“Encountering Grace: Temptation”
Scripture Reading: Matthew 4:1-11
Sermon Transcript for February 25, 2007
By Pastor Bob Coleman
We shared in a prayer last Wednesday evening; it was the beginning of Lent, Ash Wednesday, where we combined together the imposition of ashes and communion, recognition of our vulnerablness as well as God lifting us up. It was our first attempt to “encounter grace”—the theme that we will carry through all of Lent, through Easter, and the Sunday beyond. Today’s Scripture first comes from Luke in the lectionary, but we chose Matthew as you will see in just a moment. In the Matthew encounter, Jesus going into the wilderness happens just after He has been baptized having the blessing of God saying, “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Should be enough to carry you forward in almost any and every circumstance, and indeed, as we will see, Jesus faces something that we wonder why Jesus would have to face these temptations. For me, it helps me to recognize that Jesus experiences what I experience and more so.
This morning we are going to look at how God helps us encounter grace, God’s grace, through temptation. It’s like starting a journey. A journey that takes us where we may not wish to go, choice on our side, but a journey that God leads us to. So let’s watch, listen, and experience the presence of God’s Spirit guiding Jesus into the wilderness to experience these temptations as we see the video.
VIDEO:
Narrator: Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written, man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand at 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 the stone.” Jesus answered him, “It is also written, ‘Do not put the Lord, your God, to the test’.” Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from me Satan. For it is written, ‘Worship the Lord, your God, and serve him only’.” Then the devil left him and the angels came and attended him.
These three temptations by Jesus are classic; they have been told again at a time in many different ways and make themselves some kind of a distancing. How do we ever in our human experience get close to these kinds of temptations? Who of us would ever fast for 40 days? Many of us can’t fast for 24-hours. Our youth did on Friday night though. By the way, there were 58 youth who spent the night here in the church fasting from Friday night to Saturday night going to the Juvenile Center on Saturday morning raising money for world hunger. These are the same youth that are asking you to help fund their trips for the summer where they raise $1800 to go from themselves to others to help with world hunger and to experience what it means to live without bread for a short time.
The temptation is to let hunger be the driving piece to use the power that Jesus had. But he chose not to and said the greater nourishment is not from physical bread, but from the word of God. Then the second one, that sense of going on top of the place where you could be tossed down, but be protected. As you saw presented earlier in this service on the screen saying that I will send my angels to protect you. And literally, Jesus could have called them down. But he stepped up inside and said, “This isn’t the issue to test God.” And truth for you and me, it is God testing us. And of course the third one, to look around upon all that there is which Jesus had as being God Incarnate already in his hands and his lips, but Jesus says, “No, do not serve the things of this world but worship only your God and serve him only”.
Matthew speaks to us, but I am going to go about this I a little bit different way. I want, first, to take the view that most do not think of. And the first temptation for me is so sudden is to not be tempted that evil does not exist. It was the spirit of God that drove Jesus out into the wilderness to face this thing called “Satan”. And for some the physical presence of Satan is important to have that sense of delineation between yourself and that evil out there. When I went through and looked at the Scriptures on evil and found them at the very beginning in Genesis. It’s God who has something to do with at least part of that when “the tree of life and the tree of knowledge in the garden is the knowledge of good and evil”. God gives the choice to choose between good and evil. So the issue isn’t that there is something out there necessarily battling against God, it’s that there is a choice we have. And if we believe there is no evil, then there is no choice.
Continuing on in Ecclesiastes, it says in Chapter 9:2, “All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.” We all face the same end—this life then death. And later on in that same chapter, “The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live and afterward they join the dead.” For me, the presentation of evil is much more important to realize that it rests in me. And for many people who put it off as in the distance, who may not take the reality that evil truly comes out of ourselves. But that’s a frightening thing to think that evil exists in us, in our own hearts and our thoughts, and our minds, and our wills. But God comes back around in the Scripture in Psalm 23, the very familiar one says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Even though evil is present and it is in us, do not fear in the long term where you will be. And Jesus, of course, in the New Testament, goes in another direction and says in the very prayer that we just shared, “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from (in one translation) the evil one.” In another, “deliver us from evil”.
