You Can't Eat Rocks

Good morning.

I have a few quick announcements before we jump into what we're going to talk about.

The first one is just to remind all of us that every single Sunday, as soon as we're done, we have prayer available in the prayer room.

If you've never been to the prayer room, right in the main hallway here, if you go out these doors, make a left, you'll see it.

There's a table outside.

But there's just something really powerful about having people pray over you, pray with you.

So if you have anything going on in your life, we have incredible people that have a gift for that.

And their heart is to do nothing but encourage you and to uh you know to give you what whatever God has for you in prayer uh to help you carry on.

So if you want to, if you want or need some prayer this this morning, we want to encourage you to take advantage of that.

Um also want to remind everyone that we still have two more weeks of Wednesday night at his hands.

We've been doing that all of February and March.

We've got groups and classes for literally everyone.

We also have live music in the coffee shop from eight to nine.

It's just a great, a great way to grow in your relationship with God, but also meet a lot of the people that are here at his hands and get plugged in.

Um so if you haven't taken advantage of that yet, there's still two weeks and they're gonna be a good two weeks.

Uh the other thing I have is actually a high school-related uh announcement and and kind of an ask.

Uh one of the great things about about this church is our youth group.

We have an awesome group of students at this church.

We really do.

Um and uh I like for me, it's a pleasure to be able to spend time with them every single week.

And our high school students have one of the one of the biggest things we do every year for them coming up in June, and that's that's this summer road trip that we take every single year in the summer.

It's it's a blast, but it's one of the most important things that we do every year for our students.

And God has God has shown up in incredible ways over the last few years.

In the last two or three years, we've had over 50 high school students get baptized on the trip, for example.

Um, last year we had kind of a God breakthrough that I got to share about when we got back from that that that I've I've never seen happen before in our youth group.

Um it was it was a truly incredible thing.

Um I mean, it really was incredible.

In fact, I've had a lot of you that have come up and talked about how amazing it is for you to see some of our high school students worshiping God on Sunday mornings as passionately as they do.

And that started on the road trip last year.

God kind of kind of broke through and and that's carried on ever since.

The whole the whole reason I'm saying that, well, I guess it's twofold.

If you're a parent of a high school student that maybe isn't plugged into our to our youth group um and you would like for them to go, you know, there are totally spots available.

And all you've got to do is email me, my email address is on the website, and I'll give you all the details you need.

The other thing is that every year we have several students that can't afford to go.

Uh, and all of us know what that feels like at some point in our lives.

It's$175 to go, which is actually really cheap when you think about food, transportation, lodging, and we're there for almost a week.

And so we do everything we can to get it to be as inexpensive as possible.

But nonetheless, every year we have about 15 to 20 students that cannot afford to go.

And we totally know that that God is going to work something out to allow them to go.

But already this year we've had several that have asked us and that that are in that situation.

And I just wanted to bring that up to you to see if if any of you felt led to sponsor a student this year, I wanted to let you know about the opportunity.

It's that simple.

That if you feel like, you know, hey, um, that's something we can do, then we would be super appreciative.

I know some of our students uh would appreciate it.

And it really is an investment in their lives because every single one of our students that's been has has told us that it's one of the most impacting things they've done.

So all you've got to do would be fill out a check and put, you know, student trip or high school trip or something like that on there, or put it in an envelope.

And again, it's only if you feel that.

I just wanted to make you aware of that need in case anyone feels like they want to help out with that.

Um that said, let's pray and let's jump into what we're gonna talk about this morning.

Father, thank you so much for uh for your love for us.

Thank you, God, that you are victorious, that we can we can celebrate the victory that you've had um over sin, over death, over everything that has ever stood against you and our relationship with you, God.

We just wanna be in your presence right now.

Holy Spirit, we ask that you open our hearts and our eyes to who you are and that you would take us to a more intimate place in our relationship with you this morning.

