PowerPoint

Jack Graham: Interesting, isn't it? How so often in life we are tempted after great spiritual victories, after mountaintop experiences in our lives. No matter where you go, it seems you meet the enemy.

Guest (Female): On today's PowerPoint, Dr. Graham brings a message about how to make your God-given dreams come true. Now, here's Dr. Graham with his message, The Truth About Temptation.

Jack Graham: Take your Bibles, please, and turn with me to the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Satan is described in the Bible as a roaring lion, roaming about seeking whom he may devour. And you, as a follower of Jesus Christ, are no exception.

In fact, we're told that temptation is common to all of us. There are no exceptions. We all face the enemy. I need to remind you at the outset of this message that it is not a sin to be tempted. Jesus was tempted in every point, even as we are tempted, yet without sin.

He chose God and His will every time. And so can you choose the will of God and the plan of God for your life, even against the onslaught of the enemy. Maybe you've experienced a time in your life when God has so richly and abundantly blessed you. You've experienced His presence. You are just full of His Spirit.

And then right afterwards, you find yourself in a struggle with sin or in the throes of temptation, and you're tempted to do something wrong. Have you ever wondered why that happens? Why it seems after great spiritual victories come great spiritual challenges?

Well, you are not the first to whom this has happened. And certainly, just as I mentioned a moment ago, this is common to all of us, but it was also common to Christ. And it may be that you need to realize today that you have not failed when you are tempted, but in fact, God is moving you forward in your Christian life. I love what A.B. Simpson, a well-known Christian of a number of years ago, said about temptation.

“Temptation exercises our faith and teaches us to pray. It is like a military drill and a taste of battle for a young soldier. It puts us under fire and compels us to exercise our weapons and prove their potency. It shows us the recourse of Christ and the preciousness of the promises of God. Every victory gives us new confidence in our victorious Leader and new courage for the next onslaught of the foe.”

Temptation is a test, and if you pass the test, you will be stronger, fortified in your faith, and once again, you will prove the faithfulness of God in your life. So that's why I want to talk to you today from this story in the life of Jesus at the beginning of His ministry as to how Christ Himself overcame temptation.

And when He overcame temptation, when He defeated the devil in the desert, in the wilderness, He didn't pull rank, He didn't call on executive privilege, but rather He used the same weapons that are available to us. He went out to face the enemy in the desert as our Champion and defeated Satan, and as a result, He is not only our representative, but He is our example and has laid out before us a model, a matrix, if you will, as to how we also can overcome temptation.

Because frankly, some have decided, “I can't. I can overcome anything but a temptation.” Or maybe you've tried to resist in the power and the strength of your own might to overcome the enemy and you just can't seem to do it. No matter how hard you try, it just seems that trying is not hard enough. We need something more, and that something more is seen in this story of Jesus.

Look at verse one of chapter four of Matthew. “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. And when the tempter came to Him, he said, ‘If You are the Son of God, command these stones become bread.’ But He answered and said, ‘It is written, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”’”

“Then the devil took Him up into the holy city and set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, ‘If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down; for it is written, “He shall give His angels charge over You,” and “In their hands they shall bear You up, lest You dash Your foot against a stone.”’ Jesus said to him, ‘It is written again, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.”’”

“And again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, ‘All these things I have given to You if You will fall down and worship me.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Away with you, Satan! For it is written, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.”’ Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.”

Yes, Jesus has been there and done that when it comes to temptation. And yet He conquered sin and Satan and overcame by the power of God. How did He do it? And how can we do it as well? Well, think with me about some truths concerning temptation.

The first truth that I want you to think about is the period in which Jesus was tempted. We're told here in the passage that just after the baptism of Jesus, described in the previous section of Scripture, He was led by the Spirit into the desert, into the wilderness. After thirty years on earth, Jesus was prepared for His public ministry.