So I guess you really have to see what needs to be understood in your life--An outside image of a terrible, evil Satan that you can battle against as a distant enemy or a struggle within? As Jesus says later in Matthew, Chapter 5, “I God tell us the sun should rise on the evil and the good, and sends His rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” And the question for us is, ‘Who is righteous?” And the answer is, “No one”. We all stand in the need of God’s grace. We encounter the grace when we recognize that evil rests within us.
In Matthew 15, Jesus reinforces what was said in the Old Testament. “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” It was Jesus who said it is not just the outward actions that we have to protect ourselves, it’s not that outward evil only, it is evil thoughts. It’s the very thought of something evil that we need to protect ourselves against. And recognize our weakness and our shortcomings.
So the first temptation, the temptation is to believe that there is no evil. We are raised in a society and history that has tried to construct governments, little societies to be the perfect place. If we would just all love one another, if we would just all abide by the rules, what a wonderful place this would be. None of those have ever succeeded for it is not long before evil comes first from your own hearts if not from some other place.
A second temptation is to believe that truth doesn’t matter. For Jesus could have said, “Well, I guess I can do whatever I want.” That wasn’t his answer. Today, not just today but for generations and centuries, there has been the battle of, “What is truth?” Is truth kind of a relevant thing based upon where you are and your own circumstance? For example, you can believe in your truth and I can believe in mine and if you are sincere in yours and I am sincere in mine then lets just walk away in peace and not worry about it. That statement that if truth is relative then absolute right and absolute wrong is doubtful and obscure. If truth is relative the only the objective of the person who is in power will define what truth is. The subjective, indefinite answers based upon my situation and my time are the ones that get us most in to trouble. You see sincerity and good works are merely the reliance upon our own strength and our own desire to be God. Inevitably we believe our merit will favor God. Insincerity in that merit does not get us very far because God can look at our hearts and know that they are evil and see that we are twisted in the way that we value things and have truth. You may say, “See how sincere I am. Isn’t that good enough? Don’t I deserve to go to heaven?” The answer is, “Sincerity and good works are not good enough to satisfy God because the encounter with grace is that grace is unmerited love not something we earn.” We need to believe that there is truth and that truth says is what God says is true.
Now is it easy to understand what God says? No, it is not! It’s a deep and challenging every generational barrier to understand what is God’s word and what is truth in that Word. Even Pilate, when Jesus was brought before him, struggled with that very same question. It says in John 19, Pilate said, “Do I look like a Jew? Your people and your high priests turned you over to me. So what in the world am I supposed to be doing with you?” “What’s my responsibility to you?” in other words. Jesus responds, “My kingdom doesn’t consist of what you see around you.” Remember being up on that highest hill when Satan said, “All of this can be yours if you just worship me.” Jesus said, “Wouldn’t this that you see around you, if it did consist of my kingdom, my followers would fight so that it wouldn’t be handed over to the Jews or to you. And I’m not that kind of a king, not the world’s kind of king.” Then Pilate said, “So, are you a king or not?” Jesus responded, “You tell me. Because I am King, I was born and entered the world so that I could witness to the truth. Everyone who cares for truth, who has any feeling for the truth, recognizes my voice.” And then the age-old response, Pilate says, “But still, what is truth?”
Essentially Pilate was saying “truth is what you make it”. But if truth is that which we only can conceive as true in our own hearts and our own minds based upon our own circumstance, then there is no one who is right and no one who is wrong because it is all sort of equal. And the Hitler’s and the Sadam Hussein’s are just as right as Mother Teresa and Jesus. Hitler and Sadam and many evil people are sincere in their beliefs. In fact if we tried to construct our own truth, we can be very sincere but as we heard earlier, or like the old radio program of the 30’s, what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Who knows? The shadow knows. The evil lurks in our hearts. And every time we try to construct the world based upon what we think it ought to be, we will find that struggle.