That when we leave here, we are more ready to uh to experience you than ever before.

And Lord, we ask all this in your name.

Amen.

Well, um, this morning I want to talk about Jesus, which is a surprise.

Um But there's this this one particular event in Jesus' life that we're gonna focus on this morning.

But before we get into that, I want to kind of start by saying that I think one of the most challenging things for me to do in my relationship with Jesus is to just see him as a real person.

I started following Jesus when I was about 10 years old, and I remember it really specifically because uh my family had never really gone to church before.

And when we were in the summer between my third and fourth grade years, we moved to a new house, and my parents got invited to church by our neighbors, and so they informed me that we were gonna start going to church.

And I remember actually being really unexcited about that because the few experiences I had had before that I didn't enjoy.

And it was the summer, and I was 10 years old.

And you know, 10-year-old boys, you don't picture getting up early and dressing up and wearing khakis and going to church.

And so I was really, I just was really unenthused about it.

But right away, um, right away I got really into it.

We we found a great church that we really plugged into, and I think pretty much right away I started believing in Jesus.

There was no great moment uh of decision or anything like that.

I think I just went and the Sunday school teachers said, Hey, here's Jesus, and here's all these crazy, miraculous things he did.

I didn't doubt it because at the time in my life I spent a good portion of time pretending to be one of the X-Men.

So, you know, Jesus, I mean Jesus walking on water wasn't that far-fetched.

You know, it was just, I was like, cool.

Um and I and I just believed in him.

I just believed it was it was that simple.

And I think as a as a boy, I sort of saw Jesus as like a real life superhero.

That was probably the most accurate image that I had in my head.

And obviously, as I got older, I had a I had a more you know developed sense of who he was, at least in what I would say.

I would say, oh, he's the Messiah, he's the Son of God, um, you know, he's my savior.

But somewhere deep down inside of me, that was still how I saw God for years and years and years, or how I saw Jesus rather, was this sort of real life superhero.

I definitely didn't see him as a real person.

I don't mean that I didn't see him as someone who existed.

What I mean is that I didn't see him as a human.

You know, I saw him as God pretending to be a person, or maybe God disguised as a person.

You know, he was God 100%, and he he made himself look like a person, talk like a person, and kind of act like a person, but he wasn't really a person.

He was he was God pretending to be a person.

And it's really easy to see Jesus like that.

And one of the unique things uh that the Bible teaches us about Jesus is that he was both 100% God and 100% man.

And that's a really strange dynamic to sort of wrap your head around, but it's what it's what it teaches us, and and most people tend to see Jesus as more of one than the other.

You know, there's a lot of people in this world that see Jesus as an incredible man, as a great man, a great wise teacher, but they miss or dismiss the God part.

And so they miss out on who he really is.

For most of my life, it's been the opposite.

As soon as I started following Jesus, I saw him as God, and and the person thing, it didn't quite click with me until later that he really was a person.

He really was one of us.

And so I was on the other side of that, but but at the end of the day, we have to see him as both.

Because when we miss the fact that Jesus really was one of us, that he really was a person, we miss a huge aspect of who he is.

We miss his personality, we miss his passion, and we really can't relate to him.

But whenever we see him as a real person, it opens up a whole new dimension for us.

Suddenly we can kind of see ourselves in him, and we can understand that he really did live life like we did.

One of the things that that Steve talked about at the beginning of this year was how Jesus really made it a point to hammer it home to us that he was a person.

There's a couple titles that are used to talk about Jesus in the New Testament, one is Son of God and one is Son of Man, and both are equally accurate.

He is 100% the Son of God, but he was also the Son of Man.

He was a human.

And he chose to call himself the Son of Man 81 times, and he only called himself the Son of God three times.

And that wasn't to diminish the fact that he's God.

I think that he he knew that we wouldn't have a hard time maybe believing, yes, he's God, but that we would have a hard time seeing that he is one of us, and so he really had to make that a point.

