City Church Dublin
Sermons preached at City Church Dublin. Love God. Love People. Love Dublin.
City Church Dublin
Luke 4:1-13
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This is Luke chapter four, verses one through thirteen. And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil, and he ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread. And Jesus answered him, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone. And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And he said to him, To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you then will worship me, it will all be yours. And Jesus answered him, It is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, He will command his angels concerning you to guard you, and on their hands they will bail you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. And Jesus answered him, It is said, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time. This is the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_02Fantastic. Welcome to you. If you join us while we're singing, my name is Mark. I'm one of the leaders here at City Church. If you could have that passage open in front of you that Grace uh read for us, it was supposed to be Mark 4, 1 to 30. Uh, and I got to the end of writing 1 to 13. I thought, wow, I feel like that's a whole sermon. Uh so there you go. If you feel shortchanged, we'll uh get to it next week. But we're going to be looking at the uh the temptations of Jesus now this morning in Luke chapter 4. If you need a Bible, there is uh one here just underneath the uh the offering box, you can uh dash down and and grab one. If you don't have a Bible at all, you can even take it home with you as our free gift uh to you. Imagine for a second uh that uh into our gathering here this morning uh walked uh Satan himself. Now I don't imagine he'll have a tail and a pitchfork, probably come in quite nicely, smartly dressed, might even wear a jacket. It's not me. Um come in this morning, he'd sit down beside you, and he'd begin to whisper in your ear and ask you, what do you want? What would uh what would get you out of here? What would stop you coming along? What would turn your attention away from following Jesus? What would it be? Maybe it would be success, advancement, getting that uh that career, that promotion that you've always wanted, because it will come with the approval of your family, of your peers. Maybe it'll be love. Maybe it comes and whispers in your ear and saying, I will make sure that you are never lonely again. I will bring you the love of your life. Would that entice you? Or riches, no more worries about where the money is gonna come from to pay the next bill, comfort, status, all the things that come with wealth. Say the word and it will be done. What do each of these things have in common? Is it wrong to be successful? No. Is it wrong to find love? No. Is it even wrong to have money? No, not in itself. Success isn't sinful, love isn't wrong, money isn't evil. The devil loves to use good things to entice you away from God. And that's exactly what he's doing here with Jesus. Jesus is hungry. Is it wrong for him to have a sandwich? No. There's nothing sinful about him eating. Jesus is the king. Is it wrong, therefore, that his kingship be acknowledged by every realm of this world? No, not for him. Jesus trusts his father and his father loves him. And so is it wrong for that to be put on display? No, not in itself. But this is how the devil gets under our skin. See, we wrongly think of the devil in in horror movie terms, in possession terms, but how the devil loves to work is to use our physical needs or our desires or psychological longings for approval, love, and success to entice us. They're the bait on the hook that will really get us. He even uses spiritual language. Did you see? He starts quoting the Bible back to Jesus. He gets on to Jesus' rhythm and he's like, ah, I'm gonna give Jesus a verse. Have you ever justified something in your head with a verse just taken out of context? Just makes you feel better about the thing that really you want to do anyway. I realize that some of you here this morning might hear talk about the devil and uh think that that's a little bit ridiculous. Haven't we moved on from chat about uh Satan and demons and uh pitchforks and cloven hooves and horns and things like that? Uh we in our modern world prefer not to think of evil in these ways. We think that evil is something that can be explained away. It's a it's a sociological problem. It's to do with systems and injustices, it's to do with uh lack, poverty, lack of education. If only people knew, then they wouldn't treat other people like this. Or we psychologize evil. We say, well, no, it's because of it's because of past uh trauma, abuse, fear that somebody has acted in a particular way. And of course there is an element of truth in all of that, but the danger in believing that that's all there is that's going on in our world is that it reduces the problem of evil down to something that we think that we can manage. It reduces the problem of evil down to something that we think that we can fix by improving the side the sociological systems, by helping people, psychology by meeting physical needs, then the world will be less wicked. But history tells us otherwise. You think of the 1930s, what happened in the 20th century. Many ordinary people in Germany knew that something was up, they knew that something was wrong, but they couldn't imagine how wrong. Even world leaders, FDR was the president in America, and he couldn't possibly get his head around the fact that the Nazis would do what they did in the Holocaust. It was unbelievable. It was not what a civilized society would do. They thought, well, the Germans give us uh so much in terms of education and industry and advancement. They were a modern power. How could they do such wickedness? And so a blind eye was turned for such a long time, not because the evil uh was invisible, but because the evil was unimaginable. Because we think of evil in sociological, psychological, or biological terms. And if history teaches us anything, it's that evil usually succeeds because people are naive to it. Because people