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[The bell is awoken.] [Praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord. Blessed be the time of the Lord, blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised. The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory is ever more glorious. Amen.] The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens. Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down upon the heavens and the earth?

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He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ashes to make them fit with princes, with the princes of his people. He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children. Praise the Lord.] In this very short and sweet psalm, the psalmist calls us to praise God at all times and in all situations and regardless of our status in life. And he says we are to do this because of the faithfulness and the love which are to be found in the Lord. One of the ways in which we praise God is with our gifts and our offerings. And the ushers will wait upon you now to receive your act of praise. It's been a busy day for me. I began it in Bay Village, Ohio in the Bay Village Presbyterian Church. Very exciting Presbyterian congregation. They have three worship services on a Sunday morning. So I preached at 8 and at 9.30 and began at 11. And then there was a luncheon with the officers and then the three hour drive to get here to be with you this evening.

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I don't think I would have come for any other reason than to be with you this evening. But I did come for that reason and I'm glad I'm here. The Gospel according to Matthew, the chapter number 4, beginning the reading at the verse number 1. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights and afterwards he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." But he answered, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'"

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Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, 'He will give his angels charge over you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against the stone.'" Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, 'You shall not tempt the Lord your God.'" Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. And he said to him, "All these I will give you if you will fall down and worship me." Then Jesus said to him, "Be gone, Satan, for it is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.'" Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him." May God bless us this reading from his words.

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Notice how quickly the temptation of Jesus comes after his baptism. The comparison and the contrast is most vivid in the gospel according to Mark. For there the baptism of Jesus, when he hears his Father's voice, "Thou art my beloved Son, and with thee I am well pleased," is followed by the very next words, and immediately he was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. Immediately. After the moment in which Jesus' nature is confirmed, he is taken into a time of temptation. So it is with those who know the Damascus Road experience, with those who know the converting power of God. As soon as one commits oneself to Christ, immediately there comes a time of temptation.

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Evil attacks and attempts to shake the promises and the commitments that have been made. And what is interesting is, God allows this to happen. Now he allows it to happen because, as any parent knows, a child that is reared in a greenhouse, a child that is protected from every temptation, a child that is somehow screened so that that child never encounters anything that tests it in life, that child will be unable to endure strain and contest. To protect a child too much is to ruin the child's future. I could regale you tonight with tale after tale out of my college experience, in which very well-intentioned and very loving mothers and fathers so restricted their children in their college experience that their children left school without maturity, without testing or trial.

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Unfinished, and great was the fall thereof. God allows us to be tested. He allowed his own sons to be tested. For it is in testing that we develop and build our mental strength. So every one of us as Christians will undergo temptation. But it is especially upon those who have just come through some great experience of God, like the Damascus Road experience. And notice I say every one of us, not just we Christians. You're traveling in Europe sometimes and you have the opportunity to visit the Vorkburg, which is the castle in which Duke Frederick protected Luther for a while when Luther's enemies were seeking to take his life.

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They will show you a room, the room in which Luther translated the Bible for the first time into German. And they will show you on the wall a great ink block. And the story is that as Luther, having gone through this great affirmative experience of the Dieterborm, "Here I stand, God help me, amen," after this great announcement of faith, this positive conviction, this act of profound determination, when he goes apart, immediately after that, he was so attacked by temptation that it was as if he saw the devil before him. And he hurled his ink pot at the devil. And the mark of it is still on the wall. So great Christians and small ones, the sophisticated and unsophisticated in the matters of faith, all know what it is to be tempted, even Jesus.

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I would remind you that there is nothing wrong in being tempted. In the yielding to temptation there is sin. But in being tempted there is no sin. For Jesus, who was sinless, was tempted. And we would not know about this temptation of Jesus had he not told others about it. He was in the wilderness by himself. No one would ever have been aware of this experience had not Jesus himself related it. So let's begin here. That temptation, the wilderness road, is common to all those who believe, and especially to those who are coming from dramatic moments of faith. Now almost invariably when this temptation comes, it comes first in the form of a questioning of the validity of the spiritual experience you have known just before it.

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Notice what Satan says to Jesus. He says, "If thou be the Son of God." Jesus has just come from the experience in which he has heard God say, "Thou art my beloved Son, and with thee I am well pleased." What's the first thought that temptation puts into his mind? "If thou be the Son of God." And I think that's what happens to those who come from a Damascus road, or from a converting, or some other mountaintop experience. The first thing that begins to nibble at the corner of their consciousness is, "Are you really Christian?"

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I mean, has anything really changed? Aren't your prayers just a projection of your wishes? Isn't this new dependence upon God which you claim nothing more than a rather unsophisticated defense mechanism? This is the reason, you see, it is so important to remind ourselves of the decisions that we have made, and to stick to them. In the story of Ulysses, the Odyssey of Ulysses, there comes a time when he visits the Isle of Circe.

