Welcome to the first Sunday of Lent that season of the church year where people who attended church were once traditionally asked to give something up for the season.
What have you given up for Lent lately?
Often the idea of a making a personal sacrifice for God falls on deaf ears. What does God need anyway? He already has everything, right? Everything, yes, except perhaps that part of the human heart that refuses to acknowledge him as Lord.
Lent is about submitting to God’s will — all of it — and following God’s direction wherever it is headed even when you can see a cross at the end of the path.
The readings for this week from Scripture show the beginning and the end of that path.
For Moses, his journey on this earth was near its end. He would stand on the top of Mt. Nebo soon and see his people depart into the land God had promised them. He himself would not make that temporal journey. For 40 years he had led them through the Exodus all the way into the promised land. Now their journey of promise was fulfilled. God had kept his word to them and he didn’t want them to forget. The curse of being blessed with bounty is that you can easily become more focused on the blessings and too easily forget the One who imparted the blessings.
When the one forgotten is God, the words of the Lord at the end of Mose’s ministry ring with warning. Don’t forget who brought you to this point. So Moses reminded them of his and their personal history. “My father was a wandering Aramean….” It was a personal way to remind people to take their faith history personally, as well as to retell the story of God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants.
The message of Lent with its 40 day measuring stick of Jesus, after you subtract the Sundays, matches up well with the journey of 40 years that Moses had just completed.
In 40 days God is going to take us on quite a Lenten journey with our Lord Jesus Christ.
Is there anything you need to give up before you take up your cross and follow him all the way to paradise?
Lent is a time not just to give up what distracts us from God or the Gospel. It is also a time to get up and follow him. To see Jesus do his work for forty days is to see God’s plan of redemption fulfilled.
In the ancient church, the season of Lent was a period of instruction. Newcomers to the faith were instructed in the faith. Over 40 days in the early church, newcomers heard the word of repentance and the call of the Gospel that Jesus preached in order to prepare them for baptism.
A lot can happen in 40 days. More can happen in 40 years. But if you ignore God’s call to repentance, even if you have 400 years — as God’s people did in Egypt — all you will have is slavery!
Real freedom if it is to be truly experienced and cherished means getting up off you duff.
Can you imagine what it must have been like for the people of God to see before them the land God had promised to give them? On a hillside they sat back and then listened as Moses preached his farewell address.
Scripture doesn’t say much about this account but what it does say is quiet clear. Freedom, ownership, responsibility, a nation lay ahead for the people of God. No one offered to stay behind with Moses. All of God’s people continued faithfully forward into the promised land.
Lent is God’s way of preparing us for the promised land. The promise of salvation belongs to all people who repent and believe the Gospel.
Don’t be tempted to think there is another way back to God beyond repentance and faith in the Gospel?
There are many who see no need for personal penitence.
Did you watch George Bush’s first address to the joint session of Congress earlier this week? I didn’t see anyone after his address lamenting any of their own past failures before God or our nation. Much of the talk sounded a lot like the same impenitent talk that existed the in the previous administration.
Life with out genuine repentance becomes a thin hollow shell that is easily penetrated. Never mind how many times you have been caught red-handed. Saying you are sorry after you have been caught seldom sounds like genuine repentance to anyone listening — including God.
The message of freedom lies ahead for those who have the courage to believe. To repent and believe.
I know there are lots of people in our age who have yet to discover the joy of real repentance. There is a wonderful rebirth that happens only when you turn your back on the past and go forward with God into a future blessed with his promises.
When God’s people journeyed into the promised land, they had to get-up and leave Moses to receive God’s blessings. When Jesus journeyed into the wilderness for 40 days, he had to leave behind his comforts and put the devil on notice what lay ahead.
During those 40 days in the wilderness, he was tempted. The first of the options that the devil lay in front of him hardly sounded like sin at all. “You say you are God’s Son — tell this stone to become bread!”
Jesus did do that. Although I wonder what would have changed in the story of salvation if he had. Maybe everything. Or maybe Satan would have simply altered his tactics if there was truly any doubt about the one with whom he was dealing.
The journey of Jesus towards the cross after all meant Jesus was marching towards death, and death for Satan had always meant victory. Why would this journey be any different?
Just to be safe Satan through out other temptations, far more alluring than the first call simply to demonstrate his power.
From a high place he showed Jesus in an instant all the kingdoms of the world — “I will give you all their authority and splendor...if you worship me.”
Jesus had been sent by the Father to win back the world for God. Was this concession from Satan a shortcut he could take to avoid the cross?
Temptation is never simple. The Devil knows when and how to tempt us to thrown in the towel or to try and take the easy wrong route instead of the hard right.
In these instances we see the difference between Satan and God. The devil tempts. He lays something appealing before us — with enough truth in it just to help us avoiding being able to see his lies within.
But God never tempts. Satan tempts. God tests. He tests us to make us strong for temptations from the evil one that lie ahead. Sometimes we will fail God’s tests. But we can learn from our failures and be prepared by him with a new test from his own loving hand.
The Good News of Jesus Christ is proof of God’s willingness to test and to retest, to strengthen and transform human weakness through the power of faith into something that will not give into temptation.
Lent begins historically with Jesus being tempted and Satan being put in his place.
Do you want to go somewhere with God? Then you have to examine your own life. Satan is. He knows where to exploit your weakness. Being the cowardly liar that he is, he attacks there. Illness, moral lapses, repeated patterns of the past old unbelieving lifestyle, are all the arrows he has in arsenal to challenge the validity of your commitment to God.
But because of Jesus Christ, he had never challenge God’s commitment to you. Lent is proof of that. Jesus went all the way to the cross and to the tomb and even to hell itself for you!
Lent is about getting up and taking up your cross. God’s call is not to give up, but to get up and take up!
The last temptation Satan lay before Jesus in the wilderness came from the heights of the temple itself.
It is interesting that this temptation took place there. After all, Jesus would shake the foundations of the temple itself. Everything that he would accomplish as the Lamb of God offered for the sins of the world would render the sacrifices of the temple obsolete. Satan said, He said, “If you are God’s Son, jump. It’s written, isn’t it, that ‘he has placed you in the care of angels to protect you; they will catch you; you won’t so much as stub your toe on a stone’?”
“Yes,” said Jesus, “and it’s also written, ‘Don’t you dare tempt the Lord your God.’”
That completed the testing. The Devil retreated temporarily, lying in wait for another opportunity.
What a text!
What story!
What a warning, for those of us about to begin our Lenten journey.
That old adversary the devil will plan another attack. If he planned one on Jesus, even after having failed, what makes anyone secure that he will not plan an even greater assault in the future on those of us who have fallen to his temptations in the past.
When he returns, however, one thing can be different though. With faith in Jesus Christ, we won’t be alone next time that old tempter comes looking for easy prey.
Jesus, the one he failed to snare, the one who got-up from the tomb, will be there besides us to face him.
And the little tests that God will have enabled us to endure will have made us strong for the final assault.
Know your enemy. Jesus on the training ground of Lent is about to teach you how to exploit the tactics of the evil one. The lesson of spiritual warfare is about to begin. Amen.
