Good morning everyone.
Allow me to begin by asking you a question. If the Lord Jesus appeared to you today and said, ‘I would grant you one request, one desire’, what would you ask for? Another way to ask that question is to say, at this point in your life, what is your deepest desire? What is it in the heart of hearts you have, that above all else, (you) do you need, desire, want?
It may sound almost like a silly exercise, but in fact it can help us to understand the extraordinary episode in Jesus’s life when he entered into the desert and allowed the father of evil to tempt Him. And it is, in the end, all about desire.
So we can begin by asking the question, why is it that the Lord went into the desert in the first place? And the scriptures, the Evangelist tells us it was in fact to allow the devil to be there to tempt Him. But we could also surmise there is another reason that points to the deepest desire in Jesus’s heart. Because He was preparing for His public ministry and the very fact that that ministry would be public would take Jesus to many different places and towns, seeing many different people. We often hear in the scriptures, He cured and preached all day into the night and would escape to the mountains to feed His deepest desire. For in the desert alone, stark, He could fulfill that desire to be one with His Father, to enjoy the communion He has always had from the beginning of creation, from the beginning of time, before there was time. The profound love He has for His Father and His Father with Him, even in His humanity. For the deepest desire of the Lord was always to be one with His Father and He always was one with Him, desiring Him above all else.
So when the father of evil came to tempt Him, he did for Jesus what he does for us; that he takes what appears to be somewhat of a legitimate desire and twists it, precisely because he is hoping that we would forget that the one desire you and I, in the base deepest part of our lives, must nurture every day, is the same deepest desire Jesus had; which is to be one with God and to allow God to be the foundation of our lives, and to have everything else in our lives flow from that.
So the father of evil takes the legitimate desire to have food and drink, particularly after 40 days. And yet he twists it to say to Jesus ‘but use Your divine power to do it’ so it’s an illegitimate use of power. And Jesus said no, because ‘I’m one with My father’. Or when He looks at the temptation of being at the parapet and saying ‘jump off because the angels will protect you’, we know God will protect us and certainly His Son, but it’s not a right – it’s a grace.
And so when we presume it again, and a legitimate desire that the father of evil twists, when we forget that God the Father is the source of all blessings and grace He gives even before we ask.
And then of course all the kingdoms of the world, it’s ironic my friends all the kingdoms of the world will worship Jesus. He is the Master and Savior of all things. And yet the father of evil twists it so that it becomes an end in itself. And Jesus says no. Because in His heart of hearts, all of His life is offered to His Father. And all the sovereignty that is given to Him is given back to His Father.
For you see my friends, the lesson is this; if we wish to have an ordered life, if we wish to have the legitimate desires that you and I have that are good, not to be twisted into something evil. If we wish to avoid sin in all its forms, we must always go back and ask the fundamental question: what role does God play in my life? For if He is not the foundation of my life, if He’s not the prism through which we order everything else, if we don’t always start with Him and end with Him, if we are tempted to do something other than that, my friends, we are going to get into trouble. And when you examine your conscience as I examine my conscience, and when you look your sin squarely in the face in the most brutal honesty you and I can muster, the roots of every one of those sins begins by forgetting who God is, what role He plays in my life. And we forget to trust Him for all the good desires we want for ourselves, for those whom we love, and for the whole world.
Jesus never forgot it. Sadly you and I do, and that is why we have the season of Lent.
So let me ask you one last time: if Jesus appeared to you today, what would you ask? For above all else, what is your deepest desire? Jesus knew the answer to that question. Do we?