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And Circe, you will remember, was the beautiful woman who lured the men from Ulysses' ship into her castle by sweet wine and music, and then touched them with a wand and turned them into swine. And this happens to half of Ulysses' crew. Only one who goes, Eurycoccus, manages to escape. And he comes back and he tells you this. And Ulysses, strong, powerful, with an immense will and ego, sets out to rescue his men, not considering the danger of confronting Circe. But on the way in the story, he meets the god Mercury. And Mercury gives to him a flower. And he says, "Whenever Circe comes near, smell the flower."

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Ulysses goes into the castle, he hears the music, he drinks the wine, and the moment comes when Circe was about to touch him and turn him into swine. But at that moment he smells the flower, and the power of evil is broken. We need to have about us all the time the fragrance of our faith, to hold up before us the blossom of our beliefs. That's the reason when people come to be part of the fellowship of this church, we ask them to enter into classes, Bible studies, and other experiences where they will grow in the faith.

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Development of faith is essential if faith is to be held to in the time of testing and questioning. We must know what we believe, and we must be growing in our understanding of why we believe it. And this must start at the very beginning of the journey of faith. There's a story that comes out of the Appalachian Mountains about how the serpent went to the robin and asked the robin just for a few of his feathers.

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And the robin handed them over, and the next day the serpent just asked for a few feathers. And the robin handed them over, until pretty soon the robin had lost so many of its feathers that it could no longer fly. And in that moment it was trapped and doomed. We must not even give away the feathers.

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We must begin at the very beginning to educate ourselves, to experience in conversation with others, to be regular upon the worship of the church, to sit down ourselves with the Word of God and to search out the truths it has for us. It is only in so doing that we will be able to resist that first temptation, that subtle whispering that comes, "Is it really going to make any difference, or is it not but a figment of your imagination?"

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Hold the flower of faith tight and breathe upon it. Now as one notices the temptations that come to Jesus, one notices that generally two observations can be made about them. The first is that he's asked to choose not between evil and good, but between good and bad. Now that is a very subtle way of tempting us also.

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You know, when the devil says to Jesus, "Make these stones into bread," there's nothing per se wrong with that. I mean, what can be wrong with feeding the hungry? Well, this is what's wrong with it. If one wins the allegiance of others by bribes, one has won nothing at all.

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If one wins people only by handing to them one kind of reward or another, by lavishing upon them all kinds of things they would not have under other circumstances, and then one says, "To receive these things there must be some kind of believing," that leads to prudential faith at the very most.

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We believe in order that we might get something out of it, and prudential believing is no believing at all. It's good to feed the hungry, but it's bad to believe in God only so your belly's full. Look at the next temptation. "Throw yourself down from the temple and people will believe in you."

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There's nothing wrong with believing in Jesus. It is certainly all right to win allegiance to the plans and the purposes of God. But were Jesus to have yielded to this not-so-bad idea, he would have been forcing the hand of God, for this is not the way in which God chose to move.

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His was the way of sacrificial love. His was the way of the cross. In other words, we are often tempted to do those things which appear to be good because, look how quick the results come. But God's way is always the way of patience.

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One of the most famous atheists to ever ply his wares up and down the length of this country was Robert Ingersoll. This was back in the days when there was no radio or television, and people used to go out and hear speakers like that for the thrill of it. And the finale of his lecture was for him to take off his watch, it wasn't a wristwatch, it was a pocket watch,

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and hold it up and say, "Oh God, if there is a God, I give you one minute in which to strike me down dead." And it is said that people actually fainted in the audience at the tension. Would a bolt of lightning come to the ceiling and finish the teaser right on the spot? And they would wait while he ticked off a second, and then laughed at God.

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Until, one night, an older lady sitting in about the eighth row got up halfway through the minute and said, "Mr. Ingersoll, sir, you're just gone crazy if you think you can exhaust the patience of God in one minute." That was the end of Ingersoll's lecture. The patience of God. We are tempted many times to move ahead more swiftly.

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But the fact of the matter is, his plan is to be sovereign. And that's the temptation that's put before Jesus, and so often before us. Things that appear to be good, but they are not all that they ought to be. The other thing that's characteristic of temptation is that it most often strikes us at places where we are strong.

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Jesus had the capacity, you see, to do any of the things he was able to do. It would be no temptation to us to say, "Change that loaf, that rock, into a piece of bread." We couldn't do it. How would we be tempted? Jesus was tempted precisely with things that he could do.

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Jesus could, in response to his third temptation, to have bowed down before Satan. And if he would have bowed before Satan, then all the kingdoms of the world would have been given to him by the prince of the powers of the air. They would have been his. He had the capacity to do it, and that's what made the temptation so severe.

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The person with the very glib tongue, for example, is the one who's most tempted to use that tongue to gain his purpose. The individual who's very charming and suave is the one who is most readily tempted to use his suave, debonair manner to gain ulterior purpose. You see, evil is smart enough to know that in approaching us, we will most likely be on our guard at our weak point. But we're proud of our strong point, and these he attempts to subvert.

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So be aware of the fact, when you walk the wilderness roads, that when temptation comes, it will most often come not in a choice between evil and good, but in a choice between good and bad. And it will most often come not at the place where you are weak, you'll be on your guard there, but at the place where you are strong. There you will be led to do evil. It's important as we race through this parrhia, of course, to notice how Jesus rebutted the devil, and he used the same technique in every instance.

