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Spirit, you would attend your word, the ministry of your word, as it has been read, and we pray as it will be faithfully proclaimed. Spirit, come and open blinded eyes, unstopped deaf ears, and trade hearts of stone for hearts of flesh, so that even here in the wilderness we may find the gospel of your Son Jesus Christ. We pray these things in his name and for his sake. Amen. Please be seated. A few days before Christmas this past year, um former Senator Ben Sass took to Twitter and he wrote this. Friends, this is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I'll cut to the chase. Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized stage four pancreatic cancer, and I'm gonna die. Advanced pancreatic cancer is nasty stuff. It's a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week, too. We all do. Senator Sass's words seem jarring in two days before Christmas, but appropriate, fitting for this season of Lent. Just a few days ago on Ash Wednesday, with so many of you, we we pressed ashes into the shape of a cross on your forehead as we remembered that we are dust and to dust we shall return. And we we were wondering on Wednesday where in the midst of judgment and death, which ashes represent, where in the midst of that do we find good news? Where is the gospel in ashes? It was a striking contrast to the week before, where we had heard about hope transfigured there on the mountain, as Jesus' glory was unveiled there with Peter and John, and as Moses and Elijah stepped back through the veil, we go from mountain peaks down into the dust of the valley of death. And so I hope that today, on this first Sunday in Lent, you are searching desperately for the gospel. Searching desperately for the hope that is gonna carry you not just through the next 35 or so days until Easter Sunday, but hope that is gonna carry you all the way through the wilderness of this world. Hope that is gonna lay you in a grave one day, and hope that is gonna call forth your name. Where do we find hope? In the wilderness. The hope we're looking for, of course, is not hope as the world reckons it. The world reckons hope primarily as a feeling of expectation or a desire for something certain to happen, but gospel hope, which is not the world's hope, gospel hope, which isn't hollow and thin, substantive gospel hope, we're looking for something sturdy enough to build a life on and certain enough to plan a death on. And I think we find it here in the wilderness today. If you've had even a passing conversation with me about kind of the dream and the vision for All Saints Anglican Church, where we we make much of Christ for our neighbors and for the world, you know, that conversation will eventually turn to a permanent home for this gathering of the saints. And I picture in my mind, you know, of course, live oaks draped with Spanish moss and palmettos and a sanctuary spire rising up. It looks like it's been there for 200 years, beckoning, beckoning the saints to come in to worship, beckoning sinners to come in and hear good news that when they repent and believe the gospel, they are welcomed in by Christ who died for them. But then I start to get a little weird, I think, when I talk about a permanent home, and I inevitably mention tombstones and graveyards. I love and long for a graveyard. Because I think that graveyards remind us of the importance of the Lord's day. Of gathering, of course, with the saints. That's important. But more important than that is gathering with our Lord by his word, where reality is reframed for us. Because for six days, from Sunday to Saturday, the world is trying to tell us reality is something other than what it is. And we need to come and we need to hear the clear words of Scripture as God tells us that reality is not ultimately your present circumstances, that there's something greater. There is a Lord enthroned in heaven above who rules and reigns over all. And that Lord looks on you with pity and with love so great that he took on flesh to die on a cross in your stead. We need to hear that reminder. Walking through a graveyard to make your way into the doors of the church, I think, reminds saints of the reality and the gravity of our sin. And for preachers, it reminds us of that one message. That one message we must hold forth, which is Christ and Him crucified. So graveyards, they I think serve a catechetical and a and a preparatory purpose. Catechetical in that they instruct saints in the reality of the world and of God's word, and then preparatory, they are preparing our hearts to hear and receive the gospel of Christ again and anew. Lord's day by Lord's day, as we gather with the people of God. That wasn't so for most of human history. Most of human history saw families burying multiple children. For most of human history, the reality of death was right in front of your face. Indeed, in the Reformation, that was true. And so as the reformers in Heidelberg, Germany are gathering together to lay out a catechism, this series of questions and answers by which they will instruct their children and the people of God in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, as they gathered there in Heidelberg to write this catechism, the first question they asked had to do with the reality of death. What is your only comfort in life and in death? My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own. But belong both body and soul in life and in death unto my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. That same Jesus Christ watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven. And in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Death is part of the reality of life in a broken, in a fallen world. But by God's grace, death does not have the last say. And indeed, in God's wisdom, death, as we'll see, is the means by which we enter into life eternal. I invite you, if you have your copy of the scriptures, to turn with me this morning to Matthew chapter 4. If you don't have your copy, then there's a pew Bible there to hand, that black pew Bible. If you don't have a Bible, then please take that with you. That's our gift to you. Because we believe that the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword. That