Sermon For First Sunday Of Lent

Driven Into The Desert, Held By The Word

Brothers and sisters, we begin Lent today. And Lent begins, as it always does, not with a gentle invitation to self-improvement, but with a hard and searching question. The question is not merely what we will give up for forty days. The question is this: when everything that ordinarily props us up is stripped away, when we are hungry and uncertain and the voices around us seem to offer perfectly reasonable solutions to our distress, what do we actually trust? Where does our weight finally rest?

That is the question Luke 4 puts before us this First Sunday of Lent. And it is not a comfortable question. But it is a necessary one. And the good news, the genuinely good news we carry into this season, is that we do not face it alone. We face it in the company of One who has already walked this ground.

The text is Luke 4:1-13, and I want us to stay close to it.

"Then Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over, he was hungry."

Notice what Luke tells us before the first temptation even arrives. Jesus is full of the Holy Spirit. He has just been baptized. The voice of the Father has spoken over him from heaven. And then, immediately, the Spirit leads him not into a season of triumph but into a season of testing. The wilderness is not a detour from God's purposes. It is the path of God's purposes. That matters enormously for how we understand our own difficult seasons.

Jesus is hungry. He is physically weakened. He is alone. And into that vulnerability the devil comes with what sounds, on the surface, like a perfectly sensible suggestion.

"If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread."

Now hear what is really being said here. The devil is not simply tempting Jesus to eat. He is tempting Jesus to use his identity, his divine authority, to serve his own immediate comfort. He is tempting him to prove who he is by acting independently of the Father's provision and the Father's timing. The whisper underneath the words is this: you have the power, you have the need, why wait on God?

And Jesus answers from Deuteronomy: "It is written: Man must not live on bread alone."

He is quoting from Israel's own wilderness story. Israel spent forty years in the wilderness and repeatedly failed the test. They grumbled about bread, they doubted God's provision, they took matters into their own hands. Jesus, in forty days, recapitulates that entire history and answers it faithfully. He is, as the Letter to the Hebrews will later say, the one who was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.

This is the governing conviction I want to place before you today, and I want to return to it more than once because it is the heartbeat of this passage and of this season.

Jesus did not trust himself through the wilderness. He trusted the Father, and the Father held him.

That is the word Lent speaks to us. Not a word of self-reliance. Not a word of spiritual heroism. A word about where our weight belongs.

The second temptation moves from the physical to the political. The devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and says, in effect, I will give you authority over all of this, if you will worship me. Skip the cross. Take the shortcut. The glory without the suffering.

And again Jesus answers from Scripture: "It is written: Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only."

We should not rush past this too quickly. The kingdoms of the world were, in a real sense, what Jesus had come to reclaim. The reign of God over all creation is precisely what the gospel announces. The devil was not offering Jesus something entirely foreign to his mission. He was offering him the destination without the road that led there. He was offering him the crown without the cross.

This is a temptation that comes to all of us in various forms. We want the fruit of faithfulness without the long obedience that produces it. We want the peace that passes understanding without the discipline of prayer that opens us to it. We want the character that suffering produces without the suffering. And the voice that says there is a faster way, a more efficient way, a way that bypasses the costly path, that voice is not new. Jesus heard it in the wilderness.

And he refused it. Not because the goal was wrong, but because the means was a betrayal of the Father. The road to the kingdom runs through Gethsemane and Golgotha, not around them.

Jesus did not trust himself through the wilderness. He trusted the Father, and the Father held him.

The third temptation is perhaps the most subtle of all. The devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem and quotes Scripture back at him. Psalm 91: "He will give his angels orders concerning you, to protect you, and they will support you with their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone."

Throw yourself down, the devil says. If you are the Son of God, prove it. Make God demonstrate his faithfulness publicly, dramatically, on your terms.

And Jesus answers: "It is also written: Do not test the Lord your God."

This is the temptation to turn trust into a demand. To take the promises of God and use them as leverage. To say, God has promised to protect me, therefore I will engineer a situation that forces him to act. It looks like faith. It sounds like faith. But it is actually a form of control. It is faith that has quietly placed itself at the center and made God the servant of its own agenda.

Real trust does not demand proof. Real trust does not manufacture crises to test whether God will show up. Real trust walks forward in obedience, holds the promises of God with open hands, and waits on the Father's timing and the Father's way.

When Luke tells us that after these three temptations the devil departed from Jesus "until an opportune time," he is being honest with us. The wilderness is not the last test. Gethsemane is coming. The cross is coming. The temptation to avoid the suffering, to find a way around the Father's will, will return. And Jesus will face it again. And he will be faithful again.

Brothers and sisters, this is why the First Sunday of Lent matters. We are not simply observing a religious calendar. We are being invited into a season of honest reckoning with the places in our own lives where we are tempted to live on something other than the word of God. Where we are tempted to take shortcuts around the costly path of obedience. Where we are tempted to use the promises of God as tools for our own comfort rather than receiving them as gifts that sustain us in the Father's purposes.

And I want to be clear with you: Lent does not promise that if you fast and pray and give alms for forty days, your circumstances will change. The wilderness did not end for Jesus in triumph over his enemies. It ended in his returning to Galilee in the power of the Spirit to begin a ministry that would lead him to a cross. Faithful obedience does not guarantee an easy road. It guarantees the presence of the One who walks the road with you.

That is not a small thing. That is everything.

The collect for this day in the Book of Common Prayer asks God to come quickly to help us when we are assaulted by many temptations, and because we cannot always stand upright, to grant us the support of his grace. Notice the honesty of that prayer. We cannot always stand upright. We are not asked to pretend otherwise. We are asked to reach for the grace that is already being extended.

And that grace has a face. It is the face of the One who stood in the wilderness before us. The writer to the Hebrews says it plainly: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Therefore let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need."

Jesus did not trust himself through the wilderness. He trusted the Father, and the Father held him. And now, as our great High Priest, he intercedes for us in our wilderness.

So let me ask you directly, as this season begins. What is the wilderness you are carrying into this Lent? Where are you hearing the voice that says take the shortcut, prove yourself, stop waiting on God? Where are you most tempted to live on something other than the word of God, to find your security in something that is not the Father's provision?

You do not have to answer that question alone. You answer it in the company of the One who has already been there. You answer it as part of a people who gather week by week around the Table where the bread and the cup proclaim that the One who endured the wilderness also endured the cross, and that neither the wilderness nor the cross had the final word.

We are moving toward that Table today. And before we arrive, we are invited to be honest. Honest about our hunger, our weakness, our temptations, and our need. And then to hear again the word that sustained Jesus in the desert: the word of the living God, which is sufficient, which is trustworthy, and which will hold us.

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus, you know what it is to be hungry and tested and alone. You know what it is to hear the voice that offers an easier way. And you were faithful where we have not been. We come to you this Lent not with our strength but with our need. Hold us by your word. Lead us by your Spirit. And bring us through this season to the Table where you give yourself to us again. We ask this in your name, and for your glory. Amen.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2017. Luke 4:1-13; Deuteronomy 8:3; Deuteronomy 6:13; Deuteronomy 6:16; Hebrews 4:15-16.

The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Publishing, 1979. Collect for the First Sunday in Lent, p. 218.

Joel B. Green. The Gospel of Luke. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

N. T. Wright. Luke for Everyone. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

Darrell L. Bock. Luke, Volume 1: 1:1-9:50. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1994.