Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · February 25, 2007

First Sunday in Lent

Prayer of the Day

Lord, you know us and our hungers.  You love us like a father and nurture us like a mother.  In this hour of worship, O Lord, draw us closer to you and closer to each other.  Amen.

Scripture

Luke 4:1-13

As many of you know, this is the first of six Sundays of Lent, a season that leads us to Easter.  Lent is a word that comes from the Old English that means spring or springtime.  It is a time when the Church has called itself to spend time reflecting, reassessing, confessing, fasting, repenting, and trying to align ourselves more nearly with the purposes and goals of our Lord and Savior Jesus.  Our text today is one that many will remember and have heard many times.  It begins in Luke 4.  If you have your Bibles and want to follow along, you are more than welcome to do so.  Here begins the reading.

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from Jordan, from his baptism, and was led by the Spirit through the wilderness where for forty days he was tempted by the evil one.  During that time he ate nothing, and at the end of those days he was hungry.

The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell, turn, order, these stones to become breads.”

Jesus answered, “It is written, the Scriptures say: ‘Man can not, shall not, does not live by bread alone.’”

Then the evil one led him to a high place and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and said to him, “I will give you all of this, all of this power, glory, wealth, splendor, pleasure.  I am in charge of them all, and I can give them to, turn them over to anyone I choose.  Worship me.  Give yourself to me, and it’s all yours.”

But Jesus answered, “The Scripture also says: ‘Worship the Lord your God and the Lord your God only, and serve only your God.’”

Then the evil one led him to Jerusalem and had him stand at the highest point of the temple.  “If you are the Son of God, jump; for it is written, isn’t it, that God has placed you in the care of angels.  They will catch you.  You won’t so much as stub your toe on a stone.”

And Jesus answered, “It also says: ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

When the evil one had finished all these temptations, the devil departed, withdrew, left him, biding his time until his next opportunity.

This is the Word of the Lord for us this day.

Message

Make Your Choices and Act on Them Gladly

Rick Frost

I have a test.  It’s going to be fun.  What ever you do for the next twelve minutes, don’t even think about chocolate.  Don’t even think about a cool, refreshing glass of Chardonnay.  Don’t even think about a thick, juicy steak.  Don’t even think about sex. 

So, Elliott, Larry, what are you thinking about right now?  I know.  It’s Jesus.  That’s what I thought.  OK. 

You see, folks, it is hopeless.  Whatever someone tells you not to do, just the fact they do, just puts the idea in your mind.  Someone says, “Don’t yield to this.”  “Don’t do that.”  “Don’t do this.”  And bingo, it goes to work on us.  Doesn’t it?  Often just to see where it goes, we take the opposite track.  We go the opposite direction.  The evil one, folks, is very smart, crafty.  The evil one knows just how to pull the right strings, knows your vulnerability and my vulnerability, knows how to get to us. 

Now, the usual way we deal with this text, and we deal with it almost every year, is to focus on the one-on-one combat that takes place in the Scripture between Jesus and the evil one.  You’ve heard the story.  I just read it to you.  Jesus is freshly baptized, 33 years of age, led by the Spirit of the Living God into the wilderness for forty days.  Oh, by the way, for forty nights also, because you know that the nights are often the hardest part. 

How silly of us to think that if the Spirit of the Living God is leading us, that it is going to be a smooth, comfortable, pleasant place.  Not necessarily so. 

The tempting of Jesus is a powerful story.  The devil, as you know, offers Jesus everything.  He can have it all for the low, low price of his soul.  Forget God.  Forget self.  Worship.  That’s what the word “worship” means.  It means give yourself.  Give yourself completely.  Give yourself without reservation to me.  That’s what worship means.

Now, Christians, it seems to me, are divided into two groups these days.  The first don’t think that sin matters very much.  The second group knows perfectly well that it does but have really not much idea what it is.  That leaves us with a problem.  So my tactic today is going to be to try to put this thing called “temptation” into its context, because most of us in this room – you and I – are in the camp that’s trying our best to follow Jesus, and so dealing effectively and realistically with the reality of temptation, as I hope you will see in a few moments, is absolutely critical.

