Sermon from February 13, 2000
The Lord of the Church has granted me knowledge of the spiritual warfare of the Church in our generation, but He has not yet granted me the authority to declare that knowledge anywhere except here. As an act of my obedience to the Lord of the Church, I declare that knowledge again to you.

In our generation God is leading the church of North America into a test, which is also a temptation by the devil, just as He led our Lord into the perilous desert test, which was also a temptation by the devil. The test is this: Can we Christians be people of integrity in a world where we are free culturally to do anything we can get away with? The fire for Christians in the West is staying true to Jesus Christ when around us all allurements entice when no one is watching. The only answer to the test will be the sacrificial answer of our lives.

Out of our individualism comes the habit of seeing temptation solely as a personal matter. But the pronoun in the Lord's Prayer is plural. "Lead us not into temptation." It bears witness to a collective meaning of testing and temptation. God will at times lead His people en masse into temptation. We have seen this happen to the Church under the great totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.

We do not of course see ourselves laboring under a totalitarian regime. Does that mean He has not led us into temptation? Why are we so sure that He has not? Even Christ's temptation in the desert did not involve persecution. To hear Matthew and Luke tell it, it involved offers of great personal power, pleasure and advantage.

I want to give you an example of this test, and I ask you to judge if it does not exemplify the guerilla warfare in which the Church finds itself embroiled. I apologize for the first-person example I am about to give. Maybe it makes the test more real to do it this way, and in any case I am subject to this test just like anyone else.

About eight years ago, Carole and I bought a new love seat. It cost around $800. I charged it on a Visa card, because we had already saved up money in the bank to pay for it. The person at the store who waited on us seemed to have trouble putting the charge on our Visa account, but it finally went through, the seat came to our house, and we have used it every day since then.

A few weeks later, the Visa bill came, and there on the bill was about the last thing I expected to see. Sure enough, as expected, I saw the $800 charge for the seat, but a few lines later there was an $800 credit for the seat. I left town. I mean, I was scheduled to go out of town for a couple of weeks, so I did not deal with the problem right away.

Part of me knew I had to deal with the problem. It was a mistake. It would be wrong to let the Visa bill stand. But before I went to the store and paid the bill, part of me did not want to deal with the problem at all. We were still recovering from my being out of work for more than a year, seven months of which saw no income at all. Here was a Visa Card windfall. My tracks were covered. No one ever need know. We could use an extra $800.

My conscience said it was wrong to keep the money. Remembering the money we had lost when I was not working said it was okay to keep the money. No one would ever know. And it wasn't my fault if some store person could not keep his buisness straight.

Do you have any temptation stories like that? The closet is full of them, isn't it? That is one reason why the story of Jesus' earthly journey holds such interest for us in the episode we consider today. Let's take a look in Mark 1:12-13.

At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him. Before we explore this further, I should remind you of a characteristic of the Gospel of Mark that I talked about last month.

In verse 3 Mark quoted an Old Testament passage from Isaiah that focused attention on the splendor of the long-expected, coming King of Israel. In verse 2 he quoted an Old Testament passage from Malachi that focused attention on the possibly unwelcome nature of the King's coming. By putting those quotations at the very beginning of his gospel, Mark was preparing us gently, unobtrusively to grasp the meaning of the story he was about to tell.

His story of Jesus tells the story of how the long expected King of the Jews had showed His hand right down in the jungle of life. Mark meant that Jesus was the long expected King. So Mark focused on the splendor of the King, like Isaiah, but he also focused on something unwelcome, abrasive about King Jesus, as in Malachi.

We have already met one unwelcome abrasive episode in the story of Jesus. I mean Jesus' submission of Himself to the baptism that John was calling Israel to at the Jordan River. It didn't fit, did it? I mean, what was Jesus doing at a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins? Did He need to repent? Did He need forgiveness? It seemed like a blunder for all four gospels to put Jesus in a setting that exposed Him to great misunderstanding. But it cannot have been a blunder. The stories about Jesus that make up the gospels were told hundreds and thousands of times before they were written down. Including Jesus in a baptism meant for sinners had to be deliberate.

The opening words of verse 12 express, if possible, something just as deliberate and unsettling. At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. Mark has mentioned the Holy Spirit three times in the first 12 verses of his gospel. In verse 8 John the Baptist promises that Jesus will baptize us with the Holy Spirit – an event of worldwide blessing which the Old Testament attributes only to God. Verse ten says the Holy Spirit came like a dove upon Jesus when He came up out of the waters of His baptism – an act we should interpret as His inauguration into public ministry.

Both those events seem overwhelmingly good. The event in verse 12 seems anything but good. It is the word sent that does the damage. You may have a translation that says the Spirit drove Him out into the desert. Actually, that is more accurate and more unsettling. It is what the Spirit sent or drove Him there for that completes our uneasiness. He sent Him to be tempted by Satan. So, the first thing we discover about the temptation of Jesus is that it was in some sense necessary. The Spirit would not have done that if it had not been necessary.

Let's look more closely at that necessity. Three events take place in Jesus' life before He actually begins to act in public. First, Jesus submitted to John's baptism in solidarity with the people of God and in anticipation of the coming kingdom of God. Second, His public ministry was inaugurated when the Holy Spirit descended on Him, and the Father declared His divine sonship. Third, He was tested by the devil to see if He would stand the test victorious.

