Luke 4:1-13 Hearing God in the Wilderness
Today we begin the season of Lent,
traditionally a 40-day season of repentance in the life of the church.
It’s a time for looking clearly at who we are and what God is calling us to be.
It’s a time to try to pick out God’s voice among the noise and confusion
of all the voices that clutter our lives. A time for listening for God.
For these six weeks, we will be listening for God
as we journey through Lent to Easter.
Today’s scripture reading is probably familiar to many of you.
Every year, in churches everywhere, the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness
is the lectionary reading for the first Sunday of Lent.
We don’t ease into Lent gently.
We get right into the heavy stuff -- like temptation, and the devil, and sin.
These subjects are not as popular as they once were in the church.
Some of you probably grew up with good old hellfire and brimstone preaching
where if nothing else, church scared you into believing.
Almost as a backlash to that, nowadays,
many of us go to worship and we want to hear the good news.
We want to hear about God’s grace,
not about sin and the devil and hellfire and brimstone and judgment.
Life is hard enough -- who needs to turn Sunday into a guilt trip?
Besides, in the last 3 or 4 decades,
our culture has been slowly shifting from taking responsibility for ourselves
to blaming others when we can.
Just last week I was reading about the executive from IBM
who was fired for using work time to surf pornography sites.
But the twist in this story is that he is suing IBM
because he contends that his addiction is a disorder
that deserves his employer’s concern, not a pink slip.
Whatever your opinion is on this story, the point is still the same:
this executive isn’t going to solve his problem
until he takes some responsibility for giving into his temptations.
Whether it’s popular or not, sin is real. Temptations assault us every day.
Sometimes we struggle with tests in our own lives
that leave us feeling lost and alone in the wilderness.
There are so many competing voices in our head
and our choices don’t seem all that clear.
Temptation is deceptive.
According to Fred Craddock, famous Disciple preacher,
real temptation is not an incentive to fall, but to rise.
If the church can’t help us sort through this, then who can?
So today, on this first Sunday of Lent,
we’re going to look at temptation and how to listen for God’s voice
when we’re struggling with it.
Before we look at the specific temptations,
there are a couple of things you need to understand about today’s reading from Luke.
First of all, we need to note that Jesus faced these tests
as a human being, not a divine being.
The way we know this is that we are told he hasn’t eaten for 40 days
and that he’s hungry. Being hungry is a human thing.
This is an important point;
otherwise we might just dismiss the whole story by saying
“well of course Jesus is going to win out over the devil - after all he’s the Son of God.” No, Jesus was hungry. And that makes his testing a very human experience.
Also, notice that these tests were slippery tests,
because they looked just close enough to a good thing,
that it was hard to know for sure just why it would be such a bad thing
to turn a stone into loaf of bread -- doesn’t God promise to supply our every need?
Or to take charge of the world -- after all Jesus was the Son of God --
who better to lead the world?
Or to leap into the arms of angels --
his Father in heaven would surely protect him, wouldn’t he?
What we’re hearing is the voice of the devil. Deceptive. Enticing.
Sounds like a friend even.
It was the only voice we heard in
the desert with Jesus.
Yet somehow that voice didn’t drown out the voice of God.
Each time the devil speaks, Jesus has an answer
and it’s always straight from the scriptures.
The first temptation was such a small one.
But Jesus knew what Satan also knew:
very often, temptations begin in a small way.
One toe in, just to test the waters, and pretty soon we’re in over our heads.
So Jesus had an answer ready: “we do not live by bread alone.”
Those who heard this verse would have known the rest of it, too,
for Jesus was quoting from the Old Testament, which his listeners knew so well.
“We don’t live by bread alone,” Jesus said,
“but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
Jesus arms himself with that word for each test that followed.
He is so immersed in the scriptures
that he uses them to rebut every temptation the devil throws at him.
Jesus can resist the
devil’s offers
because he has heard
God’s voice so often thru the scriptures.
The other thing that helped Jesus resist the voice of the devil was prayer.
Although prayer is not specifically mentioned here,
the gospel of Luke usually connects a time in the wilderness
with a time of prayer. Luke
Luke
and he spent the night in prayer to God.
Fasting and praying were part of Jesus’ regular spiritual practices
which gave him the strength to stand resist the temptation he faced.
