🦁 Lent 1-7

Readings: Psalm 77; Proverbs 30:1-9; Matthew 4:1-11. 

Reflection

Good morning. This is Tim Jewell broadcasting from Sacramento, California. Today's readings come to us from Psalm 77, Proverbs Chapter 30, verses 1 to 9, and Matthew Chapter four, verses 1 to 11. Again, we revisit Psalm 77, which is a very, again, very delightful thing about what God can do for us. And when we remember and think about what he's done for us and what he will do for us. 

And again, we go into, you know, what God does and you what your way was through the sea. Your path was the great waters, yet your footprints were unseen. There is a beautiful poem called Footprints. You can look it up. I believe the author, if I remember correctly, is unknown. But the basis of it is persons looking back across the beach, the sand in the beach, which the footprints represent their lives. And there's two sets of footprints. One is this person. The other one is God. And then they turn around. There's certain points where there's only one set of footprints and they look at God. Why did you abandon me? I didn't abandon you. That's when I carried you. 

So think about that. God is there for us. God carries us through things and times. And we may not always understand it or get it while we're going through it. But when we look back, we'll see where the hand of God was. 

And in Proverbs 30, again, this is more education about wisdom and how to act with the first four question questions, the first four verses as a statement. Surely I'm too stupid to be a man. I've have not learned wisdom who is ascended to heaven and come down and so on. But then in verse five, we have this Every word of God proves true. He is a shield to those who take refuge in them. So again, we have this imagery where God is always honest and true, and he shields us when we take refuge in watching the gospel of Matthew. And this is the first. So the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John saw Matthew's the first in order. And so this is we get the first reading about the temptation of Christ. So Jesus was born. Of course, we had Christmas. We had the epiphany. So Jesus growing up, we don't know anything that happened after the Weismann wisdom, which was somewhere after probably a year or two or so, depending on who you want to listen to. But they didn't go see him in a major manger at the at the in Bethlehem. That didn't happen. These guys came from the east. It took a while to walk there with the camels. So that took a little while. But we that's what the story is. Then we pick up the story again with John the Baptist. We hear the story of John the Baptist. So John is the one who came before and he is out there and he is baptized in calling for repentance. He's wearing, you know, the wild eating honey and wild, wild locust and honey. And, you know, this voice in the wilderness. And he's baptizing people in the Jordan River. For those of you who don't know, the Jordan River is not a big river unless there's, like, a lot of rain and it's not a very clean river. So you're talking about being baptized and cleansing yourself. And you go into the muddy, the muddy Jordan as it's known. You can look it up in your favorite search engine and look for pictures of it and you'll see exactly what they're talking about. 

So Jesus is gone. And, you know, John has baptized Jesus, so he immerses them and he comes up and, you know, the the heavens open. And this is Mike, This is my son. And then Jesus goes, What this says here is led by the spirit and the boldness where he falls for 40 days and 40 nights. It's a lot of fasting. He's out in the desert, in the wilderness, and without the as well. This is the Middle East. Okay, so this is the desert. This is a very arid, dry area, you know. So he's out in the desert. It's hot going through all this physical suffering. And then the devil comes and says, Hey, you're hungry, We'll turn rocks and you can do this. You know, you can perform miracles, turn these stones into bread, eat the bread, you know. And then he turns them, says, you know, takes him up on the pinnacle of the temple. And you can look that one up to you and see what the old temple looks like. They have the renderings of it. This is a very high pinnacle on top of the temple, and you jump off and you won't hit the ground because you'll be saved. The angels will come to your foot. You're lost off lust. You strike your foot against the stone on the Ganges that don't you don't tempt God, you know, you don't live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. So we need to listen to God's Word along with eating. Those are all both very integral parts of our lives as Christians. And then, of course, he says in the last meeting, a very high mountain shows him the world and says, I'll give this all to you. It really wasn't his to give in the first place. But then that's when Jesus banishes and sends them away because you shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve. So again, Jesus, the temptation. He sticks to his guns. Of course, He is the perfect being and himself. The thing that the thing for me and you'll hear me talk about this in a couple of readings that we'll have later on as we go through Matthew and the other Gospels about Jesus and talking about who he is and what Jesus was like. This is a man who experienced all the physical pains, temptations, emotional, spiritual, all he experienced, all of that. As we say in the Nicene Creed, he became a man. He became just like us. He had a flesh and blood body just like you and I and all the stuff that comes with it. So he experienced hot, he experienced cold. He exposed all those physical experiences that we had, everything that we deal with in those types of things. Jesus felt those, too. And that's to me. You will talk. You'll hear me talk a lot about the humanity of Jesus. And that freaks some people out because they don't want to think. They don't want to think of them as human. That's very, very it is very much he became man. He became human. He became one of us. So he was subject to the same temptations, pains and everything else that we do. It was just being a son of God and being that perfect being. He didn't succumb to them like we do, and that's the difference. But he experienced it all. So when we take something, when we're in the middle of going through something, whatever it may be, we can go and pray because we pray to God through Jesus. And Jesus didn't sit there and tell God, I know this one. I He gets He understands that he intercedes on our behalf with God because he had that physical experience. And that's a really for me, that's a really important part of my faith. And why I believe his, because he became human. Jesus became mankind. He had a body just like mine with all the aches and pains and heart and cold and sunburn and all that stuff that, you know, comes along that we dealt with and that we deal with. He experienced those. And that's what makes our faith to me. My faith. That's what makes it for me. That's what makes it different and why I believe in this as opposed to some other thing that may have similar teachings was because Jesus can relate to me on.