Brothers and sisters, if I could be honest, the devil is not hiding behind every bush.
But what he likes to do is he likes to tempt, and he likes to lie.
And these are the two ways that he's able to get Christians to trip up most times.
Well hey, welcome back to our Matthew devotional.
Today we're going to be looking at Matthew chapter 4.
Matthew chapter 4 says, Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted
by the devil.
After he fasted forty days and forty nights, he was famished.
The tempter came and said to him, If you are the Son of God, command that these stones
become bread.
But he answered, It is written, Man does 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 had him stand on the highest point of the
temple.
And he said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,
he will command his angels concerning you.
With their hands they will lift you up, so that you will not strike your foot against
the stone.
Then Jesus said to him, Once again, it is written, you are not to put the Lord your
God to the test.
Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world
and their grandeur.
And he said to him, I will give you all these things, if you throw yourself down on the
ground and worship me.
Then Jesus said to him, Go away, Satan, for it is written, you are to worship the Lord
your God and serve only him.
Then the devil left him, and the angels came and began ministering to his needs.
Now there are two trains of thoughts I want to be able to break down here.
Number one is what these temptations represent.
And then number two, we're going to get into kind of what spiritual warfare is.
Starting with what the three temptations represent.
Let's break those down.
You see bread being the first one.
When Satan said, Turn these stones into bread, what that can show is provision.
The second one is throw yourself down.
What that kind of shows is a person's conscience.
And the third one is bow to me and I will give you power.
But what I want to break down on this is, these are actually the same type of temptations
that the people of Israel dealt with when they were in the wilderness for 40 years.
Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days, they were in the wilderness for 40 years, and continually
broke God's covenant with them by giving into each temptation that came to them.
They would complain all the time and tell Moses, Moses we're hungry, it's better for
us to have been in Egypt and stayed in Egypt than it would be for us to die in the wilderness.
So Moses, praying to God, prayed and asked for God to provide and God sent manna.
And yet the people still complained by telling Moses, oh it's better for us to have stayed
in Egypt and to be slaves and to die, if you're only going to lead us into the wilderness,
to die here.
And Moses, again, came to God, asked God, God would you provide water, God would you
provide sustenance, God would you provide a victory over these battles we are about
to fight.
And we saw that God came through each and every time.
And then we see finally that when they came to the gates of the promised land, they felt
defeated and they said it is better for us to have stayed in Egypt and to stay there
as slaves and to eat the fat of the land than to fight against these people.
And we saw that Moses at that time, being angry and upset, came to God again and asked
God to intervene and God said they will not enter into the promised land until this generation
has died.
And so time and time again these people gave into the temptation of griping and complaining
and saying God is not faithful, only for God to prove his faithfulness time and time again.
And yet we see here Jesus is in the wilderness for 40 days and these same type of temptations
come.
Jesus is fasting, he's hungry, he's tired, and the enemy comes to him and says, hey if
you are the Son of God, turn these rocks into bread.
And Jesus says, for it is written, you will not tempt the Lord your God.
And so what Jesus is saying here is, hey I'm not going to turn these rocks into bread,
I'm not going to give into the temptation of eating right now, I'm not going to give
into the temptation of what my flesh wants, instead I'm going to look to God to provide
for me.
We see again he brings them to the highest point of the temple and he says, hey if you
are the Son of God, throw yourself down and God will send his angels to protect you.
God will send his angels to save you.
And we see Jesus says again, once again, it is written, you are not to put the Lord your
God to the test.
Knowing that hey, just because I'm fasting, just because I'm walking with God, just because
I'm tempted to give into my conscience and I want what my heart wants now doesn't mean
I'm going to put God to the test.
And then the last temptation was, hey if you are the Son of God, bow down to me now and
I will give you all these nations, all the nations of the world, all the kingdoms of
the world for you to rule.
And we see right then and there that Jesus, instead of bowing down and giving himself
over to have more power, knowing that God has already given him power, decided to tell
the devil to flee, to run, to get behind him.
Now this is a great passage of what we see, what it means to actually persevere through
temptations. So many times we have believers today who will give in to the
first temptation that they see, the first temptation that they have. When it comes
to provision, how many Christians do you know? And maybe it might even be you.
