Sunday’s Sermon: Lenten Discipline

Matthew
4:1-11

Introduction
Fabio Capello made an impression when he got his England football squad
together at the beginning of the week, prior to the friendly match with
Switzerland on Wednesday. There was a new régime at work. The players weren’t
allowed their mobile phones, games consoles or iPods. Capello referred to them
by surname. They had to wear uniform. They were to sit down for meals together,
and leave together. No wonder that highly intellectual player Rio Ferdinand
astutely observed that it was like being back at school.

Capello has instilled a culture of discipline. And discipline
is central to our thinking, now that we have entered Lent. Much as I like
three-point sermons, I’m not going to look at the three temptations Jesus faced
in the wilderness. Instead, I want to look at the disciplines Jesus employed. Although
there are many spiritual disciplines, coincidentally I find three in this
story.

1. The Discipline of
the Spirit
At the risk of alienating the sport-haters even more, let me tell a story not
about football but about that even more wonderful game, cricket. It was the
only sport I was ever remotely good at playing. I was a left-arm bowler (seam
and spin – I’ve always been indecisive!), and a specialist number eleven
batsman. When I fielded, I liked to be close behind the batsman, in the slips. There
were two reasons for this: one was that in that position, you didn’t have time
to be scared if the ball came hard and fast. The other was that if I was a long
way from the bat, on the boundary, I didn’t have a strong throw to get the ball
back to the wicket-keeper. Yet there was one time when I was playing for my
primary school in a tournament when I was fielding on the boundary. I remember
hurling the ball back as best as I could to the wicket-keeper, and our teacher
called out, ‘Good throw, David F!’ I didn’t think it was a good throw, but he
did.

What does that have to do with Lent disciplines and the Holy
Spirit? Bear with me for a moment. Our story begins with these words:

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be
tempted by the devil. (Verse 1)

‘Led by the Spirit’? Many Christians talk about feeling they
are being led by the Spirit. They feel led by the Spirit to serve God in Outer
Mongolia, the inner city or leafy Surrey. They feel led by the Spirit to change
job, marry a beautiful blonde, move church, or buy a Mars bar. They feel led by
the Spirit to tell you something.

But the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. There’s
nothing warm and fuzzy about it. He has just had an amazing experience of the
Spirit descending on him at his baptism – a spiritual ‘high’ if ever there was
one – and now he is led by the Spirit into the wilderness.

What does it have to do with throwing a cricket ball? Simply
this: ‘led by the Spirit’ is altogether too twee a translation. The Greek
means, ‘Jesus was thrown out by the Spirit.’ Ekballo is the Greek verb: ‘ek’, meaning ‘out of’, and ‘ballo’, to
throw, from which we get our word ball. The Holy Spirit hurls Jesus into the
wilderness.

There’s a lot of traditional ‘led by the Spirit’ language
that I approve of. I do believe the Holy Spirit leads people to share insights
with others that the speaker couldn’t otherwise have known would be helpful to
the hearer. I do believe the Holy Spirit does remarkable works of power that
transform lives for the better. I believe all that stuff. But I also believe
the Spirit leads us into the tough places, the wildernesses of our lives and
this world, just as Jesus was led. It is therefore a Christian discipline to
listen to the Spirit’s promptings, even if they are uncomfortable.

So is there an area of life where you felt led by the Spirit,
perhaps forcefully, but where you are unhappy or at least uneasy? It might be a
job, family situation or something to do with church. It’s easy to want to run
away sometimes, but if the Spirit has thrown us into such an environment, then
escape should not be our first option. The season may well come to an end, just
as it did for Jesus in the wilderness, but we are wise to allow the discipline
of following Spirit’s leading to teach us more of God’s ways and shape us more
like Christ.

2. The Discipline of
Self-Denial
If there’s one thing we associate Lent with, it’s giving up something for the
forty days. Last year, we invited a couple of families around one day and got
out our chocolate fountain. It was agony for some of the girls, who had decided
to renounce chocolate for Lent!

You may have seen other initiatives publicised this Lent.
There is TEAR Fund’s Carbon Fast,
which encourages us to cut our carbon use and reduce further damage to the
climate. There is the Church of England’s Love
Life Live Lent project, with us for a second year this year. It features
booklets for children, youth and adults, suggesting a new action for each day
of Lent.

All of this comes from Jesus’ actions in the wilderness:

He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he
was famished. (Verse 2)

It wasn’t unusual for a Jew to fast. Forty days was extreme,
though. It goes close to the limits before lack of food has an irreversibly
detrimental effect on the body. Remember that those IRA hunger strikers who
died, such as Bobby Sands, fasted for fifty or sixty days. Why does Jesus do
it?

As I explained in a couple of school assemblies this week,
Jesus shows us a Christian value of giving up something good for the sake of
something better. The ‘something better’ here is prayer. For Jesus, being in
close communion with his Father was essential throughout his life. However, here,
at the outset of his ministry, it is particularly vital. Prayer becomes more
important than food.

It also becomes a counter-cultural witness. How easy it is
to conceive of life as being about self-fulfilment. It’s an immature society where
people gratify their every desire. The other day, Rebekah has a friend come
back after school to play with her. When her father came to pick her up, he
said in all innocence, ‘They’re having fun. That’s what we’re all here for, isn’t
it?’

