The Logical Seduction // Discovering the Hidden Things of God, Part 3

When the going gets tough, it's so much easier to sort things out for ourselves – than to rely on God.  Really…..in fact, when we're hungry, why shouldn't we feed ourselves? It's a funny thing that from time to time God leads us out into the wilderness and then, it seems, He leaves us there to fend for ourselves. When I think of Jesus out there for forty days in the wilderness without food, He must have been starving, literally. Forty days with nothing to eat, He would have been feeling dizzy and weak and completely vulnerable. All His natural support mechanisms and defences stripped away. I mean, if that had been me I wonder whether I wouldn't have been sitting there after forty days thinking, "All right God, so You told me that you'd called me and you told me you had some bold plan to use me to change the world and you told me that I'm Your Son so, so why aren't You providing for me? Why have You thrown me out here into the desert to starve and the only person you've given me for company is the devil himself?" Imagine you're out there in the burning sun starving, what's the most logical thing for you to do? I remember a time when I was training to be an officer in the Australian Army, it was four tough, hard years and on more than one occasion they took us out on survival exercises and we didn't eat for days and there we were carrying a heavy pack and a machine gun and ammunition and everything it seemed except for food. And they'd give us a map and a compass and they'd say, "Well we can't get food through to you here." So they'd give us a grid reference over the radio and we'd have to navigate 25 kilometres over hill and dale where there would be a food drop. So over you go and you get there and there was no food and you'd radio in and they'd say, "Oh look sorry, the truck couldn't get through, we'll give you a new grid reference, 32 kilometres over hill and dale." And this went on for days. And then every now and then you'd get a food drop by a helicopter and they'd drop like half a ration pack for 4 men when you're supposed to have 1 each every day. And we had no idea when it would end. We'd get grumpy and hungry and weak and our moral was pretty low, we'd sit there at night with our stomachs, well our stomachs had given up rumbling we were that hungry and we were a small squad of 4 men and we sat there and talked about these mongrels who were doing this to us and, "Let's walk out to the nearest highway and hitch a ride home." I look back on that experience now and it was so hard back then but it built our characters. It's something that's hard to explain but when you go through something like that it teaches you things in a way that you don't forget. And the obvious temptation in the middle of all of that was to grumble and complain, to do something to provide for ourselves, to go out to the highway to hitch a ride home, to go and buy a pizza, you know. And its exactly the same thing when the Lord puts us into a spiritual wilderness, the most tempting thing under the sun is to provide for ourselves, to seek provisions separate from God rather than relying on Him and so it's no surprise that when Jesus was led by God out into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, the very first temptation of the devil is where he tried to hit Jesus in exactly that spot. Have a listen, Luke chapter 4 it comes from: Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert where for forty days He was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days and at the end of them He was hungry and the devil said to Him, "If you're the Son of God tell this stone to become bread." And Jesus answered, "It is written, 'A man does not live by bread alone. Douglas Webster in his book, "Under the Radar' writes this, he said: The popular, easy to read books on leadership are of no value in the wilderness. They're not the kind of books you want to read when you're lonely and suffering. Titles like Developing the Leader within You or Leadership 101 or Success One Day at a Time, well they never make good reading out in the wilderness. Seminary degrees and graduate programs may help but they don't produce leaders. The best networking and mentoring in the world doesn't compare to the importance of the wilderness experience. You see, what God was wanting to teach Jesus here in the desert was not self reliance, it wasn't ingenuity or innovation or imagination or invention. It wasn't the ability to forage on the land; it was none of those things. For forty days Jesus was famished, He was weak, vulnerable before the devil and the greatest temptation of all was for Jesus to meet His needs in His own strength. After all He was the Son of God, I mean He was entitled, I mean what the heck, why not? He was hungry, He was in need, He was the Son of God no one could deny that. In fact, that very first temptation, it probably didn't feel much like a temptation at all, it was purely and simply providing for His own needs. In many respects this first temptation was a logical seduction, the temptation to meet our needs, even the most acute need of starvation, in our own strength rather than waiting on God. Wow, that's a strong temptation, to end the suffering because we can. It happens in our lives when we're in a situation perhaps a relationship and its hurting and we go and do something that we know isn't from God but we just want to end the suffering in our own strength. Again, Doug Webster relates this story in his book when he was pastoring a Church and all the people in the Church were giving him a hard time and his temptation was to run away, to throw it in, to say, "That's it, I've had enough, I'm going to go and look for another Church." But he went to a man by the name of Eugene Peterson who's the man who translated the Bible into the translation called, "The Message" and Eugene Peterson gave him some godly advice that went something like this. He said: As I've continued to think and pray I want to urge you not to be too eager to solve the problems and get rid of the suffering that is coming from the murmuring congregation and to believe that God knew what kind of congregation it was when He called you there and that perhaps the pain that they inflict is being used for God's purposes of Holiness in you. See, when we are in the desert and we've been hungering for forty days we've got this acute need, this acute pain. What we want to do is to end the pain but God's view, God knows that: … suffering produces endurance and the endurance produces character and the character produces a hope and its a hope that doesn't disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that's been given to us. That's what Paul writes in Romans chapter 5, verse 3. God is teaching us not to rely on our own goods, not to rely on our own abilities, not to rely on other people, not to rely on the devil, not to rely on ourselves. God wants to teach us in that wilderness this wonderful lesson to learn to rely on Him so that when things get bad, when things get beyond us, when things are so much bigger and harder than we can ever imagine, we can think back to that wilderness and remember the last time God provided for us. He never leaves us there longer than we have to be there, this is the wonderful hidden thing of God, that He wants us to learn to rely on Him and when we go out there and try and provide for ourselves that's the great temptation, the logical seduction of the devil himself.