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Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, the text for this first Sunday in Lent comes from James’ epistle. You may be seated. The first Sunday in the season of Lent is a lot like Christmas, or Easter, or other major holidays. A Lutheran Christian sermon. And you will see how the two are inextricably intertwined. But the text is all about James and his epistle.
Before we jump into James’ epistle, there is one phrase in the Gospel reading that you have to circle or underline in your Bible someday. And it’s the same thing in the Old Testament reading as well, in Genesis 22. In the Gospel reading, who leads Jesus into the wilderness? Does Jesus take the initiative on His own and boldly go into the wilderness of His own volition? And the answer is no. So who, therefore, leads Jesus into the wilderness for His testing and trying? It’s not Jesus. It’s God, the Holy Spirit. It’s God who leads Him into the trials and tribulations.
This is vitally important for you for comfort because you can drive yourself insane, and you already have many times, as I have, trying to figure out this sorrow, suffering, difficulty, testing, or trying. If it is the Spirit who’s leading Jesus into the wilderness, then who’s in control of every facet of Jesus being tested or tried in the wilderness? The Father, His God. Who, therefore, is in control of every facet of you being tested or tried, pulled or stretched? Your God.
The problem in your being tested or tried is not in God, and it’s not in Satan. The problem in your being tested is you, just like me. And James is who hits this nail proverbially on the head. Because it’s not Satan; it’s your desires that Satan appeals to. It’s not Satan. Satan is not a puppeteer who controls you when you’re testing or trying. Satan is only enticing you with your desires. But God is in control, and He allows it, as He allowed it to Jesus in the Old Testament reading, as He allowed it to Abraham.
That’s important because He’s the one who’s leading you into your trial or tribulation. Hear what St. James says: “Let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God. For God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” So if God cannot be tempted and He doesn’t tempt you, where does the problem lie? In you, in your desires. That’s where the problem lies, in your desires.
It goes on. Each person, St. James says, is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it is conceived, gives birth to sin. There we are. The desire is sinful. Thinking about it is sinful. Acting upon it is sinful. And if we don’t repent and believe in the gospel of forgiveness of sins, then the rest of James’ statement applies: “And sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.” Not physical death; that already has been brought upon us because we are sinners, but eternal death, the second death.
So from the get-go, our Lord, because of what God has said in that gospel reading and what God has said through St. James, He has a purpose to your being tested or tried because you are His beloved children. Now, His purpose is very multifaceted. But if He’s the one who’s leading you, then it’s very clear that it’s God who’s working in you as He tests and tries you.
One of the first things that God does in testing and trying you is because it shows you what you really love and cherish: your desires. We are so interesting with our desires. We’re very quick at saying, “I don’t have this problem, I don’t have that desire. I’ve overcome it. I don’t have this problem, I don’t have that desire. I’ve overcome it.” But then we’ve got these few over here, but by golly, we’re not going to let go because those things are too risky, too scary to let go of those desires.
And those are the ones that God reveals to you so that you see who you love more: yourself and your desires and your pride or your vanity, or God. He tears away, by revealing this to you, our earthly hope in them, that we can get through life with them. So whenever we’re the most humiliated and humbled, when we feel like crud, and we don’t want people to see that we don’t have any clothes on, like the emperor, is precisely when He can clothe you, isn’t it? With His blood and righteousness.
But it’s not a pleasant feeling to have revealed to you that you really are naked. You don’t have it all together. And neither do I. Because He’s pushing us to see the only place where we have comfort and hope is not in ourself, in our desires, but in the desires that He alone has given us, which are completely counter to the desires we have within us with which we struggle.
When He tests and tries us, He’s pushing you to kill your fleshly desires and pride and trust only in those desires He’s given you that come from outside of you, that He’s placed within you by His Holy Spirit. I pray for you. I pray you never have to experience what our brother in the faith Abraham had to experience as he held the knife above his only son, the miraculous birth Isaac, laid out before him that God said to slaughter.