don't believe that it's really possible. A belief in Satan and demons, therefore, is actually, for the Christian, it's far from naive. We understand, we see it in the world, we understand that this thing that has happened, there are no other reasons, other than we live in a spiritual world, and as Paul says, our warfare is not against flesh and blood. Jesus is not naive. Jesus at the start of our passage in Luke chapter four, he doesn't walk naively into the wilderness. This is something that we looked at back in our Holy Spirit series, but it's worth re-emphasizing if you haven't been here, uh, is that Jesus in the start of Luke chapter four is going on the offensive. Don't think of Luke chapter four in terms of Jesus is trying to get a little bit of peace and quiet, and he so he stumbles uh on into the wilderness for like a retreat getaway time, and uh the the devil, somebody who he's never seen or recognized before, suddenly ambushes them. Now that's not what Luke tells us. What Luke tells us is that the Holy Spirit, operating like a commanding general, sends the Son of God into the wilderness in order to take on this being. He tells us that Jesus is full of the Spirit and is led into the wilderness by the power of the Spirit in order to face Satan. It is a clear-eyed, offensive move by the Son of God against evil. And here Jesus is tempted or tested, not as punishment from God, but as proof of who he is. Because when we were in chapter three, what we looked at uh last week in chapter three concluded with the baptism of Jesus. And how does the baptism of Jesus uh finish? Well, it's the voice speaking from heaven. The father says, What? He says, This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. There is this declaration of sonship, and then the bit that we didn't get to in chapter three was the genealogy of Jesus tracing through Mary's line, which concludes chapter three with saying that Jesus is the son of Adam, the son of God. Luke three is making the case Jesus is the son of God, and the devil comes along and says, Prove it. Prove it. Vindicate yourself. And now this second Adam comes again face to face with the snake. And where the first Adam fell, the great son of Adam, the Son of God, will stand. And the first temptation shows us exactly how. You see, we want relief from our sufferings, from our desires. We want relief without dependence, but Jesus chooses trust. Verses one to four, that's our first point. We want relief without dependence, Jesus chooses trust. Pick it up with me in verse one. And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil, and ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. And the devil said to him, If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread. And Jesus answered him. It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone. See Luke telling us that Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days. This is supposed to be an echo. We're supposed to be thinking Old Testament thoughts. We're supposed to be having our minds going back to the people of Israel in the wilderness, not for 40 days, but for 40 years. That's right. That was their period of testing. Luke wants us to remember this because Jesus in this whole narrative is succeeding where others have failed. So he is standing against the snake where Adam fell, and he is exercising dependence upon his father, where Israel turned in faithlessness and began to grumble and look back at Egypt and go, well, we had we had meat pots there, and where's the bread gonna come from? And Jesus is going to win where they fail. And that's gonna become very important later on. Luke's what Luke wants us to remember this. And we're told that Jesus is hungry, his hunger is real because Jesus is fully human and has experienced all of the uh the trials and tribulations of life in the physical, and so he's hungry, and Satan comes to test him. And surely it is no sin for the son of God to have what he needs to live. Who could begrudge him some bread? And if you are God's son, surely you have the power to turn this stone into bread. Where is the harm in the Son of God satisfying his hunger? Where is the hook in this bait? Where's the lie beneath the offer? Here's the lie that Satan is tempting Jesus with. Are you ready? It's this. Your needs, your desires, your longings give you permission to act independently of God. If you feel this yearning, this hunger, this desire in you, well, because that's there and God hasn't satisfied it, then you can act on your own to satisfy it without him. That's what Satan is saying to Jesus, saying, why don't you, your God has left you hungry? Why don't you satisfy your hunger? Satan's test, therefore, is not primarily about food, but about dependence. Will Jesus rely upon the provision of his father or will he take matters into his own hands? Put it another way, will Jesus say to himself, My Father has kept me hungry for a reason, and that reason is not because he doesn't care about me. That reason is not because he doesn't love me. How often do we find ourselves in seasons of longing, of hunger for that love, success, wealth, comfort, whatever it is, and we think that what is motivating God is that either he's forgotten about us or that he is being punitive against us, he's punishing us for something. Rather than thinking God has placed me in this season of longing for a particular reason, and he remains good, and I will trust him until he brings me through and provides for me. Because he has seen me, he knows me, he loves me. That is what Jesus is being tempted with, and that is what we're tempted with all the time, and we fail in that all the time, don't we? We take matters into our own hand, we satisfy our own longings and desires rather than waiting for the provision of our Heavenly Father who loves us. One of the things that you'll notice if you read the Gospel's account, the Gospel account of Jesus' life here in Luke or in any of the other three, when you read of Jesus performing a miracle, one of the things that you will notice is glaringly absent. Jesus never performs a miracle for his own ends. You realize that? Jesus never performs a miracle in order to satisfy something in himself. His power is always used