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.

Matthew 26:2 “As you know, the Passover is two days away–and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.”

The days God asks his people to remember and celebrate are always meaningful. You know that the Passover was all about God’s deliverance. For hundreds of years the people of Israel lived as slaves in Egypt. Because the Egyptians came to fear them, they began attempts to kill the Israelite boys at birth and reduce their population. God sent Moses to lead the nation to freedom, but before that could happen the Lord had to deal with the Pharaoh’s refusal to let the people go. God sent plagues to convince the Pharaoh of his power and demonstrate that resistance was futile. Still the Pharaoh refused.

Finally, God instituted the Passover. On that night all Israel would sacrifice a Lamb. The blood was painted on the frames of their doors. The meat of the sacrifice was eaten by each family. That night God sent the angel of death throughout Egypt, and where the angel saw the blood on the door, he passed over. When he came to the homes of the Egyptians, he killed the firstborn in the family. Finally, the Pharaoh got the message, and the Egyptians practically drove the Israelites out of their land. God had delivered his people from slavery. He had rescued them from death. This was the Passover that they celebrated for the next 1450 years.

As much as the Passover looked backwards, the Lord had always intended it to look forward as well. It foreshadowed the work of the Messiah, the Savior, and the Jewish people understood this, too. Perhaps they didn’t get all the details, but to this day when they celebrate the Passover, their celebration includes rituals that remind them someone is coming to save them.

Of course, we know that someone is Jesus, and he has already come. Like the Passover lamb he was sacrificed, and the family of God gathers to eat the body that was sacrificed, and to receive his blood through their mouths, the doorway to the temple that is their bodies. Jesus, the Lamb of God, takes away the sins of the world. This is the slavery from which he rescues them, the slavery to sin. His death defeats the ruler who held his people in their slavery to sin, the devil. He rescues his people from death, and leads them to a better Promised Land, a heavenly one.

With God, holidays aren’t just opportunities to gather with our families and friends, wear our best clothes, eat some fantastic food. We may do those things to celebrate, and rightly so. But that is never what the holiday means.

They aren’t primarily about doing something kind for your neighbor, either. His festivals, his holy days, are always about the gritty, painful, even violent work of delivering a lost and sinful world from sin and death. They are the story of love so great that our God gave up the comforts of heaven, lived in the world we had trashed, and let himself be tortured and killed by the people he loved, in order to forgive and to save the people he loved. They mark his rescuing us from that which is most wicked, most painful, and most ugly in our lives.

Jesus’ sacrificial death completed the meaning of one holiday God’s people celebrated. It forms the basis for another one we continue to celebrate today. Let that meaning continue to be the reason for our celebration.

Matthew 26:3-5 “Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and they plotted to arrest Jesus in some sly way and kill him. ‘But not during the Feast,’ they said, ‘or there may be a riot among the people.’”

These men who arranged for Jesus’ execution try to put a noble veneer on their plot. Historians estimate the population of Jerusalem at about 80,000 at the time of Jesus. But during the pilgrim feasts, the size of the city could quadruple. It’s not hard to imagine that 200,000 extra people with their sheep and goats at Passover created some issues of crowd control under ordinary circumstances. Even if a minority of the people believed Jesus was a prophet, these leaders saw potential for a lot of violence if they took Jesus’ life while all those people were in town. As responsible leaders with good civic values, they wanted to make sure that no one got hurt when they murdered the Messiah.

I trust the irony is not lost on you. “Let’s make our murder as safe and peaceful as possible. We wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.” At least you have to admit that these traitors to the nation they served and faith they professed were not unique in their muddled way of thinking. Take the adulterous couple who said they kept their affair a secret so that no one would get hurt. But if that is what they really wanted, shouldn’t they have practiced a little self-control, a little personal decency, and put a stop to their behavior before they tore two families apart, robbed their children of secure homes, and brought everyone they love to the brink of poverty?

