The Temptation of IF
This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan on the First Sunday of Lent, March 9, 2025.
Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
We're moving into the season of Lent. It is the first Sunday of Lent. We gathered for worship on Wednesday night for Ash Wednesday. We received the imposition of ashes on our foreheads as a sign of our repentance. Our worship has changed. We're now singing "Return to the Lord your God" instead of "Alleluia."
That's because we have the tradition that the ancient church has preserved for hundreds and thousands of years of not using the word "Alleluia" during the season of Lent. It's a discipline that we apply to ourselves during worship. We're not celebrating as intensely. "Alleluia," of course, means "praise God." And so because we're not celebrating, we've put away the word "Alleluia" until Easter.
This discipline in our worship, by the way, if you're wondering why, as you came in today, you might have seen a bucket of sand. It's clean sand. It didn't come from the cat box. It is where the children who were here on Ash Wednesday took the word "Alleluia," little slips of paper like this, and rolled them up and we buried them. "Alleluia's" are in the grave, but they'll come out just like we will come out and be resurrected on the last day. So that's why we have this bucket of sand. It's a liturgical bucket of sand! (I tell you, church supply houses can sell anything these days.)
The Reality of Sin
The reason we do these things is because sin is a reality for all of us. The world has this in common, except one, that we are children of a fallen humanity, that we have become sinners, that we've inherited that from our earliest moment of conception, that we have become sinners in the hands of an angry God. I say every person on earth shares this, except one, because there is one man born among us in a miraculous way who underwent every temptation that is common to us and persevered, not sinning, and that man is Jesus Christ. He was like us in every way except being without sin, and that is not for lack of temptation.
Jesus' Humanity and Temptation
I think sometimes we imagine that Jesus feels so different than we are, so transcendent and holy and other, so far away in time and space that it's difficult for us to imagine that Jesus is fully a human being. And yet here in our story from Luke's gospel today, Jesus is experiencing very human suffering. He's gone out into the wilderness, and Luke is careful to tell us he is full of the Holy Spirit. Why? Because in the passage just previous to today's gospel reading, Jesus has been baptized. He undergoes, is not a baptism for the forgiveness of his sins. He's not a sinner, so he doesn't need that. In fact, that's the reason you might recall from that story that John the Baptist is a little taken aback, that Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, stops and says, "Hey, I should be baptized by you. Why are you asking me to baptize you?" And Jesus says, "Let it be this way now to fulfill all righteousness."
Why? Because when Jesus goes into his baptism, he doesn't lose his sin. He doesn't have any, but he goes into the water and gives the water of holy baptism his righteousness so that when it is applied to you in your baptism, your sins might go on to Jesus Christ and you might be clothed instead with his righteousness. Dripping wet from his baptism, he is filled with the Holy Spirit, and what happens next? He lives happily ever after the end. No! The very first thing that happens to him, filled with the Holy Spirit, is he's led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
He goes straight from his baptism where he receives a declaration of his identity. The voice speaks from heaven. The Father says, "This is my Son, my Beloved. With him I am well pleased." And he goes straight from there out into the wilderness to be fasting and to be tempted. He has taken on our sin in baptism. He has put his righteousness into the water of baptism, and now having received our sin, he goes into the wilderness and he does battle with our sin.
The Reality of Temptation for the Baptized
This is not something that only happened to Jesus, but this happens to all the baptized as the evil one works his plan to demonstrate to God that we were never worth the effort. I know this because I've seen it firsthand. I'm thinking of a woman in my first congregation who brought herself and her whole family to be baptized into Christ. And as she came to holy baptism, she had had so many things to get in the way of her finally bringing her whole family into our church in order to begin becoming attending Christians, faithful Christians, coming to worship. So many things got in the way. And when she came to me to talk about baptism, I warned her that it was quite likely that the things that had gotten in the way up to that point were a pale shadow of the challenges she was going to have in the intervening month leading up to her baptism. The devil was working against her.
