Who Are You Following?
Matthew 4:1-4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 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.’” (NRSV)If, in that moment, Jesus’ hunger, His desires, His emotions had overridden what Scripture says, He’d have ended up bowing down to Satan. He’d have ended up following the ways of the world. He’d never have gone to that Cross to suffer and die so that your sin and mine could be forgiven.
At what point did we decide that our feelings, our emotions, the world’s decaying morality all mixed into one should be the final arbiter of the truthfulness, or otherwise, of God’s Word? How exactly did that happen?
It’s true, isn’t it? Large swathes of the church have rejected large chunks of God’s truth – His call on what’s right and what’s wrong – simply because His ways don’t seem all that convenient. His ways jar so badly with contemporary thought. His ways no longer feel all that good, all that relevant.
Imagine if Jesus had taken that approach out there in the wilderness:
Matthew 4:1-4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 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.’” (NRSV)If, in that moment, Jesus’ hunger, His desires, His emotions had overridden what Scripture says, He’d have ended up bowing down to Satan. He’d have ended up following the ways of the world. He’d never have gone to that Cross to suffer and die so that your sin and mine could be forgiven.
Those are terrible outcomes, and still today the consequences of rejecting God’s Word for the sake of self-remain no less devastating. Too many of God’s people have stopped following Christ. Instead, they’re following self. Don’t be one of those.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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