Lent Sermon Series 4: Outward Disciplines

Matthew 4:1-11

New readers start here: in our circuit sermon series so far, we have begun by asking what the point of Lent is, and answered that by saying that it is to do with reorienting ourselves towards Jesus.

In the second week, we took that further by asking what our relationship with God looks like.

Then last week, this week, and next week we’re looking at various spiritual disciplines that we can use to tune into Jesus and the will of God better. After all, since he draws us into a relationship of friendship, we shall be keen to know what he says and what he cares about.

Last week’s set teaching was on what we call ‘inward disciplines.’ This week we turn to what are classified as ‘outward disciplines.’ And to do that, we’re taking the familiar story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness that we usually read on the First Sunday in Lent, not the Fourth. But we’re not going to look at it in the conventional way, where perhaps we look at the meanings of the three temptations, or we highlight the way Jesus fasted and quoted Scripture. There was material about both of them in last week’s reflections, in any case.

This week, we are asked to think about four outward disciplines that help us focus on Jesus. There is no single Bible passage that refers to all four, but this one gets as close as any.

Firstly, submission.

Jesus submitted to the Father’s will when he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness (verse 1). In fact, ‘led’ is altogether too weak a word. This is not on the same level as the inane ‘I feel led’ conversations of some Christians – you know, ‘I feel led to buy a Mars bar,’ and so on.

No: Jesus was ‘thrown out’ into the wilderness! The Father made his will known very strongly here – and Jesus submitted to it.

Not only that, Jesus submitted to human beings, not least in his trials and execution.

Here is an important Christian discipline: to submit to God and to one another. We submit to the will of God. We also submit to one another, for Paul tells us in Ephesians 5:21 to be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Now some of you may be listening to this nervously, knowing that there is a bad form of submission. There are terrible stories coming out of some churches where abused wives were told by pastors to go back home and submit to their abusive husbands. Those same churches never challenged the husbands, and in some cases covered up for them. Please do not hear me as approving of anything remotely like that. It is evil. It should be reported to the police.

So what is godly submission actually about? It is a discipline that is designed to counter the selfishness of ‘me first’, which is so contrary to the way of Jesus. Jesus gave up the glory of heaven and – as Paul says in Philippians 2 – made himself nothing, and took the form of a servant, becoming obedient even to death on a cross.

Let that be a challenge for Lent and for the whole of our Christian lives. How am I putting the will of God before my own will? How am I preferring others to me? This is what submission is about.

Secondly, solitude.

Jesus goes to the wilderness alone. This is a solitary act of discerning the Father’s will and battling evil spiritual forces. It is something he would practise during his ministry when he took himself off on his own to pray.

There is much that the Bible teaches us about being together as the People of God: we are the Body of Christ and we all need each other. We worship together. We have fellowship and study the Bible together.

But we also need solitude. Every one of us needs those times when it is just ‘God and me.’ I need to relate to God myself. I need to know the voice of his love for me. I need to know what he is saying to me. I need to tell him what is on my mind and heart. Much as I need other people, I cannot rely on them to do the spiritual life for me.

This has all sorts of surprising benefits. Our willingness and ability to practise solitude with God contributes to the other side, where we relate to others. True solitude makes us better at fellowship! Being present with God enables us to be present with others. The great German Christian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that you cannot practise true fellowship unless you know how to practise solitude with God.

So this is not a call to go off and live in a remote place as a hermit. Nor is this a call to enter some kind of spiritual loneliness. The truth of Genesis 2 remains that God says it is not good for us to be alone. We need helpers.

Perhaps we don’t like the thought of solitude with God because we might feel spiritually exposed. But that is a good thing. Because solitude does not expose us before a vengeful, angry God who wants to fry us at the first opportunity.

No: we enter solitude with a God of mercy, grace, and love. And if in that relationship he highlights something uncomfortable in our lives, it is so that he can heal it and we can draw closer to him.

Let us ask ourselves how we set aside time to be in solitude with God.

Thirdly, simplicity.

I think we can reasonably infer that – apart from the story we read where Jesus puts the devil in his place – he inevitably practises the spiritual discipline of simplicity. This is bare bones living. Just what Jesus needs, and no more.

We know that soon after this, Jesus will make simplicity of lifestyle a virtue for his disciples when he tells them not to store up treasures on earth but in heaven. Later in his ministry he will send his disciples out two by two to nearby villages ahead of his arrival, and he will instruct them not to take with them more than they need.

I can remember a big emphasis in the church when I was in my teens that promoted the slogan, ‘Live simply so that others can simply live.’ The trouble is, there is no set level below which we are living simply and above which we are living greedily. We each have to discern this prayerfully and thoughtfully.

You can even see different responses among the disciples of Jesus. On the one hand, think of the fishermen who left their nets and their family businesses to follow him. But also think of the wealthy women in Luke 8 who funded a lot of Jesus’ ministry, having stayed put.

Simplicity is not only about being able to give generously to others, it is also about being content. Look how stressed many people become because they are not content, and because they are sucked in by the advertisers and influencers. What kind of witness is it to show such people that you can have peace of mind without that strain and hassle?

Our television has had a particular fault for a while, and at the beginning of the year I suggested we look for a new one in the sales. We found a good model that would do everything we wanted at nearly £200 off the list price. However, Debbie then raised some questions and doubts about the wisdom of proceeding then and there. So we decided to be content with the current TV, despite the issue.

Where is Jesus calling us to practise the discipline of simplicity so that we have more to give or so that we can exhibit the peace of contentment?

Fourthly and finally, service.

I said in the introduction that no single Bible passage covers all of the four outward disciplines, and this is the one I cannot really infer from the account of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. Although if I were pushed, I would say that it follows from the discipline of submission with which we began!

But we know that in any case Jesus had much to teach about this later. You have only to go on to Matthew 20, where two of the disciples, James and John, get their mother to speak to Jesus and ask that he grant them the privilege of sitting on his right and his left in his kingdom. Jesus uses that faux pas to teach that in his kingdom leaders do not lord it over others, but serve, just as he came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

If we want to become like Jesus, then we need to imitate him. In a sense, that’s what we’ve been talking about with all of these spiritual disciplines: do what Jesus did. As the saying goes, it isn’t rocket science.

And nowhere could it be plainer than in this discipline: service. Jesus served people when he healed them, when he gave his time to them, when he taught them. For Jesus, live was not gimme, gimme, gimme: it was, what can I give to others?

Now while this attitude is still widely admired in our society, it is also true that it is perhaps more admired in the breach. So much of our language is about us wanting our rights and wanting what we deserve.

Jesus, though, shows us a different way to live. In fact, not simply different: it’s in an opposite spirit. Serve.

We might not like the word ‘servant.’ We think of people who had an inferior status, whether we are the generation that watched Upstairs, Downstairs, or the generation that watched Downton Abbey.

And it’s worse if we think of the word ‘slave.’ Not only do we have the terrible history of slavery in the world, we have recent examples of modern slavery, such as the appalling case in the news the other day of the woman who enslaved another woman for twenty-five years and treated her with unbearable cruelty.

We cannot control how others treat us. But Christianity is not about upping our social status anyway. And in any case, God will be pleased with us and will affirm us and reward us if we follow in the footsteps of Jesus by taking the decision to serve others. And as we do so, we shall become more like him.

Which is our goal. Isn’t it?