Lead Us Not into Temptation

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, March 9, 2025
Luke 4:1-13

    Do you ever have a recurring dream?  One of mine is forgetting to bring my ID to the airport.  In various iterations of this dream, I try to get someone to bring me my passport from home, or I try to run home myself and rush back to catch my flight.  This dream actually came true one time for me, thankfully for a domestic flight, where I realized I did not have my driver’s license, and I was already at the airport.  Thankfully, I usually travel with a photocopy of my passport, and I had another form of ID. I had to go through extra security, but I made it onto the plane and back without my physical ID.
    I am no psychoanalyst, and I often don’t understand why I have the weird dreams I do, but it seems to me that this particular recurring dream of mine is fear of losing my identity.  Who am I, and who does God want me to be?  Who is God, and if Jesus is the Son of God, as he says he is, what does that mean for him, and for me?  These are questions of faith.  As we turn to our gospel for this morning, Jesus is tempted in the wilderness for 40 days by the devil.  There are three main temptations that the devil tempts Jesus with, and it may be more realistic recognize that the devil is tempting Jesus over and over again during this period, rather than just three times at once. That’s how temptation works in our own life, doesn’t it?  We are tempted, we resist (or give into the temptation), and the temptation doesn’t necessarily go away, but recurs.  Different things may tempt us all at the same time!  
The underlying consistent attempt of the devil is to get Jesus to question his identity:  “If you are the son of God (command this stone to become a loaf of bread); (throw yourself down from here); IF you, then, will worship me, then it will all be yours.”  The devil would like Jesus to belong to him rather than to God. The devil tries to throw uncertainty about Jesus’ core identity as the son of God, and tries to make us uncertain also about who Jesus is and therefore who we are as Jesus’ followers.  This is the root of all sin and temptation – to mistrust who God is and who we are as God’s children.  The devil tries to convince us that we are not good enough as we are as God’s own children, claimed through our faith in Jesus Christ through baptism.  Instead, the devil wants us to doubt our sufficiency in Christ so that we think we need more stuff – turn this stone to bread.  We think we need a bigger ego-boost, to have more power and glory.  The devil tries to make us think even that we need to prove our faith in God is enough by putting God to the test; to protect ourselves with self-preservation rather than trusting in God’s goodness.  “If you are the son of God, prove it,” the devil basically says to Jesus.  What do we think we have to prove to others about ourselves or about God?  In Christ, we have nothing to prove!
    As we begin the season of Lent, we begin by confessing the ways in which we have given into these temptations.  The devil, the world, our flesh- evil in its many forms however you want to call them – often works in subtle ways to attack the foundation of our faith that Jesus Christ died for our sins once and for all and because of this we are saved, as our reading from Romans encourages us this morning. We may struggle with an addiction to food, drugs, alcohol, or screens.  We may struggle to distinguish living in the world as confidently as Christians from how we were raised culturally, if we were raised in a non-Christian environment.  We may be tempted to trust other things – money, politics, success – to save us, rather than Christ’s ability to save.  We take a moment today to reflect on what our particular recurring temptations may be.  Ultimately, our faith in Christ leads us to rely on him to resist temptation, remembering who we are and whose we are. We belong to Christ.  And Christ has power over sin, death, and the devil.  In Christ, we have ultimate victory over all that would seek to tear us away from Christ and his ways.
    I have mentioned that this year for Lent I am focusing on the Lord’s Prayer as a basic way of strengthening our trust and faith in Christ.  Listen to Jesus! This is how he teaches us to pray!  We start in the middle of the prayer this morning:  “Lead us not into temptation.”  Martin Luther in his Small Catechism teaches us that “God tempts no one.”  It’s the devil, the world, our flesh that tempts us.  We pray this prayer regularly to remind ourselves that temptation is real, but Christ’s power over these temptations is stronger.  Just as Jesus does not give in to these temptations after forty days in the wilderness with the devil, Jesus will help us overcome our temptations and give us victory through life everlasting.  Christ has died and Christ is risen! Everything that needs to be done has already been done for us through Jesus.
    In Luke’s gospel, Jesus is baptized and then we have a list of his genealogy as a son of David in chapter 3.  We are told who Jesus is, in other words. God says, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”  Then full of the Holy Spirit, Jesus goes from his baptism into the wilderness, before he calls the first disciples and begins his public ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing.  Life sometimes feels like this for us, too, doesn’t it?  We are baptized, we come to faith, we affirm our baptism – we have mountaintop experiences of feeling at-one with God, fully loved, freed, and forgiven by God through Jesus Christ, hearing clearly those words, “You are my child, my beloved, with YOU I am well pleased.”  Sunday morning worship or Bible study or our personal devotional time gives us these moments of clarity about our identity in Christ and strength of purpose.  And then we go out into the world.  We face immediate temptations all around us.  We get bogged down by the bad news of evil at work everywhere we turn.  We start to wonder if we still have that identity of “Christian.”  Did we lose or forget it at home?  Do we have a copy?!  How will we get through the day without proof of our identity?  But when we think of the cross of Christ anointed on our foreheads through our baptism, when we take a moment to remember those words “Child of God, you are marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the power of the Holy Spirit forever,” we know that we have an identity in Christ that cannot be lost, removed, or taken away.  We are his, eternally.  Christ has won the victory, and his victory is ours through faith.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.