it does indeed contain not just the story of some remarkable figure, Jesus Christ, but it contains the very words of life. That through the word of God the dead are raised to life. So please, if you don't have a copy of the scriptures, that's our gift to you. You can find Matthew chapter 4 on page 759 of that Q Bible. If we're going to find the gospel in the wilderness in the midst of ashes and dust and death, then we must ourselves go to the wilderness. And so here we we find ourselves, and there's this remarkable word. A word that's overlooked so often in all of literature, but especially in the Word of God. Matthew chapter 4, verse 1. Then. I wonder if the weight behind this word is not simply then marking off the next occurrence in a series of occurrences that seem to just be happenstance and random, but if indeed the weight of the word behind, the weight of the word behind then is actually more akin to therefore. Let me reset the scene for you. If you look just on the page just in front of you, Matthew chapter 3, what has just transpired before the then, or before the therefore? The baptism of the Lord Jesus Christ. Saint Mark, in his account of the wilderness and of the baptism, he says that the Spirit immediately drove Jesus into the wilderness after he had come up out of the water. The wilderness of the then and the therefore, this wilderness theme, it brings to mind Noah's 40 days in the Ark of the Covenant, Elijah's 40 days of fasting, Moses's 40 days on the mountain, communion with the Lord, and learning the law, and indeed Israel's 40 years wandering in the wilderness. Friends, the wilderness has a way of clarifying and concentrating our minds. And it reveals ultimately to Jesus, and if it reveals to Jesus the Son of God, it certainly reveals to us our utter and absolute dependence on somebody else. Then Jesus was led by the Spirit. That sounds like the beginning of a pretty good little story, doesn't it? That sounds like something that you and I may indeed long for. But wait, there's more. Into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. I wonder if it has dawned on you. That the last words before Jesus' forty days of fasting without food and water, the last words he heard came from heaven. This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. Forty days. Forty nights. And Jesus hears nothing. Just like Israel, as they were waiting 400 years from the close of the Old Testament, the prophet Malachi, until another prophet, John the Baptist, would spring forth again, declaring the word of the Lord. So Jesus, for 40 days in the wilderness without food or water, is clinging to the promise of God. This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. And in the midst of his weakness, his dehydration, his famishness, if that's that's a word we're going to coin it, famishness. In the midst of all of these things, he has been clinging to this word that he heard from the Father in heaven, beloved Son, and the very next thing he hears, if you are the Son of God. There are echoes there of Eden. Where that first son of God, Adam, and his dearly beloved wife Eve, where they had heard the word of God and his gracious invitation to eat of all the trees in God's good creation in Eden, all the trees which were a delight to the eyes and to the senses, where then wherein their physical necessity would be perfectly satisfied. And then Satan comes along and he says, What did God actually say? If you are the son of God. You see, Satan's playbook hadn't really changed between that day in Eden and that day in the wilderness. Satan's playbook has always been the same. First, he questions whether God has spoken. And then if we know our Bibles well and we respond, well, yes, indeed, God has spoken, what does he begin to do after that? He begins to question God's character as he says to Eve. Essentially, God is withholding something from you. God knows that in the day that you eat of that fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will know good and evil, and you will what? Be like God. God's withholding something from you, Eve, and so she ate and she failed, failing to realize she was already like God. She believed the lie of that forked tongue rather than holding fast to the promise of the Father. And so Adam believed the lie of the deceiver and the tempter. And man fell and death came. Here Satan comes along with that same forked tongue. Jesus, if you are the son of God, if you and all of your hunger and your wants, if you are the son of God, command these stones to become bread. Of course, we've just read earlier in Matthew that God can raise up from these very stones children of Abraham. So bread doesn't seem like such a far-fetched idea. What's going on here as Jesus, or excuse me, as Satan tempts Jesus, questioning his sonship and trying to get him to fall into the same sin that Adam had. I think ultimately this first temptation is a temptation towards self-reliance. So you see, Jesus, his, his, his temptations are not really all that different than yours and mine. We sometimes think that Jesus' overcoming temptation was an easy, breezy task because Jesus, I mean, Jesus is God, right? I mean, nothing's impossible for God, but what else is Jesus? Man. Man just like you and me. And so so in his manhood, these temptations are just as real and just as pressing. And food and water are just as much a necessity. And there's no reason that Jesus couldn't eat, right? The fast is over. The fasting is complete. Here, though, Satan is tempting Jesus not to rely on God to provide for him, his Father in heaven, but instead to manufacture that provision himself. Jesus responds by by quoting Deuteronomy, right? Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. When he he quotes Deuteronomy, he's placing himself in the role of Israel as they're wandering in the wilderness. And what did Israel need as they were wandering in the wilderness? Bread, bread, bread. And that bread ultimately came down from heaven. You could eat that manna from heaven every day, and still, what would happen? One day, you would lay down and you would die. Exactly right. Because Jesus knows, and what Israel failed to understand, though God was quite clear, is that man does not live by bread alone. There's a temptation to self-reliance and to manufacturing the response to what we perceive to be our own needs. But instead, Jesus clings to the word of God and to the promises that he had made. Alright, the second temptation. We find ourselves now in the holy city, and that's not Charleston, of course. That's Jerusalem. And there in the Holy City, he is perched with Satan on the pinnacle of the temple. And Satan says once again, if you are the Son of God, then cast yourself down. Throw yourself off of this. You see all of all of Jerusalem laid out before you, all of the Kidron Valley, surely God will come and rescue you. Indeed. He has made a promise to you. Hasn't he, Jesus, that he will send his angels lest you strike your foot against a stone? Throw yourself down. But that psalmist that Satan quotes and that Jesus quotes in response, the psalmist writes of one who abides in the shadow of the Almighty, as we read, not one who throws himself from parapets in order to prove a point. The temptation here to cast yourself down from the temple is, I think, spiritual presumption. Presuming that we know better than God knows. Presuming that somehow our ways are better and higher than his. It's a demand for miraculous proof, not just for yourself with bread, but for everyone in Jerusalem, to see that you are the Son of God. Jesus, if you are the Son of God who has come to fulfill all of these promises, then throw yourself down and the people, they will come racing into your kingdom to follow you. Throw yourself down. Jesus. This, Martin Luther says, is the temptation of the saints. When they would prescribe to God the time, manner, and measure of his help. It is dangerous, friends, to assume that we even rightly perceive our greatest needs. And more dangerous still to presume that we know and rightly perceive the means of our deliverance. We need something outside of our sinful minds and our sinful hearts. We need an objective, external, fixed reality. So when Jesus replies to Satan, what does he do? He does not lay out his credentials as the Son of God. He doesn't roll out a business plan for how he is. He's gonna bring this startup off the ground into a booming empire. Well, I'm gonna heal the, I'm gonna heal the sick, I'm gonna cause the lame to walk. Satan, I'm gonna feed the hungry. I'm gonna feed the 5,000 and the 4,000. He doesn't do any of those things. What instead does he do? He turns again to the word of God. It is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Well, the third temptation. The devil took him to a very high mountain, verse eight, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Jesus, All these I will give to you if you fall. Down and worship me. The temptation here, I think, is bypassing the cross. It's a theology of glory where the crown comes without the cross. And where the kingdom comes without any kind of suffering. The devil here he tempts Christ with glory and dominion, but without the suffering that must come before it. And Christ's refusal here, it anticipates what Martin Luther calls the theology of glory. He says in his Heidelberg disputation, the theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. The theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is. Satan is a theologian of glory, calling good evil and evil good. Christ, though, is a theologian of the cross. And Christ has set his mind and his heart and his eyes toward that Mount Golgotha, where he'll be raised up above his enemies. Do you remember what John said when he saw Jesus after his baptism? What did he say? Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Christ is this Lamb of God who has carried your sin and mine and the sin of the world into the wilderness, bearing it those forty days. He has already begun to suffer for the sake of the world, and his suffering will only continue and increase until it comes to its final flowering, as he's planted on Golgotha's hill. Christ is a theologian of the cross because he knows that the only way to redemption is through suffering. So here at the last, Satan offers him glory without the nails. But Christ instead chooses obedience, humiliation, and indeed the Father's will. Every holy week, and we'll talk about this again here in a few weeks, every holy week I'm struck by what transpires in the Garden of Gethsemane. There Jesus is, of course, praying, and he is sweating great drops of blood, and he's weeping and he's crying out, and he pleads with the Father, right? If there's any way that this cup might pass from me, make it happen, Father. Nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done. Who was there with Jesus as he was praying? I mean, we might say the disciples were there with Jesus when he was praying, but kind of. They were a good ways off, and what were they doing? They were taking a nap, right? Have you ever wondered who kept Jesus in the garden? Who kept him from walking away from the cross and all of its suffering? Who compelled him to drink the cup of God's wrath? Ever last dread? No one. Jesus had every opportunity to walk away from the suffering. He had every opportunity to walk away and escape the horrors of the cross and its nails and its crown and the greater horror of looking for the Father, and instead of seeing the Father finding hell itself opened before him, he had every opportunity to walk away. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. That, my friends, is the theology of the cross. That is the nature of the kingdom of Christ. And in Satan's kingdom, Satan says, your life poured out for mine. But the message of Christ's kingdom is my life. For yours. It's always a joy and a delight to gather on Thursday nights at our house, which we won't do this week. We'll bypass the joy this week because we'll be at Synod. But it's always a joy and a delight to gather with saints at our house and to look at the upcoming scripture readings for Sunday and to talk about what's going on and to look for the different connections, how the Bible is one great story of God's love for us in Jesus Christ. There's something about those cargyles. Amy, as she often does, she just sits there very quiet and thoughtful the whole time, and then she just like drops a bombshell at the end of Home Group. And she did that this this past Thursday. She pointed out that Jesus is there in the wilderness with Satan. I mean, those are the only two people who are there. There are no other eyewitnesses to everything that has transpired as Jesus is tempted in the wilderness. So Jesus must have relayed this story himself to St. Matthew and to St. Mark and to St. Luke, who all make some kind of reference to the temptation in the wilderness. So Jesus has control of the narrative here, as they say, right? He tells the story, but what does Jesus leave out? What does Jesus not say once he's finished the story? He does not say, go and do likewise. He does not say, head out into the wilderness and fight your own battle against Satan. Because, friends, if you and I are left in the wilderness to fight our own battle against Satan, he's going to eat our lunch. We have no. The temptation is simply laid out as what Christ has done. It is his victory in the wilderness for you and for me. There's no application, there's no command. We see that the true and better Adam, the true and better Israel in the wilderness, he has trusted the promises of the Father so that for you and me he can be a true high priest. The gospel in the wilderness is that Christ is for you in your place, and Christ is for you with his favor. Well, Jesus didn't have any application, and I rarely have application, but today I'm going to have some application for you, flying in the face of what seems like it ought to be. Friends, you and I defeat temptation the same way Christ did. We don't defeat temptation by checking off all our piety boxes. We don't defeat temptation with our quiet time. We don't defeat temptation with communion or with making sure we have our church attendance all in order or even with our almsgiving and our fasting here in the season of Lent. As good as all of those things may be as we discipline ourselves for the purpose of godliness. But ultimately, those are not the ways that we defeat temptation. We defeat temptation the same way Christ did. With the promises of God. If you want to withstand the assaults of the devil, don't argue with him. Instead, reply to him with the promises of God. One more Luther quote for you. You can never have too many, right? And a familiar one to you as well, if you've been here. When the devil throws up our sins to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak to him thus. I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? I know one who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. And where he is, there I shall be also. Christ in the wilderness is not the example of how we are to fight Satan. It is his victory over Satan for us. And we move from victory to victory when we rest in his victory on our behalf. And then we have weapons for our warfare, one in our right hand and one in our left. And in both instances, they are the promises of God. The promise that he made to Jesus at his baptism, you are my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased. Friends, do you know that promise is yours as well? Because of your baptism. You are a beloved child of God. There's a cemetery, apparently, in New Haven, Connecticut. I've only driven through New Haven. I've not seen this cemetery myself. This is secondhand. A cemetery there whose entrance is marked off by two towering stone columns with a wrought iron crossbar. Last night I was I was listening to a conversation between Senator Sass and his longtime friends Mike Horton and Dan Bryan. They're both of uh Sola Media and White Horse Sin. I encourage you to go and find that interview and to be familiar with both of those ministries. Back in the 90s, young newly married Ben Sass, he was the editor and executive director of what became Sola and White Horse Inn. So these three friends they were gathering actually just after the wedding of one of their daughters, just a few days ago. They were discussing cancer and suffering and the gospel. And then he shared what was written in wrought iron. Those words that you passed under as you made your way into that cemetery in New Haven. There in iron was written in all caps, and the dead shall be raised. Brothers and sisters, what is the only hope of those ashen saints lying in the dust of the ground in New Haven, Connecticut? Or lying in the sandy dust here on St. Simon's Island, Georgia, or in so many family plots scattered around the world. What is the hope of your saints that you've laid back down in the dust? And what is your hope, ye who are left behind in this wilderness? All of those saints, they're not now hoping in their lives well lived. They're not even hoping in their deaths well died, or their earthly accolades and acclaim, even the deep love and grief of their families and friends who have mourned them, they're not hoping in that. The hope of every saint is not bound up in their present circumstances. But it's the hope. The hope of the sons of God who have trusted in the words and promises of God. They're resting in the promise, and the dead shall be raised. One last reason to love a graveyard. The gospel in the wilderness. The gospel in ashes, the gospel encapsulated in that promise of God, and the dead shall be raised. That gospel turns the wilderness of graveyards into the garden of God. And it turns death into a garden. All he does is drop seeds in the ground. So when Christ comes again and the dead in Christ rise first, they will shoot up more glorious than they ever imagined. This is the gospel in the book. Christ has gone for you victorious over temptation, and he will go for you to the cross to triumph over death. I pray today that you trust and you rest in this gospel of the wilderness. Let's pray. We praise you, Christ, that you have gone before and you never call us anywhere you have not first led. And so we pray that in your mercy and goodness you would fix our eyes by your Spirit on you crucified for us and risen and coming again to call the dead from their graves, that we may ever be with you. Sanctify to us life in this wilderness. So that in the wilderness and through the wilderness we may find the joys of your kingdom and the feasting at your table all the more joyous and all the sweeter. We pray these things, Christ, in your name and for your sake. Amen.