Turn to the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 4.
And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan,
and was led in the Spirit in the wilderness
during forty days, being tempted of the devil.
And He did eat nothing in those days:
and when they were completed, He hungered.And the devil said unto Him, If Thou art the Son of God, command this stone that it become bread.
And Jesus answered unto him, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone.And he led Him up, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
And the devil said unto Him, To Thee will I give all this authority, and the glory of them:
for it hath been delivered unto me;
and to whomsoever I will I give it.
If Thou therefore wilt worship me, it shall all be Thine.
And Jesus answered and said unto him, It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.And he led Him to Jerusalem, and set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said unto Him, If Thou art the Son of God, cast Thyself down from hence:
for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee, to guard Thee:
and, On their hands they shall bear Thee up,
lest haply Thou dash Thy foot against a stone.
And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not make trial of the Lord thy God.And when the devil had completed every temptation, he departed from Him for a season.
In the first letter to Timothy, chapter 1 and verse 18:
This charge I commit unto thee, my child Timothy, according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that by them thou mayest war the good warfare.
And in 1 Timothy 6:12:
Fight the good fight of the faith.
Then, in the second letter, 2 Timothy 2:3-4:
Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.
No soldier on service entangleth himself in the affairs of this life;
that he may please Him who enrolled him as a soldier.
It is not necessary to prove to you that the Christian life is a warfare. But it is a matter concerning which we need to have a realization. There is a great deal of difference between knowing a thing by way of information and realizing what that thing really means.
It does matter, though, for our remembrance and our realization, that the Christian life is a warfare. Moreover, the New Testament makes it perfectly clear that this warfare is an age-long thing. It goes right on to the end of the age.
It is shown right through the New Testament to be such. The New Testament points on to the very end of this age and shows that it is characterized by spiritual warfare all the way through.
Now, the enemy with whom we have to contend has a very elaborate, comprehensive, and detailed tactical plan for gaining his advantage.
One of the major tactics of the enemy is to eliminate from Christians the very element of warfare itself—that is, to make Christians non-warring people; really, to take the element of warfare out of them, or in some way to bring them to a state where that is completely eliminated.
There are more spiritual casualties by not fighting than there are by fighting.
There are many who get bruised and wounded and knocked down temporarily in the fight. They may be casualties all the time being, but they get up and fight again.
But the very land is strewn with casualties who are casualties because they did not fight. I say there are many more.
I was impressed again yesterday, as I have very often been when flying, with this: when the plane is climbing, and when it is at its altitude and has all its power in action, it is most steady. It goes on steadily and meets the adverse forces in a triumphant way.
But immediately the plane is thrown into the descending position, the acceleration is retarded, and the power is reduced, the thing becomes the plaything of the wind. You rock about, shaken all over the place, because the driving force has been lessened.
It is very like that. We become the playthings of the devil; we get knocked all over the place when we cease to be positive, or when the fighting-going spirit is reduced enough. That is the perilous moment in the Christian life.
I repeat that the warring spirit in a Christian is a great protection. To be without it is a great peril.
If we let go, I think Satan will do the same. But he will get us in other ways. We may have the impression that we would have an easier time if we were not so positive. He may let up if we do, in that particular form, but he will work in further and more subtle ways. He is not giving it up.
You want to have an easier time, and yet no less perilous a time? Stop fighting, and you will find the enemy will pull you to pieces. It is, as I say, the peril of becoming a casualty by not fighting.
We come to Christ’s temptations, these three temptations of which we have just read. Note that the line was crossed at Jordan. The battle was set and begun. He committed Himself to the Cross, as symbolized in the Jordan, and then the anointing Spirit came upon Him. That was the beginning of the battle.
Now note the nature of the warfare as indicated by those temptations.
First of all, the attack—the assault—was upon His relationship with the Father: “If Thou art the Son.” His relationship to the Father, the whole question of sonship, was an objective of the satanic assault.
Notice how the end of the account is given: the devil departed from Him “for a season.” But the margin says, “until a more opportune season,” and he did come back on that right at the end, in the hour of greatest weakness. He came right back on that again: the whole question of His relationship with the Father.
I have no time this morning to speak about what that relationship really means—a son for the Father—but I can just indicate this: sonship, in its very meaning, means that the whole honour of the Father is involved.
True sonship means the taking up of the honour of the Father. The most terrible thing about failure in sonship, whether in Christ or in the ordinary relations of life, is that it dishonours the father. It brings reproach upon the father. It brings shame upon the father. The father suffers shame by the failure of a son.
So it was with Christ. The whole matter of the Father’s honour and the Father’s satisfaction was involved. Therefore, the enemy focused his assault in the first place upon that relationship with the Father.
Remember, that is always the nature of this warfare. Our relationship with God is a focal point of constant attack and assault by the enemy, and it will be to the end, because so much is at stake and bound up with that relationship. The enemy is always trying to drive a wedge between us and the Father.
Then, in the next place, there is relationship to the world: relationship to the world. The offering of the kingdoms of the world, their glory, and their authority was on Satan’s terms.
So it became a question of whether Christ would let go this world as it is, and all that it had to offer—position, rewards, influence, and everything that this world puts after us—whether He would let that go in its present form, to have it only on God’s terms and to win it in God’s way.
You can see that this is a very real issue in spiritual warfare, especially for young Christians. You come up against that at once, almost immediately. You become a Christian, and you are up against it.
Now then, the world or the Lord—which are you going to have? Very often that becomes a very clearly divided question when you become a Christian, and you are right up against it.
There are many practical ways in which that pressing question comes. It becomes warfare right on to the end. It is never pleasant to our natural life to be discounted by the world and to have the world hold back its favour and its patronage because we are Christians. But God has said, and it comes to the test.