So I've gone most of my life reading stories about Jesus and thinking about him and seeing him as God, pretending to be a person.

And it's amazing how that's kind of influenced the mental picture I've had of him as he taught and as he lived his life.

You know, if he cried.

If he cried, it was because he was demonstrating something to us about God, showing us something about God's heart.

It wasn't because he was literally sad and had emotions.

If he was angry, it was the same thing.

It was some kind of divine lesson that he was he was showcasing anger to teach us something, but it wasn't because he was mad.

I don't even think that I realized that Jesus actually slept until maybe a few years ago.

You know?

If he did sleep, it was an act.

You know, Jesus wouldn't need to sleep.

Uh in fact, I remember this story that that I it was really one of the memorable stories about Jesus from my childhood when I was when I was growing up in church and learning about it, was the story of him on this boat with his disciples, and this storm comes and it's a violent storm to the point where they're afraid they're gonna die.

And these are sailors, these are men that have spent most of their lives on the water, so you know it had to be pretty intense for them to be afraid of, you know, for their lives, and Jesus is asleep in the boat.

And I never saw it that way.

Even though all three of the stories, all three of the gospels, you know, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all three of those that have that story say he was asleep, and the disciples had to wake him.

I always picture Jesus pretending to be asleep.

You know, in my mind, it's like there's no way he could have actually been asleep.

He was pretending to be asleep for the disciples to, you know, get to the point where they needed to come ask him.

Because if Jesus was actually asleep, in a way, it kind of means that he was a deep sleeper.

And I know this sounds strange, but and I think a lot of you maybe you can relate to me.

To me, it would almost seem blasphemous to suggest that Jesus was a deep sleeper.

You know, this the way I grew up seeing Jesus, that would be like, no, and and if Jesus could have possibly snored, well, that would be that would be like, you know, we'll just stop in case we get in trouble or something.

No.

But seriously, that's kind of the attitude that I had about Jesus, is that, you know, you have to diminish the fact that he was a real person.

But Jesus was the opposite.

He wanted to, uh, he talked about that more.

He wanted us to know that.

Because he was a real person.

He is real.

He had emotions, he got tired, he got hungry, he got upset, he got, you know, he got surprised.

And that's something that I would have never been able to accept a long time ago, that Jesus could have been surprised by something.

But there are tons of examples in the Bible where things sort of catch him off guard.

There's a story where he's surprised by the faith that a person has that he doesn't expect.

He's he's kind of taken aback and says, I'm amazed at this man's faith.

There's other times where he's like legitimately surprised at how little faith people had that he was teaching.

And it's almost like he didn't see that coming.

Jesus is God, was God when he was on this earth, but he was also a person.

And it's in that context that I want to approach the story that we're gonna get into uh from Jesus' life, because if we can see it as him, a real person experiencing this, we're gonna be able to take something away from it that we just can't take away if we forget the fact that he was a real person.

He had the same feelings, he had the same, you know, the same body that we have, he was real.

The story is of Jesus' temptation, and it's a really powerful story.

I think the last time I was I was up here I mentioned, you know, apart from it, but but we're gonna look at at the story of Jesus being tempted.

And temptation is one of those things, it's a really popular subject.

People love the word temptation.

Let's talk about it.

Um but it's real.

We all get tempted.

In fact, there's probably fewer things that most of us could could easily find in common than the fact that we're all tempted.

In various different ways, each of us will experience temptation.

In fact, I'm sure that if all of us thought hard, we could think of a temptation that we dealt with this last week.

Maybe we handled it well, maybe not.

And I'm sure we can all anticipate temptation coming.

And Jesus, just like us, had to deal with temptation.

He got tempted right after he was baptized.

Matthew 4, 1 and 2 says that then Jesus, and then is meaning right after he was baptized, was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted there by the devil.

For 40 days and forty nights, he fasted and became very hungry.

So Jesus is going to be tempted.

