A worship service was held at 10.30am in the church on Sunday 22 February.  The service was simultaneously broadcast on the Church Facebook page.  You can catch up here for the next four weeks.

The Bible passage is Matthew 4:1-11 and Duncan led and preached a very helpful sermon on the temptations Jesus’ faced, and how his experiences of temptation inspire and help us.   The sermon starts at about 32:30 in the catch-up.

Here’s the full text of Duncan’s sermon:

Our media at the moment is dominated by issues centred around money, sex and power. The great triangle around which we live all of our lives and  the kind of temptations, the power for good and the power for ill that are part of all of our lives in the context of that reality.

Matthew 4:1-11 begins with Jesus spending forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. I heard a phrase this week which really struck with me and it’s this: ‘Jesus doesn’t go instead of us, he goes ahead of us’. Let me just say that again. ‘Jesus doesn’t go instead of us, he goes ahead of us’.

Jesus goes ahead of us

What does that mean? It means that when we read Matthew 4 together and reflect on Jesus’ temptations, we are not doing it this morning as some kind of an academic exercise. This is not just a topic of light interest and amusement for a few minutes as part of a Sunday morning service.

We are looking at Jesus’s temptations in the wilderness because Jesus has gone  ahead of us, not instead of us.

Jesus experienced real and powerful temptation in the wilderness ahead of us, so that we too could face these temptations in our lives, strengthened and armed with Jesus’ wisdom.

Before looking at temptation itself, I think it’s really important to note that this passage really doesn’t make a great deal of sense without mentioning the background to it. Immediately before Jesus’ wilderness experience, Jesus is baptised in the River Jordan. And as Jesus came out of the waters of baptism, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son whom I love, with him I am well pleased’.  (Matthew 3:17)

Jesus’ identity as the beloved of God is declared in the baptism he receives. And it’s then that the temptations follow. But let’s be clear as to where this holds together. Let’s notice that love and encounter with God come first. And equally striking in our passage today is that the same spirit which descended on Jesus in baptism, now leads Jesus out into the wilderness.

There is mystery in the workings of God and we want to recognise this morning. He is not only the God of Psalm 23, who leads us beside quiet waters, he also leads us, according to Scripture, into the wilderness.

To be a son or daughter of God, as we are in Christ,  in the wilderness is a challenging life we want to recognise this morning as it was for Jesus who went ahead of us.

The temptation to self-serve

Verse 1, then: ‘Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil’.

It’s striking that the venues for the temptations vary. There is wilderness, there is the city, there is the top of the temple and there is high mountain. And I think that says, among other things, that there will be no place, no time, no age where we will be immune from temptations in our lives.

And strikingly, I want you to notice that these temptations come at a moment of great weakness for Jesus. He has been fasting for a lengthy time. He is hungry and he is physically deprived of food. He is weak. It is in the moment of great weakness that Jesus is tempted.

I think such a scenario raises just questions for us all to think about this morning. When are we weak and vulnerable? When it comes to temptations in our lives what kind of scenarios is it sensible for us to seek to avoid,  or not to make a move towards?

Or if we can’t avoid situations where we feel weak and vulnerable in the face of temptation how do we face them?  One thing to mention at this point is that the gospel story doesn’t offer up simple and straightforward answers. Life is much more challenging and complicated than that.

I mentioned that I have taken up this discipline of listening to the daily service which is on Radio 4x every morning during Lent. And more often than not, I listen to it later on in the day. But all of this past week, five different people on five successive mornings have offered five different angles on Jesus’ first temptation, and his response, ‘man shall not live by bread alone’.

There’s a lot of wisdom and there’s a lot of angles to reflect on as we think about Jesus’ struggles in the wilderness and our own personal temptations this morning. Let’s just look one by one, very briefly, at each of the temptations.

‘After fasting forty days and forty nights, Jesus was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, if you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread’.  (v2-3) Jesus is exhausted, he’s weak, and he’s hungry. And it’s then that the tempter comes to him.

And how does a tempter come at Jesus? ‘If, if you are the Son of God.’ Days before, that’s why I mentioned it, days before,  Jesus at his baptism have been declared God’s beloved Son. That’s the Word of God. And here the tempter seeks to strike at the very identity Jesus has been given.