She missed church the next Sunday because her car broke down. She missed church the next Sunday after that because somebody broke into her husband's semi-truck when it was parked and stole a bunch of stuff out of it, and they were trying to figure out who was responsible, and they had to have the police out there that morning. But she made it the third week, and she heard the gospel message, and it strengthened her resolve that she would let nothing happen to get in the way of her baptism. And she made it to church. She made it to church to be baptized into Christ.
The evil one wants to show God that you weren't worth it. And he started with Jesus himself. It's funny because we imagine that once you've gone through the steps to become a Christian, done the Christian things, you've gone, you've received holy baptism, your sins are washed away, you've received the righteousness of Christ, if you were a child when that happens, as you're raised up, you go through confirmation, you learn about the Christian faith, and then after that you go on and you're receiving holy communion, you receive confirmation, you're raised in the church, and we imagine that you've done everything right. The devil isn't an aspect of your life anymore, and it's just not true. But it's subtle in our culture, it seems. And sometimes the very first thing that happens to us is not the mountaintop experience of transfiguration like last week, but the travel through the desert and the wilderness of sin.
Jesus' 40 Days in the Wilderness
That's what happens to Jesus. He goes out into the wilderness for 40 days. He's fasting. He's obviously probably still drinking water of some kind, but he's not eating anything. How many of you have skipped a whole day's eating on purpose or accidentally? Okay. You remember how hungry you were. Have you done it a second day? Have you done it a third day? As you go through these fasts and you get longer and longer, your mind starts to mess with you. It starts to play tricks on you. You start to see things. You start to hear things. You start to smell things. You can just be walking down the street and you think you smell a cheeseburger. It starts to happen to you, and as it does, it gets harder and harder, and you get weaker and weaker. Have you ever been that hungry? Have you ever fasted that intensely? Imagine then fasting supernaturally long, 40 days in the wilderness.
And then, after he is at his weakest, his most vulnerable, his least able to stand up for himself, that's when the evil one strikes, and he shows up and begins to tempt.
The First Temptation
The first temptation is this. He says, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." He uses Jesus' natural human need for food as a lever to try to disconnect Christ from his mission. He says, "If you are the Son of God, use this power to serve yourself." And you might say, "Well, I mean, why shouldn't he? He's the Son of God. He's the face of this earth. He's come as the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. He is the Son of God made flesh on this earth, and he has a mission to teach and preach, and then eventually to go to his cross. It will do no good to anybody if before he has had the opportunity to preach and teach and then go to his cross, if he starves to death in the wilderness."
It's not wrong that he's hungry, but the means by which that hunger is satisfied is sinful. God doesn't want him to die before his appointed purpose, but he must not give in to the question that is embedded in what the devil says. The devil says, "If you are the Son of God." And that's the question, isn't it? Is he really the Son of God? Is he really the Son of the Most High God? Or not? And if he trusts his Father, he will endure his hunger, and he will not use the devil's suggestion on how best to satisfy it. It's a question of doubt and faith. The voice from heaven has just spoken, "You are my Son, my beloved. With you I am well pleased." Now, the question the devil asks is, "Hey, Jesus, do you believe it?"
And Jesus, rather than simply responding with human words, "You bad old devil, get out of here, you devil. I don't want to talk to you," he knows that's not going to do him any good at all. Instead, he relies on the Scriptures. He says, "Man shall not live by bread alone." The rest of the quote that isn't recorded in Luke is, "But by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." Survive temptation on your own. You are not strong enough. You are not able by your own willpower to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stand before a holy God and the temptation and the power of the evil one. But God has given you His holy word and says, "Trust this word and live."
