Luke 4:1-14 - The Testing of Jesus

This is usually the time where I then walk up and say, join me for a prayer, a pastoral prayer.

Before I get into the pastoral prayer this morning, though, I do want us to open our Bibles to the book of Luke.

In Luke chapter 4, is where we are at this morning as we study through the Gospel of Luke, and we see Luke the historian giving an account, a historical, accurate account of the life of Christ, the ministry of Christ.

Luke 4 · chapter mention

He's now, Christ has been proclaimed by John the Baptist.

He's been baptized and affirmed by God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, as he is, God the Son.

And then comes temptation.

What might be called a testing.

Read with me these first thirteen verses of Luke chapter 4.

Luke 4 · chapter mention

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.

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.

And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, To you I will give all this authority and all their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I will give it to you, to whom I will, if you then will worship me, it will be all 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 up on a 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.

That we would not gather this morning, sing your praises, sing of your glories, confess our sin.

Come to your word, Lord, and then look at it and behold it, and then leave and not let it shape us and forget us.

Or let that we would forget it.

Like a man who looks in a mirror, seeing himself, and then walks away and forgets what he sees.

Rather, may your word build us up, may it convict, may it encourage, may it enlighten us, so that we can know you more fully and obey you more completely, to glorify you, to walk in the ways of life, to enjoy your good provision.

That we might love you more.

That we might look at your word and understand you and what you've done and love you more and love others more.

We thank you for the blessing it is to have your word as a church, to open it up, to instruct and teach, to be taught and to be built up and admonished.

May our pride not get in the way.

May our false humility not get in the way.

May our minds that are quick to accuse ourselves, and the lies of the enemy that are always accusing us, may those not get in the way.

May the lies of the world around us and the lies that other people have told us about ourselves or about you.

May they not get in the way.

We pray, Lord, this morning for other churches as they gather around our community and around our county to be encouraged as they open your word.

May we be a community and a neighboring communities that love your word, that are praying for churches that are not uh overly concerned with our own church, that do not exist for our own well-being, but exist to glorify you.

And see your name made great around the world and in our own homes and in our own lives.

Your name will be made great in the lives of our neighbors who don't know you, our family members who've rejected you, our coworkers who are struggling, and we have the words of eternal life.

May we be bold and share that with them, that your name might be great among them.

Or may we be a people of the word.

Never fearful to stand on your truth, bold to declare your mercy, your grace, your love, bold to declare the gospel.

That you are a holy, holy, holy God.

We are a people in sin, separated from you, and alienated without hope, apart from Jesus Christ, who has come to pay the price for us by living a perfect life, dying and atoning death, that we might be redeemed to you, the holy God, and that we might walk in faith and obedience because of that.

I praise you for these things.

We praise you for your word.

May we enjoy you and be satisfied in you.

We pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.

You know, there's times in our life when testing comes.

This passage in my Bible, the ESV, has the heading, The Temptation of Jesus.

I think we could accurately call it also the testing of Jesus.

Testing time is really not a fun time for anyone.

If you're a student, you're going, you're preparing for exams and tests, you're gonna pass these tests if you want to move on to the next grade or you want to graduate and go and do other things.

And I want to give you some encouragement if you're a young person in school still.

The testing never stops.

Isn't that great?

It just changes.

It becomes more ambiguous, more confusing, and less accurate, okay?

But it keeps going.

If you want to be in the trades, you need to learn a trade and be competent.

If you want to go on to a profession, especially the medical field or legal field, you've got to pass exams, you've got to take exams and do these things to show yourself approved, to show that you actually know what you say you know.

Then there's informal testing.

There's just people around you who want to push on you and test you.

Especially if you profess to be a follower of Jesus Christ and you find yourself around a lot of ungodly people, which is probably normal.

We don't live in a regenerate society.

We might live in a kind community.

There's a lot of unbelievers who want to test you.

They're watching you, they're watching your conduct and your words and your actions.

See, are they really who they say they are?

Is she gonna behave like a Christian should?