I've definitely fallen into this temptation before when it comes to
provision, when it comes to maybe making more money at a job that you know God
has called you out of, or when it comes to maybe spending more time away from
your family to be able to focus more on your career so you can get that next
We see that we'll much rather risk our devotional life, we'll much rather risk
our time with God, we'll much rather risk our Sundays at church, we would much
rather risk everything else when it comes to the spiritual just so we can
have our physical provisions and needs met. Maybe the second one, maybe we'll
give ourselves over into a gloom mindset, maybe we'll give ourselves over into a
negative outlook on the world and so many times we'll see that we'll walk
around, we'll just have negative thoughts towards people, maybe we'll look
around and we'll just start looking at people as if they're less than, maybe
we'll start judging people and holding grudges, maybe we'll start letting our
conscience be plagued and bittered and uprooted from what's good and what's
godly and we'll just become a person who is willing to to throw themselves at
every single wind and wave of whatever it is that brings us joy, instead of
knowing that we're not to put the Lord to the test, instead of saying, God you
know how I'm feeling now, I guess I'm just gonna walk away from my faith
because you didn't do this or God I'm just gonna I'm just gonna give up
because you didn't do that for me. We're telling ourselves, hey you know what our
our emotions don't dictate our reality, we're not gonna put God to the test like
that. Or maybe even the third one which is probably the biggest one is how many
of us have been tempted with power, whether it's again that promotion or
whether it's whether it's to stay in a relationship because we have control
over that person or whatever it is, we see so many times that these are the
temptations that the enemy likes to throw at us and so many times we have
Christians that fall into this left and right. This is a great passage of what
spiritual warfare looks like. You see the devil's way of attacking Jesus is to
tempt him and dispute what I like to call half-truths. What half-truths are are
it's not necessarily a full lie, there's still still some truth in it but it's
not the full truth. You see this is the way he also likes to attack every
believer. If you can get someone to fall into a pit and to stay there then you
don't have to worry about them anymore and if you can get someone to believe in
a lie you don't have to worry about them anymore. We saw that in World War II, we
saw that in Nazi Germany when Hitler had an entire nation believing lies. He used
passion, he used half-truths to be able to to get these people in this nation to
believe the the agenda he had at hand and we saw the consequences to it. One
thing I want to iterate here is we need to understand that it is often not the
devil attacking us it is usually the consequences of our sins and yet we love
to to blame him anytime life gets difficult not realizing that we have
given ourselves into the temptations that were presented to us or we believe
the lies that were told to us and because of that there's this thing
called consequences of sin and when we fall into these temptations when we
believe these lies we actually start seeing what sin actually does. It hardens
our heart it turns our gaze from God and it allows us to be able to start
complaining like the like the people of Israel did and yet so many times in so
many ways we have churches and we have Christians who believe that spiritual
warfare is anytime life is an inconvenience anytime there is a
sickness every time there is a disease we assume that it's from the enemy we
assume that the devil sent it to us but brothers and sisters if I could be
honest the devil is not hiding behind every bush but what he likes to do is he
likes to tempt and he likes to lie and these are the two ways that he's able to
get Christians to to trip up most times you see he uses scriptures and he
twists it to be able to fit his agenda we see he did that with Jesus in the
wilderness and yet we see that Jesus refutes every attack with scripture you
see Jesus is quoting a scripture from the book of Deuteronomy you see this is
a book that a lot of us skip over in our devotions Deuteronomy if I could be
honest when I read it it's very boring because I have how repetitive it is and
yet Jesus is battling Satan in the wilderness using the book of Deuteronomy
I mean might as well throw the book of Numbers in there with how boring I feel
Deuteronomy can be and yet we see here that Jesus is able to refute every lie
every half-truth that the enemy throws to him by quoting scripture and what
blows my mind is this is how every single word in the Bible is used to help
the children of God so whatever spiritual attack the enemy wants to
bring to you whether it's whether it's half-truths whether it's temptations or
whether it's what we see in the book of Job if it's if it's full-on spiritual
physical attack you can refute that with scripture why because the Word of God is
a lot more powerful than anything that the enemy can throw to us and so the
amazing thing about this chapter
is we see actually how to fight the enemy spiritually.
And it's scripture refuting scripture.
It's scripture refuting temptations.
And it's scripture refuting lies.
There's so much truth in the Word of God.
I hope this blessed you.
I hope you were able to get a lot out of this.
Grace and peace.