At His baptism, the Father had affirmed His deity by saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The Spirit of God had anointed Him for His calling as the Messiah, and now His life is aglow with the anointing of the Holy Spirit. After thirty years of obscurity, He is now ready for three power-packed years in the limelight, and the Spirit of God leads Him into the wilderness.

Into the desert. How anticlimactic. After this great moment at the baptism came the desert. Interesting, isn't it? How so often in life we are tempted after great spiritual victories, after mountaintop experiences in our life when we think we're as close to God as we could be. Maybe it's in a time of prayer, maybe it's as you're reading your Bible, maybe it's even in a worship service, and you find yourself thinking thoughts that you ought not to be thinking, dealing with temptations that you thought were gone in your previous life, in your B.C. years.

No matter where you go, it seems you meet the enemy. Now, Jesus went out into the desert to meet the devil, not on the defensive, but on the offensive, to demonstrate His power over Satan and to establish His victory and to serve as our model. But someone called this the Dove-Devil Principle. Right after the dove comes the devil.

Right after the baptism comes the blasting. And I want to warn you to be on guard because after your greatest spiritual experiences, after your biggest victories in the Christian life, you will often face Satan because Satan loves a shining mark. We are vulnerable after victory. And when God opens the windows of heaven to bless us, Satan will open the doors of hell to blast us.

And every spiritual commitment that you make in life, every time you want to move forward in your Christian life, Satan will be there to challenge you and to challenge your commitment. Because remember this, Satan never takes a day off. He doesn't. And therefore, you must always be on the alert.

Jesus said, “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation.” He taught us to pray in that model prayer, “Lord, lead us not into temptation.” We dare not coast in the Christian life or bask in spiritual victory. Let him that stands take heed lest he fall. And yet every experience of temptation offers us the opportunity to grow in Christ and in our faith and experience the faithfulness of God.

Guest (Female): You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and the message, The Truth About Temptation. Be sure to sign up to receive Dr. Graham's daily video devotion on the Seven Words from the Cross. This powerful study will remind you of the sacrifice Jesus made so that we can be forgiven of our sins and reconciled to God.

Dr. Graham will share a short devotion about the final words that Jesus spoke from the cross and what they mean to us today. To sign up, text CROSS to 59789. It's absolutely free to join, so text CROSS to 59789. Right now, you have an incredible opportunity to help someone experience the hope and truth of Jesus Christ.

And thanks to an exciting $150,000 matching grant, your gifts this month will be doubled to help proclaim God's Word even farther through PowerPoint Ministries. And as our way of saying thanks, we'd love to send you Dr. Graham's book, Help, a powerful resource showing you how Jesus meets you in your struggles with strength, comfort, and hope. Text MAR to 59789 to give today. Again, that's MAR to 59789. Now, let's get back to today's message, The Truth About Temptation.

Jack Graham: Jesus was led by the Spirit of God into the desert. It was the wilderness. He was alone in a barren place. And in this desert, in this desolate place, Jesus would have been more alone on earth than anywhere else on the planet. And yet He was not alone, because He was fasting and praying and spending time with the Father.

Just before His three years of ministry, before the fulfillment of His Messiahship and His cross and His resurrection, He must now take time in His humanity to collect His thoughts, to ready His mind and His body and His Spirit, to plan His strategy and to brace Himself for the challenges ahead. What a reminder that is to us that we will never know victory, public victory, until we know private and personal victory in Christ.

God uses people who are willing to spend time alone with Him. Moses had his forty years in the desert. Elijah the great prophet had his Brook Cherith. Paul had three years in Arabia. Now the Lord Himself, after these thirty years living in an out-of-the-way place in Nazareth, He is now spending forty days in the wilderness alone with the Father.

And yet someone else is there. Satan shows up, and then the battle begins. As the father of lies offers Jesus seductive and powerful temptations. Wave after wave. And the indication is, when you read the New Testament text, that these temptations just kept coming and coming at Him.