Or are they gonna behave like the rest of the world?

And I don't say that to make you feel like you're just weighed down with a bunch of guilt and anxiety and now we've got to perform.

I'm just saying this testing element is continuous in life.

And Jesus here is facing a test.

I want to give us a little bit of a historical background as we get into this passage.

If you remember at the end of last week's text, we went through the genealogies, and we talked about how Luke goes from Jesus to Adam.

Right?

From Adam, the first Adam, the fallen Adam, to the last Adam, the better Adam.

The one who did not give in to temptation, the one who did not falter, did not neglect his bride, did not blame his bride, but redeemed her and is making her holy.

Again, I want us to step back into the Old Testament, to begin to build a framework as we look at this passage.

No doubt most of us are familiar with the Old Testament in the story of Abraham and his sons, and then the slaves in Egypt, the Israelite slaves, being there for hundreds of years, and they're praying, and God does for them what all slaves throughout all time have prayed for: that they would be set free, that they would be delivered, and that their uh prisoners, those people, the Egyptians, would be punished.

And that's exactly what God does.

God comes in, he brings these plagues and all these things, and he single-handedly rescues the Israelites out of Egypt, brings them to the Red Sea, parts the Red Sea, it's dry, they walk across, the Egyptians come in, the Lord destroys the Egyptians.

And almost no sooner do they get across the Red Sea into freedom, protection.

God has done miracle after miracle after miracle that God's people begin to complain.

They just begin to complain about almost everything.

You can read this in the book of Exodus, the story of the Exodus, exiting out of Egypt.

God brings his people to the edge of the promised land.

This place that is abundant, it has all the provision, all the land is wonderful, the land is lush.

People are actually working the land, and God's gonna give them all those vineyards and fields.

And they begin to complain.

And they begin to test God.

Can He really rescue us?

Is he really gonna deliver us?

Is he really with us?

Is this God with us?

And the people complain and complain, and God punishes the generation.

So for 40 years, forty years, they wander around in the desert until every generation, every person in that generation almost, had died.

Until they all had died.

And we pick this story back up in Deuteronomy.

But it's interesting that the complaining attitude.

They complained that they didn't have bread, so God gave them bread.

They complained they didn't have good water, so God gave them water, and they didn't have meat, so God gave them meat.

And everything like God just provided and provided, and they complained and complained.

Finally, that generation dies, and we're back to the edge of the promised land with another generation, decades and decades after being brought out of Egypt, and God gives them more instruction to the book of Deuteronomy.

God instructs his people before they go into the promised land.

He gives them these instructions.

And I just want to highlight three of these things, and they're from chapters 6 through 8 of Deuteronomy.

I'm not going to turn there this morning, but I will give you the reference.

In Deuteronomy 8, 3, the instruction is that man shall not live by bread alone.

In Deuteronomy 6, 13 through 15, the instruction is that you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.

And then in Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 16, you can probably guess what this one is.

Deuteronomy 6:16

The Lord tells them that you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.

So God gives them these instructions as they're about to go into the promised land.

They had been, God had delivered them, they had been complaining.

They were testing God, and now he gives them this instruction.

And when they go into the promised land, and everyone's happy, and no one complains, and it's all good, right?

No, that's not at all.

Pretty quickly they begin to complain again and kill each other and leave and forsake God.

It's like no sooner did the instructions that God had given in Deuteronomy hit their ears.

They're like, okay, okay.

And then out they go, forgetting those things.

And I know this is kind of funny.

I have lots of three little boys and a little girl, but the boys, you tell them something, and it's like, man, and before I even finish what I'm telling them, they're off doing something else.

And it's not that their heart is against me always, sometimes it is, but they're not listening.

They're not concerned with what I'm concerned about.

Their world is so small and so little.

They are not trusting their father's words.

They're not submitting to the authority that is over them for their good.

So in this text in Luke 4, it's good for us to know that the testing that Jesus is going through wasn't just a test for him.

This is a test that had been given to God's people again and again and again, and they failed and they failed and they failed.

