As Christians in modern American society, we are surrounded on all sides by constant and unrelenting temptation. How do we deal with it? Well, Christ underwent his own temptation out in the desert and provided us a model to follow. Let's talk about what we can learn from that story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| So, what we face in our culture, our great trial is temptation. | |
| That's our battle. | |
| And of course, every Christian across the world has to deal, across history, has to deal with temptation of one kind or another. | |
| Not every Christian has lived or does live as we do now in a world, in a culture, I should say, seemingly designed with no other purpose than to tempt. | |
| So we're surrounded on all sides by this temptation. | |
| Every time we go on our phones, every time we go online, you scroll down a news feed, every time you turn on the TV, Every time you walk outside of your home, every time you enter into conversation with another person out in the world, every time we do anything or go anywhere, we're subject to this intense, relentless, constant temptation. | |
| Which is why, you know, I'll sometimes hear Christians say that, well, you know, we've got it easy here in this country in comparison to Christians overseas who are persecuted. | |
| We're the ones who got the easy end of the bargain. | |
| Which is true physically. | |
| Physically, we've got it a lot easier. | |
| That's definitely true. Spiritually, we really don't. | |
| Which is why I would wager that in the end, if we're taking count here, if we're counting heads, I think in the end, there are going to be far more Christians from the Middle East who suffer persecution. | |
| Far more of them are going to be in heaven than Christians here because our culture, this atmosphere, is so effective at drawing Christians, luring them into a life of materialism, hedonism, nihilism. | |
| Our entire culture is kind of a current running away from Christ So even if you don't go out of your way to indulge every vice like our culture wants you to do, but even if you don't, still you could be swept up and kind of swept away, ultimately into hell, if you just try to sort of exist, get alone, without making any considered effort to actually be a Christian. | |
| If you don't actually practice self-denial, if you don't practice obedience, if you're not always walking towards God and making that effort to do so, swimming against the stream, if you don't, then the force of everything will just cause you to drift in the opposite direction. | |
| So what I'm saying is that the greatest temptation in our culture isn't any one temptation or another. | |
| Although they're all serious. | |
| But the greatest temptation is simply the temptation not to worry much about temptation. | |
| Not to worry much about being a Christian. | |
| Not to worry much about denying yourself. | |
| And to just kind of go with the flow. | |
| That's the number one temptation for us, is to go with the flow. | |
| And it's a very potent, very tempting temptation. | |
| And one that I believe has claimed many, many, many souls. | |
| I think there are many souls in hell who, on the outside, if we were just viewing their life, if we could just kind of rewind the tape and look back at everything they did, we wouldn't find many instances of them doing something that seems from the outside especially horrible. | |
| What we would see instead is just a whole lot of little, just a life that was consumed by these, quote, little sins. | |
| And they just kind of went with it and just sort of floated and just existed, going with the flow, just going wherever the culture goes. | |
| If the culture says, well, this is okay, then they did that thing. | |
| You know, whatever it is. | |
| What everyone else is doing, they did it. | |
| But it's not like they were out killing people. | |
| It's not like they were rapists, child molesters. | |
| You know, we're not talking about that. But just people who, you know, whatever everyone thinks is fine, they just, you know, they'll do that. | |
| I think hell is probably primarily populated with those kinds of people. | |
| So I think it may be worthwhile to try to understand what exactly temptation is and how we handle it And for this, as always, of course, we can turn to Scripture. | |
| And there's a story in Scripture that I've been thinking a lot about recently is the story of Christ's temptation in the desert. | |
| We're told that at the beginning of His public ministry, right after He was baptized, Jesus went out to the desert. | |
| He was led to the desert, we were told, in order to undergo this trial, in order to be tempted by Satan. | |
| He went to the desert to be tempted by Satan. | |
| And so it seems kind of like he was going to the desert and sort of calling Satan out. | |
| He was saying, okay, Satan, come and do your worst. | |
| Now's your chance. And he went into this duel with Satan with one hand tied behind his back, metaphorically, because he starved himself for 40 days first. | |