in service of others. Isn't that amazing? His power is always used in service of others. If Jesus turns the stone into bread, then he would cease, like Adam, to live as a dependent son, relying upon his father. He would stop, like Israel in the wilderness, trusting in his father's provision. His response. All of Jesus' responses are taken from three chapters in the book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 6, 7, and 8, where Moses is saying to the Israelites, don't be faithless, don't turn your back. And they do. Jesus deliberately pulling those verses out for us to go, I am the true Israel, I am the people of God, and I will win where others have failed. I will triumph over Satan, sin, death, where others have fallen. And so he quotes Deuteronomy 6 and he says, Man shall not live by bread alone. Not because bread is unimportant, but because obedience is essential. Dependence is non-negotiable. Where do we justify our independence? Because the pressure feels too much or illegitimate. Where do we say to ourselves, well, surely God understands that I need this thing? So we take matters into our own hands. We often want relief. More than we want trust. Jesus chooses obedience and so stands where we have fallen. Second temptation. We want victory without suffering. Jesus chooses the cross. Let's pick it up again, verse five. The devil took him and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said to him, To you I will give all of this, all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you then will worship me, it will be yours. And Jesus answered him, It is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. Luke says that in a moment of time Jesus sees all of the kingdoms of the world. Imagine it. And Satan offers them all to him. If only Jesus will bow the knee and worship him. There's some curiosities here, isn't there? What's really going on? Satan, as he so often does, is distorting reality. He's distorting reality and claiming that he can deliver on this promise. Certainly he holds some sway over the kingdoms of this world, but that sway that he holds is given to him by another. But isn't this often part of the lie of sin? Isn't this how the little voices whisper in our ears? They promise us things that they know that they can't deliver, and yet they Their claims are far more grandiose than how it all turns out. And of course, we know that Jesus will be the one who will rule over every kingdom. And so the temptation, therefore, is not about outcome. Jesus will reign over every kingdom. No, the temptation is about the root. In what way will Jesus become the globally cosmically recognized king? Satan is saying to Jesus, take all of this. Without the suffering of the cross, you don't have to go to the cross. You don't have to experience that unimaginable suffering, pain, shame, ignominy. Just bow the knee. It's so easy. And it will get you to the same result. Why suffer? Why follow this father of yours who just wants pain for you when you can get all of it just by bowing the knee? So enticing, isn't it? All of the payoff and none of the suffering. All of the glory and none of the pain. Take the crown without the cross. The only price is to change your allegiance, Jesus. Worship me and we will rule together. Jesus responds, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. Pause. Take a moment. Do you realize what just happened in Jesus' answer? You shall worship the Lord your God alone and him only shall you serve. You read on past it. Do you realize what just happened there? Do you realize how important that is? Your whole salvation just hung on that answer. Do you realize that? That if Jesus had gone, yeah, all right then, we're toast. Your whole eternal destiny just hung in the balance there. And Jesus succeeded. He won. For you and for me. That's how crucial that answer was. Jesus was offered the same choice as Adam. Glory! Without obedience. You will be like God. Turn your back on him. But unlike Adam, his obedience. His obedience would have led straight to life. But Christ knows that his obedience will lead him to death. Christ knows that his obedience would lead him to the cross, and yet he stands where we have fallen. Third temptation. But Jesus entrusts himself to his father. Verse nine. And he, that's the devil, took him, Jesus, to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, He will command his angels concerning you to guard you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. And Jesus answered him, It is said, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time. He realized that the devil knows the Bible better than you do. So he quotes Psalm 91 Adam. So, well, surely it's God's will to preserve you, to keep you alive, to show you off to the world. And so he takes them to the temple and he sets him at the highest point. It's this uh corner in the southeast uh wall of the temple precinct, uh, overlooking a 120-foot drop over the uh the Kidron Valley there in Jerusalem, and Satan and Jesus stand there. It could well be that Satan is telling Jesus to publicly show his sonship, a visible proof to everyone that God cares about him. But maybe the devil is simply saying you can have the acceptance of the crowd without any of their rejection. Who hasn't felt the pull of that lie? We want the adulation, we want the praise of people around us. We don't want any of their thinking ill of us, rejecting us, despising us. But behind it all, something subtler and more insidious is going on for Jesus. It is about whether his father can be trusted to care for him. Perhaps the devil is looking at Jesus and saying, he didn't stop Adam from falling. Why didn't he? Will he really stop you? Are you so confident in his love that you know that he will stay with you right through to the end? Are you sure he will stay with you beyond the cross? Will he bring you through to resurrection? How do you know? Prove it. Are you sure? I would want some reassurances before I walk that road. Think of it as a good faith down payment, Jesus. Jump. Force him to prove that he cares for you. Jesus responds, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Faith does not demand signs. Each time the Son meets Satan with scripture. Why? Why