He was thoroughly in its grip. Totally paralyzed. Feet glued to the floor, unable to move. Perhaps you've experienced the same trauma -
plate in hand at the head of a long buffet table, loaded with more delicacies than you've ever seen at one time - mouth watering dishes that seem to be picture perfect, lifted straight from the covers of the world's best cookbooks.
What do you take first?
And how much of each?
I call it "Buffet Paralysis". Interesting thing is that nobody really complains when they get it. "A disease worth having at least once" seems to be the general opinion.

Choice - it's something we crave in Canadian society. The more choice the better. Go for a lunch buffet, and most people will decide to go to "the big one with lots of different dishes."
Small hardware stores find it difficult to compete with Rona or Home Depot because they can't stock the same choice. Dropped by Rona for a new toilet seat and found over 30 different ones! Toilet seats! Talk about choice.
Loblaws Superstores run all over the competition because they can offer 20 kinds of cheeses and 6 different mustards to put on any of their vast array of lunch meats.

It's come to the point where we don't just see choice as a luxury, anymore. It's taken for granted. Even expected, as though it were some kind of a right - choices in what we eat, what we buy...... and in what we do.
Almost no limits on our choices.
Making us a nation of pampered pickers and choosers.

That pampering is going to make today's bible reading a little hard to hear;
tough to swallow; one that we'd rather lay down in the pew instead of taking it home and applying it.

It's a passage about choices that face us everyday -
- tough choices, not just do I eat calamare or crab salad
- with real consequences, far beyond having to pop a Tums or two.

Join in as we read an account from the opening chapter in Jesus' ministry.
I think you'll see quick enough what I mean.

I said we live in a world swirling with choice. We're free to choose:
- What satisfies us
- What comforts us
- What works for us
Very few limits, right?
And we quickly get to the point where we think that all choices are equally valid - you make ones that work for you; I'll do the same for me.
Today's reading casts a new light on the whole thing.

We see Jesus faced with some choices of his own in a very rugged and challenging set of circumstances. "Temptations", they're called. Seductive choices that seem awfully appealing, even somewhat innocent. But behind that seductive appeal is a destructive reality.
And before Jesus heads out on the road to teach, heal and live with the people he has come to save - before that there will come this time of testing.

Testing - the Holy Spirit deliberately brings Jesus to this time of character shaping and moulding. Can you see how that must be?
Jesus has just come from a real high point - a spiritual mountain-top experience in his baptism. But life isn't lived on the mountain tops - not for Jesus, and not for us. Reality bites in the valleys to which we descend after the peaks, the times of routine, the seasons of challenge. Canada has far more prairie than it does mountain, and so do our lives.
So the Holy Spirit brings Jesus to a place and time - a tough time - where he's going to be faced with some tough choices.
There's a saying that goes like this - "If you love something set it free. If it returns to you it is yours. If it doesn't, it wasn't yours in the first place." So true. You can force a child to kiss you, but it's not really a kiss.
Jesus is brought to the place where he'll be faced with a very basic choice in his life - will he be dependent on His father in heaven? Or will he opt for independence, for self-sufficiency?

It's a time of choice-making that comes hard on the heels of a 40 day fast in the desert. For those of you up on bible knowledge, that number may ring a bell or two. 40 is a number often associated with testing, cleansing, tough times.
The great leader of Israel, Moses, fasted 40 days in tough mountain conditions before he received the Law from God. Elijah, the greatest Old Testament prophet, comes down from a mountain-top experience of his own, where he defeats and kills 400 idol worshipping priests - he comes down and heads into the desert for 40 days where the very future of his work hung in the balance and he questioned his whole purpose in life. The nation of Israel is taken through some amazing moments as God sets them free from slavery in Egypt with powerful miracles. Their enemies, the Egyptians, die in the Red Sea, while Israel escapes on dry ground to the other side. It is, says 1 Cor 10, their baptism as a nation. After that, though, comes 40 years of moving around in the desert. Some tough times there before eventually they come across into Palestine and enter what will be their own homeland.
Jesus' resolve and character is shaped by 40 days in an environment where nothing can distract him from focussing on His heavenly Father. No other people. No food. No nothing.
At the end of that time come the choices.
Hard choices.

The one whom the Bible calls "The Devil" enters the scene.
Devil comes from a word that means "to split". Martin Luther said correctly that the Devil's main purpose in roaming the earth is to try and split human beings from God; to tear them away from Him.

And the Evil One places three choices before Jesus, choices that to the casual observer will: - satisfy him
- comfort him
- and work for him.
But they are choices laced with poison, spiritual poison designed to split Jesus away from a relationship with His Father in Heaven -- deadly choices.

The first tempting choice is very subtle. The second is a little more powerful. The third is high powered - heat turned WAY up.
That's often how the devil works. He approaches us after the mountain top experiences, when we're in the grind moments, the moments of challenge, perhaps the complacent moments of routine. And he'll start with easy pressure. But if we don't give in, the heat gets turned up. And up.
The challenge facing us, who are used to a pampered lifestyle where any choice works, is to lay aside the easy going attitude and recognize that sometimes tough choices have to be made.
Times where we have to say "No."
Times when more is not necessarily better.
Times when the quick road is not the best road.
Where shortcuts are out of bounds.
Hey - let's call a spade a spade - maybe it's even tough for us consumer types to even admit that there's such a thing as "out of bounds."