| And then he said, all right, Satan, here I am. | |
| Do your worst. Now, why did he do this? | |
| I've been thinking a lot about that question. | |
| What was the point of this whole scene? | |
| I think there are a couple of reasons for that. | |
| Probably more than a couple, but here are the couple that in my little meager mind I can see. | |
| First, we know that Christ was fully man and fully God. | |
| And if He was going to be fully man, then He was going to share entirely in the human experience. | |
| He was going to drink from the cup of human experience completely. | |
| And so He did. And a big part of the human experience, especially for us, but for all people, Is temptation. | |
| So he went to be tempted. | |
| But Christ was like man in every way except sin. | |
| So Christ had no spiritual weaknesses. | |
| So he couldn't experience temptation exactly the way that we experience it. | |
| When you and I are tempted, the devil is not coming up to us physically in person and saying, hey, why don't you do this? | |
| Right? That's not how we get tempted. | |
| Because we're spiritually weak and frail, so evil can kind of, we have these sort of cracks in our soul that evil can enter into and speak to us within ourselves and entice us. | |
| So when we're tempted to do something, if we're saying, oh, I was tempted to do X, Y, Z, It means that there's a real part of you that really wants to do that thing and is enticed by it, and so you're arguing with yourself, should I do it or should I not? | |
| And you've got that internal dialogue going on, but there's definitely this significant force within you that is telling you, yes, do it, and you really want to do it. | |
| That's how the temptation works for mere mortals like us. | |
| But for Christ, he doesn't have those cracks in his soul. | |
| So... When he was being tempted by the devil, there was never any part of him that said to himself, oh yeah, maybe I should do that. | |
| There was never a part of him that said, yeah, maybe I should worship the devil. | |
| Maybe, hmm, let me think about it. | |
| And I think this is something that Christians, I got into an argument actually with a group of Christians recently about this. | |
| And they insisted that, no, he was really human, so that means that he was tempted just like we are. | |
| Okay, so you mean, you're telling me that you think Christ, that God incarnate, that there was a part of him that actually wanted to worship the devil, that's what you think? | |
| No. Because that part of you that wants to do sinful things, that is a result of sin. | |
| Christ has no sin. But he can be tempted externally, which means that the temptation can sort of walk up to him, not get inside him, but walk up to him and speak to him. | |
| And he allowed that. Anyway, so I think that was one part of the reason. | |
| But the second part is that he was exposing. | |
| I think he was exposing Satan. | |
| He was kind of drawing the snake out from under the rock so that we could see him and understand him and see how evil functions. | |
| I think that's the main thing we could take away from this story. | |
| It's a very important story. That Jesus is showing us Satan. | |
| Showing us this is how temptation works. | |
| So Satan thought that he was going to get the best of God, but really it was the other way around. | |
| He came out and he was exposed, and we all learned quite a lot about him from this exchange. | |
| And what did we learn? Well, first we learned that Satan, evil, is prideful to the point of insanity. | |
| I mean, think about it. The devil was trying to tempt God. | |
| How crazy is that? | |
| He must have known that it wasn't going to work, that there was no way. | |
| He must have known on some level. | |
| Given that he knows who God is, and he understands God far more than any of us do, so he must have known that there was no way this was going to work, that he was only going to be humiliated in the end. | |
| But he tried anyway. | |
| And that's pride, because Satan is just pride. | |
| And we do the same thing, don't we? | |
| In our pride, we try to win these little sort of victories over God. | |
| God tells us to reject sin, to live holy, virtuous lives. | |
| God tells us that that's the only way we're going to be happy and that we're going to have joyful lives. | |
| Yet we go looking for joy elsewhere. | |
| If we believe, that means that we know God's telling the truth. | |
| We know that it's true. We know that sin can lead to only death and misery, yet we do it anyway. | |
| We try to kind of game the system. | |
| We want to see if we can have it both ways. | |
| We want to see if we can have the joy and can we have the sin as well. | |
| Knowing, so on one level we're doing that, but on another level we know that it's not going to work, yet we do it. | |
| We go looking for joy where it cannot be. | |
| We look for joy within our favorite sins, knowing intellectually that these sins will bring us only misery. | |