But Jesus does not fail.

He is the obedient son.

In the book of Hosea, it says, Out of Israel I will, I called my son.

In Exodus, Pharaoh, release my son that he may worship me.

This is the son.

This is the obedient son.

Christ is the one who came saturated with the word and obeyed God's commands.

This is the one who kept the law, who passed the test.

It's an interesting situation.

We read this, and if you're familiar with it, this is a wonderful verse or passage about fighting temptation with Scripture.

It's a wonderful, easy application, and it's true.

But it's important to remember or to understand this test that Jesus is facing is a test that everyone has failed.

All the Israelites failed it.

Every generation failed it.

You have failed it.

I have failed it.

But Christ has not.

Amen.

So how does Jesus get here?

Into this temptation.

One minute he's being baptized, and the Holy Spirit's coming down, and the sky's being ripped open, and God the Father speaking, this powerful moment.

And then he's in the wilderness, being tested.

The first thing I want us to see in this passage is the Spirit's leading.

It's the Spirit who leads him.

It's full of the Spirit.

He goes into the wilderness.

It's easy as we understand this text to say, well, the Spirit led him into the wilderness, but where's the Spirit after that?

Sometimes when we get into times of trial or testing, we don't understand that to be the Spirit leading us.

We understand that to be that we're doing something wrong or something wrong in our faith, and we need to somehow satisfy God because He's punishing us for something.

We have this mixed-up view of God the Father as if if we're following Jesus the right way and we're following God correctly, all of life should just be easy.

I mean, there'll be some hardship, of course, there's death and there's sickness, but there shouldn't be like trials and suffering.

There shouldn't be this war being waged in our soul that we're just weary from.

And so we can have this thought that, well, we must be doing something wrong.

Or God, God must be punishing me for something.

And I just want to say, if that, and I'm not even accusing you of that, I'm just saying, if that's a response in your heart to hardship, that, well, I'm not satisfying God, he must be disappointed, he must be bringing some kind of suffering in my life to punish me.

I just want to encourage you.

You don't know the loving, gracious Father that we have.

Yes, God does discipline those whom he loves, for sure.

And that is a grace, and that is a mercy.

And if you're in a season of discipline, I pray that you realize that quickly and you repent and you seek to grow in your faith and mature.

Because that's what it means to be a Christian, that's what it means to be a father with children.

You correct them because you know what's best for them.

But if your thinking is somehow there's a scale, and I'm in the hardest season of my life, or I'm really in the valley, where is God and what have I done to deserve this?

Why would He do this to me?

Then your understanding of God is twisted, and the enemy just keeps lying to you about who God is.

Rather, we should count it joy, as James 1, 2 through 4 says.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.

For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.

And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

So are you in a trial?

Are you in a suffering, a season of suffering?

Don't think God has forsaken you or just kind of putting you over here for now and letting you learn your lesson.

But rather count it joy.

Maybe that the Father's disciplining you.

Count that as joy.

Or that the Lord is just working through the trials that you're meeting.

Brothers and sisters all around the world facing trials.

Not because they're going out looking for them, not because God's angry, but because God cares more about our holiness than we do.

He cares more about our holiness than he does about our comfort.

He cares more about our holiness than he does about our life of ease.

And he allows and brings hard things into our life.

The Spirit leading us into hard things, bringing us into hard things, or allowing hard things in, that we might grow, that we might turn to him and walk in obedience.

J.C.

Ryle, speaking of this passage, says, Let it never surprise us if we are tempted by the devil.

Let us rather expect it as a matter of course.

If we are living members of Christ, the master's lot will be with the lot of his disciples.

That mighty spirit who did not fear to attack Jesus Himself is still going about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Sometimes we want to push away God, the hard things that God might be allowing into our lives, and then other times we discount that there is an enemy, that there is a Satan, a devil who is powerful and deceptive and an accuser, who is so bold as to seek to destroy and attack Jesus Himself.

And he also is coming after us.

And yet, this is where the Spirit has led Christ into this environment, into this wilderness to be tested.