He goes into the wilderness and he fasts for 40 days and forty nights.

I don't know if any of us have fasted before, but fasting was actually a very, very common spiritual practice to the Jewish people in Jesus' time and before.

And a typical fast in that culture would have been a one-day fast, and the way they would mark that day was sunrise to sundown.

It wasn't 24 hours, it was from sunrise to sundown.

They wouldn't eat anything, but they would drink water.

But they would fast for all different kinds of occasions and in lots of different ways.

In fact, it's interesting because the Bible only commands the people of Israel to fast once.

There was only one time that they were required to fast by the law, and that was on the Day of Atonement, the day that the official sacrifice was made for all of Israel's sin.

That was the only time they had to fast.

But they did it often and for a lot of different reasons.

The Old Testament is filled with stories that include people fasting.

They would fast if maybe they or someone they loved had committed a really serious sin and they wanted to pray for forgiveness.

Moses fasted for 40 days and 40 nights after Israel started worshiping idols, asking God to forgive them.

There's times when they would fast when they were mourning about something.

David fasted after he mourned the death of Jonathan and King Saul.

But the fast that Jesus is going on here, it's not in that same realm.

It's actually much more like the fast that we see in the book of Esther.

If you've ever read the book of Esther, it's an incredible story.

And Esther is the queen in Persia, and she is married to King Xerxes.

It's kind of interesting because if you've ever seen the movie 300, the Xerxes from that movie is the same Xerxes in history that we have here in Queen Esther.

May take a few small licenses historically, I don't know.

But um but that was the same man in history that Queen Esther was married to.

And basically the situation that happens, the long and short of it, is that Queen Esther is Jewish, but the king doesn't know she is.

And one of the king's closest friends and advisors comes up with this plot to exterminate all of the Jews that are in the nation of Persia.

And the king signs on to it, he's sort of tricked into doing that.

The problem with King Xerxes is he's very proud.

He's not one that will admit mistakes, he has a terrible temper.

And when Esther learns of this plot, she has to approach the king to let him know essentially that he's made a pretty serious mistake.

He signed the death warrant of his own wife.

And the thing about it is that the king hadn't seen her in months, and the way it worked in that culture, as strange as it may sound to us, is you couldn't even approach the king uninvited, even if you were the queen, that was against the law and it was punishable by death.

So Esther's having to risk her life to even go before her own husband.

And on top of that, she has to tell him in the right way that he has made a huge error and he's got to do something about it.

And so she has to approach it in the absolute most perfect way.

So what she does is she she prays and fasts for three days and nights.

She even tells her her cousin Mordecai in Esther 4, 16 and 17, Go and gather together all the Jews of Susa and fast for me.

Do not eat or drink for three days, day or night.

My maids and I will do the same.

And then, though it is against the law, I will go in to see the king.

If I must die, I must die.

So Mordecai went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.

Here Esther sees this incredible challenge ahead of her.

This incredibly difficult situation, and so she prepares for it.

She fasts and she prays, she gets as many other people as she can to fast and pray that God would just be with her.

She wants to be as spiritually strong as possible when she goes to see the king, even to the point of sacrificing physical strength for spiritual strength.

And it's interesting because that that is how Jesus goes into his temptation with Satan.

Before I I ever saw Jesus as a real person, I always thought of this story very differently.

I thought of this as, okay, Jesus is tempted.

This was sort of a rite of passage.

You know, he had to be tempted so he could cross off temptation from his Messiah to-do list and then continue on on his way to the cross.

Never once, never once would I have thought, okay, well, could these temptations have been difficult for Jesus?

They have been an actual challenge.

And you know, I don't know if they were or not.

Jesus is the only one that can answer that.

But what's interesting is whether or not saying no to Satan was hard for Jesus, he approached it as a man preparing for something difficult.

He fasts for 40 days and 40 nights.

Esther had something difficult, she fasted for three days, three nights.

