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Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent – March 9, 2025
Luke 4:1-13
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
In our adult Bible study recently we talked about the Christian life as a battle. The conversation arose out of our looking at St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, specifically in chapter 6 where he writes: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” Paul then goes on to describe what the armor of God is: It is the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness and shield of faith and the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit. These are spiritual weapons for a spiritual battle.
On the one hand, this sounds utterly foreign to many people. To think of life as a spiritual battle sounds like something from medieval times or out of a fantasy novel. To talk about “standing against the wiles of the devil,” as Paul says, sounds a little too woo-woo for some. As children of the Enlightenment, rationalism has shaped our minds in powerful ways. It has made us quick to dismiss spiritual realities, particularly the reality of the devil. The devil prefers it this way, you know. As C.S. Lewis once quipped, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.”
Many of us, then, are predisposed to dismiss the whole idea of spiritual warfare. But when I started to describe this spiritual battle in our Bible study as a struggle between belief and unbelief, between hope and despair, between fear and trust, between obeying our appetites and obeying God, between living by faith or grasping for control, well, then heads started nodding around the room. When you start to talk about the devil in the way the Bible describes him – not as a little man in a red leotard with a pitchfork, but as an accuser, as a deceiver, as a tempter – well, then the devil becomes an enemy that people start to recognize. This is a battle people are familiar with. This is a battle you are in. We all are, whether we realize it or not.
St. Paul encourages us to put on the whole armor of God for this battle, and in our gospel reading for today Jesus teaches us how to use this armor.
Jesus was let by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he engaged in spiritual hand-to-hand combat with the devil. This was like a spiritual karate match in the desert, with Jesus deflecting every blow.
The first attack the devil attempted was to exploit Jesus’ hunger. After forty days of fasting in the wilderness, St. Luke tells us, Jesus was famished. And with his appetite raging, he was vulnerable. You’ve probably heard that it is a bad idea to go grocery shopping when you’re hungry? Well, the devil knows this too! Our appetites have a way of lowering our defenses, lowering our inhibitions, weakening our resolve. You can bet that the enemy will attack us at this same point, at our appetites – both physical and emotional. The devil will exploit the hunger in our bodies and the feelings in our hearts in order to lead us astray.
While his stomach was in knots, writhing with hunger, the devil tempted Jesus to command a stone to become a loaf of bread. There was nothing inherently wrong with this. Jesus would miraculously provide bread on other occasions in his ministry. But Jesus would not obey his appetite when that meant obeying the devil. And so Jesus deflected this attack by quoting from scripture. He quoted from Deuteronomy 8:3, saying, “One does not live on bread alone.” Jesus stops there, just referencing the first half of the sentence, but the rest of the verse is implied, and is just as important. The complete sentence is: “One does not live on bread alone, but from every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
We all have hungers and we all have feelings. But neither of these define what is true. Neither define what is good for us, necessarily. We must obey God rather than our appetites. Our appetites need to be kept in check by the Word of God.
The next attack was to tempt Jesus with an easy route to having authority over all the kingdoms of the earth. All Jesus had to do was worship the devil. All he had to do was bend the knee. This was a sneaky move. Both the devil and Jesus knew perfectly well that Jesus already had authority over all of these kingdoms, over all of creation itself. After all, he was the Son of God! What the devil was offering here was an easy route to establishing that authority. Touching his knee to the ground would have been a whole lot easier than dying for the sin of the world. Bowing before the devil would have been so much easier than going to the cross. This could be the shortcut to glory by which Jesus could avoid all of that nasty business awaiting him in Jerusalem, and Gethsemane, and Golgotha.
You can be sure the devil will try this tactic on us too, laying before us what looks like an easier way of doing things, trying to lure us away from God by showing us another path – the path of least resistance. The devil tries to promise us glory without a cross. Just as the legendary blues man Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly glory, we too can be convinced to take short cuts in our lives in order to avoid doing the hard thing. We will abandon people rather than doing the harder thing of seeking reconciliation. We will let ourselves be conformed to the world rather than transformed by the will of God. We will bow the knee to our own personal causes and comforts and conveniences rather than making the sacrifices we need to make in order to be faithful to God. It is all so very, very tempting!
Jesus shows us how to deflect this attack. He did so by turning once again to God’s Word. Jesus again cites the book of Deuteronomy, saying, “It is written: Worship the Lord our God, and serve only him.” This is a reference to the First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods.” We deflect this attack by keeping this commandment front and center in our lives. We repel this attack by always putting God first, worshipping and serving only him, even when it is hard.
The third attack was to tempt Jesus to prove God’s faithfulness by throwing himself off the pinnacle of the Temple in order to let God’s angels rescue him. The devil’s tactic here was to demand evidence that God’s promises were true. The devil tried to lure Jesus into calling God’s bluff rather than trusting God’s promise.
This is perhaps the most sinister tactic of all, because the devil uses scripture for his own evil purposes. Perhaps he is learning how Jesus fights and is trying to use Jesus’ moves against him. The devil quotes from Psalm 91, where it says that God will not let one’s foot be dashed against a stone. The devil quotes this passage to Jesus and says, “Well? Prove it!” And Jesus fought back with a counterpoint verse, again from Deuteronomy, saying: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
As Christians we live by faith, not by sight. The evil one tries to lure us away from God by making us think we should be able to prove that God’s promises are true with hard evidence. Sometimes we do have evidence in the form of an answered prayer, an unexplained healing, or a life dramatically transformed. But sometimes we don’t! And when we base our faith in God on proof, on evidence, we’re not really living by faith anymore! Living by faith means trusting in God even when you’ve fallen and are hurting. Living by faith means trusting in God’s salvation when all you see around you is suffering and sin. Living by faith means trusting God’s promises rather than asking God to prove them. When this tactic is used on us by the enemy, we can deflect it by trusting God rather that testing him.
We have learned some moves from Jesus’ duel with the devil. We’ve learned some techniques as we engage in this spiritual battle that is the Christian life. We’ve learned to not live by our appetites, but by every Word that comes from the mouth of God. We’ve learned to take the path of the cross rather than the path of least resistance. We’ve learned to live by promises and not by proofs. These are all important moves for us to learn as we wage this battle. But Jesus is so much more than our sensei. He is so much more than a spiritual karate instructor.
During the Lenten season we use a different prayer after communion. In this prayer we pray, “Almighty God, you gave your Son both as a sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life.” Jesus is a model of the godly life, to be sure, and so he has some moves to teach us. But even more importantly, Jesus was given as a sacrifice for our sin. Jesus is more than a sensei; he is our savior. Jesus went into the wilderness for us, a place of utter desolation. Jesus experienced excruciating hunger for us, going without food for forty days. Jesus did battle with the devil, winning every round for us. This was all a great sacrifice for us, and it foreshadows the greater sacrifice he would make for us on the cross. It was there on the cross that the devil found his next opportune time, and came at Jesus again saying, “If you are the Son of God, save yourself! Come down from the cross!” But Jesus didn’t come down. And it was in Christ’s sacrifice for us on that cross that the devil was finally defeated.
We still have a battle to fight, there are still these spiritual skirmishes over our souls, but the war has ultimately already been won by the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, who promises to share his victory with us when his kingdom comes in all its fullness. In the meantime, as we sing in “A Mighty Fortress,” Martin Luther’s great battle hymn of the Christian church: “God’s Word forever shall abide, no thanks to those who fear it; for God himself fights by our side, with weapons of the Spirit.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church