What to do in Lent - serve the Lord

Let us pray. May the study of your word bring us to a closer understanding of you Lord, and may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable to you, AmenToday, as you may have noticed by the readings, it is all about sin. …Well, what Sunday isn’t,… if sin is the opposite of living in God’s way then every service in some way addresses that need. Either in rejoicing for how God has provided a way in Jesus, or calling us to understand God’s way. Sin, and its opposite, following God, is A major theme of the Bible.

And what significant readings they were today. We have man’s first account of sin, in the Garden of Eden. Then the psalm today has a powerful message of God addressing sin. In the epistle to the Romans, Paul is dealing with the concept of justification, or… being right with God. And lastly, in the Gospel reading there is the story of the temptation of Jesus, his forty days in the wilderness. So… where should I begin? I don’t want to keep you here for hours, so I need to choose one … Well since it is the first Sunday in Lent, Christ's 40 days need to take precedence. But I would suggest that the passages today are too significant to miss and maybe as a Lenten exercise, you could all take home your bulletins this Sunday with the readings listed and spend more time mediating and studying God’s word. The readings today are so rich with meaning.

In reviewing the Gospel message I have the following central theme to share with you. We are to “Serve him with absolute single-heartedness.” This is a paraphrase from Peterson’s The message. I will say it again using more familiar words from today’s text “You shall worship the Lord your God and serve Him only”…. You are probably thinking to yourself, thanks…, thanks for that small suggestion. …

So let’s consider the passage and the context a little closer and you will see why I said what I said. First of all the reading is from Matthew’s gospel. Now, Matthew was one of the disciples, a tax collector and a Jew. At the time of the Roman occupation, Jews were used to collect taxes from other Jews, because they knew the people, they knew what they could get from them. The people were predominately working poor, slaves to their jobs to meet the heavy taxes imposed on them. In that time 1/3 of people were in fact slaves and many of them had become slaves because they had effectively been bankrupted into slavery. So Matthew as a tax collected would have been one of the most socially despised people. Yet Jesus chose him to be a disciple. And Matthew for his part turned from his ways and followed Jesus. As part of following Jesus, he later in life, wrote the most Jewish Gospel account. All of Matthew’s gospel is written to show who Jesus really is. The reading today has only three chapters before it and you can see how many times Matthew writes about who Jesus is

1st genealogy to the significance of Jesus
then there is Jesus’ conception, with the visit of the angel to Joseph

explaining how his ‘bride to be’ was pregnant
and how this is a fulfillment of the prophet Isaiah

then chapter 2 the visit from the magi

with more prophecy fulfilled by Bethlehem being the site of our Lord’s birth
there was the star in the sky that directed the magi

Then the angel appearing again to Joseph, warning of Herod’s jealous plan to kill the male babies of Bethlehem

This sent them away and later fulfilled of prophecy with Jesus coming out of Egypt

Then in chapter 3 the preaching of John the Baptist

Again the prophecy … with a ‘a voice in the wilderness’
The very content of John’s preaching ‘preparing the way for the Lord’

The baptism of Jesus with the descending of the dove, and a voice from heavens – stating that “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased”

Matthew’s message is the Gospel, and the “good news” is Jesus (pause)

So now we get to the text for today. First Jesus after being so clearly identified is lead by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. It’s at this point, as one literal translation puts it … He hungered, that is when the tempter arrives. Now just as the snake in the garden, the tempter is crafty, he uses scriptural story to challenge Jesus saying if you are the son of God turn these stones into bread. Jesus responds with scripture from Deuteronomy 8:3 “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”

Now I would like to pause for a moment to say, here is a real pearl. The Bible is not an answer book in that one can run all details of one’s life, what I mean is, you don’t go to the bible to decide if you should repair your car or should buy a new one, or if you should drive or take the bus or train. But today we have one of the answers that you can bank on, that you can shape your life around - "“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’” The essence of how we should live our lives is found in the full - every word – meaning of bible, we are to study all of the scriptures, not just the parts that suit our needs, but every word for how to live.