So let’s start out by saying upfront these things:  Yes, it would be wonderful if we lived in a perfect world.  It would be wonderful if we lived in a world without evil, but since that has certainly not been my experience and my doubt is yours, most of us would settle for a world where everything is fairly clear-cut.  Right? 

I think that is one of the big reasons we are so gaga in this land about sports.  In athletic competition, you know from the get-go who’s who.  It is real straightforward.  These guys in the black and gold jerseys are the good guys.  These other folks in these other jerseys are the bad guys.  It is a straight up dualism.  These folks over here are our friends.  These folks in this contest are our enemies.  And so, at the stadium, at the arena, on the course, or at the track, or maybe in front of our TV, we emerge from our sort of murky world where we live most of the time into the artificial bright light of athletic competition.  We enjoy, most of us, the luxury of an hour or two of our lives where things are fairly clear-cut.  These are the good guys.  These are the bad guys.  If our team is the underdog, so much the better, because it makes the win so much sweeter.  That’s the way, I think, most of us want life to be.  We want it straightforward.  We want it clear-cut.  Right is right.  Wrong is wrong.  No ifs, no ands, no buts, no grays, no in-betweens, no shadows.  I mean… It’s March Madness time, folks.  We have a race to run.  We all want to win.  Right?

The trouble with most of our views of temptation is that we are always hoping that Christianity will be more like an athletic event and less like real life.  Do you know what I’m talking about?

It’s no fluke, folks, that some of the fastest-growing churches in America are Fundamentalist churches.  Those are the folks who say, “This is what we have selected that you must do.  These are the things that we have selected that you may not do.  And if you do what you are not supposed to do, you are no longer welcomed here.  In fact, you are damned to hell.”

Now in case you didn’t already know this, Broadway is not generally a place Fundamentalists call home, because you and I have discovered something, I think, in our journey.  Haven’t we?  We’ve discovered that as we grow and as we mature, have you noticed that nothing is as straightforward as it once seemed?  You know what I’m talking about?  I think you do.

So the reason I can’t simply stand here and say the standard, usual things about temptation, I can’t tell you that everything in this world is clear-cut.  I can’t tell you there is always is a straight up choice between what is good and what is evil.  The reason I can’t do that is because I know you are smarter than that.

So, how do we get at this real, critical problem of temptation?  This stuff is very real.  It is the stuff that is pulling your string and it’s pulling my string.  What might a realistic victory in real life actually look like?  Or let’s put it another way, and I think this is even more important.  How do you and I get a grip on the things that are blocking, that are preventing, that are limiting our desire and our ability to follow Christ?

There are a lot of them.  Let me suggest three things that the scholars say go to the heart of the matter.

Number 1:

First, let’s define temptation.  Temptation: the desire to do something or to acquire something that one finds attractive and enticing, but knows is unwise, risky, dangerous, even wrong, and results in undesirable consequences.  That’s temptation. 

Temptation always takes...  Here’s number one.  It always takes as its starting point something, which in itself, is good.  Isn’t that interesting?  Dividing the world up into the good things and into the bad things simply doesn’t do for us.  Now, obviously, there is a distinction between what is good and what is evil.  That’s obvious and clear in some cases, most cases.  But we can’t get at it, folks, if we think we can see it by chopping up God’s creation. 

Chocolate, and money, and power are all part of God’s good and loving creation, as much as bread and water are.  Sex, in spite of what some people think, was God’s wonderful idea all along, and it still is.  Wine is such a great thing that Jesus once went to a wedding and made gallons of it.  The human emotions, especially those of falling in love, are so wonderfully important that an entire book in the Bible is devoted to it.  Is this dangerous talk?  It’s only dangerous for the dualists.  That’s the person who wants everything clear-cut, where everything is either right or it is wrong.

The serious Christian, I would suggest, realizes that sin, and I’m going to define that for you as an offense against God comes not in the thing itself, but as everyone in this room knows, from its misuse, whatever it is, when we take one of God’s good creations and treat it like it’s our toy.  Treat it as if it is our trash.  When we do that, we are wrong.