The Second Temptation
The second temptation is a temptation to worldly power and glory. And that's a temptation that's not just for Jesus. It's a temptation for you and me too. There are shortcuts to making yourself powerful and wealthy in this world, but most of them lead straight through violations of God's commandments. The devil says, "You're out here in the wilderness and you're suffering and this is bad. But hey, Jesus, that cross is going to be a whole lot worse. You're going to have to go to Jerusalem and die and you know it. And you know how bad it's going to hurt. The easiest thing for you to do would be to simply claim the power and glory that the devil is holding out and saying, 'I will give this to you if you just bow down and worship me.'"
Shortcutting the cross and receiving what the devil offers. And he's not even entirely wrong. He says, "It has been given to me and I can give it to whomever I please." Well, it is true that this world has been given over into the power of sin and death and the devil. And we Christians are a problem for him. But it is not true that by worshiping the evil one that these things will be given over to Jesus. In fact, it will just prove the devil's point that human beings were never worth it. Never worthy to be image bearers of a holy God. And so Jesus, again, doesn't respond with good words and strong will. Instead, he responds with the scriptures. He relies on the word of God. He says, "Worship the Lord your God and serve only him."
The Third Temptation
So then the devil takes him to the top of the temple. Now he's being offered a shortcut to religious power and authority. Why? Because can you imagine a man who is standing on top of the temple and jumps off and lightly floats to the ground? It's not wrong what the devil's doing. In fact, here the devil quotes scripture at him. But the devil wants to twist its meaning and misunderstand it. And it's a shortcut to religious power because can you imagine seeing this man float down from the top of the temple and then he says, "Hi, I'm the son of God and I've got things to tell you." Of course, everybody's going to listen to him. No suffering. No difficulties. No prayer in Gethsemane and sweating drops of blood. No cross. No death. Just power.
Jesus says, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."
Lessons from Jesus' Temptation
We can learn from the experience of Jesus in the wilderness.
First, the devil does not make up new ways to tempt us. The ways that Jesus was tempted, the ways that we are tempted are not brand new ideas that the devil came up with on their own. The devil takes human needs and twists them. The need for companionship becomes fornication or pornography. The need for food becomes gluttony. The need for feeling welcome in a community becomes the lust for power. These things are good things which get twisted by the evil one in order to accomplish his purposes. This is why fasting, by the way, is valuable as Christians, especially in the season of Lent. If you've not done that before or it's been a while since you've done it, I'd recommend you make it a part of your Lenten disciplines because it reminds us that we as human beings do have these needs, but we can, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, through His Word, overcome these temptations.
The second thing is that we need to remember that it is very common for us to look for shortcuts, but there is no shortcut in Christian discipleship that circumvents the cross. The cross stands as judgment and glory. It's judgment for those who would reject it. And glory for those who embrace it. I see far too many Christians who think it's comfortable to simply say, "Well, I'm going to be a Christian and I'm never going to experience suffering for the sake of my faith." There are Christians losing their lives daily in Sudan right now because of the terrible things that are being done to them on account of their Christian faith. Losing their lives, being beheaded in dozens every day right now. For us here in this comfortable place in which we live, we have to remember that there is no shortcut to success in God's eyes that goes around the cross. When Jesus calls a man, Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, he bids him come and die.
And third of all, it's a reminder that even in mountaintop experiences like last week, temptation is always at the door. Lent is an opportunity to recommit ourselves to those disciplines which circumvent and thwart the devil's purposes. Prayer as a means against the devil, fasting as a tool against our own flesh, and almsgiving as a weapon against the world. Ways that we can stand in Christian faith against the devil's purposes in our lives.
Conclusion
May you faithfully attend worship in this season of Lent and in your private lives.
May you be devoted in prayer and the reading of scripture and even fasting to deepen your faith and your relationship with God and Jesus Christ and trust only him.
And most of all, may you remember the identity that was given to you in holy baptism. That you are a child of God. That in your baptism, God spoke to you and said, "You are my beloved son, my beloved daughter, with you I am well pleased on account of Christ."
And may the peace of God which surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and minds strong in Christ Jesus our Lord to life everlasting. Amen.
