Matthew 4:1-2 “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.”

An old mentor of mine used to tell about a man so poor during the Great Depression that there was just one coffee cup and saucer in the whole house. If they had a guest, the guest would get the cup, and the man would drink his coffee from the saucer. If the guest objected to taking the man’s cup, he would reply, “I like my coffee from a saucer.”

An elderly couple I served for many years used to tell about their first apartment shortly after World War II. The sum total of all their furniture consisted of a table and two chairs. When the pastor came to visit, the husband stood the entire time.

My high school English professor used to tell us how hard it was to buy shirts during the war. It wasn’t until after the war that he had his first dress shirt bought in a store. Up until then, they were homemade, using the cloth from the sacks in which they bought their flour.

There are a couple of common threads running through these stories. One is having to make do with very little. The other is that these people all survived the lean times with their lives, their faith, and their dignity intact. Most of them looked back on those times almost with a sense of nostalgia. Not everything had been bad, even in the poverty itself.

What about Jesus’ surroundings here? When you picture the desert in which he was tempted, don’t think of the Sahara: nothing but sand dunes as far as the eye can see. Think more of the scrubby desert of the American West, a kind of useless wasteland of thorny plants and desert grasses. It may not have been the Sahara, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a challenging place to survive. If you ever watch survival shows like Survivorman or Man Vs. Wild, then you know that lack of water, cold, heat, and general exposure all make living a challenge. Jesus didn’t make this trek into the desert in a Land Rover filled with camping gear. It was man against the elements.

One thing we know he did without was food. For forty days he fasted. That begins to approach the human limits for not eating. Mahatma Gandhi was known for his 21-day protest fasts. He survived them on water and fruit juice. Jesus’ fast here was nearly double. Few people would survive past eight weeks, or 56 days, without something to eat. Just the physical situation was challenging.

None of this happened by accident. Jesus was “led by the Spirit” into the desert. This was God’s will. And when we suffer lean times, we can assume that God has led us into our own hungry deserts, too. He certainly has the power to prevent it if he chooses. Recession, joblessness, wartime, health crisis–all of these can come from God’s own hand. That’s not to say we need to seek poverty or dangerous circumstances. Even for Jesus, forty days of hunger in the desert was not the normal situation. You already know from experience that the way the Lord arranges and orders our lives is often far different than anything we would plan for ourselves.

But while we are dealing with our difficulties and seeking a way out, we can content ourselves in knowing we aren’t in them by some divine mistake. God’s Spirit still leads his people. He is still working, not for our spiritual harm but our blessing. Expect to find God’s grace at work there, and lean on his strength. Our lean times and difficult days are his opportunity to teach us to live by faith.