Take the Big 10 university that told incoming students it was okay if they shoplifted from stores like Walmart or Target, “because big companies like that can afford it.” Take the pharmaceutical CEO who brought huge dividends to his shareholders, but he raised the price of a life-saving medication 5000 percent to do so. He jeopardized the lives and livelihoods of thousands who depend on the medication. But he didn’t break any laws.

We are not immune to these kinds of rationalizations of our own behavior. Maybe you have thought something like this: “I’m not so much running this stop sign as I am keeping the traffic flowing, or making sure I’m not late and inconveniencing the people waiting for me.” Not that creating a traffic accident wouldn’t interrupt the flow of traffic or inconvenience anyone.

Jesus’ enemies wanted to avoid a riot when they murdered the Savior, “So let’s not do it during the festival.” God spare us from the kind of logic that blinds us to our own sin.

On the other hand, some might have thought it was ironic that God’s own Son would die on the day that celebrated God’s great deliverance from death, the Passover. They might have thought that Jesus would say, “Not during the Festival.”

But Jesus chose this very day to redeem the world. The timing of his death wasn’t irony. It was divine poetry, because he is our true Passover Lamb, whose sacrifice takes away the sins of the world.

2 Peter 1:19 “And we have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

Jesus’ coming, his power, his love, and his sacrifice make the words of the prophets more certain. In as much as the prophets were just writers for God himself, none of their words were ever in question. But Jesus is the fulfillment that ends all doubt.

Some people are impressed with the secular prophecies of Sixteenth Century French Astrologer Nostradamus. He is said to have predicted the rise of Napoleon and Hitler, the assassination of President Kennedy, even the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. I won’t take time to repeat what he actually wrote here. You can look it up later for yourself if you like. But his prophecies have all the detail of a typical horoscope. They are vague enough to describe about anything you like.

The Biblical prophet Micah named the city where the promised Savior would be born. From Micah the Jewish rabbis could tell you where it would be before it happened. Isaiah tells you where he would grow up, details about his healing ministry, and together with David and Zechariah these men describes Jesus’ last days and the scene at the cross as though they were standing there themselves.

Well over 450 specific Old Testament prophecies can be identified which Jesus fulfilled. Statistically, the chances of one person fulfilling just eight random predictions made hundreds of years before the fact, like place of birth, betrayal by a friend, gambling for his clothes, and manner of death is about one out of 10 to the 17^th power.

To illustrate what that looks like, that is like burying every inch of the state of Texas under silver dollars two feet deep, and then telling someone there is one particular silver dollar in that pile that you have in mind, and that this person, free to travel the entire length and breadth of the state, could pick the right one. That’s for getting eight prophecies right, not 450 (www.biblebelievers.org.au/radio034.htm). “We have the words of the prophets made more certain.”

What’s the conclusion? “You will do well to pay attention to it,” and not just because the words are so certain, so true. When we give our attention to what is written about Jesus, whether Old Testament or New, something special happens. A light goes on inside. A new day replaces the darkness in our hearts. Faith rises like a star and we live in the happy certainty that Jesus loves and saves us.

2 Peter 1:17 “For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

The Father spoke from heaven. This was well-witnessed. At the very beginning of his ministry John the Baptist heard God say this at Jesus’ baptism. Peter was there with James and John when Jesus let them see a little glimpse of the glory that made him something far higher than themselves. This was not just an “impression” these men had, a “gut-feeling,” like so many people who say “God spoke to me” today. They saw the light. They heard the Voice. This wasn’t last night’s pizza talking.

 “This is my Son,” the voice says. Sometimes people say that we are all God’s children, because he made us all, and that’s right. But that isn’t what the Voice meant. There were six men on that mountain top that day we heard when we read Matthew: Peter, James, John, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. The Voice doesn’t say, “These are my sons.” It says, “This is my Son.” This one is different.

This is God’s Son in the sense we hear it in what may be the most famous of all Bible passages, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,” his only-begotten Son. This isn’t a son he made. This is the Son who is made out of the same stuff his Father in heaven is–an eternal Being, an all-powerful Spirit, perfect Love, absolute Authority.