So back to the text, the devil then takes Jesus up to the top of the temple, to the pinnacle, the place where a trumpet is sounded and major news is told to the entire city. And challenges Jesus to throw himself down and using more scripture (Psalm 91:11-12) and that “with their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.” Jesus seeing the tempters work, counters with more scripture saying “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.’” (from Deuteronomy 6:16).

Finally the devil took Him up on a very high mountain where He could see the kingdoms and all their glory below Him, the whole world below him, and the devil offers them to Jesus if only he falls down and worships the devil. To this Jesus tells the devil to “go away, and again citing Deuteronomy says ‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.’”. To this the devil leaves and the angels come to minister to Jesus.

Notice the Devil has no doubt who Jesus is, He identifies Jesus as the “son of God” and how the he has powers over the stones to become bread or that the angels will catch him from the top of the temple and finally will give Him power over the whole world, wanting only for Jesus to worship him. But Jesus sees the threefold temptation for what it is, sin,

To despair of his Father's goodness…

To presume upon his Father's power…

To alienate his Father's honour…

Notice also the wording that Jesus uses and Matthew is careful to recite, the Lord, Your God. Not only the Lord that created everything, but also the Your God, the personal God that knows each one of us.

The text today speaks of the temptation of Jesus, this is not to illustrate how He beat temptation or who Jesus was, because just before this passage we had the definitive statement “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.” The temptation is there for us to understand that Jesus suffered as we do, and was tempted as we are.

“ For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.” (Heb 4:15)

So we have from all of Matthew a very clear message of who Jesus is, and we have our Lord being tempted and living as we live. We have, in the start of Jesus ministry –to reflect on the kind of person he was – not by a display of power or authority as we might think to use – but to display the power with the word of God (which is available to all of us).

I would like to share with you a story I was told during my first year of College. It was about a man on his first day of work after being unemployed for quite some time. The phone rings and someone is looking for the owner of the company. While he was taking the call, the owner was walking by and overheard half of the conversation, he was waving the man off, indicating that the man should tell the person of the other end that he is not in. The man ignores the boss and passes the phone over. After the call the boss is fuming, here is this guy on his first day of work, disobeying him and getting him to talk to a person that he had been trying to avoid. What is the man’s response “if you want me to lie to a stranger on a phone, how can you ever trust that I wouldn’t lie to you in my job?” This man was facing temptation head on. On one hand there is an easy lie and the ramification great, it is his first day on the job, he has been without work for some time, and no doubt he needed the job. To say that his boss is out of the office, what could be easy, especially when faced with the prospect of loosing his job. Often, temptations are small events like this. But it is in every thing we do that we choose to live within God’s ways or against them. The boss didn’t fire him, and later went on to be Lord something of Mark’s and Spencer, a major English retailer and this man prospered to be his most trusted and longest standing employee.

Where have you been tempted this week, has it been big trails with a major decision. Or has it been in small events of little significance. They all count, not that we should understand God as a judge keeping score, but they count to us, to our character, we know ‘when our heads hit the pillow’ at night if we have submitted to temptation, large or small. We know if we have been living in a way that would be pleasing to God, The temptation by the devil for Jesus was both big and small, in one temptation Jesus was offered the kingdoms of the world and in another more subtle way something small like satisfying his hunger. I mean, imagine that you are God and after 40 days and nights of fasting when you are hungry, and weak… to change stones in bread, what’s the big deal? The big deal is who did the temping and whose advice Jesus would be following which would be to despair the goodness of God.

Consider what you will do for Lent this year, will it be big or small? Just as the New Year brings resolutions for our health, such as quitting smoking or exercising more. Lent gives us Christians a unique time to give up something or to start something to focus on God. When you are attempting to do whatever it is that you have decided to give up for Lent, replace that urge with time in prayer or reflection to God Or maybe a further study of the scriptural passages from this Sunday’s service…. In Lent, temptation is faced more specifically then the rest of the year,… So… “Serve the Lord, YOUR God with absolute single-heartedness.” Amen