And I want you to see how the devil came after Jesus, for the way Satan came after Jesus is the same way he's going to come after you. His M.O., his method of operation, hasn't changed in all these years. From the beginning of time, when Satan slithered his way into the Garden of Eden to this moment when Jesus was tempted to this very day as we face our enemy, the strategy of Satan is still the same. It's not changed.

Really, Satan has three kinds or types of temptations. Temptations that are directed at the physical appetite, temptations that are directed to our personal ambitions, and temptations that are addressed to our spiritual allegiance. First, he came at Jesus, as he comes at us, with a temptation concerning physical appetite. When God said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” Satan was listening around the corner.

And so after all of these days of fasting in the wilderness, Jesus is tired. Jesus is hungry. Satan moved in and took advantage of His weakened physical condition and said something like this, according to the Scripture: “Jesus, I've just been listening. And Your Father said that You are His beloved Son, in whom He is well pleased. I've just been noticing, Jesus, that You're tired and You're hungry. You're starving out here. And since You're the Son of God, why don't You just turn these stones to bread and satisfy the craving of Your flesh?”

Now, there's nothing wrong with a physical appetite. It is natural, it is normal to desire food. In fact, you could describe or define temptation in this way: Temptation is the opportunity or the solicitation to satisfy or fulfill a God-given desire in a God-forbidden way. Satan comes and says, takes our desires, our physical appetites, and says, “Satisfy yourself. It doesn't matter that you step out of the will of God or do it your way rather than God's way. God has given you this desire. If it feels good, do it.”

God has given us these desires for intimacy, for approval, for acceptance, for love, for creativity. And the devil was saying, “Jesus, You're the Son of God. You deserve better than this. You're starving out here. God is not meeting Your needs. God's not going to take care of Yourself. So You better satisfy Yourself. If God really loved You,” he says, “He would take care of You, but God's holding out on You. God's not giving You His best. So what You need to do,” Satan says, “is to grab for all the gusto You can get right now.”

Had Jesus yielded to this temptation, He would have broken His fast before time and He would have also indicated that He was no longer depending upon God but satisfaction. I want you to remember this when it comes to physical appetites. Satan, sin, can gratify but never satisfy. Because God has given you these certain desires and inclinations and needs in your life, and He has promised to fulfill those needs in His way, in His time.

So we must never yield to the temptation to step outside the plan of God, to step outside the will of God, to disobey God in any way simply to satisfy ourselves with some physical appetite. It was just bread. It was just stones into bread. Perform a miracle, take the bread, eat it. It's just one time, Jesus. How many times does Satan come at us and say, “Just do this one time and it won't matter”?

And how many times does that one time turn into a habit or an addiction? How many times does just one time of rebellion against God turn into a lifestyle of rebellion against God? How many times does just one disobedience concerning sin and Satan and lust and greed and power, how many times does just one time turn into a lifetime of regret and sorrow and sadness?

Because with every kick, there's a kickback. First, Satan fascinates and then he assassinates. He said, “Jesus, You're hungry. You need food. Do it Your way. Forget about God's way.” That's the first kind of temptation that we all face. Just as Jesus faced it, we face it as well. But then came another kind of temptation.

When Jesus responded and resisted that temptation, there came another kind of temptation, and that was in the realm of personal ambitions. Personal ambitions. Satan took Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and Satan says, “Alright, Jesus. You're the Messiah. You're the Son of God. Prove it. Jump off this pinnacle of the temple.”

I stood where the pinnacle of the temple still exists to this day, and it's a dizzying height. And to jump would be certain death. So he said, “Jump off, and when You do, the angels will bear You up, and everyone in Israel will know that You are the Messiah because You're the man that the angels delivered. Do something spectacular, Jesus. Draw attention to Yourself. Take the shortcut. Jump, and God will take care of You. Just name it and claim it.”

Now, do you see how Satan is reversing the strategy here? In the first temptation, Satan was saying, “God's not going to take care of You. Turn the stones into bread. God doesn't love You. You better love Yourself.” So when Jesus said no to that temptation, then Satan reverses field and he says, “Jesus, God's going to take care of You no matter what You do. Jump off the temple mount. Do something silly. Do something spectacular. Do something crazy. God's going to take care of You anyway.”

