Romans 3:22 “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

Everything interests me. When I was a little kid, put me in a room with a set of World Book Encyclopedias, and I would be entertained for hours. I tried collecting everything from rocks to coins to beer cans. I like sports. I played on football, baseball, basketball and track teams. I took lessons for tennis and dabbled in golf. But I also wanted to play music–I took piano lessons and sang in choirs– and I liked having parts in school plays. My dad was handy–my grandpa always said he should have been a carpenter– and I liked to build stuff in his workshop, and watch him fix cars.

The only classes I didn’t care for so much in school were math classes, and that was mostly because of the endless repetitions of solving equations after you’ve got the concept. I mean, once you have memorized the quadratic equation, why do you have to work twenty-five examples? It’s just the same thing with different numbers.

Everything interests me. But talent? That’s another matter. There are very good reasons that I am not earning a living as a musician or pro athlete. I probably shouldn’t even be allowed on a golf course. Sometimes I still try to do my own car repairs or home improvement projects, and sometimes it turns out okay. It’s hard to mess up an oil change, and painting isn’t rocket science. But what do you do when you have torn half way through an engine, and then you get stuck, especially when your wife is gone with the other car? Or what do you do when you put it all back together, and you have parts left over? Some things are best left to a professional.

Salvation is one of those things. Everyone is gifted at something, but no one is gifted at dealing with sin and its consequences. Paul spends chapters of his letter to the Romans trying to talk us out of making this a do-it-yourself project. “There is no one righteous, not even one,” he writes. No one has the qualifications. “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his (God’s) sight by observing the law.” Try as hard as you might, trying to be good enough for God to be satisfied never, ever goes well.

Righteousness, you see, isn’t a relative term. It’s like computer code, either a one or a zero, either the switch is on or its off. Either you are, or you aren’t. Misspell what you are searching for on a web page or computer document, and you will never, ever find it, even if it’s just one letter. Commit just one sin, and the whole save-yourself project crashes and comes tumbling down. “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” After thousands of years of history with no exceptions, neither you nor I are going to be the exception.

So God turns us to the “professional.” There is someone who can fix the sin problem. He can repair the damage it has done, restore us to a right standing with God and spare us from death and hell. “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

Righteousness, you see, is God’s not guilty verdict. Just because we can’t live life so well that we deserve it doesn’t mean that God can’t still give it away. Jesus Christ is the source, the “professional” if you will. Faith is the channel through which he gives us our not guilty verdict, our restored relationship with God. He doesn’t ask us to do something. He simply invites us to trust him.

Why trust Jesus? “He was delivered over to death for our sins, and was raised to life for our justification,” Paul writes at the end of Romans 4. He paid for our guilt so that God could declare us not guilty.             Trust the professional. Trust Jesus Christ. He alone can make people righteous who have been broken by their sin.

John 3:8 “You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

If you watch the weather report any given evening, it may seem that the weatherman is telling you where the wind is coming from and where it is going. You see the fronts on the weather map. You may know that the wind flows clockwise around high pressure systems, and counter clockwise around low pressure systems. That is not the picture Jesus has in mind.

Think of an individual gust of wind on a particular day. Just where did that particular column of air start to move? Where does it die? These are the things you can’t see, and no weatherman can tell you. But you know that the gust of wind was real. You felt it on your face. You heard it rustling through the trees or whistling past your ears. It’s real thing, a real phenomenon, but it’s unseen.

That, Jesus says, is like the people who have been born again. Line up a bunch of randomly selected people, and then tell me which ones are the Christians just by looking at them. You can’t do it. Even if you followed them around for a while you might have difficulty telling them apart, because Christians don’t always act like Christians, and sometimes unbelievers seem to act more Christian than the Christians.