Does it matter whether you listen to him? Does it matter whether you follow him? There is nothing in your world that matters more! We contradict him, we ignore him, we deny him at our peril!

The Voice has even more to say about the Son. “This is my Son, whom I love.” Well, duh! I love my sons, too. Even when they were naughty I didn’t stop loving them. But the Father is saying something more.

God the Father had special reasons for loving Jesus his Son. “The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life–only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father” (John 10:17-18). That’s part of Jesus description of himself as the Good Shepherd. The Father loves his Son because the Son lays down his life for us. He dies to save us. His death forgives us.

More than anything we have heard about Jesus today, this is why he wants us to follow him. He doesn’t want to scare us into listening to him with threats of his power and glory. He wants to love us into listening to him with the sacrifice that brings us forgiveness and life. Trust him and he will give you real life, unending life, fuller and better life than any other you can find. Know him and he will show you God’s love, love that knows no limits, love that infinitely surpasses any other affection you have ever known.

These things you’ve heard about Jesus–his sacrifice, his forgiveness, his love, his gift–these things are certain, too. No one less than God the Father in heaven speaks to it to assure us it is true.

2 Peter1:16 “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

Peter, whose version of Jesus’ life is written in the Bible’s gospel of Mark, didn’t preach and teach about a character he made up. He didn’t take a real character of history and make up stories about him, like the story you hear about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. He didn’t even embellish stories of Jesus’ life, like Laura Ingalls Wilder may have done in some of her Little House books. “We were eyewitnesses,” he says. He’s giving testimony. And he’s not the only one.

So why should we trust these witnesses? First of all, they have overwhelming numbers on their side. Four different men wrote four accounts of Jesus’ life–the four gospels. From the first to the last, they were written about 50 years apart. One of the four, Luke’s, is basically a collection of interviews with various people who lived and worked with Jesus. While they choose different details to mention in their accounts, as you would expect from different witnesses, their accounts all agree. Beyond the four writers you have 500 eyewitnesses of Jesus’ greatest act of power and majesty–his resurrection from the dead. That’s a lot of witnesses saying the same thing.

 But what if these witnesses all formed a plot, a pact, to tell a tall-tale? Just look at what their story got them. None of them became rich or powerful. They were thrown into jail. They were whipped and beaten. They died horrible deaths. Peter was crucified upside down. Other apostles were skinned alive, beheaded, or burned to death.

Now if you knew that the story you have been telling was just a story, and there was no advantage in sticking to it, and in fact you were going to be tortured and killed for it, wouldn’t you give it up? Wouldn’t one out of so many witnesses admit to the hoax? But these weren’t “cleverly invented stories.” They were the testimony of eyewitnesses. What Peter tells us, he saw with his own eyes.

Why does it matter? Like us, the people to whom Peter originally wrote these words didn’t know Jesus directly. They had all these amazing stories about Jesus turning water into wine, healing the sick and the blind, controlling the weather, confronting demons, raising the dead, dying and rising himself. That’s a lot to ask people to believe.

Then, like now, there were skeptics questioning everything Peter and the other apostles had to say. They said it wasn’t rational. Water doesn’t instantly turn into other substances. You can’t just tell a storm to stop and it stops. Dead people don’t come back to life. Those aren’t “modern” ideas. They called the people who believed in Jesus gullible. They mocked their faith. They tried to de-convert or un-convert them.

Maybe the bigger challenge comes from the inside. Jesus has a lot to say about how we live our lives, and some of it might not be appealing. His teachings meddle in our sexual lives. He tells us to be self-sacrificing in our relationships with other people, even our enemies. He tells us to deny ourselves, carry our crosses, stop treating our money like our god, stop our worrying. He forgives us when we fail without fail. But he does not compromise on any of this. He won’t meet us half way. Disagree with him, and he tells us to repent.