I can’t imagine what Abraham must have gone through on the inside of his heart to think that he was going to plunge the knife into his beloved and one and only son. But I do know that God tests you. He tests you as son or daughter to make sure you still honor and love your parents. He tests you as mother and father so that you don’t overdo to your children or underdo to your children. He tests you as husband and as wife that you may love and honor and serve the one, especially when they don’t deserve it.
This is where He pushes you as He tests you for you to see within yourself those relationships as son or daughter, as mother or father, as husband or wife, as brother or sister. I have not loved you as I ought. I have not loved my neighbor as myself. As we confess, that’s what testing and trying does to us. So that we can kill it and put it to death and say, this is not godly, this desire that I see welling up within me. These desires are godly that God has placed in me by His Spirit.
This is the amazing thing in your being tested and tried. When Abraham was tested and tried, what did God send Abraham to guide him but an angel? When our Lord Jesus was in the wilderness, what did God send Jesus to comfort him after He had been tested but angels?
I haven’t seen any angels come into my life, brothers and sisters, and you haven’t either. However, God has given you more than any angel’s appearance in your life. And He’s given it to you more frequently because He hasn’t taken the word away from your heart. He continually and daily gives you His word and promise of forgiveness. And He hasn’t taken it away from you. We may take ourselves away from it, but He will not take it away from you.
Every time you open His Word, you hear His forgiveness for your desires that are misplaced. Every time you gather here on Sunday morning, you hear His forgiveness for your desires that are misplaced. Every time His Word is proclaimed to you, you have hope, not despair. That is a great gift. God does not send you into testing or lead you into testing without accompanying you with those promises. Because that’s all we have.
Finally, what’s the result of all this testing? Exercise your faith. It exercises your faith and trust not in your desires, your abilities, your anything, but to be exercised to trust and rely upon His gifts, His mercy, His power, His forgiveness, His peace.
You remember those times if you were an athlete and the coach would push you beyond what you thought you could be pushed? Or in the military, or in any other aspect of your life as a musician, if your music teacher gave you a piece of music that seemed to overwhelm your abilities to perform? Every time you have had that done to you, you were pushed. That is exactly what God does when He tests you, pushes you, so that then after the fact, you look back and go, Ah! Because this loving person pushed me, I am where I am.
Well, it’s not because of your ability. It’s because really of your failures that you are where you are. Because only through your failures do you turn to the one who brings hope and certainty in His forgiveness. The other thing that God does in this testing of you all about is to get you off of you, and to get you to think, rather than on yourself, on loving and serving someone else than yourself and someone else than you. That’s why He tests and tries you.
So that you kill those desires that focus on self and lift up desires to serve another person. And finally, in testing you and trying you, you know what He produces within you, and you don’t even feel it or see it. That which He produces in you, you don’t even feel or see by testing and trying you, is that God produces in you good works as you trust in His forgiveness. Good works as you trust in His forgiveness.
So let’s have a recap. It is only God who leads you in any testing or trying, like a loving coach or a kind and benevolent teacher. He it is alone who controls your testing and will not give you too much to crush you. He it is alone who provides you and will never take it away from you His word of comfort, His forgiveness. He provides that for you and doesn’t leave you to go out without it as you’re enduring your testing and being tried.
And He gives you in the midst of it that which you can’t feel but which you believe and know—hope that He’s in control. Finally, as James said, it is He, not you, He who brought you forth to faith by the word of truth, that you may be a kind of first fruits of His creation. If it’s God who brought you forth by the word of truth, then it is He who keeps you in the midst of being tested and tried.
If you get through it, it is He who gets you through it. If you fail miserably, it is He who is still there and picks you up, and brings you forgiveness. No one else. That’s why we sing, “Though devils all the world should fill, all eager to devour us. We tremble not. We fear no ill. They shall not overpower us. This world’s prince may still scowl fierce as he will. He can harm us none. He’s judged. The deed is done. One little word can fail him.”
In the name of Jesus, Amen. The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