| But there's a part of us that thinks, well, maybe we can have it all. | |
| Maybe we can have everything, right? | |
| We can have the joy of this sin and the joy of eternal life, and that's just pride. | |
| We are humiliating ourselves the way that Satan humiliated himself. | |
| And so Jesus drew evil out into the open in full view so that we could recognize it within ourselves, so that we could look into those cracks in the soul To see, okay, that's what's going on there. | |
| I think the next thing that we learned, which is a very scary thing, is that Satan is a theologian. | |
| Pope Benedict wrote a book called Jesus of Nazareth, which is a great book, recommend for everybody. | |
| And he makes this point. | |
| He says, Satan is a theologian. | |
| He knows scripture backwards and forwards. | |
| And so he uses God's own book against him. | |
| He gets into this theological debate with God. | |
| Because he knows the book. And he knows it better than we do. | |
| He tempts him. Christ quotes scripture at him. | |
| And then what does Satan do? | |
| He throws it right back at him. | |
| Which again is pride, but it also shows, well, he knows. | |
| He knows the Bible. And that tells us that, first of all, knowledge of the Bible does not in itself mean that a person is saved. | |
| Just as believing that Jesus is the Son of God, believing that he's the Messiah, that's not going to save you either, because Satan knows both of those things. | |
| He doesn't just believe them, he knows them. | |
| Satan knows the Bible, he could recite it, he could recite the entire thing. | |
| Could you? Because I can't. | |
| And Satan knows for certain that Jesus is the Son of God, is the Messiah. | |
| Yet Satan is still Satan. | |
| Satan's flaw is not that he believes the wrong thing. | |
| It's not that he doesn't know the Bible enough. | |
| It's not that he doesn't know who God is. | |
| He's confused. It's not that he's an atheist and he pretends that God doesn't exist. | |
| Okay, if he was going to pretend that Jesus didn't exist, then this whole scene in the desert never would have happened. | |
| That's not it at all. His great flaw, his great sin that got him cast out of heaven is that he does not love God and he will not serve him. | |
| It's got nothing at all to do with belief or knowing the Bible or anything like that. | |
| It's just, I will not serve. | |
| That's what Satan said, I will not serve. | |
| So next we learn, and this is very important, I think, next we learn the forms of temptation that will be used against us. | |
| And this is what makes it, so this is Christ's brilliance, is that he is Showing us essentially the three great forms of temptation, or he's not showing us. | |
| Satan is showing us. | |
| He's drawn Satan out, and then Satan will expose himself by showing us not just, you know, who he is, but also the exact forms of temptation he's going to use. | |
| So Satan tempts Christ first to turn rocks into bread so that he can eat, which is appealing to his physical appetites. | |
| Then Satan tempts Christ to throw himself off a cliff. | |
| And allow the angels to come save him in some great demonstration of his heavenly power. | |
| And that's an appeal to pride and to ego. | |
| And that's a temptation that you and I probably, we would be very tempted to actually go through with that. | |
| If we knew, you know, if someone told us that, you know what, you could jump off of this building in front of everybody and And a great swarm of angels will come and grab you out of the air and place you back on the ground. | |
| Well, that'd be a very serious temptation. | |
| So that's pride and ego. | |
| That's what Satan's trying to appeal to. | |
| And then he tempts Christ to worship him, the devil, and in return he'll receive all the power in the world. | |
| And that's an appeal to materialism. | |
| So there we have it. We see here that Satan seeks to make of us gluttons, egoists, and materialists. | |
| And he'll settle for just one, but of course nowadays he has little trouble getting us to be all three. | |
| If he could just get us to be egotistical, then it doesn't matter if we're materialistic or gluttonous. | |
| But these days, it's no problem. | |
| We'll be all those things. | |
| And I think the final and really important thing we learn is how we can overcome these temptations. | |
| That really is the most important point. | |
| When the devil does come to us and says, hey, why don't you do this? | |
| And he's whispering in our ear, how do we overcome it? | |
| How do we deal with it? | |
| Well, how does Christ deal with every salvo from the devil? | |
| He quotes scripture. | |
| And that was for our benefit, not his. | |
| I mean, this was all for us. | |
| Christ could have easily said to the devil, get out of here. | |
| Could have swatted him away like a fly, right? | |
| A little twerp. He could have smacked him halfway across the desert if he wanted to. | |
| I mean, we have to understand that. | |