So we see the Holy Spirit at work through God's word, working in his word, and then we see the devil in this passage and how he is crafting and how he works.

And that's the second point the devil's deceiving.

So first we need to realize as we look at the text that the devil is a real person.

He's not a force.

He can tempt, he can deceive, he has the power to he has an immense amount of power.

The text says that he's able to be.

In the wilderness with Jesus, and then somehow take him up and show him the nations, all the nations of the world.

And then take him to Jerusalem and those high pinnacles.

This is a powerful, powerful person.

He's producing visions.

And when he says, when he says to him, listen, you see the nations?

If you worship me, I'll give the nations to you.

He had that ability.

Yes, it's God's universe, and God is sovereign over all things, but in a sense, Satan has dominion of this world for a season.

He has, if you will, these like squatters' rights to the nations.

And so when he says to Jesus, this is a legitimate offer, worship them, or worship me, and I'll give them to you.

He is a powerful person.

And he knows the scriptures.

He's saturated with the scriptures.

Satan knows the scriptures.

This is why he's so incredibly dangerous.

Pastor Ryan Fulton, who was really helpful in this passage, says that, talking about this, that the most dangerous lies in the world come from people saturated in the Bible.

And that is why Jehovah's Witnesses are so successful.

That's why Mormons are so successful.

That's why Catholics are so successful.

They use so much Bible here and there.

And sometimes they put it together in convincing ways.

So often we fall deceptive, or we can be deceived.

That one verse says one thing, and when we take one verse out of context, and we take one verse out of the rest of Scripture, and we use that verse to argue our point.

We lean on that one verse.

We must know the whole counsel of God's word.

We must know God's word.

We must be diligent to not isolate Scripture.

And again, it's easy to kind of pick on different groups and say they do it this way and they do it that way, and these people.

But in our own lives, we can just hold, we can kind of lean towards the grace passages.

Just grace.

And who doesn't love grace?

Seriously.

Like who doesn't love God's love and all these things?

And we just gravitate there, neglecting other passages about justice and truth.

Or we gravitate towards the law and justice and truth.

We kind of poured to the law, the law.

And who doesn't love law?

It tells us clearly what we're supposed to be doing.

And it's just, it's a matter of fact and it's exact.

So even in our own hearts, we must be leery that we don't choose some passages over other passages in Scripture.

But the enemy, the devil, he knows the word.

And it's interesting.

We look at what the tactic here.

The first thing is 40 days, no food.

40 days.

Now God had the people in the wilderness for 40 years, provided food for them.

Day after day after day after day after day for 40 years.

And then He takes them to the edge of the promised land.

Knowing that I've been the one providing you food miraculously every day for you.

But don't trust in bread alone.

You must not just look to these temporal needs.

You must not be overly concerned with these things that seem so important for a moment.

But the moment they're consumed, they're gone.

So Jesus, 40 days, no food, the devil comes.

It would seem maybe the devil has been tempting him, but now the devil says to him, hey, look here.

You're hungry.

You are the Son of God, verse 3 says.

Command this stone to become bread.

And doesn't that just seem like the most logical thing?

Like you haven't eaten forever.

You can do the miracle.

Just make some bread.

Then he goes to tempt him with all the nations.

It's something like you deserve it.

You can have all this.

You want the nations to worship you anyway.

You are the Son of God.

Just tell me, and I'll and I will give you authority over the nations.

It will all be yours in a moment.

Just worship me.

Or follow me.

Follow me, and I'll give you the desires that you really want.

I'll give you what you truly desire.

And then the last tactic of the enemy are you really the Son of God?

Is that who you really are?

And it's interesting how these correlate to our own desires and fears.

How often the concern is, is there enough of a thing?

But this is why the people failed in Exodus.

Well, we need bread, God.

We need bread.

Don't you think He knows you need bread?

He made you.

He's the creator of all things.

He knows you need bread.

God knows what you need.

But yet that pulling on us, will there be enough?

Can we make it?

