I assume the main reason we hear of Jesus' forty days of temptation in the wilderness today is because we have entered into the forty days of Lent. Seeing patterns like this must be a testament to my education, so chalk one up for the Fresno Unified School District. Anyway, Mark's version of the temptation is, as is usual with Mark, a little light on the details, he says only that, "He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him." In the other Gospels we pick up facts like that of Jesus fasting while he was in the wilderness and the exact nature of the temptations. But let's stick with Mark today and not fill in any extra information. And so what I would like to do is take a few moments and focus on the fact that Jesus was tempted and, in more practical terms, to focus on the fact that we are tempted as well. For based on personal experience I can with a clean conscience state that I and I assume the rest of you are very susceptible to temptation. After all if it were not tempting it probably would not be called temptation.
So let's start by getting a definition. Generally speaking and in the context of what we hear today, temptation is something that takes us away from living our lives in the ways that God calls us to live them. But beyond explaining the word in such general terms, temptation is very hard to define at the granular level, because it varies from situation to situation. If you were dying of thirst you would be more tempted to make moral compromises to find water than you would if you were sitting next to one of these giant pallets of water that seem to be everywhere around here. And it is not just situational because different things tempt different people. As John Donne put it, "Other men's crosses are not my crosses." For example, I have never found anything remotely interesting about gambling. You could put me into the middle of a casino and I would come out the other end with the same amount of money as I went in (and maybe even a free drink if I was lucky). Yet I have known some addictive gamblers. I worked for a guy when I was in college who would drive to Reno from the Bay Area and the first thing he did when he got there was fill up his car with gas because he knew that he would not have any money by the time he departed. And I know this is a rather silly example, but I simply want to point out that we can all be lured away by various and sundry things. And we should not assume that because we are not susceptible to temptations that get a lot of attention that we are not susceptible to any temptations. Our temptations may be on the top ten list or they may be something seemingly benign, but when they draw us away from the one true God they are detrimental for us or at least not the best thing for us.
Since we are in the season of Lent I want to talk about something that may appear unrelated at first, but stick with me for a minute. In the season of Lent people often give up something that they enjoy, like chocolate or soda. In recent years there has been a move in some quarters to pick up something rather than to put something down. So, for example, I might try to regularly visit a shut in or try to be kinder. And I am not opposed to this idea of picking something up, but I think sometimes the motivation for doing this comes from a misunderstanding of why we give up something in the first place. The first reason why people give things up in Lent is in imitation of Christ. He fasted for forty days and so in a smaller way we are fasting from something. But there is a second reason and one which I think we can forget these days in which our every desire and whim can be met almost instantaneously, and this second reason is that it strengthens our resolve, showing that there is nothing more important to us then God. Having to say no now and then in little things can be an important practice.
There is the old story of the smoker who said that, "quitting smoking is easy I have done it hundreds of times." We laugh at the ridiculousness of this story because we know that this particular smoker has never actually quit. And so while I am not saying that everyone needs to give up something for Lent, what I am saying is that now and then it might not be a bad thing to work on strengthening our will. To say no to something that we want so that our will might be stronger when severe temptation comes.
Think about it like this, we exercise so that we are healthier and able to do certain things when required. And so following this logic it might not be a terrible idea if we worked on resisting temptation now and then so that when we really needed it, that ability would not be flabby and out of shape. It is interesting that in terms of physical fitness it seems very logical to exercise in ways that do not necessarily reflect things that we do in real life. And so when we exercise we do things like lift weights or swing a kettlebells none of which are part of anyone's job description as best I know. And for many good reasons, we believe that seemingly odd forms of exercise translate into making us better physical specimens, and better at performing tasks in our daily lives. However, we tend not to follow this same line of reasoning when it comes to our moral lives. But is that really wise? Does showing some discipline and the ability to resist temptation in something small ultimately lead to our ability to do the same with something large? I would argue that it does because the only people who truly know the power of temptation are those who have been able to resist it. If I drop my diet every time someone offers me a cookie, I really don't know what it takes to be on a diet, because I really have never been on one.
C.S. Lewis one time said something interesting (well he said lots of interesting things but anyway). He said in discussing the ways we rationalize our behaviors that you often hear people say that whatever less than admirable thing they did was not so bad because it was not like they had killed a million people like Hitler or Stalin. His retort to that was that what the person was saying was true but by the same token that same person had never been given the opportunity to kill a million people. Most of the time we will be tempted with more mundane things in this life, things that will not be earth shattering. And if you don't want to believe me or C.S. Lewis about the importance of small things listen to the words of Jesus in the Parable of the talents. He says of the servant who took the money that was given him and doubled it, "Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master." And yes I know this parable was not strictly about temptation, but it shows some of the scalability of the Kingdom of God. God is happy when we do things correctly whether they are large or small. The key is that we are faithful to him when we are doing them.
And so while in some sense the resisting of temptation may be a bit false in Lent in that we sort of cook up our own temptations to resist, the idea in our walk with God is to resist temptation no matter how small those temptations seem to be. Some temptations are seemingly very bad, but even the small ones take us away from doing the best thing. And so my encouragement during this season of Lent is for us to leave it a little better than we entered it. For some this may be a massive change, but for others it might be something seemingly innocuous. But any time that a piece of us returns to God there is rejoicing in heaven. And so while we could say that resisting these small temptations does not matter we could also look at them as low hanging fruit. There are small things that we could resist which will draw us closer to God - that is kind of nice. Being a Christian does not have to be hard work all the time but requires us to be like the servant and to be faithful in the small things so that we may be God's both now and forevermore.