sin, because of Jesus Christ, the truly repentant can receive forgiveness and the power to resist temptation in the future.

The third and most important lesson we can learn from Jesus’ being tempted in the wilderness is this: At every turn, Jesus was able to resist the devil by knowing what God says in His Word, the Bible.

Jesus knew not just what the words of the Bible said. He also knew what the words of the Bible were about. That was because He spent time in God’s Word every day. It was His bread and water! As Martin Luther wrote in A Mighty Fortress is Our God, the Christian has the confidence that as the devil tempts us, “one little word”--one word from God--”subdues him.”

Fiery coach Greg Schiano has taken the Rutgers University football program from nowhere to being contenders every year. He’s tough and competitive. He’s also a deeply committed Christian. In an interview with Sports Spectrum magazine a few years ago, he said, “When I’m doing well [as a Christian and a person], it’s getting in the Word in the morning and constant prayer. When I’m not doing well, it’s ‘I’m too busy to get in the Word’ in the morning, and I go to bed at night and I haven’t talked to God all day.”

If you and I are intent on having a meaningful life and to be prepared to resist the temptation to walk away from God, the only Giver of life, we need to make our relationship with Jesus Christ our number one priority. God first; no exceptions. It only seems fair when you think about it: God has put us first, so reciprocating seems the appropriate response. When we’re focused on the God we meet in Jesus Christ, we’re empowered to live life as it’s meant to be lived!

This Lenten season, as we consider the spiritual discipline of prayer during our midweek services, I ask you to allow a daily time with God’s Word to inform your praying.

When we, like Jesus, get to know our Father and lean on His Word, we build a tower of faith in Christ and an ability to really live life that no one and nothing can tear down!