A great missionary, E. Stanley Jones of the early 20th century,
said this about prayer:
“When prayer fades out, power
fades out.”
Jesus had the power to win this show-down with the devil
because he lived a life of prayer.
Besides prayer and scripture, there is something else.
Jesus was not exactly alone in the desert.
He is full of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit stays with him --
as a comfort, advocate, guide, source of strength -- in his wilderness testing.
Without this Holy Spirit, without regular practices that keep us close to God,
it can be hard to hear the voice of God among all the voices
that demand our attention every day.
This story speaks to us because the tempting voices in it sound so familiar.
The first one is about fear and getting our needs met.
It sounds like this: how can you be sure you’re going to have enough?
Enough money, love, security, friends, time?
Wouldn’t it be better to grab and hoard
all you can, while you can
so there is enough for you?
That’s the only way you’ll be okay.
It is a human temptation to think and live as if there is never enough.
But living this way is not the way God created us to be.
The second temptation is a little trickier to hear
because it’s about greed and power and what we will worship to get it.
It would be easy to dismiss this one as unrealistic.
Of course Jesus would never agree to worship the devil. Neither would we!
But the devil can be in disguise. We don’t always recognize him.
What we’re doing may seem like a good thing.
But anything that we prioritize over God can become a false god.
Today’s idols are more in the self than on the shelf, someone recently said.
If we prioritize our work over all else - success and achievement become our god.
If we prioritize our children over all else - the perfect family becomes an idol.
If we prioritize our fitness or health over all else - we idolize our own bodies.
If we prioritize physical gratification - thru alcohol or sex or drugs or food -
these begin to have a control over us that replaces God’s authority.
These can be loud voices shouting for our attention.
It can be hard to hard to hear God in all this noise.
The third test is about testing God.
Whenever we are tested by life’s difficulties and choices,
it is an easy thing to slip into testing God. This voice sounds like this:
How can you be sure God is with you? How do you know you can trust God?
When Jesus was tempted NOT to trust God, he answered back,
“Don’t you dare test
the Lord your God.”
The story that best explains what it means to test God
comes straight from the scriptures.
But you have to do a little Bible study to know what’s going on.
Here Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy,
but if you read the notes in a study Bible and turn to
Deuteronomy
you’ll see another reference to a story from Exodus 17 when the Hebrews tested God.
If we listen to this story, we’ll understand this testing of God and how often we do it.
This translation also comes from the contemporary The Message:
Directed by God, the whole company of
moved on by stages from the Wilderness of Sin.
They set up camp at Rephidim.
And there wasn’t a drop of water for the people to drink.
The people took Moses to task: “Give us water to drink.”
But Moses said, “Why pester me? Why are you testing God?”
But the people were thirsty for water there.
They complained to Moses,
“Why did you take us from
with our children and animals to die of thirst?”
Moses cried out in prayer to God,
“What can I do with these people? Any minute now they’ll kill me!”
God said to Moses,
“Go on out ahead of the people, taking with you some of the
elders of
Take the staff you used to strike the
I’m going to be present before you there on the rock at Horeb.
You are to strike the rock. Water will gush out of it and the people will drink.”
Moses did what he said, with the elders right there
watching.
He named the place Massah (Testing-Place) and Meribah (Quarreling)
because of the quarreling of the Israelites and
because of their testing of God when they said,
“Is God here with us
or not?”
Isn’t that the cry that comes out of our mouths when we face difficulties?
Isn’t the temptation
to blame God for
everything rather than to trust God with anything?
Is God here with us
or not? It’s the deepest cry of our
lives.
There are many voices out there, promising answers to this and other questions.
Giving us false hope, offering weak solutions.
Sometimes these voices shout for our attention.
Sometimes these voices sound like friends.
But these voices are NOT the voice of God.
We sometimes find ourselves very far away from God,
so far away that it’s hard to hear the voice of God.
And so we wonder: Is God here with us or not?
The answer is a very loud YES.
But to hear that voice, we need to draw near to God.
We need to spend time with God, in prayer and reading the scriptures.
Dallas Willard is a speaker and writer on Christian spirituality
and he reminds us that Grace is free – we don’t have to earn it.
But that relationship with God requires some effort on our part.
This season of Lent,
Where we are encouraged to take a hard look at ourselves,
Offers us the opportunity to draw near to God.
God is calling each of us to come closer.
Are we listening for his voice?