Consider the three choices facing Jesus.

#1 - turn some stones into bread. Jesus is hungry. He has the power to make this happen. Why not? It's not that performing a miracle in order to make food isn't allowed. Soon after he turns water into wine. Later he'll feed 5000 and then 4000 people with miraculous food production.
Satan lays out a very subtle line. He's calling Jesus to an act of expediency. If it works, do it. Focus on yourself and meet the need you feel inside. Give it to yourself. You deserve it.
What he's calling Jesus to is an attitude that focusses on self - self-sufficient, self-serving. And he plays on Jesus' strength to do it. "If you are the Son of God" - which is not a question, but laying out a basic assumption. Something like this - "You're the Son of God, right? OK, that being the case, go ahead and use your miracle power to make yourself lunch."
Trying to draw Jesus away from focussing on the Lord.
Getting him to think about his own wants and needs first.

Jesus' rebuttal comes from Deuteronomy 8, where Moses is reminding the people of Israel about a similar time in their own history - where they got all hung up with their hunger pangs and what they wanted that they forgot about the Lord who had promises from the get-go to care for them. They became all wrapped up in themselves.
Jesus tells Satan flat out that this kind of approach gets you nowhere.
Yes, we need food. Yes, we have other legitimate needs.
But first things first. The Lord first. Ourselves - way later.

How different from common wisdom today which calls us to find our strong points, and build on them to develop a solid career, to work a retirement nest egg, to build our popularity with classmates. You've got a world of choices - find your strengths, and choose accordingly what will take you the furthest.
No.
No.
No.

God has given you strengths.
But first things first. What does His word say about using them? And have you stopped to ask how HE can be served best........ rather than yourself?

Test # 2 - a little more direct.
Satan moves away from trying to satisfy Jesus' immediate urges and on to playing the religious card. He moves to using holy words in a holy setting. And he tries to get Jesus to challenge God to, in a rough way, "show His stuff."
"If you're really God, then show me something big. Make it good."
A spectacular display. Push God to the limit.

And rather than humbly trusting that God will care, that He will pick us up after we stumble and fall, that His goodness and faithfulness is greater than our weakness and foolishness -
- which is the true intent of Psalm 91, which Satan quotes -
rather than that Satan tries to position Jesus to behave like some demanding child calling the babysitter to perform. "Here's what I want. Give it to me........ now!"

Which is how Old Testament Israel behaved, as Moses reminds them in Deuteronomy 6 - the rebuttal that Jesus swings back at Satan. Israel was thirsty, and they throw a temper tantrum. "God, you owe us..... Big time!"
Oh?
Really?
Who owes what to whom?

Can the cricket who sits in an enclosure with an elephant really be demanding of the elephant?

Our heavenly Father is not some 50 cent vending machine. We don't push a button and wait for the favours to pop out. We can't fold our arms demanding help and saying, "well, it's about time."

Yet the temptation is there.
It would be tempting to continually look for spiritual highs, the flashy, the miraculous and jump from one to the other. Not that they don't exist or are wrong. God, in His divine and sovereign mercy, continues to work powerfully. But in HIS time, not ours. And in HIS way, not ours.
It's very easy to allow our prayer life to slip into a cheap routine of sending shopping lists up to heaven - "Lord, grant us this and this and that and that...."
- Do this....
- Go there....
- Provide that.....
 
 

And then the third temptation - most powerful of all.
Jesus' whole mission in life is to win control of earth from Satan. And now he's offered an apparent shortcut - one that avoids suffering. No cross. No pain. Just gain.
Whatever works.
If it gets you ahead, do it. No questions asked.
That's Satan's line.

It's the greatest shortcut -
- greater than satisfying needs of the moment
- greater than looking for the flashy and the showy.

And here's the greatest contemporary problem we face -
We're a numbed-out society, my friends. People aren't interested too much in discussing the "why's" of life. Just tell them "how."
As long as it gets the job done, that's all that matters.
No one is watching, anyway.
How often haven't you heard that?

Well - someone IS watching. Watching as we make our choices. Watching to see if we'll get suckered in by the One who desires to split us away from a living, day by day relationship with our Creator; to follow choices that are worried about what's in it for us rather than if it follows the will of our Father in Heaven.

Are our choices in life self-serving?

OR

God-honouring?

Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit, stuck to His guns and chose the latter.
We who are Christians are called to do the same.
Recognizing that it may not always be easy. At times the pressure to choose the easy way out may grow greater and greater.
But taking courage from the knowledge that we don't have to do the choosing alone. For Christ, in His holy and gracious goodness, will grant us the power of the Holy Spirit to make our choices. And He will send gracious heavenly power, angelic power, to refresh us and guide us when we do.