The Overlooked Aspect of Jesus' Win Over Temptation

You can’t believe it happened again.

By this time, you’ve lost all sensitivity in the matter. You want to do better—you know you should do better. But here you are. So, you kick yourself in the pants, and say you’ll do better next time…you hope.

We’ve all been trapped in patterns of sin where it feels like no matter how hard you try, how much you pray, or how much you try to not do it again, you still manage to “slip up.” If you’ve ever just felt totally “spent” on fighting, I get it.

But have you ever considered the way you frame all the self-talk about your sin problem?

Let’s be honest. It wasn’t a slip-up. It was just plain ol’ sin. And the sin didn’t happen to you…you engaged in it.

Kicking yourself in the pants has never led to behavior change…why continue beating yourself up over this, likely ensuring you’ll do it again out of self-misery and frustration? Maybe you’ve prayed for God to take it away—or that He’d help you say no…but short of throwing up an occasional prayer, you’ve neglected to address behaviors that set you up for failure. For example, no matter how much a guy struggling with alcoholism prays, “God help me stay sober,” there are certain places he just doesn’t need to go. Watching a ball game with friends at a bar or taproom is just a bad idea.

The truth is, sin isn’t “out there” waiting to trip you up…it’s in our hearts. James 1:14-15 tells us:

^“14 But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. ¹⁵ Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”

So, how do you fight what’s already inside you? It feels like a setup, doesn’t it? And in a moment of weakness, we often roll over and give in.

But didn’t Jesus experience weakness? Let’s not forget his humanity. As a red-blooded Jewish carpenter, surely He had desires He had to squelch, right? Furthermore, didn’t He get “set up” to fail and sin throughout his ministry? For example, the Pharisees continually set traps to catch Him doing wrong. Yet, He remained faithful.

In Luke 4:1-13, Luke documents the temptation of Jesus. Most of the time, when you hear this passage taught, it seems like the focus goes one of two places: the temptations themselves (physical needs, power, influence), or Jesus’ response to temptation (fighting with scripture). However, when you look closely, I think we often overlook something very important: the context of the story.

Jesus had just been baptized. It was a major “mountain-top God moment” in the life of Jesus, where God audibly spoke in affirmation of the Son, descending in the Spirit in the form of a dove. Can you imagine the scene? And then our passage begins: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.”

We need to take more notice of this bit about Jesus being “full of the Holy Spirit” prior to his temptation in the wilderness.  

What’s going on here?

See, Jesus wasn’t content to allow his “mountain-top God moment” at His baptism to simply slip away. For many of us, after we have a “mountain-top God moment,” at some point we return to “normal,” and eventually a spiritual dry spell sets in. Why? I think it’s because we allow the spiritual highs to make us lazy. When we have a particularly unique experience of God, it’s easy to dwell on the moment and neglect the habits, patterns, and routines that got us there. Now, to be clear, I’m not saying there’s something you can do to make a God-moment happen for you…What I am saying is that often our powerful God-moments come when we are diligently seeking Him. And when the seeking and diligence fall by the wayside, the chances we’ll remain near to God slip away.

Jesus, on the other hand, wasn’t content to go from spiritual mountain-top to spiritual valley…He got to work in the midst of His God moment. When Jesus entered the desert, a literal valley, what He chose to do there is a master class in resisting temptation. So, what was he doing in the desert? Well, if the pattern of his life recorded throughout the Gospels is any indication of what was going on during the forty days of fasting and temptation, Jesus’ wilderness experience was totally given over to prayer and meditation on God’s Word. Just think about the first temptation: Satan tempts Jesus to turn the stones into bread. And Jesus response is Deuteronomy 8:3. Have you ever hunted down this scripture reference? It’s the mid-point of a sermon Moses delivered to the Israelites, reminding them of God’s provision of manna in the wilderness. This is crazy! Jesus is literally starving, having no fuel in his body, and he’s dwelling on the fact that God provided for his people in their hunger. I can just imagine Jesus thinking, “If God provided for the whole nation in their suffering, He can certainly provide for His Son now.” How powerful it is to consider the strength of Jesus despite his physical weakness! This is the upside-down nature of the Gospel: God chooses the lowly to shame the wise. The weak over the strong. The wilderness was never a place of weakness for Jesus—it was from the wilderness moments that he drew his spiritual strength, because He sought God in the secret place.

So, while Jesus had been meditating on God’s Word and reminding Himself that God knows and will provide, I think there’s a third thing we should take away from this event too. Jesus focused on positive rather than negative obedience. Here’s what I mean: often, we try to obey by focusing on what not to do. I’d call this negative obedience. Don’t lie. Don’t swear. Don’t cheat. Jesus, on the other hand, shows us a life lived under positive obedience: focusing on what to do. Love God first. Serve people self-sacrificially. Jesus shows us that by flipping our Christian life from “don’ts” to “do’s” odds are, we’ll remain more faithful. By focusing on the “do’s,” we’ll likely find the “don’ts” thrown in.

It's because Jesus focused on the “dos” in His relationship with the Father that He memorized scripture (which He used to fight temptation) and dwelt on God’s faithfulness to provide in days gone by. And He used the scripture He had absorbed, along with the reminder of God’s faithfulness, to fight temptation. But the starting point of Jesus’ example for us is that He said “yes” to acts of positive obedience: things like solitude, scripture reading, prayer, meditation, and loving God and others.

Today, what would it look like for you to shift focus away from “don’ts” to “do’s?” A change in perspective might be all you need to better fight sin because shifting focus to the disciplines that keep us close to God in the first place can make all the difference.