Psychologists tell us that the ability to defer personal
gratification is a sign of maturity. Those that can’t do this are not grown-up
people. On that basis, we have developed a whole culture of adolescence – we have
adolescents of every age!

On a purely human level, this is of course what Fabio
Capello knew in imposing a disciplined approach in his management of the
England football team. A group of people whose lifestyle affords them every
opportunity for self-indulgence run grave risks of undermining the very skills
that have earned them their outrageous wages in the first place. In the
sporting arena, Capello knew that success would require self-denial.

So it is for us, too. I’ve just started a Lent course at
Broomfield where we are studying the DVD version of John Ortberg’s book If
You Want To Walk On Water, You’ve Got To Get Out Of The Boat. In the first
session, he makes an important point: Christians have to choose between comfort
and growth. If we opt for comfort, we shall not grow spiritually. If we are
committed to growth, we shall have to become uncomfortable in all sorts of
ways. Self-denial will be required.

Is God, then, calling us to give up something, not so that
we might be miserable, but rather because he is training us for something
better? Is God calling us to the discipline of denying ourselves in some area
so that something better might happen for his kingdom? If that is the case,
then there is real incentive for the discipline of self-denial.

3. The Discipline of
the Scriptures
When the pressure is on, Jesus responds the same way every time to the tempter.
He answers each of the three temptations in the same way: ‘It is written’
(verses 4, 7 and 10). He dismisses every temptation with Scripture.

And it’s not merely a case of Jesus shooting back a
proof-text. In the second temptation, where he is tempted to throw himself off
the Temple, it’s as if the devil has become wise to this, because he quotes the
Bible, too. I can remember a radio phone-in presenter banning his callers from
quoting the Bible, because he said people could quote it to support any
position. The devil treats Scripture like that.

But Jesus doesn’t. He can dismiss the temptation with more
Scripture, because he knows his Bible better. He knows the big story of
Scripture, the story of God, his ways and his character. In fact, every time
that Jesus fires back a verse at the devil in this story, each quotation comes
from the same part of the Bible. They all come from Deuteronomy, and the
account of Israel’s forty years in the wilderness. Clearly, Jesus sees great
significance in that for his forty days in the desert.

Ah, you say, but Jesus was the Son of God. He knew the
Scriptures because he was deity. We’re not like that. However, wait a minute –
remember his humanity. Remember that Jesus conducted his ministry as a man
acting in the power of the Spirit. Without that, he couldn’t be our example for
living. And as a human being, a Jew of two thousand years ago in Palestine, he
would have gone as a boy to synagogue school. From an early age, Jesus was
steeped in the Scriptures.

I see Jesus, then, as someone who had engaged in a
disciplined reflection on the Scriptures. He read them, meditated on them and
prayed them. It was as if they became woven around him like a garment. For years
before this event in the wilderness, Jesus has engaged in the discipline of
Scripture. It is stored up in his life.

I have taken to comparing this to the Old Testament story of
Joseph in Egypt. You will recall that when he becomes Pharaoh’s trusted
adviser, he institutes a policy where during the seven years of plenty, grain
is stored ready for the seven lean years. In a similar way, the discipline of
Scripture is one where we store up the goodness of God’s Word, ready for the
lean or wilderness times. When we hit a crisis, God may graciously direct us to
some Scripture that will help us. But I believe his best for us is that we immerse
ourselves in the biblical material now, before the crisis hits.

So how do we come to the Bible helpfully? I recently found
some helpful
and challenging words from an American Methodist, William Willimon[1].
He says we can’t just come to Scripture, condemning it for where it doesn’t
meet our preconceived ideas. For example, how can we condemn it for being
violent when our society is extremely violent (just not always in front of our
eyes)? We spot what we think are cultural limitations in the Bible, such as
where we think it is sexist or racist, but we are blind to our own. Our big
mistake is in trying to conform the Bible to our view of the world. Here are a few
sentences from Willimon:

Scripture is an attempt to construct a new world, to stoke,
fund and fuel our imaginations. The Bible is an ongoing debate about what is
real and who is in charge and where we’re all headed. So the person who emerged
from church one Sunday (after one of my most biblical sermons, too!),
muttering, “That’s the trouble with you preachers. You just never speak to
anything that relates to my world,” makes a good point.

To which the Bible replies, “How on earth did you get the idea that I want to
speak to your world? I want to rock, remake, deconstruct and rework your
world!”

…

Thus when we read Scripture, we’re not simply to ask, “Does
this make sense to me?” or “How can I use this to make my life less miserable?”
but rather we are to ask in Wesleyan fashion, “How would I have to be changed
in order to make this Scripture work?” Every text is a potential invitation to
conversion, transformation, and growth in grace.

So a true discipline of Scripture shapes us. We are thus ‘in
shape’ to face the wilderness and temptation, whenever they occur. That discipline
of Scripture becomes our primary way of disciplined listening to the Spirit,
thus leading – amongst other things – to the discipline of self-denial. In all
these disciplines, we become fitter, more trained for the battle against evil,
in which victory is already assured – because of Christ’s obedience, even to
death on a cross.

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