You see how hurriedly I am passing over these things, only hinting at them.
Then, in the third place, the battle was focused upon the relationship to the church. Satan took Him to the pinnacle of the temple. The temple. Why did he not take Him to the palace? Well, that would have belonged to the other realm. No, it was the temple.
The Lord Jesus came with the object of securing His church. Here is the issue: it is a religious one now. It is not the world now; it is a religious one. It is not God immediately; it is something else.
Here you have, represented by the temple, the popular religion, the established religion, the traditional religion, the formal religion—yes, and the dead religion. The devil does not say so, but he suggests in his temptation that Christ can get to the religious world if only He will do this thing.
He can capture the religious world and gain a place in the religious world. He can capture a reputation. He can capture influence in that world. He can make a name for Himself in that world. He can get applause, acceptance, and a following in the religious world.
But Jesus always, in His life, drew a distinct line between traditional, cold, dead, formal religion and a living church. He committed Himself to the church. He said, “I will build My church.” Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it.
Now, the devil has a keen sense of things. He has an intuitive knowledge. I think he knows what that church is destined to mean in his undoing. So, if he could just turn Christ away from that specific object of the church onto something religious as an alternative, he would have scored a tremendous victory.
Relationship to the church: no, Christ is not being put off that. Do not forget, dear friends, the enemy is always trying to get us to accept something that is less than God’s full thought concerning the church: to become religious, yes, formal, professional Christians; to be brought down onto that level; and to be robbed and deprived of the tremendous significance of the Body of Christ and its destiny in the counsel of God.
Again, I only hint at this. I want to come to another threefold application of this. But these are three realms of the battle: our relationship to God, our relationship to this world, and our relationship to the church. The battle rages on those three points.
But then look at Christ personally, in Himself: first, His body.
There was an attack upon His body, and upon what seemed to be its needs. There is a direction, dear friends, in which the great issue arises in the very bodily realm: whether the dictates of our bodily life, our physical life, are going to be paramount, or whether the will of God is going to prevail.
Sometimes that is the issue. The apostle says:
I beseech you to present your bodies a living sacrifice.
Your bodies, a living sacrifice, because so often the body is the thing that rises up and dictates our course—what we need for our very difficult life, it seems; what is demanding; what is good for us bodily and physically.
Sometimes it is a matter of finding rest. Oh yes, these bodies need rest, and God knows that. Christ took account of that with His disciples. He knew the need of physical rest.
But there are points, I say, and times when that question can become a spiritual one, not just a bodily one. There may be physical weakness or some indisposition that becomes the dictating thing, and we lie down under it, accept it, and are put out of the battle.
Yet even then, there are times—not always, mark you—when we are called upon to say, “Yes, I do not feel very fit. I do not feel very well. The body seems to say I ought to do this, that, and the other. But there is some spiritual issue at stake, and therefore I lay hold on life.”
I lay hold on life. Is it not often true that when we stand on our feet and gird ourselves for that very physical battle, life comes in and we do what we would not have done if we had given way to the body? You see the point.
It was a question then, at that time, of whether the body was going to dictate or whether the will of the Father was going to prevail: the realm of the body.
Then there is the realm of the soul. As I pointed out, this offering of the kingdoms of the world was an appeal to His soul—ambition.
Ambition! All the saddest tragedies of ambition in this world. Parents, in their ambition for their children, have so often devastated the spiritual life of their children.
Our ambition in this world—to get somewhere, to get to the top of the ladder, to be something, to make a name, and every other form of our own natural life—how powerful it is. This was an appeal to selfhood in this world: reputation, name, position, influence, gain, success, prosperity, getting on. All that was involved in this.
Well, there is nothing wrong with doing a good job, with working in this world, and with getting on. But if it is at the cost of doing the Father’s will, and if it is at the suggestion of the devil and the drawing out of our own soul-life, there is an infinite peril bound up with that.
We have to fight this thing out and get right to this issue: What is it that is dictating—my own selfhood, my own soul-life—or really that old question, what God wants for my life? That is a very keen battle, is it not?
Then, as to His spirit—His spirit. The whole question of worship governs this temptation, does it not? Worship in spirit.
The spirit is that part of us where God is worshipped. God seeks true worshippers who worship Him in spirit—not the body, not the soul, but the spirit.
Paul said, “Whom I serve in my spirit.”
The enemy will do anything to get us off the ground of that essential and ultimate relationship with God in our spirit—anything to draw us away from that.
You and I have learned more and more keenly and clearly what it means to walk in the Spirit and to have our life with God by our spirit: not by our feelings, our emotions, our desires, our own reasoning, nor by the governing influences of this world at all.
With God in the innermost part of our being—with God. You see how, from that very moment, this was a primary issue in the life of the Lord Jesus Himself.
All the way through, from this committal at Jordan and from this fundamental and inclusive battle in the wilderness, His life was based upon this: would He be influenced by other considerations, or would He walk with the Father in an inward way, in His heart?
You see how that arose again and again. The enemy was trying to tap in there, to get His life upon another basis than the basis of His inner fellowship with the Father.
Much could be said, could it not? You realize the battle that rages there to get us off that ground. But all this raises one big question: What is going to prevail?
The enemy comes along through physical life; he comes along through emotional life; he comes in all these different ways. But there is one issue in it all. It is a battle. Who is going to prevail, and what is going to prevail?
The Lord Jesus came back every time upon what the Father had made known as to His will. After all, when He said, “It is written,” He was only saying, in other words, “God has spoken. God has spoken. I know what God has said.”
That is the thing. That is the final word in this battle. That is the argument—not even the argument of my physical needs and conditions, not the argument of my well-being in this world at all, but the argument of my inward life with God.