The scarcity, I need to have more, not so that I can just relax, but man, what's going to happen if I don't have enough?

The response is of faith.

Jesus' response is of faith.

Matthew 6, 33 says, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Well, Jesus is saying, man doesn't live on bread alone.

He's saying, listen, bread, sure, you need that.

Your Heavenly Father knows you need that.

That's what Matthew 6 is all about.

God knows your needs.

He's going to take care of that.

Jesus was not trusting in a sense in the desires of his stomach or worldly concerns.

But in God's promises that he would provide.

This fear, is there enough?

Can we make it?

The second temptation seems to revolve around desire.

For us, it's I want that and I don't want to wait for it.

I want that thing.

Jesus, because he was God, knew what the nations needed.

Knew what the nations needed?

Him.

The brokenness of Israel.

The Roman Empire.

People all over the face of the earth.

What they needed in this moment was a perfect Messiah.

They needed his authority to overcome sin.

So what's the devil doing?

He plays to that.

Hey, you can have authority.

They can be yours.

I can give these to you.

Just worship me.

You have this desire, and I can provide it, and I can provide it right now.

Psalm 16, verse 11 says, You make known to me the path of life, and in your presence there's fullness of joy.

Psalms 16:11

And at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

And so often the things that we want aren't necessarily bad things.

They're not sinful things.

But we want them on our timeline, not on God's timeline.

I want a wife, but I can't have a wife, so I'm just going to have a sexual partner now.

I want financial freedom, but I don't have finances, so I'm going to go and do whatever I need to do to have money to go chase whatever I want to chase now.

I want the gratification instantly.

I want it now.

I don't know about you, but I feel this all the time.

I want to be freed from my flesh that's always waging war against me now.

I just want Christ to come back and I want to be set free from these things.

I want the Lord to complete the work, the work that he has promised to do in me.

But the Lord and his sovereignness and his goodness has not done that yet.

Has not fulfilled all the desires of my heart.

Because he's more concerned with my holiness than he is about my satisfaction, my being content.

But this is a trick of the enemy that we see all around us.

You want that thing?

Listen, if you go God's route, it's going to take you many, many years, and you might not ever get it.

And sure, in heaven you'll have it, whatever, but you're young, and who knows, you might live a long time.

Come my way, the devil says.

You can have it right now.

And you know what?

I have the authority to give it to you.

But it's always a counterfeit, isn't it?

It's never the thing you want.

You're created by God in his image to worship and adore and to follow him.

It's the deceiver, the accuser, comes in and he begins to masquerade and act like he can give you the things that God could, but in your timeline.

This is Genesis 3, church.

This is what happened in the garden.

This was the first deception.

Well, surely God didn't mean it that way.

Surely you can have what you want when you want it, regardless of obedience to God.

And then this third temptation is getting right at the core.

The identity of Christ.

Here he had just been baptized.

And he says to him, right, are you, excuse me, let me find the passage here.

If you are the son of God, verse 9, the second part of verse 9, if you are the son of God, if you are, if you're really this person, then do these things.

And so often that lie is the lie that rings so loud in our hearts, our souls.

Am I really a child of God?

Does he really love me?

Has he really forgiven me?

Does God actually and truly delight in me?

Ephesians 2, 17 through 19.

And he came.

This is Christ he's speaking of.

Paul's speaking of Christ.

He's telling the church at Ephesus.

He came and preached peace to you who were far off.

And peace to those who were near.

And for through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father.

So then, because of that, you are no longer strangers and aliens.

You've no longer rejected.

You're no longer outside of the camp or outside of God's people.

But you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

Amen?

We belong to Him.

And this temptation, this lie is spread so often, so often by the enemy.

Does God really love you?

Why are you going through so much hardship?

Are you really a Christian?

Then why are you struggling with sin?

Are you really a faithful follower of Jesus?

Then why does it seem that your children aren't walking in God's ways?

Are you a faithful member of a church who seeks to follow and disciple and love Jesus?

Well, if you are, then why are all these hard things happening in your life?