But this new birth, this spiritual life, this relationship with God, this trust in the grace and forgiveness of your King, is a real thing. “You know you’ve changed,” Jesus seems to be telling Nicodemus. “You don’t regard me like the other Pharisees. You hear my words, and it stirs you deep within. It moves you in ways you don’t even understand. Exactly when I became more than just a curiosity to you, and you started to trust me, maybe you can’t even say. But you know that you have changed. You are starting to talk differently. You are starting to think differently about things. You feel guilty about things that never bothered you before. But most of all, you are finding a peace you didn’t have before, because you have found a King who loves you, who will protect you, who will give his life to save you.”

Sound familiar? I could tell you about many modern day Nicodemuses, surprised by their own new birth of faith. Nabeel Qureshi came to the United States from Pakistan to study to be a doctor. For years he dismantled the Christian beliefs of his poorly trained Christian classmates. Then he met a Christian student who knew a thing or two about the Bible. After several years of debate, study, and friendship Nabeel came to the conviction that Jesus is the saving God he claims to be. Before he died of cancer, he became a speaker for a ministry that reaches out to Muslims. Something changed.

You don’t need stories about other people. You have your own. Whether early in life or late, whether by baptism or the word, the Holy Spirit found his way into your heart. Everything changed. You’ve had a new birth. You’ve got a new life. Because of Jesus, that’s no surprise.

John 3:6 “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”

There are no natural born citizens of this Kingdom. The fact that your mother conceived you and gave birth to you gets you one thing: existence. Now you have life as a human being. That’s what we expect, right? Dogs have puppies. Cats have kittens. Humans have baby humans. If it ever worked differently, it would be all over the news. But it never works differently.

Humans don’t give birth to prepackaged children of God who naturally know and trust him, at least not since the fall into sin. Physical life cannot produce spiritual life. The human birth process does not fill a person with the Holy Spirit, does not create a heart beating with faith, does not create a soul that knows it’s true Maker, Savior, and King. I know of no stories of missionaries who have come upon some tribe previously cut off from all Christian contact and discovered that some were already believers in Jesus.

I do know examples of nominally Christian parents who for one reason or another never brought their children to church, never led them to Jesus, and predictably their children remained unbelievers, non-citizens of God’s kingdom. “Flesh gives birth to flesh,” period.

“But the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” God has a way. This new birth, this second birth, is not a do it yourself project, any more than your first birth was. Birth is something that happens to you. It’s a gift. Did any of you schedule your own birth? Could you have chosen to cancel it? Of course not. All you could do is show up when the time came.

God’s Spirit is your spiritual mother in this case. And Jesus hints strongly at where the Spirit shows up to give us birth into God’s kingdom: “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.” The Spirit shows up at our baptisms, like he did at Jesus’ baptism, like Peter promised the 3000 baptized on Pentecost day he would, like he has at every baptism ever since. At the same time the Spirit shows up whenever God’s word is present, like Jesus says to his disciples in John 6, “The words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and they are life,” like Peter wrote in his first letter, “You were born again of the living and enduring word of God.”

The need for a new birth is no surprise. It’s necessary, because it does what our natural birth can’t do: get us into the kingdom of God.

John 3:5-6 “Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of heaven unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”

The Jewish leader Nicodemus was drawn to Jesus’ and his teaching. He saw the miracles, he saw the love, and he was convinced that Jesus had been sent from God. But some of the things that Jesus taught weren’t clear to him. Nicodemus was part of a movement in the Jewish faith that believed a good relationship with God was based on two things: the right family heritage, and the right way of life. If you could trace your family tree back to Abraham, and if you worked very hard at being good, then God accepted you. Jesus turned this idea on its head.           

Jesus wasn’t saying there was anything wrong with having Jewish blood running through your veins. He himself was certainly Jewish. But all that did was give you citizenship in Israel. Jesus wasn’t saying that there was anything wrong with trying to be good. It certainly beats the alternative. But the kingdom of God isn’t a Jewish state, nor is it a moral reform society. It’s the kingdom of God. Let’s explore that concept a little.