Jesus fasts for 40.

So whether or not saying no to Satan was hard for Jesus, whether it was a real test of his loyalty to God and his ability to not sin, he approached it as a man.

He took it seriously.

And he was committed to being spiritually strong and ready for the temptation.

You know, in Matthew 4, 1, again, it said that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted there by the devil.

That was the whole reason he was going into the wilderness to begin with.

It was to be tempted.

And he took it so seriously he treated it as if it was going to be an incredible challenge, and he fasted and prayed for 40 days and 40 nights so that when that temptation came, he would be ready.

I think that's encouraging to us because uh temptation is not one of those things that we probably see Jesus relating to really well.

In our minds, it yeah, he got tempted, okay, yeah, technically, but it's not like it would have been hard for him.

But at least we can see that Jesus prepared himself and took it seriously in a way that we can we can sort of emulate.

And we'll get that we'll get to that in a moment.

But first, let's jump into the actual temptation because this is where it gets really interesting.

During that time, the devil came to him and said, If you are the son of God, tell these stones to become loaves of bread.

But Jesus told him, No.

The scriptures say people do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Then the devil took him to the holy city Jerusalem, to the highest point of the temple, and said, If you are the Son of God, jump off.

For the Scriptures say he will order his angels to protect you, and they will hold you up with their hands, so you won't even hurt your foot on a stone.

Jesus responded, The Scriptures also say you must not test the Lord your God.

Next the devil took him to the peak of a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

I will give it all to you, he said, if you will kneel down and worship me.

Get out of here, Satan, Jesus told him.

For the scriptures say, You must worship the Lord your God and serve only him.

And then the devil went away, and angels came and took care of Jesus.

And we have three temptations.

The first one, Jesus hasn't eaten for days and days, and Satan comes and tempts him to break his fast.

The second temptation, Satan takes him to the top of the temple in Jerusalem, tempts him to jump off, kind of a uh prove that you're God, but also are you sure you really trust that God's going to protect you?

Are you sure he's got your back, kind of a temptation?

And the third and final one, he takes him to the peak of this very high mountain, shows him all the kingdoms of the world, and says, if you'll worship me, I will I will give you all of these.

Those are three pretty interesting temptations.

And it actually seems, as you read that, it seems as though Satan sort of progresses in each temptation.

Each temptation becomes a little bit more intense, maybe a little bit more challenging.

And you would think that if you're Jesus, you would have viewed the first temptation as kind of like a soft opening.

You know, it's like Jesus, like Satan's kind of dipping his toe in the water and feeling it out before he really gets to the big stuff.

You can imagine that Jesus thought about this event often in his life, and he had to have at least talked about it some because this is one of the events in Jesus' life that's recorded in Scripture, but there was no eyewitness to see it.

A lot of the things that we see Jesus do, the people that are writing it or are either people that saw it happen as they followed Jesus or they know someone really closely that told them about it, but there were no eyewitnesses to this.

It's just Jesus and Satan.

He's alone in the wilderness.

So the only way his disciples could have known about this to write about it is if he talked about it.

If he told them what happened.

So this is definitely something that stuck with Jesus.

It's something that he would have thought of often.

And you would you would imagine if you're Jesus and you're gonna think back to these temptations, you know, it's it's months later and you're thinking about it, you're reflecting on it, you would think that that the second two would really stick out in your mind.

They're much more, much more elaborate, they're much more dramatic.

You know, he's up high on this huge temple, he's up at the top of this mountain.

Satan probably chose the cinematography perfectly.

You know, he wanted these to really stick.

You would think that those two would be the ones that would really stick out in his mind.

But as far as I can find out, later in his teachings, Jesus only references one of these temptations.

And it's the first one.

It's a very subtle reference, but it's really important.

And it's the first temptation that Jesus references later when he's teaching us about God.

We'll get to that in just a second.

But first let's go back and look at the actual temptation.

