Passing the Test

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. We're going to start probably where you don't expect in this Genius of Jesus series. You'd think we'd start maybe at the beginning, you know, like with a word from John, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. Start kind of grandiose on a great scale, or at least with his birth and kind of go chronological through his life. Or with his first big teaching, boom, and a big splash of a miracle. But instead we're starting where nobody else was. No other human being was with him during this time. And it's a time of private testing before his public ministry. And I think that's where we're going to see, of all places, we're going to see what really moves him, what really is his focus and his goal and the genius behind it, through what's called the temptation in the wilderness. So we're reading now in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 4. You can also see this also occurs in Luke chapter 4, and also just a short snippet in the Gospel of Mark in chapter 1. But this is a longer version. So there's three times that the temptation comes up and is dealt with in one version or another. So we're going to read in Matthew chapter 4 verses 1 through 11. Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. Man, I'd get hungry a lot sooner, but okay. 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 comes from the mouth of God. 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 command his angels concerning 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 put the Lord your God to the test. Again, the devil took him to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their glory. And he said to him, All these I will give you if you 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 were ministering to him. Okay, that's our text today. Kind of low key in one sense. Nobody else was there. Nothing much productive seems to be going on through 40 days. I've never fasted for that long, you know, that's for sure. But can you imagine, this is 40 days, Jesus is in the wilderness. Notice at the beginning of this that the Spirit is the one who compels him to go out in the wilderness. And he's there in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, fasting, doing nothing. Do you understand what I mean? It kind of seems like aimless, purposeless. He's not being productive. He's not writing a book. He's not, you know, you don't see him building anything. He's not doing anything, and yet it is here. Isn't that true in our lives too, when you're alone? When nothing much is happening, when you don't see anything, you know, like, Wow, I've got this goal or anything going on. When it's just emptiness, wilderness, not much happening. That's when you get down to the core of who you are, what you're about, where things are going. That's kind of what's going on here. We're finding here, when everything's stripped away from Jesus, there's no crowds around him. He's not doing any activities. I think we're finding here who he is, what he's really about, how he's going to define himself. And what's going on here is going to determine the rest of his ministry as well. We get it stripped down, so we get kind of the inner core rather than any of the other accoutrements along with it. And then we question what's really Jesus about. We're going to find that out in this text. This series, Genius, you've heard that term before. It's genius. Wow, that's genius. I looked up the definition in Merriam-Webster and elsewhere. And many times it has to do with intellectual capacity, but it's not just that. It's also originality. It's also a penchant for a direction, a focus. It's something more than simply, oh, he's genius, he's brilliant, he can do anything. That's not what we're talking about. It's much more for Jesus. The focus and the genius in his life is how he goes about being the Son of God for us. Rodney Stark wrote a book called The Triumph of Christianity. And in it, the beginning, in the introduction, this is what he says. He was a teacher and miracle worker who spent nearly all of his brief ministry in the tiny and obscure province of Galilee, often preaching to outdoor gatherings. A few listeners took up his invitation to follow him, and a dozen or so became his devoted disciples. But when he...