You can’t equate the kingdom of God with an earthly nation, not Israel of the past, nor America of the present, nor any other country in the future. There may have been Christians involved in founding our nation, but America never was, nor will it ever be, God’s kingdom. It would be better if we put the idea of a territory or real estate out of our heads altogether.

A kingdom is what a king rules, and a king doesn’t rule dirt or grass, or roads and buildings. He rules people. There is a relationship here. Sometimes the Kingdom of God has what we call “heaven” primarily in view. Even then, we should think less of the clouds, or the pearly gates, or some lavish visions of extreme luxury. We should think of the special situation where God rules unopposed over angels and people who live in perfect obedience. The relationship of ruler to citizen is the thing.

In heaven God may rule unopposed. But here on earth there are more candidates for king than candidates running for president. Not everyone lives under the God of the Bible. They may live under the idol gods, the false gods, of other world religions with names like Allah, Vishnu, the Great Spirit, Mother Earth, or the Universal Consciousness, to name a few.

Others live under the “Spirit of the Age,” sort of a universally agreed upon set of standards for society that often flatly contradict what God has to say about life.

Still others may declare themselves king, like the poet William Ernest Henley does in his poem Invictus. He declares, “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”

Then there are those who have surrendered control of their lives to some vice, or substance, that robs them of their dignity and makes them hate themselves. They have lost control, and they can’t get back the reins. They lose more of themselves every day.

But all of these kings are “front men.” Behind them all is a dark and sinister Power, the Prince of this world, pulling the strings on his puppets and keeping people from entering the kingdom of God and becoming its citizens.

The difference between these two sets of citizens isn’t just a matter of behavior. Often their behavior is hard to tell apart. Those who have entered the kingdom of God often show themselves to be unsteady, imperfect citizens guilty of various crimes and misdemeanors.

Still, God is their King, they are his people, and the relationship remains. It has always been a relationship based on grace and forgiveness, anyway. Those on the outside, in the other kingdom, often come to see the benefit in things like modesty, self-control, faithfulness, generosity, kindness. With God or without him, it’s just a better way of life. But they have no interest in the God who should be their rightful ruler, or the Jesus that he sent. They have no life with the King, because they have not been born again.

Members of God’s kingdom live under his gracious rule, enjoying his gracious blessings. This citizenship itself is a gift to be cherished, a part of the “good news” Jesus came to proclaim.

Matthew 4:4 “Jesus answered, ‘It is written: Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Our life is informed by the way Jesus dealt with the temptations. He met temptation with God’s word. In this example, and the next two temptations the devil throws at him, he always has a Bible passage in response. Here’s what God’s Word can do:

God’s word guides. It immediately points us in the right direction. Maybe you’ve known people who have are always trotting out little phrases that keep them on the straight path. Have you seen the Disney movie Finding Nemo? There is a little support group for sharks in the movie, a kind of 12-step program for recovering “fish addicts.” To keep themselves in recovery they keep repeating the phrase “Fish are friends, not food.” It’s not the whole solution to temptation, as the sharks in the movie also find, but at least it’s a start.

For temptations, you don’t have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible. Having a few Bible passages up your sleeve to recite to yourself at a tempting time may be all you need to get you going. There’s a reason that God summarized his will in just 10 commandments, and that he expressed them in memorable phrases of four to ten words.

With us, though not for Jesus, God’s word also convicts. It exposes the places where our hearts are in the wrong place. It gives us the kind of insight to our own souls that leads us to repent. And with the confession of our sin, God is turning our hearts to far more powerful sources of help.

 Look again at the words that Jesus quoted. “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Would you call that a commandment, or a rule? Isn’t it more of a promise? Moses originally spoke these words to the nation of Israel to explain why God let them get hungry on their journey to the promised land, and then fed them every day with manna from heaven. About themselves, God was teaching them humility. You can’t get by all alone.