| Satan, in comparison to Christ, is just a little fly, a little net. | |
| He's just nothingness. | |
| So, Jesus could have done that. | |
| Could have just ignored him. But he didn't because that would not be a model that we can follow. | |
| Christ can respond to the devil that way if he wants to. | |
| We cannot because we're no match. | |
| Christ is a match. | |
| He's much more than a match for the devil. | |
| The devil's nothing in comparison to him. | |
| Literally nothing in comparison to him. | |
| But it's different for us. | |
| We're no match for the devil. | |
| We're no match for the forces of hell. | |
| Satan is smarter than us. | |
| He's stronger than us. He's more powerful. | |
| He knows scripture more than we do. | |
| He knows our own religion better than we do. | |
| So we can't win an argument with him. | |
| We can't win a fight with him. | |
| We're puny. We're weak. | |
| I mean, he can stay focused. | |
| He's going to stay focused when he's got a plan of action, a plan of attack for how he's going to take you down. | |
| He'll stay focused on it your entire life, and he's never going to waver from it. | |
| Whereas you can't stay focused on anything for more than two seconds, right? | |
| You and I, we're like these just ridiculous little butterflies fluttering around from one thing to the next. | |
| We can't stay focused. | |
| Satan is staying focused on us. | |
| So, you know, we're outmatched. | |
| And Satan could eat us for breakfast without a problem. | |
| We can't beat him. We can't beat him on our own, that is. | |
| And so I think what Christ is telling us with his responses is we cannot rely on our own understandings. | |
| We can't rely on our own strength. | |
| We can't rely on our own resilience. | |
| And he's telling us to just grasp onto God, onto our faith, to use the Bible as our shield because he can't harm us when we're huddled close to the Lord. | |
| He can't grab us. | |
| He can't take us when we're walking with Christ because we can go where he cannot. | |
| We can flee into the arms of God. | |
| We can stand beneath the cross as our shelter. | |
| Satan can. You know, what Christ is saying is, listen, when the devil came for me, I had scripture and prayer. | |
| I relied on the Father and on scripture. | |
| That's what I did. So what do you think is going to happen to you if you do not have those things as a shield? | |
| If I had that shield, what chance do you have going up against the devil with nothing, unarmed? | |
| You have no chance. And this is very important because we live now in a desert of our own. | |
| We live in kind of a spiritual desert. | |
| And we really are alone out here, you and I. We can't look to the world to have our back, to support us, to encourage us when the devil comes for us. | |
| And to try to resist the devil, to resist temptation, to try to live a pure and holy life, to attempt to be virtuous, this is only going to provoke laughter and jeers from those around you, including other Christians. | |
| They're just going to mock you. | |
| And as Satan grabs you by the ankles and tries to drag you into hell and you cling desperately to any kind of rock or root that you can find, the world will come and start kind of prying your fingers loose. | |
| Stop resisting. It'll tell you. | |
| And it'll just sneer at you and spit on you. | |
| It'd make you feel stupid for even caring. | |
| This is the situation that we face. | |
| There's a war happening here, but it's a spiritual war. | |
| And much of it is invisible to us. | |
| And the tactic of the evil one Which is very different from the tactic that he uses in other parts of the world. | |
| But for us, his tactic is to just numb our souls and to fill our stomachs and to rub our shoulders and to pamper us. | |
| And to just give us everything our hearts desire. | |
| And even when we've had everything our hearts desire, He'll give us more so that our hearts will develop new desires. | |
| And these desires become progressively more depraved and disordered as we're just looking for more things to want. | |
| And so the devil's very happy with us just being comfortable. | |
| He's fine with that. | |
| That's what we should understand. | |
| The devil doesn't want you to be uncomfortable. | |
| He doesn't want you to be uncomfortable. | |
| He doesn't want you to experience any pain or anything right now. | |
| Right now. And He wants you to just indulge and to be happy right now. | |
| And so that's why I think, of course, we look to Scripture and we look to the example that we've been given. | |
| And the example is, you know, we just have to cling desperately to God. | |
| And that's our only chance. | |
| But it's more than a chance, of course. | |
| If we actually do that, if we actually stay with God and cling to Him and stay in His light, then it is a certainty that we will be safe. | |
| The problem is that so few of us actually do that. | |
| So, just a couple of reflections from Scripture for us today. | |
| I'll leave it there. Thanks for watching, everybody. |