Tempted

Lenten Devotion Day 2

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Matthew 4:8–10

Tempted.  We’ve all been tempted. To do, to take, to eat, or worse yet, to speak our minds without filter.  In the scene in this passage Jesus is tempted.  As a child, I always thought that Jesus’ temptation wasn’t too bad being that the world and all that is in it belong to God, thus to Jesus, being that he was fully God and fully human.  In my eyes the devil wasn’t offering anything Jesus didn’t already own. 

But through adult eyes I see that Jesus’ greatest temptation was to step outside his fully human self to serve his own needs.  Here he was after 40 days of fasting in the wilderness.  His body was weak.  He was hungry.  He was tired. What Satan was really tempting him with was the opportunity to check his humanity at the door, and embrace his Godhood. Embrace his omniscience. Embrace his omnipotence. To think of himself for a change.  To worship the kind of selfishness that Satan embodied.

But Jesus, having been totally enveloped in prayer, meditation and scripture for the past 40 days knew that to worship God and serve him only, was to live for others.  It meant putting the needs of a woefully lost world before his own immediate needs.  Jesus showed us what “I am second” looked like before it became a Christian catchphrase. 

Today, the message that we are bombarded with in society is “me first”.  First let me satisfy my immediate needs and then let me work on long-term needs and goals, then my wants, and finally, so often only then do we look around to see the “least of these”.  Our greatest temptation in today’s society is a sense of entitlement. The sense that we “deserve” anything beyond salvation.  No, what we deserve is death. What He gave us was grace. We have been saved by it and for it.  Saved for the work of sharing grace to a world that is lost and dying in sin everyday.  No one was more entitled to all the world has to offer than Jesus, and yet he saw beyond his needs to ours. 

Prayer: Jesus, you were fully God and fully human and yet you did not allow Satan to tempt you to something greater in the world’s eyes and less in the eyes of your Heavenly Father.  Help me today to follow your example.  Amen