If we could make ourselves believe that he is a myth, a story, then we wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable with ignoring him. If we could believe that he is a man, just like us, then why should his opinion count any more than our own? But while it’s true that no one can force us to follow him, Peter wants us to know that the things you have heard about him are certain: his coming (he’s real), his power (he’s not just another man). That means his grace and salvation are real, too. Eyewitnesses vouch for it.

1 Corinthians 3:21-23 “So then, no more boasting about men! All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future–all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.”

Did you have a favorite Sunday School teacher growing up? Something about the way that teacher taught struck a chord with you. He or she opened up the Scriptures in a way you could understand.

But did you get nothing at all from the rest? Weren’t they all God’s gifts to you, feeding your faith, moving you along toward maturity? It is a matter of God’s grace to you that he has given you not just one cook to prepare dinner for your soul, but many teachers and pastors, each with their own flavor, just like God gave Paul, Apollos, and Cephas to the whole congregation in Corinth to serve them all. As long as God’s word is being served in all its truth, there is always some good thing there for us, no matter whose mouth it is coming from, even if it is just a reminder and confirmation of truths we have known for a long, long time. Why boast about just one when the Lord has given us all of them?

Have only the pleasant things and the easy things served you in your life? Haven’t your injuries and your sicknesses, your disappointments and struggles, your losses and your crosses taught you humility, deepened your empathy, and developed your patience? Haven’t they stretched your faith, enabled you to see God’s faithfulness in action, and helped you to look forward to heaven with genuine longing?

Then Paul is right when he says the world, and life, and death, and the present, and the future–in other words, all of our experience, everything that touches us this side of heaven– is “yours.” God has put it all under you. As a believer in Jesus Christ everything is working for you, even when it seems the opposite. That’s not something that happens to members of some closed club of Christians who have attached themselves to some human teacher. Every believer has everything in Christ, so no more boasting about men.

Doesn’t every one of us belong to Jesus by faith? Jesus didn’t purchase some of us with his blood. He purchased all of us. Our sins are equally forgiven. Our souls are equally saved. He isn’t preparing a place in heaven for some of us. He is preparing a place for all of us. “You,” all of you, “are of Christ, and Christ is of God.” You don’t get that by belonging to a clique or dedicating yourself to some favorite teacher, even if that teacher is the Apostle Paul. You belong to Christ, so no more boasting about men.

Do you need something really worth boasting about, something that builds the church instead of tearing it down, something based on God’s wisdom not man’s, something that leaves the politics behind and leaves the spotlight on Christ? Paul has that identified for us too, in the last chapter of one of his other letters (Galatians): “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

1 Corinthians 3:18-19 “Do not deceive yourselves. If anyone of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a ‘fool’ so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”

Sometimes people who think they are smarter than they really are can be funny. Remember Cliff Claven, the mailman on the old TV series Cheers? He would sit at the bar and share his gems of wisdom, like: the Chinese used cows as guard animals during the Chung King dynasty of emperors; in genetic research, DNA stands for ‘Dames Are Not Aggressive’; 42 % of all deaths in America are caused by accidents in the home; sun tanning became popular thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age; and many other “facts” he seems to have made up on the spot. It’s all kind of harmless, and funny, when no one is taking this stuff seriously.

Pride that styles itself “wise” by the world’s standards, and covets the world’s respect, and wants to be the smartest guy around church isn’t harmless or funny. It’s spiritually dangerous. When we think we are wise in this sense, we don’t tolerate correction very well. A man in the congregation where I once served stormed out of a council meeting because he had set up a game for a church picnic in a place where kids could get hurt. Everyone else on the council could see it. But he could not admit there was anything wrong with his plan. He had one “logical” reason after another for defending what amounted to an accident waiting to happen.

How many times doesn’t Solomon in the proverbs talk about the wise man who receives council and correction, and the fool who won’t. We lack biblical discernment about ourselves when we lack the humility to see that we don’t know everything.