Matthew 4, 3 and 4.

It said, During that time the devil came and said to him, If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become loaves of bread.

But Jesus told him, No.

The scriptures say people do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Okay, Jesus hadn't eaten for 40 days.

He's hungry.

And this is real hunger.

And this is just the same hunger we would feel if we hadn't eaten for that long.

And that's when Satan shows up, when Jesus is physically weak, and he tempts Jesus to break his fast.

Okay, so I have a quick question, and this is not rhetorical.

I'm really interested to see what is said.

What does Satan tempt Jesus with?

Food.

Okay, bread, right?

That's what I had always thought.

I've heard this story from the time I was a kid, and I've read it several times, and every time I would read this, you know, I kind of go through it.

Okay, Jesus, you know, he's hungry, Satan shows up and tempts him with bread, and then Satan takes him to the temple and tempts him to jump, and then he tempts them with all the kingdoms of the world.

You know, it was bread, it was proving that he was God, it was jumping, and then it was all the kingdoms of the world.

But what's interesting is that Satan doesn't tempt Jesus with bread.

You go back to verse 3, it says, During that time the devil came and said to him, If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become loaves of bread.

The devil's very sneaky, very subtle.

Jesus hasn't eaten for days.

He's extremely hungry, and Satan does not come up and offer Jesus freshly baked bread.

There are no bagels, there's not even toast, okay?

He offers Jesus stones.

He tempts Jesus with rocks.

And very subtly, he sort of passes it off as bread.

Just turn these stones into bread.

But he doesn't actually offer Jesus bread.

He doesn't offer him any food at all.

I think this was kind of a fatal flaw in Satan's plan because Jesus saw right through it.

He may have been physically weak, but he was spiritually strong.

He'd prepared for this.

In fact, I think Jesus was offended.

As a person, he would be offended whenever he was offered rocks.

I mean, imagine yourself being incredibly hungry.

You haven't eaten for days, and someone comes to you and says, Oh, you're really hungry.

Here's some rocks.

You know?

You'd be offended.

You cannot eat rocks.

You can't do it.

Well, you can, technically, but you shouldn't.

Um, it doesn't work.

You can't eat rocks.

That's the deep thought of the day.

You can't eat rocks.

He offers him stones, and Jesus saw it.

In fact, that is the exact thing that Jesus references later when he's teaching us about God and God's nature and how he is with us.

It's in Matthew 7, a few chapters ahead.

Starting in verse 7, Jesus is teaching about prayer and God's heart to give us what we need.

He says, Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for.

Keep on seeking and you will find.

Keep on knocking and the door will be opened to you.

For everyone who asks receives.

Everyone who seeks finds, and to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

You parents, if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead?

If your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone?

I always thought that this was Jesus using an illustration to teach us about God, but it wasn't an illustration.

This was an actual experience.

Because Jesus had had a moment in his life that he was hungry.

It almost makes you picture Jesus praying, talking to God during his fast.

God, I'm hungry, tell me when I can eat.

Maybe he was even craving bread.

And Satan shows up and offers him stones.

He tries to pass it off as bread.

I think that Jesus realizing this and seeing this is the exact opposite of what God would do.

God would never offer us stones in place of bread.

But that's what he was offered.

I think that had a profound effect on Jesus.

I think he took something away from that.

Obviously, he mentions it here later.

The second two temptations, maybe they were tough for Jesus, maybe not, but I have a feeling that after the first one, when Jesus saw through Satan's lie, I have a feeling that Satan was like grasping at straws from that point on.

He's just offered Jesus rocks.

It's really hard to recover from that once Jesus had realized it.

The application for us is kind of simple.

Temptation is something all of us deal with.

Every single one of us faces it.

We face it daily.

Sometimes we're we're strong, we recognize it, sometimes we're not.

But it's a part of our lives.

Satan was pretty sneaky 2,000 years ago, and he hasn't changed his tactics at all.

