So we are looking at the temptation of Christ this morning at the gathering...my dad shared about his convo with my old pastor back in the 'burgh, Ken Culbertson, and his sermon/teaching on the passage and it peeked my interest. And since we are in the midst of Lent, when we remember Christ's temptation...it seemed fitting. Following Christ's baptism in Matthew 3, when voice from heave said, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased." We find Christ entering the wilderness, being led by the Spirit and facing the tempter.
The temptation that seems to be the foundation of them all is the temptation to be make your life about you and who you are...rather than about being who you have to be to complete your mission, rather than submitting to the will of the Father and fulfilling your purpose within the Trinity. There's more up front temptations: prove it to yourself, prove it to others, do it quicker and easier, be relevant, be spectacular, be powerful. But if you reduce it down to the fundamental temptation, Satan tries to get Christ to make his life on earth about himself and separate him from his mission and the trinity. If you are the Son of God, go ahead turn the stones into bread, your hungry right? Come on, if you are the Son of God, take a quick leap off the highest tower, let everyone see your being saved by the angels so they can believe too. Show off a little. I can give you what your mission is going to result in, but do it quicker and without that whole death thing...ya know, power over everything...
All of our temptations revolve around our looking out for ourselves and not placing ourselves under the Lordship of Christ. The temptation to eat when fasting is not so much a temptation to eat because we are hungry, but a temptation to rely on our decision to eat rather than the providence of God. A temptation to react in anger is because we feel like we have been violated...we are not fully confident in our identity as children of God...we don't trust God to handle the situation, so we have to act out. Temptation towards drugs, drink, porn, money, to distract ourselves with TV, facebook, and the like rather than engage the world around us is purely about self and our need to care for ourself because we don't think God can.
...and even in this moment, i react in annoyance, because I have been bothered, because my thinking and prep was interrupted by my wife who was trying to help....Lord have mercy.
Christ's countering the temptations rests on one thing...on the written and revealed Word of God. I'm sure the fact that the Spirit was present was a great strength giver...but for every question, poke, temptation, Christ responds with scripture. Christ doesn't even rely on his own strength to say no, but rather goes to the power of what is written to defend against temptations.
how many of us have walked into a situation where temptation is probably going to be present and thought, 'i got this. can't nobody hold me down.' and walked away, head down wondering where we went wrong...maybe it was before that temptation had shown up, it was walking under the pretense and false sense of our lack of need for God. when we entered the situation, we had already fallen because we thought we didn't need God...
think i'll close this with a tweet from twitturgies that just came across:
I do not seek to be an overcomer so much as to be overcome by you God. Conquer me completely. Knock me off my feet.amen
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