So there must be truth. And two opposing truths, by the way in logic, cannot coexist. Neither one can be right if both claim to be right. It has to be one or the other. And truth, ultimately, for the best test must come beyond ourselves. That’s why Jesus said we are to live and fast on the word of God not on the bread that we make. If God’s truth does not exist, there is no moral value inherent in humanity then things like slavery and war and evil are just relative, they are contextual to the situation. And every bit is true and right as freedom, peace, and love. Without truth, that’s what you get. And so those of the slave trade are just as right as those who are against it. But that can’t be true! God’s truth is there, but we struggle to find out what it is. And one of those struggles are, in this day, is to believe that there is anything that is absolute. My daughters will always say, when that word “absolutely” is used, as is absolutely used too often. How many times, listen how often that word is done as an expression of what is done yes or no, was it absolutely. But how have we lost the power of that word? And so we are tempted to believe that nothing is absolute just like truth is sort of relative. I saw an old phrase, “Always and never are to words to always remember never to use.” We’ve got ourselves trapped around semantics. But we should not be tempted to believe that there are not any absolutes and it is all relative to this generation or this time. Here are the few that I can stand upon. And, by the way, the more absolutes you make, the farther away you get from the central truth. There really aren’t very many absolutes in my view of the world. The first is God.
God is: In the very beginning they asked God, “What’s your name?” I am; I exist; it is me. God is. From there I believe everything else springs forward.
There is only one God: Either there is only one God, the Lord above all, or you would have multiple Gods you could choose. You could get, relatively speaking, whatever God you want to use. And you and I are not that God. God is; there is only one.
God is creator: That is not another God; it is the same God. It is the God who truly has made everything or it is just by our common sense chance that we are here. And then you can be as worldly as you want because if it is just by chance that we are here, there is no reason and purpose behind our design of the universe. It’s up to each generation to make there own creation. And you don’t receive the damage done right off. And so many cultures in the past and yet probably we’ll do it again in this culture and today. God is creator.
God is love unmerited: The one that is the most personal—either there is love in the world or there is not. You can’t pick and choose. But the only pure unmerited love that I see and experience and have ever experienced and see supported in all of those around me, is grace—God in action. God is creator; God is loving.
God is present—sustainer: Not a distance God. Not some God that we don’t really have a connection with but a God who comes in Jesus, the Christ, to personally look in our eyes one on one in spirit and truth to love us. God is. God is the sustainer, the grace.
God is truth: Now logic will tell you that is circular, but if the foundation is true, it must come back to that.
Either life is sacred or it is not: And that leads us to then take and shape all of you, for either if God exist that your world must be seen differently than if there is no God at all. God is or not. It can not be both at the same time. But the easiest thing is to look at life, for if God creates, accepting God is an absolute that God is the creator, God has made something sacred. Scripture tells us this, supported in so many different ways. And either life is sacred or it is not. It’s not sacred at one end or at the other of the spectrum. Life is sacred in total or life is just a tool to use to experiment with like the Nazi’s did or for us to structurize society that there are certain levels of value, those who are more beautiful or more valuable than those who are not, those who have great power and wealth, or more important, those who are not. Those who are at the beginning of their life as young babies are seemingly more valuable than those at the end of their life with only a few weeks left. Life is either sacred or it is not. If we begin to value life on economics, on status, on power, we are doing exactly what other societies have done, or classes higher or lower, more important, less important. But God has said, “You are all equal, for I have made you every last one of you.”
So don’t be tempted to believe there is no evil; it is there. It’s that struggle that shows us we need God. And don’t believe and to be tempted that there is no truth. There is truth. Struggles we will know when it is. Not always clear because God is also a mysterious God. And not to believe that there are no absolutes and that everything is relative for there has to be something that we can count on for now on and for eternity. So in your temptations is where God will encounter you. Think of what is it in your life. And something that has been brought up today and the experience of Jesus in the wilderness and something that you are struggling with that you know is a temptation in your life. You know it’s not what you should do or think or act or feel. And it’s at that point of a temptation where we can hear God say to us, “I am your God. I love you. I have made you. And my grace is sufficient.” An encounter that you must have in this time of Lent is the encounter not through evil as much but with grace for it is grace that will see you through. Amazing grace; how sweet the sound.
Let’s turn together in a time of prayer where we will focus in our own hearts and meditate upon the temptations that we are struggling with and how they can be open pathways and opportunities for God’s grace to encounter us. “Forgive us, Gracious God, when we are tempted to let this world tell us what is true. Let us hear your truths as only your spirit can speak to us. Let us hold on to the faith and the absolute that you are God of all even us. When evil lurks in our hearts and our souls and we wish to be our own God and our own heart, let us remember Jesus who said we are to worship only you, to live only from your word, not to test you, God, but to let life be a test for us that we might reach out and receive your grace. Amen.
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