How many times does Satan tempt us to presume upon the goodness of God? To presume upon the grace of God? This is a temptation to put God to the test. Had Jesus jumped and been delivered by the angels, He would have immediately been accepted as the Messiah. Satan was saying, “Jesus, You do this and immediately the whole world is going to know who You are and You will be accepted.”

But remember, Jesus did not come to this earth to be accepted, but rather to be rejected and to give His life on the cross to rise again on the third day so that mankind could be saved and have a hope and a future with Him. And so this, you see, would have been a shortcut for Jesus. It would have been instantaneous applause and acclaim and acceptance, but it would have been rejection of the will and plan of God for His life.

Now, do we get temptations like this one? Sure we do. Often Satan comes to us and says things like, “Take the shortcut on this. Do the easy thing. Cheat a little bit over here. Lie a little bit over there. Step out of your marriage bonds and just one time see what it's like. God's going to forgive you anyway. If you fall, the Lord's going to pick you up. Or do something spectacular so that you can attract a bigger acclaim, to be noticed. And the world will love you and the world will applaud you and the world will think more of you.”

You know, we should never get ourselves in a position of compromise with sin and temptation and then expect God to get us out. How many times do we do foolish things or put ourselves in a position of failure and then presume that we'll get out of it? And yet this is a temptation that is so devastating. Don't ever tempt God's power by deliberately putting yourself in a situation that you know is wrong.

Guest (Female): You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and the message, The Truth About Temptation. I want you to know that right now, your support goes even farther to help share the hope of Jesus with people around the world. Thanks to a generous $150,000 matching grant, every gift this month will be doubled to help proclaim God's Word through PowerPoint Ministries.

That means you'll help reach even more people who desperately need truth, encouragement, and the gospel. And as a heartfelt thank you for your generous gift this month, we'll send you Dr. Graham's book, Help, to remind you that you are not alone, your pain is not unseen, and God's peace is real.

Text MAR to 59789 to have your gift doubled and request your copy today. Again, text MAR, that's M-A-R, to 59789. Be sure to sign up to receive Dr. Graham's daily video devotion on the Seven Words from the Cross. This powerful study will remind you of the sacrifice Jesus made so that we can be forgiven of our sins and reconciled to God.

Dr. Graham will share a short devotion about the final words that Jesus spoke from the cross and what they mean to us today. To sign up, just text CROSS to 59789. It's absolutely free to join, so text CROSS to 59789. Pastor, what is your PowerPoint for today?

Jack Graham: It doesn't matter how old you are, where you live, or what your social status may be, temptation finds us all. And if you're a believer, you've definitely had to deal with temptation in your walk with Christ. There's no place we can hide from temptation, but we can certainly fight it in the power of Christ and, as a result, win over sin.

Whenever you feel like the temptation you face is too much to handle, just remember that Jesus was tempted even as you're tempted, and yet through it all, He lived without sin by the power and the grace and the strength of God. In 1 Corinthians 10:13, we're reminded that no temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man.

But God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape that you may be able to bear it. Remember that temptation is the seduction to fulfill a God-given desire in a God-forbidden way. Also, always be aware that Satan is watching to trip you up, and his goal is to get you to give in to temptation.

So be ready, stay on the alert, because sin may gratify momentarily, but it never satisfies. Jesus said to His disciples in Mark 14:38, “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” When Satan tries to entice you with temptation, whether it's your physical appetites, your personal ambitions, or your spiritual allegiance, run to God's Word for strength, stand on His truth, and rest in the promises of Christ.

Guest (Female): And that is today's PowerPoint. Join us again next time as Dr. Graham brings a message about how God can work your hardships out for good. That's next time on PowerPoint with Jack Graham. PowerPoint with Jack Graham is sponsored by PowerPoint Ministries.