He's still a liar, he still tempts us, and he still tries to pass off rocks as bread.

All the time.

And it might look a little differently in our lives.

I mean, maybe it's uh you know, maybe it's addiction.

You know, if someone's addicted to something and we we view the behavior or the substance that we're addicted to, and that that gives us an escape.

We think it gives us an escape from the stress or the hurt or the depression that we feel, but you know, escape, escape implies freedom.

And addiction is the opposite of freedom, it's bondage.

But it's amazing how often the temptation centers around, oh, I just need a break.

I need to get free from this.

It's rocks for bread.

You know, maybe it's maybe it's maybe it's infidelity, you know, and infidelity.

Sometimes Satan wants to pass that off as love.

But see, love brings things together, infidelity tears things apart.

It's rocks for bread.

It's Satan trying to pass something off as what it's not.

And we can make a list of a thousand things that Satan does that with, and we can never, we can never have the time to compile all of them.

But at the very core, when Satan tempts us, all he does is try to substitute bread with rocks.

Try to give us something that we don't need that doesn't help us and convince us that it will.

Jesus saw through that.

It's incredible that he was able to catch it.

Because it's hard to catch.

The great thing about Jesus is that he gives us a blueprint for how to do the same thing in our lives.

You know, I have a son that's two years old, and he's amazing.

And it's incredible at this stage of his life how often he just does nothing but imitate whatever we do.

It's pure imitation.

But he learns at such an incredible rate just by imitating us.

And I've had some bad examples of that that I can't share, but you know, my wife's looked at me a few times, Justin, oh my gosh, what are you doing?

It's just imitation, but you know, if we would do the same thing with Jesus as a two-year-old does with their parents, if we would just look at him and just say, I'm gonna do what he does, I'm gonna imitate him.

As simple as that is, it's amazing how effective that is in our lives.

And we're all gonna get tempted this week and next week and then the week after, unless Satan decides to quit and he hasn't done that ever, so we shouldn't plan on it.

Um but we can be like Jesus.

We can prepare.

We can prepare.

Jesus was sort of the embodiment of 1 Peter 5.8, which says, stay alert, watch out for your great enemy, the devil.

He prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

Stay alert.

Watch out, you know, be prepared.

And one of the hardest things for me personally to do with temptation is to anticipate it.

Most days, at the end of the day, I'm like, oh man, I can't believe I did that.

That was not, that wasn't good.

Okay, I've got to figure out how to apologize for that or make amends for that.

But but rarely do I get up at the beginning of my day and say, okay, I'm anticipating getting tempted today.

I'm anticipating struggling with some things.

How am I gonna approach that?

Am I gonna prepare for that?

Jesus anticipated temptation.

He went out and prepared.

I don't know if he knew how long it was gonna be before Satan showed up.

Maybe he thought he was going to the wilderness and he was gonna get tempted an hour later.

But he fasted and prepared until the time came.

Now, that's not to say that we're supposed to fast day in and day out because we're gonna get tempted.

But I will say this, you know, fasting is one of those things that it is a spiritual exercise.

It does help us get spiritually strong.

Maybe for some of us, that's something, you know, we've got something in our life we're trying to work on.

Maybe we should, maybe we should think about that, taking a day and saying, okay, I'm gonna replace what feeds me physically for a day with what feeds me spiritually.

Because I want to be spiritually strong.

Maybe it's it's a day, maybe it's a half a day, maybe it's not even food, maybe it's something else in our life that occupies a lot of time that we're gonna say, I'm just gonna do away with this for a moment, for a time, to focus on God, to get myself spiritually strengthened so that I can be ready for whatever's gonna come up.

I've fasted a couple times before, but they were always the opposite, like out of guilt, like, oh no, I've done something wrong.

I better fast to make amends.

I've never fasted in preparation for something.

And I'm sure that it's effective.

But Jesus didn't just prepare by fasting.