These three events prepared Jesus to introduce the kingdom of God into ordinary human life. The first event, His identification with the aspirations of His people, was an act of love. The second event, His commission from God, was given in an act of worship. The third event, His triumph over Satan, was an act of detachment. The great realities which constitute God's ultimate purpose for every human life displayed themselves in Jesus at His baptism and temptation.

Now, we have considered His baptism. Today, we must consider His temptation. A good way to do this is to pay attention to something we bump into all the time when we read the gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the story of Jesus' temptation in the desert by the devil. However, they do not tell it exactly the same way, and John does not tell it at all. Let's concentrate for a few minutes on how Mark differs from Matthew and Luke.

Several glaring differences hit you right away. First, Mark says nothing about fasting. Matthew and Luke both say that Jesus fasted during His time in the desert and that afterwards, He was hungry. Mark downplays fasting in his gospel. It is one of the clues that points to the deep sense of joy that permeates the Gospel of Mark. We will see more of that kind of thing as the Gospel unfolds.

Next, Mark includes something here that Matthew and Luke leave out. He says that Jesus was with the wild animals. Whatever else Mark may mean, that statement adds a sense of physical danger to the temptation. The danger of temptation within and the danger of wild animals without required vigilance within and vigilance without. External dangers often make it seem more reasonable to yield to temptation. My dwindling financial resources made it seem more justifiable not to rectify my incorrect Visa bill.

Third, Mark does not plainly tell us how the temptation turned out. He expects us to figure that out as the story goes along. However, the last thing Mark says in verse 13 points to something hopeful. And angels attended him. We should watch for mention of angels. Every other time they appear in the Gospel of Mark it is in a context of triumph for Jesus. It seems likely here that their attention to Jesus means that Jesus came through the temptation by the devil victorious.

Finally, Mark says nothing about the substance of Jesus' temptations. Matthew and Luke go into some detail about what the devil was trying to get Jesus to do. You may want to say to me, "Well, pastor, just stop and let's supplement Mark with what Matthew and Luke have to tell us." Of course, that would be a good thing to do. I encourage you to do it and from time to time I will do that. But on the whole I am interested in discovering why Mark told the story just the way He did. I think I can point us to passages in Mark that give us a clue to what the devil was trying to get Jesus to do throughout His life. Look with me for a moment at Mark 8:31-33.

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

This crushing rejoinder to Peter makes one thing clear: Satan had in mind to turn Jesus aside from His coming death. By rebuking Jesus Peter unwittingly played right into the devil's intention. Once we see this, we see another famous moment in the Gospel of Mark in a new light. Mark 14:35-36 tells us that in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him.

"Abba, Father," he said, "everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will." Even though the devil is not mentioned here, the theme of turning aside from His coming death once again takes center stage.

At the very least we can infer from these two events that the original temptation the desert had to do with deflecting Jesus from His appointed course. I suspect the parallel accounts in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 will support this interpretation. And that brings me to the first of two important things about temptation we need to know in the time of testing into which God has led the Church.

We usually think of temptation as a strong desire to do this or that behavior that our conscience tells us we should not do. That is true as far as it goes, but if it goes no farther than that, we miss the most crucial thing about temptation and the most crucial thing about ourselves. Giving in to this or that forbidden behavior does not simply violate our conscience. It turns us aside from God's ultimate purpose for our life.

The great principle of Christian detachment certainly means to say No to anything that would dishonor Christ, but it means so much more. It means that we learn to pursue God's ultimate purpose for us by living all life in light of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Stay with me for a minute. Listen to three biblical expressions of God's ultimate purpose for us. So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). "But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well," (Matt. 6:33). Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made know. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is (1 John 3:2). All temptation takes us away from God's glory, away from God's kingdom and His righteousness, and away from Christlikeness.

Christian Faith is not about keeping rules. Christian Faith is a journey on which we need constant reminders of our ultimate purpose, constant encouragement to keep going in that direction, and it is a journey beset with temptations to keep us from getting there. That brings me to the second important thing about temptation we need to know.

Mark 1:13 opens with one of the great understatements of the Bible. And he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan – forty days of persistent satanic effort to turn Jesus aside from God's ultimate purpose for His life. Judging from Jesus' later exchange with Peter and from Jesus' experience in Gethsemane, the temptation in the desert was just the first concerted effort to thwart Jesus' purpose. The Gospel of Luke (4:15) comes right out and says at the end of the forty days' temptation in the desert, When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.

The freedom to do anything we can get away with finds each of us vulnerable to satanic evil at certain points. Being tempted at our most vulnerable points will dog our steps, sometimes with almost overwhelming intensity, until we take no more steps in this world.

That is why we need a trusted Christian friend who knows our vulnerablity and encourages us to keep up the fight. Many a temptation increases in power over us, when we keep it to ourselves. That is why we need to be tenderhearted and forgiving and ready to restore, when a brother or sister in the Church is caught in sin. We are not indifferent to the sin; it calls for repentance. But we will stand with each other no matter what.