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He rebutted the devil with scripture. "About the bread, it is written that man shall live, not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God. On throwing himself in the temple, it is written, 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.' About worshipping Satan, 'Be gone, Satan, it is written, 'Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.'"

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You know, I'm fascinated when I read this passage every time. It looks to me almost like a tennis match. I mean, Satan hauls that and he blasts one across, and Jesus goes, "Poof." And Satan blasts one across and he goes, "Poof." And he does it all through the use of the Word of God.

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It's interesting to compare a successful repulsion of evil with a failing repulsion of evil in scripture, and notice the difference. Take Eve and Jesus. Jesus was tempted with bread, Eve was tempted with a fruit. Jesus was told that he could have the pleasure of the power of the allegiance of the people, and Eve was told, "Look how good it is and attractive to the eye."

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Jesus is promised authority, and Eve is promised wisdom. "You will be as intelligent and wise and farsighted as God himself." The difference between the results of the two temptations is, Eve forgets what God said to her. And Jesus repeats to evil the Word of God.

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We mentioned a little earlier Ulysses in one of his journeys. Do you remember how when he was near the sirens, the sirens were those pretty girls who used to sing and lead the ships to crash on the rock. And he had himself tied to the mast, and he put wax in the ears of his sailors so they couldn't hear, and then the sailors rode by. He listened to the song and screamed of course to go, but the sailors couldn't hear him so they made it by.

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Always seemed to me he put himself through a lot of trouble there, he didn't have to. A much better procedure was followed by the Argonauts when they were searching out the Golden Fleece. They had to pass that same place you'll remember. What did they do?

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They took along Orpheus, the master of music, whose music was greater than the music of the sirens. And when they began to sing, Orpheus began to play. And they so focused upon and listened to the beautiful music of Orpheus, that they were able to ignore the music of the sirens. That's what the Bible means when it says, "Thy word have I hid in my heart, O God, that I might not sin against thee."

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You are focusing so much upon the music and the melody of Scripture, that you are not let aside by other melodies. I think it's important to observe that oft times the word of God does not have this power in our lives until we need it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian and ethicist, said that the reason that was so is that if we had this power in us all the time, we would have a tendency to begin to rely on ourselves.

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Having it, we would depend on ourselves. Instead of that, God has made us in such a way that at the moment of temptation, we go to Him and listen to His word, and He puts in that word the power to lift us and save us at the moment that we need it. And we are aware of the fact that the power comes from Him, and not from ourselves.

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When I was in Africa visiting mission stations once, the missionaries were having a conference at a place called Lake Mungkamba in Zaire. It used to be called Belgian Congo. And they were very kind. They put me up in the best cabin on the place. It had no floor, and it had no doors, and it had no glass in the windows, but it did have a roof, which made it the best one.

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Now, inside this cabin were a lot of bats, and they all lived up there in the roof. And there was no ceilings to the rooms, so that was wide open. I could lie there in bed and look up and see them all above me, which was all right in the daytime, because they were asleep. But at night, at night, they were flying all about you. You could hear them all over.

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And so, we used mosquito netting. And you had to tuck it in. Now, the reason we used it was so that the bats would not fall down on our bed. You see, if a bat were to fall on your bed, and you were to roll over on it, it would bite you.

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And bats are rabid. That's a bad trip. So, you put the net up, and the bats would stay away from the net, and you would be all right. That was a wilderness experience for me. The wilderness road, the tempting road, is one where the bats of all kinds of temptations are about us, especially when it's dark.

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And we need about us the net of God's Word. We need to be able to use it just as Jesus did to repel the evil that confronted Him. And notice how the story ends. It says that the angels came and ministered to Jesus.

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And I think that's an important thing to remember about temptation. When we go away from temptation, having defeated it, we are ministered to by angels. That means we are stronger having defeated temptation than we were before we went into the contest. Every time we wrestle with evil and whip it, we gain new strength.

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You know, in the Hawaiian Islands, the islanders believe that if you kill an enemy, the strength of the enemy enters into you. That's the reason they wear the teeth of the animals they kill and sew on about their necks. If they kill a wolf, then the cunning of the wolf enters into them, because they've been the victors in the contest. Every time we defeat temptation, some of the spiritual strength that we gather from the exercise and the challenge is added to our reserves.

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I call that the ministry of the angels. They're building us up for battles that are still to come. The message then for the evening is that we will all know the wilderness road, and that all of us can know victory there. There is no temptation, the word of God says, which is able to overcome us.

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And victory will make us stronger as we take journeys on other ancient roads for modern feet. Let us pray. Our Father, we thank Thee for the beautiful, the inspiring, the convicting witness of Thy Son. Scriptures say that He was tempted at all points, just as we are, yet without sin.

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He went into the wilderness and came out of it unscathed. May we, out of this brief survey of His experience, grasp some principles that will enable us, walking after Him, to come out of our wilderness moments, not only unscathed, but stronger for the living of lives that will be well-pleasing in His sight. And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, be with you now and forevermore.

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Amen. Bye.