does Jesus keep on quoting the Bible back at Satan? Is it that Satan's like a like a vampire? And say, right? Like that. Is it just that you you just you can throw a throw a verse out like it's like it's magic words? Maybe that's how we think about evil. And you watch the exorcist movies, and they're just they're just quoting whatever, and the the demons are like ah, and the heads are spinning round and whatever else. Is that what Jesus is doing? He's trying to scare him off with a little bit of Bible. Now, the reason why Jesus keeps on assaulting Satan with scripture is because the best weapon against the lies that the devil tells you is the truth that God has already told you. The devil will get under your skin by whispering lies in your ear. He loves to tell you lies about God, that he's mean-spirited, that he's forgotten you, that he doesn't care for you, that he's not there. He loves to tell you lies about other people. They think you're ridiculous. How dare you stand up there and say these things? Nobody likes you. How could you be loved? Nobody respects you. Lies. He tells you lies about yourself. The devil loves to lie. And the way that we combat the lies of the devil, the way that we disarm and thwart his power is by the truth. That is what Jesus is doing. Luke tells us that Satan departed until he had another opportunity. Sounds ominous, doesn't it? Because that opportunity arrived. That opportunity arrived, we're told in Luke chapter 22, that Satan entered Judas. What does that mean? Does that mean that uh that Judas was suddenly kind of possessed in a horror movie way with the eleven disciples uh kind of going, there's something weird about Judas, and Judas is there with his head kind of spinning? Is that what it means? Have you noticed a change in Judas Batman? No. Is that all of the envy that Judas felt, all of the greed, because he was stealing the money that he felt, all of the lies, through all of those lies, Satan had gotten under Judas's skin and into his heart. All of that resentment bubbled over, and he betrayed him. The opportunity arrived with Peter, also. Jesus says to Peter, Satan has asked me for you. He's asked to sift you like wheat. That is an image of he wants to show that actually there's no substance there in you, Peter, and you'll just be driven away by the wind of suffering. But I have prayed for you. The opportunity arrived with him and the disciples as they fled, and the Son of God stood abandoned and alone. The opportunity arrived as the religious leaders mocked and cried out, Come down from the cross. Wasn't that a satanic plea? Come down, save yourself. Show us that you are the Son of God. Same thing is happening here. And yet the Son of God did not serve himself. He did not relieve his hunger in the wilderness, and he does not alleviate his suffering upon the cross. He would not receive glory from any other, but went the way of obedience to his father, even if that meant death upon a cross. He cried, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Knowing that his father will not abandon his soul to death or let his holy one see corruption. Adam grasped, and Israel grumbled, and we repeatedly choose freedom and independence over relief and trust. And in the midst of it all, Jesus stood. In the midst of it all, he is victorious. He has won where we have lost. He has stood where we have fallen. And because he stood, we are not abandoned when we fall. Because he won, he covers us in his victory. This victory sets free all who would trust in Jesus. And he arms us against the devil's lies. We need not just Jesus to die for our sins. We need him to succeed in obedience where we have failed. Because when you become a Christian, it's not just that Jesus clears the debt of your sin and brings you up to kind of zero in your account, right? It's that because he triumphs here, because he succeeds where Adam failed, where Israel failed, where you and I have failed, because he is victorious, where we have lost, his victory on the cross becomes ours. And so it's not just that our sin is taken, but also that his perfect, obedient, victorious life covers us. It becomes ours through faith in him. The devil will entice you with what you need and what you think you deserve, and then he'll accuse you for taking it. What sort of Christian do you call yourself? How do we resist him? We rest in the victory won for us. We claim the truth against the lies. The truth. That the Father, though he may lead us into seasons of lack, of poverty, of hunger, of darkness and of spiritual dryness, that he has not forgotten us, that he has not abandoned us, that he will allow the face of his goodness to shine upon us again, that he will bring us through every season, every storm and trial. Because we are his. We are his because of Jesus, because of his perfect obedience, and he will finally bring us into his glory. May each of us by the same power of the spirit that Jesus depended on that drove him into the wilderness. That same spirit is amongst you and I. You and I who trust in Jesus have access to the same spirit against or with whom Jesus resisted the temptations of the devil. May we depend on that spirit today, this week, as we answer the lies of the evil one, of the truth of who God is, the truth of what he has done for us, the truth of who he says we are in him. May God bless you. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we praise you for your victory. We thank you for your obedience, your trust, your reliance, your dependence upon the Father. Even though it would lead you to the shame of the cross. But that was the road of victory. That was the way of glory. Thank you that your victory covers our failings. Your perfect life covers our sin. Help us to rest upon that victory today. Help us to know. To know in the depths of our heart, our soul. The truths that you have spoken over us. That we are forgiven, that we are set free, that we are yours through faith. And may we stand against the lies of the evil one. Give us the help and the strength of your Holy Spirit, we ask. In your precious name. Amen.
SPEAKER_00If you found this helpful or want to know more about City Church Dublin, visit our website found in the links below.