And these lies just, they're just pelted at us again and again and again.

The lies of the enemy never stop coming.

We will sing here shortly this song, A Mighty Fortress is Our God.

I just want to read the first verse.

A mighty fortress is our God, a stronghold never failing.

Our helpful, our helper, he amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.

For still our ancient foe conspires to work us woe.

His craft and power are great and armed with bitter hate.

On earth is not his equal.

Satan is evil beyond our comprehension.

We don't think about this much and we don't dwell on this much.

But he is more powerful than we realize.

And he's more evil than we know.

We know people who are unbelievers, unregenerate, don't care to follow the things of the world, but there's some moral sense in them.

Sometimes it's really whacked up, but there's still some kind of moral compass.

For Satan, none at all.

He would slit your throat given a chance.

In half a moment, he would be there, as one pastor said, to kill you and destroy you.

And I don't say that so we can just kind of freak out and be like, whoa, we're doomed, and Satan, what are we going to do?

But I say that to say our enemy is great.

Our enemy, our foe is great.

But even in the face of Satan's lies, our Messiah resists.

So the Messiah resists.

Again, when we look at this passage, we often move to the practical way of fighting sin, right?

Quoting scripture.

It's just phenomenal.

Sometimes we'll give other things, which is helpful advice, like find an accountability partner and make sure you think about the environment you're in and make sure you're arrested.

And, you know, all those wonderful things, great things.

Jesus in this scene doesn't have anyone around him, doesn't have any rest.

He's in his flesh, I would imagine, very exhausted.

He hasn't eaten his body, he's a real body, no nourishment for 40 days.

And what Jesus does is he uses the truth of God's word.

He uses scriptures to combat the lies, to combat the lies of the enemy.

This is what JC Ryle again says.

He who was full of the Holy Ghost was yet not ashamed to make the Holy Scripture his weapon of defense and his rule of action.

Our ability to mount a good defense against the lies of the enemy comes from our knowledge of the scriptures.

I just want to be careful.

I'm not saying this is an equation.

No more Bible, always defeat sin.

No less Bible, you're always going to lose to sin.

That's not what I'm saying.

But as we grow in our faith, especially as we become more mature Christians, we use the knowledge of God's word.

And I don't mean just head knowledge, I mean heart knowledge to combat sin, to combat the lies of the enemy.

We've hidden God's word in our heart that we might not sin against him, as Psalm 119 says.

That kind of knowledge of God's word, when we read it, we pray over it, we memorize it, we ask the Holy Spirit to work it deep into our souls.

That's the kind of knowledge that Christ is working with.

That's our aim.

Again, Satan knows the Bible better than we do.

It's not a knowledge, can we pull up a verse?

Can we not?

It's helpful to memorize scripture, it's good to memorize scripture.

Is it hidden in our heart that we've been praying that the Lord help us to believe it so that when the temptations come at us, when the lies of the enemy come at us, we know what God's word says.

We're not deceived by the lies of the enemy because we know the truth and we know how to combat the truth.

This is the amazing power of God's word.

This is why we pray regularly that we will be a church of the word.

Not so that we can kind of hold our heads up and be like, well, we believe in the Bible and we're people of the Bible, and you know, we we we kind of know God's word.

We're kind of theology geeks around here, you know?

Not at all.

It may never be so.

We know God's word because he's given us his living and active word that would tell us how to walk in obedience to him, how to fight against the lies of the enemy, how to love him and to know him.

It is his word that has this power.

And some people, you can read this story and see, well, the Holy Spirit brought Jesus into the wilderness, and then where's the Holy Spirit after that?

And some people kind of want to take the word and they're like, we're grateful for God's word, and they just kind of want to set it over here, and then they want to begin to do their Christian life with all their spiritual gifts.

This is God's word written by the Holy Spirit for us.

This is the Spirit's words for us.

Nobody was looking to come around and say, hey, let's use our spiritual gifts to fight the lies of the enemy.

No, let's use God's word.