‘If you are the Son of God’. It’s another way of saying really, ‘look at the state of you, Jesus. Look at how weak and tired and exhausted you are. Can God really love you when you’re in that kind of state? Is God for you? Can you really trust God when you end up like this? Does God really care for you when this is how you find yourself, famished and weak and in a very wilderness place?’

In effect, the tempter is tempting Jesus away from trusting in God’s love and care and provision for Him. ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread’.

Jesus is being tempted to self-serve. It is within his power, isn’t it? The one who turned water into wine. Yes, he could turn stones into bread to satisfy his physical hunger. That is a temptation for all of us, not necessarily to provide a miracle like that. But we can all use our power. We can all use our ‘stuff’ to serve ourselves.

And that is especially true here of the Son of God. Jesus, in the face of the temptation to serve himself, responds, ‘it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’.  (v4)

Trusting God in the wilderness

We can trust God, Jesus is teaching us here, in the wilderness times of our lives. We can truly know this morning that God has our back. He knows our needs, not just our physical needs, but our spiritual and our emotional needs. He knows all this. Psalm 23 again, ‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall lack no good thing’.

As beloved sons and daughters of God, we don’t just live by food and physical things, is what Jesus is teaching us this morning. We also need so much more that Jesus can provide. We need his word to guide our choices, to shape our character, and to give our lives meaning and direction in a world dominated by consumerism.

How much we need to hear that this morning –  ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’. Because the temptation to serve ourselves and to focus so much of the energy of our lives on ourselves is so powerful. It really is.

I learned this week on the news that the algorithms on Meta are designed in such a way that, for example, it responds to every keystroke by a teenager to produce an advert for something that will unsettle them. and make them feel they are lacking something in their life. That’s the power of the world that we’re living in today to unsettle us in the context of God’s provision.

There’s no need to test God

Temptation two. ‘Then the devil took him to the holy city, and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God”, he said, “Throw yourself down. For it is written, he will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”’  (v5-6)

You’ll notice yet again the refrain, ‘if you are the son of God’. This is a temptation once again to question the provision and the care of God, to question God’s love in the context of challenge. God has declared Jesus as his beloved but the tempter questions God’s word,  and he takes it a step further by misquoting a scripture passage from Psalm 91.

The tempter wants to cause confusion as to what is truth, what God is really meaning and saying.  Jesus answered him ‘it is also written do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ (v7) God has spoken you are the beloved son!

And that’s our standing too today. We are sons and daughters of God. We often sing, and I love singing it, ‘We stand on every promise of your word’. That’s what we do. We stand. We trust. God has spoken. And so we believe.

And we sing yet another song. ‘He will hold me fast’.

We don’t need to test God.

Worship the Lord and serve Him only

And finally, temptation three. ‘Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. “All this I will give to you”, he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”  And Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan, for it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”’ (v8-10)

The temptation is a little less subtle here. The tempter offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if he will bow down and worship him. But the tempter is offering Jesus what already belongs to him. Jesus is the Word. He was there at the beginning of the creation. In the beginning was the Word.

And we notice that Jesus knows the move, and doesn’t waste much time on this. ‘Away from me, Satan. for it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’

In other words, ‘Away with you! Get lost!  Take a hike! For it is written worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.   This is the Shema which Jesus is quoting, the Shema which dates from during the original experience of wilderness which saw the Israelites in the wilderness for 40 years:

‘Hear oh Israel The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength’  (Deuteronomy 6:4)

God is God, Jesus is saying, and we are to listen to and obey  him only. ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only’.

Jesus goes ahead of us, not instead of us. We all run into temptations in different guises in our lives. We will be tempted to serve ourselves. when times are tough. We will be tempted to put God to the test and question. We will be tempted to worship that which is not God.

Messengers of light

And over and over and over again, Jesus calls us back to listen and to follow him. He does not go instead of us, but ahead of us. ‘Then the devil left him and angels came and attended him.’ (v11)  This takes us back a few weeks to Bob Stradling’s sermon on angels.

God provides. God provides here through angels. What are angels? Angels in Scripture, among other things, messengers of God’s Word. And so in this season of Lent, I’m listening to and listening out for messengers of God. The angels, whether on Radio 4X, or the ‘Between Ash and Allelujah’ book, or so many other messengers who minister to us seen or unseen.

People, Jesus said, shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which comes from the mouth of God. We’re going to sing a song which just reminds us of the deep love that the father has for us.