Worse yet, when we are making our judgments or proposing our ideas “by the standards of the wisdom of this age,” the basis for our wisdom is suspect. Such a person may need to “become a fool so that he may become wise.” Paul explains, “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”

Some of the Corinthian men, being educated, knew their philosophers well and had their favorites. The philosophers weren’t stupid. Some of what they had to say was true, but not everything. Some of the Corinthian men tried to apply the wisdom of the philosophers to church life and church decisions. And some of them thought they saw a kind of similarity between things their favorite philosophers said, and things their favorite apostle taught.

But they lacked the Biblical discernment to sort out the false ideas in the philosophy from God’s truth in Scripture. They failed to discern that while the philosophers often disagreed with each other, the Scriptures and the Apostles always agreed with each other.

As a result, they created these political parties with a mishmash of worldly teaching and Scripture. They attached them to the name of an Apostle, and they ended up fighting with each other. They were dividing the church over non-biblical teachings they had imported.

Maybe this is a warning we can take for ourselves. Not all the scientists, businessmen, and politicians are ignorant. Some of what they have to say is true…but not everything. And not all of it has application in the church. Some of it flatly contradicts the wisdom God gives us in his word. Let’s not tear the church apart over ideas the Bible does not mandate just because they come from our favorite great thinkers in the secular world. And let’s not divide the church by introducing anti-biblical ideas that ought to stay in the secular world.

1 Corinthians 3:16-17 “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.”

Church politics is a destroyer. It attacks the very thing God is trying to build. From time to time some church still uses the word “temple” in their name, but our church buildings are not temples in the biblical sense of the word. The Old Testament temple built by Solomon was a place where God promised to live with his people in a special way at all times. No one imagined that the temple contained God with limits and boundaries he could not escape. They knew God was everywhere. But at the temple God promised to hear their prayers, receive their sacrifices, and give them his grace and blessing. The temple was a place where God could say to his people, “We are a family. I am your Father. You are my children. Here is the place where we can meet together. This is the place where I live with you.”

God doesn’t have a building like that on earth anymore. He doesn’t use a building to be present with his people, not in the way he used Solomon’s temple. He uses our bodies. Every believer is God’s temple, the place he lives with his people, the voice where God can be found with his grace and blessing.

You are God’s temple, and isn’t that a humbling and encouraging expression of God’s grace to us? What does it say about the depth of his love?

When we are hurt, and someone apologizes to us, we may genuinely forgive them. We don’t dwell on the pain or loss we suffered. We don’t live with a more or less constant grumble against that person haunting our inner thoughts. Still, don’t we sometimes end up with a distance between us that wasn’t there before? Maybe we hold them at arm’s length, not because we hate them, but because we have lost some trust and we aren’t eager to get hurt again. It is even better when our forgiveness leads to a friendship completely restored, and we find each other together again on a regular basis.

God’s grace to us goes further still. He doesn’t stop at spending a little time with us now and then. So complete is his forgiveness that he makes our bodies and souls a permanent place to live. He makes us his temple, his home, even though he knows where these bodies have been, what they have done, and the sinful foolishness they are going to do in the future. He is along for the ride through good and bad because “you yourselves are God’s temple, and God’s Spirit lives in you.”

Church politics destroys that temple. It wounds the faith of young believers, sometimes wounds that faith to death. And where faith is gone, the Holy Spirit is missing, too. God’s temple has fallen.

An article on young atheists ten years ago in The Atlantic magazine recalls an interview with a college student named Phil who was president of his church youth group, loved his pastor, and especially loved his youth leader. But during his junior year in high school the church wanted to attract more young people by asking the youth leader to teach less and play more. The youth leader disagreed with this strategy and was dismissed. He was replaced by a younger and much more attractive youth leader who, according to Phil, ‘didn’t know a thing about the Bible.’ But the youth group grew. It also lost Phil, who ended up an atheist.

There are thousands of wounded former Christians whose faith has fallen victim to this sort of thing. “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him,” Paul warns. That’s not to say this sin can’t be repented and forgiven, but like all sin it can destroy our own souls as well as the souls of those we offend.