It's the word that brings life, it's the word that transforms through the spirit our lives.

We're people of the word.

So you think about Christ being the obedient one.

He's the one who took the test in our place.

Some here this morning might not believe that you need to take a test.

Or that there is a Christ.

Or that you need him to have passed the test on your behalf.

If you are not a Christian, you have not, and I mean, I don't mean that you just think yourself to be not a Christian.

I mean that you have not put your faith in Jesus Christ, you're not repented of your sin and turned from those things and followed Jesus, forsaking all other things.

The Bible says that you are a slave to sin.

A slave.

You're bound to it.

You cannot free yourself from sin.

And more than that, you're deceived by it.

Sin is deceptive.

That's why it's so insidious.

Is you partake of it and it lies to you.

And one of the ways it lies to believers is well, it's okay, it's not that big of a deal.

Like I'm still a Christian, I still love God, but it's it's I'm okay because I have a lot of Bible knowledge, or I behave well most of the time.

For unbelievers, sin has completely deceived your mind.

Only Christ can set you free.

Only Christ can remove the veil, cleanse you from your unrighteousness, and set you free that you might worship and follow the God who has created you.

So do you have eyes to see the enemy's lies?

Do you have eyes to see the enemy's lies?

Which lies are you the most, are you most susceptible to?

You should know this, Christian.

You you should know in general, these are the ways that I can be deceived more easily.

These are the lies of the enemy that I tend to believe.

If I just indulge in this thing, it's gonna feel really good.

I'm gonna feel better.

Or, man, God's word says this about me, but my mind and people around me, and the enemy says this about me, and I'm gonna attend to believe.

That are you resisting the lies?

Are you resisting?

Are you doing that on your own strength, brother or sister?

Are you trying to resist Satan on your own strength?

Or maybe you've tried to make a deal.

But there's a few small ones that help you cope and get through the week.

And you're you permit those to linger around.

How is your relationship with God's word?

So one question is about the lies.

What do you do with those lies?

Now, what is your relationship with God's Word?

Is it transactional?

When I need some information, I need something?

I need a little bit of a something like to support an argument.

I'm in God's Word.

And I love studying God's Word to prove myself right.

Are you someone who goes to God's Word for just kind of some situational, emotional support at times?

When you're feeling bad, you feel a little guilty.

You just kind of get in there, go to those kind of well-known verses, or you just kind of flip through the Psalms and this is all God's word, so it's all beneficial.

I'm not discounting it, but I'm talking about your relationship with it.

You just kind of get in there and look for a few verses about grace and mercy and love, and you feel better, and once you feel better, you kind of thanks for God's word.

I'll come back to it next time I feel bad.

Or maybe your relationship with God's word is that you're kind of at an impasse.

You're kind of in a strained relationship.

Strained relationship with God's word.

You love Jesus and you love grace and truth and these things, but so much of the Bible is about judgment and hell and all the things you shouldn't be doing.

And God's punishment if you do those things.

So you don't really have a relationship with God's word that's healthy.

Again, you lean into some of the sweet things and you neglect the hard things.

And you what you do is you prioritize your own emotions and your own judgment over God's word.

Well, I don't like that aspect of God, and I'm just not gonna go there.

I love Jesus, and I love God, but I'm just not gonna go there because I don't like that.

Again, the last verse of the song we're about to sing says that the word above all earthly powers is evermore abiding.

The spirit and the gifts are ours through Jesus Christ, with us, with our siding.

Let goods and kinder go.

This mortal life also.

The body they may kill, God's truth is with us still.

His kingdom is forever.

So do not believe the lies of the enemy.

Be willing to forsake the things of this world.

God will provide what you need.

Forsake the things of this world, God will provide what you need.

God will sustain you, he will fulfill his promises to you.

He has passed the test on your behalf.

So he will then give you all things that you need in this life and in the life to come.

So trust him.

And when he says that you belong to him, that you are his, nothing, nothing, nothing can change that.

Nothing can change that.

You are his, and you are his forever.

Let's pray.