You know, he'd basically prepare his whole life.

1 Peter 5.8 is something that Jesus embodied, but he also embodied Psalm 119, 11.

It says, I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.

Every single time that Satan tempts Jesus, he responds by quoting God's word.

He responds with scripture every single time.

And Satan even tries to twist God's word later and use scripture against Jesus, but Jesus knew God's word so well that he used that to combat the lies.

It's just truth versus lies, and truth wins.

And sometimes that verse gets kind of taken out of context to become this kind of legalistic rule that we have to memorize the Bible.

We have to memorize scripture.

Memorizing scripture, it's kind of like fasting.

It is a great spiritual exercise.

It's a great spiritual discipline.

Sometimes memorizing things are difficult.

So we can put all this pressure on ourselves, okay, what's my verse today?

I'm gonna remember this.

But it's amazing how easy it can be to memorize and commit to our heart God's word if we're just in it on a regular basis.

If we drive in our car and we listen to a radio station, we're gonna learn some of the songs.

Probably the ones that we don't want to learn and they stick in our heads and we're mad.

We're like, oh.

Wouldn't it be great if that same phenomenon happened with the Bible?

Like, I can't get this verse out of my head.

I've been saying it all day long.

It's terrible, you know?

It's just stuck.

It's the same thing, though.

If we spend time every day, just or or every often, it doesn't have to be daily.

We don't have to make it a rule, but if we just spend time when we have it, we'll be amazed at how much of it does sink into our heart and how much of it does get recalled in a moment that we need it.

Jesus does these two things.

He he prepares, he takes it seriously.

He recognizes the temptation for what it is, and then with the truth of God's word, he combats it, and he's successful.

And he approached it as a man, the same way that we can approach it.

The worship team wants to come up.

You know, there's a lot of different ways that we can apply and start using some of these things in our lives.

And we talk about knowing scripture, we talk about getting in God's word.

Um there's a lot of great resources that exist that help us out with that too, by the way.

That's just kind of as an aside.

There's a website called Biblegateway.com that's that's awesome.

I'm I'm I'm actually really, really bad at remembering verses clearly.

I can remember like a few words, and I'll be like, oh, I on the tip of my tongue, it says something about this and this, but I can't remember it.

I'll go to BibleGateway.com and I'll type a few of those words in, and boom, there's the verse, and yes, that's what I needed.

Um I know there's there's other websites, like there's one called crosswalk.com that also is really helpful for that.

I'm sure if you have an iPhone, I'm sure there's an app.

There has to be an app.

If Jesus had an iPhone, Satan wouldn't have even tried.

He's been like, uh, not doing it.

He has an i.

But there are tools that we can use, there's things that we can use to help us.

But most of it is just being prepared, taking it seriously, and trusting God.

Because Jesus trusted God.

Jesus trusted the same spirit that we have in our hearts when we follow him.

That's what Jesus had in the desert with him.

And we have the same thing.

You know, this week we're all gonna get tempted, and that's not bad news.

Because just like we sang before the message, the enemy has been defeated.

Satan lost this battle.

And sometimes we can be fearful of temptation.

We can look at it like, oh no, I'm gonna fail.

We don't have to be fearful.

We have Jesus.

So this week, let's just let's just be ready for whatever comes our way.

Let's be in God's presence and let's make sure that we say no to rocks because our Father is offering us bread.

Let's pray.

Jesus, thank you so much that you are the example for us to follow.

You are victorious.

You won every battle that you faced.

And Jesus, you just give us hope and we love you.

We we praise you.

You're worthy of worshiping.

We're gonna worship you for the rest of our lives, but uh, but we ask for your help this week to uh to approach our life the same way you approached yours.

To trust in God, to just rely on your spirit to give us the strength that we need to resist temptation and to live the life that you've called us to.

We love you, we praise you.

As we sing this last song, we just want to stand and worship you.

We we love you so much, amen.