About himself, God was teaching them that his promises, springing from his grace and love, are what really keep us alive. God always keeps his word. If he says that he is going to feed us, then he is going to feed us. If he promises that he will never leave us or forsake us, then he is always with us. If he professes his love and mercy for us, then he loves us and takes pity on us without fail.

You see, Jesus wasn’t being driven by God’s demands for obedience when he resisted Satan’s temptation. He was living in God’s promise. He was depending on his Father, because he trusted him. Even more than Jesus wants his example to show us what to do, he wants it to show us who to trust, where to turn for real help.

For us, Jesus’ very presence here on this day was God keeping a promise. God’s Son was hungry, weak, alone, at every disadvantage. But in the face of temptation he doesn’t flinch. He crushes it, and the tempter, with an unwavering trust in God’s Word. He sends the devil fleeing until they meet again at Jesus’ cross, where with his own death Jesus delivers the death blow. He is our hero, our champion, fighting and winning the battle that we could not win.

More than that, he is our substitute whose victory over temptation God counts as our victory, just as his sacrifice at the cross God counts as payment for our debt of sin. Based on our Savior’s victory here, and our Savior’s sacrifice to come, we find the trust to live “on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Matthew 4:3 “The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

On top of the physical challenges of living in a desert wilderness, Jesus was being tempted. The physical and the spiritual circumstances combined to create the temptation. The potential for sin wasn’t so much in obtaining food and ending his hunger. It’s not wrong to eat. It lay in the method.

While Jesus lived on earth as our substitute, the plan was that he live under God the Father like the rest of us. His miraculous power was something reserved for showing mercy to other people. It wasn’t for his own advantage. He was here to show us a life of perfect trust in God. He was here to accept God’s will for all of life in all things–good or bad, easy or hard, pleasant or painful.

Remember how he got into this situation in the desert in the first place? “Jesus was led by the Spirit.” Wasn’t God the Father capable of providing food at any moment? And if God the Father wasn’t intervening to provide food, then couldn’t Jesus trust that it was okay to be hungry now?

The specifics of our situations, and the specifics of our temptations, are different. I’ve never been stranded without food in the middle of a desert and visited by the devil. But when our circumstances take us to the end of our strength; when we have nothing–no help, no resources, no prospects; when we seem to be facing our own doom, then the temptations pile on. Then we worry.

We may even be tempted to dismiss worry as just an emotion, just a natural reaction to an uncertain future. But worry is a waste of time and energy. It accomplishes nothing. Jesus later observed, “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” More than that, worry exposes a heart that doesn’t think God really cares or has things under control. Either he doesn’t love us like he says he does, or he isn’t as powerful and all-knowing as he says he is. In other words, he isn’t really God. That’s why worry isn’t just a feeling, it’s a sin, and it strikes at the heart of our relationship with God.

Alongside worry comes resentment. I appreciate the honesty, but I am always a little taken aback when someone comes right out and tells me, “I’m mad at God.” A cancer diagnosis; losing someone you love suddenly; going so long without work that you lose the house, or the car, or maybe even the marriage–these “deserts of temptation” have been the occasion for people to tell me they have a beef with the Almighty. Just at that time when we need him most we are tempted to turn against him.

So we are tempted to try to go solo, to make it on our own without God. We transfer our faith from him to ourselves. We will find our own solutions. Sometimes those solutions may not be wrong in themselves. But sometimes we wind up in self-destructive behaviors. Our desperation makes us selfish, and we have no concern for whom we are hurting as we grab and lunge for relief, like the drowning swimmer who jumps all over the life guard trying to save him.

When life becomes a desert of temptation, it is hard to trust God in spite of your circumstances. But he has something better to fill our need than stones. He has a wiser solution than us taking control out of his hands, into our own. He is still the God whose promises do not fail. He gives his people exactly what they need, no matter how hard that may be to see. We trust him with our sins at the cross. We trust him with our lives at his empty tomb. We can trust him with every pressing need in the wilderness of temptation as well.

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.