Now, I’m not talking just about surface stuff here.  I was just talking about wine, and bread, and chocolate.  Folks, I’ve been around Christians for quite some time, and I have learned that Christ-followers are often tempted at very, very deep levels. 

I know Christians who hate, reject, and deny some of the parts of God’s good world.  You and I know some Christians who even hate some of the parts of their own bodies.  You and I know Christians who hate some of the parts of their psyche, their mind, their imagination, their souls. 

See, we get into this football game going on inside of us when we find ourselves on this side of the parts that we like are playing against parts of us that we don’t like.  Here’s the bad news about that.  I don’t care who you are, if you play that game, you are going to lose.

Point?  The point is this.  You and I don’t have any bad parts.  All of our parts are good.  Our temptation, folks, however, is very real.  It always starts with some good part of God’s creation.  That’s Number One.

Number Two:

The temptation feels as though it’s appealing to our real selves, and that’s when you know.  Our real selves, our deepest instincts, our deepest longings, are, in fact, say the theologians, the starting point.  It always starts with something good, you see, and then it suggests, it entices, it lures you to elevate it out of its proper God-given context and into some different kind of setting where, yes, you get a thrill, but not the God-designed satisfaction.  You get a shot in the arm.  Yes.  But you don’t get the sustenance, the strength, the support you need for the long haul.  Indeed, what feels like the real you is, in fact, the leftovers of the old you that used to be rebellious against God.  That habit, whatever that habit might be, of using your God-given world, your God-given personality, your God-given body as if it were simply yours to use or abuse as you darn well please.  Folks, the key to biblical temptation is not our parts.  The key to temptation is our rebellion against God.  Pure and simple.

Number Three:

So, is there an answer?  Is there any answer?  Is there a way to deal with this critical problem of temptation?  The answer to temptation that really works, say the scholars, is this.  Find out, perhaps painfully and maybe over a long period of time, what it is about you that, at this moment, is out of shape.  It’s distorted, twisted, in pain.  Then, they say, you may begin to find out, again often painfully, how it is that the living God longs to help you to get what is distorted back into focus.  To get what is crooked and twisted back into shape.  To get what is bruised and hurt back into health.  That may take some time.  In fact, it probably will.  It will take prayer.  And there is every good reason to think it’s going to take some fasting.

Oh, and by the way, in case you didn’t know it, it’s A-OK in the Christian community to always ask for help.  Wise, spiritual, and practical guidance is part of your birthright as a member of the Body of Christ.  You need to know that.  Let me suggest Kim, Jacob, a Stephen Minister, a small-group leader, an elder, and oh, by the way, we have resources for professionals that go beyond our walls.

The point is to try to follow Jesus and battle with the reality of what tempts us is really what this struggle is all about.  And not to know that is sort of like trying to play football with your legs tied together.  It just doesn’t work.  I’m talking about real things here. 

Now, if you decide to take on the long-term project that will be wonderful, but you need to know that when you walk out the door there is going to be a temptation that is going to creep up on you and grab a hold of you.  What do you do?

The theologians say three things. 

1)     The first thing you do is thank God that you are a human being.  It comes with the territory.  Every single one of us struggles.  It’s the way we were made.  Instead of denying that, we affirm it and thank God for it. 

2)      This is the big one.  Pray for the grace to think and to choose responsibly.  Before you act, think and chose responsibly. 

3)     Recognize that in every moment of your life God longs to give you what will enhance and enrich your life and make it so much better in ways that rebellion never will.  Then, in the power of the Spirit of the Living God, make your choice and act on it gladly.  Wow!

And they say as we make those choices, and as we act, we may find to our surprise for some of us that, like Jesus, angels may come and minister to us in the process.

May it be, Lord.

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

You created us as beings with conscience and free will.  Help us to examine our needs.  Help us to accurately name these and bring them to your feet.  Here in your presence, may we choose what you would have us do, that which makes us whole, healthy, and glad!  Thank you for your grace and for your mercy.  Amen.