1 Sermon for 2 nd Wednesday of Lent Text: Matthew 4:7-11 Jesus said to him, Again it is written, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. 8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to him, All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me. 10 Then Jesus said to him, Be gone, Satan! For it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve. 11 Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him. Hallowed Be Thy Name... on Earth as It Is in Heaven First we say to our Father, Hallowed be Thy name. Nothing in all of Scripture denounces us and our sinful lives more. A university student told a pastor that she had been trying to find God, unsuccessfully. She had read her Bible and prayed, she said, all to no avail. He asked whether she had prayed for forgiveness. Like the rich young man with whom Jesus once spoke, this young woman replied that she had
2 never broken any of the Ten Commandments. So the pastor went through them with her, one at a time, starting with the last. Commandment after commandment, she said she had kept each of them: no coveting, no stealing, no adultery, no murder, and so on. Eventually, the pastor asked the student whether there was anything at all to come between her and God. She began answering slowly, but then spoke more firmly: I will have to say... if anything, anything, would come in the way of pursuing my diplomatic career, it would have to go It took a while to dig this far down, but at bottom this student s motto turned out to be hallowed be my name. She may not have thought she had ever broken any of God s Ten Commandments, yet she was running afoul of the very First. This went hand in hand with breaking the Second Commandment. She was not calling on God s name in a genuine spirit of supplication and in accord with his will. This young woman had marked out her goal. She remained devoted to it, even if it meant the exclusion of God. God does not want us to establish our own devotion, certainly not our own forms of devotion to him. He wants us to pray, Hallowed be Thy name. Our Father s name is to be holy among us, on earth as it is in heaven. The temptation account in Matthew 4 tells of three attempts the devil made to lead Jesus to establish his own forms of devotion. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (v 1). Think of the temptations this way. First, the devil in effect said, You re out here hungry. Perhaps God has forgotten your name, that you are his Son. Why should you remember his name? Do something for yourself. Make some bread. The second temptation was, among other things, Make a name for yourself. That s what would have happened if
3 Jesus had jumped off the temple and found himself spectacularly rescued by angels swooping down to catch him before he touched the ground. Jesus would have been as big a name as any circus performer in history. Finally, the devil said to Jesus: Let me make a name for you. Just fall down and worship me. As the three temptations progressed, the devil made less and less of Jesus almighty power. Simultaneously, he dangled more and more of an award before Jesus every time, starting with lunch and ending with all the kingdoms of the world. This is the way the devil works in our lives also. He constantly wants us to abandon our identity as the children of God and the power available to us there. All the while, he entices us with offers that steadily increase in magnitude and attractiveness. Sometimes he offers things that seem good, as he did with Jesus. Temptation can prove strongest at these times. On Ash Wednesday, we talked about Christians thinking and speaking of God in ways that trivialize him. One such way is for people to regard God as the source of their own kinds of happiness and fulfillment, as we noted then. A similar way of trivializing God lies before us today: religion as selfimprovement. Now, it could be that self-improvement seems nobler and less selfish than merely looking out for one s own happiness. It may very well be so. Perhaps I want to lose weight or quit smoking or curb my anger. It might be my goal to grow more hospitable or caring or disciplined or pious. I may even want to become a diplomat to serve my country and others. In and of themselves, there is nothing wrong with any of these things. In all the temptations the devil threw at Jesus, none of the projected outcomes stood out as bad. Jesus would have bread to eat and people to stand in awe of him. And
4 Jesus did come so that the kingdoms of this world would be his, didn t he? In a way, the devil was offering to get Jesus to some desirable goals. Yet if self-improvement and the achievement of corresponding goals amount to all we re looking for in God if this is what gives us our reason to mention his name as noted in the last sermon, we can obtain what appears to be self-improvement elsewhere. I say appears to be because of the cost involved. The more we travel alone down the various roads of self-improvement, the more God s name ends up forgotten. We ll use it less and less. This was what the devil was tempting Jesus to do: to ignore his Father and rely on someone or something else to accomplish goals for him. The devil wanted Jesus to deny with his actions what the Father had just affirmed in so many words at his Baptism, that he is the Son of God. Make no mistake, the devil can make us an offer that we, too, might gain the whole world. Yet it will most assuredly come at the price of our own souls. Jesus was not in it for religion as self-improvement, not for himself or for anyone else. The prayer he taught us to pray does not even say, Make me holy, heavenly Father, as pious as that might sound, but rather, May your name be holy. Instead of speaking about my holiness, the Lord s Prayer draws me to God s holiness. Of course, God is already holy. From all eternity, he stands apart. He is holy, and so is his name. This petition asks not for a change in God, then, but for a change on earth as it is in heaven: a change in me. This change comes about and is sustained when my heavenly Father brings me to recognize his name. As the catechism says, God s name is kept holy when the Word of God is taught in its truth and purity, and we, as the children of God, also lead holy lives according to it (SC, First Petition).
5 As God s children, we mind our heavenly Father. This begins when we get into his mind, as he has revealed it to us in his Word. Even better to say: he gets into our minds and hearts by giving us a piece of his mind, as it were. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (v 4). Jesus quoted this Old Testament passage to the devil in the wilderness. The relevant word at that moment had come from the Father s mouth forty days earlier: that Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus lived by this word, not by the devil s inducement to self-improvement. In your Baptism into Christ, God has declared that he is your Father. Because of Jesus your Brother, you are the heavenly Father s son. Without Jesus, you and I cannot come into the holy God s presence, but in him we are holy. Our holiness neither starts nor ends with ourselves. It comes entirely by association with Jesus, God s Son, our Savior. This word never ceases being relevant. Live by it. Be who you are by faith. Live like a son. Jesus responded to the devil s second temptation much like he answered the first. He looked to his Father s Word, even when the devil tried to corrupt and contort it. Jesus said to the devil, Again it is written, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test (v 7). Jesus was not going to live contrary to the way God s Word teaches. He would not tempt God. He would trust God. It was in such trust that Jesus traveled all the way to the cross as our substitute. Then he went beyond, through the empty tomb in triumph, to include us. Jesus was not out to make a name for himself. He was out to win a world for his Father. He is still out to win you. Jesus himself fights for your faith through the saving truth of his Word, against all the devil s lies. The holy way he has us walk is his way not the way of self-improvement but that of receiving followed by self-giving.
6 Finally, Jesus answered the third temptation by showing how completely incompatible God s holiness is with any other way. For at the end of the day, self-improvement in the devil s hands would make us as dependent on our old evil foe as Jesus was tempted to be. Then Jesus said to him, Be gone, Satan! For it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve God can be excluded in unbelief by our desires for selfimprovement. The devil may not dangle before us all the kingdoms of the world, but he does try to convince us that we can earmark one or more parts of our lives and keep them, quite separate and safe, for ourselves. Yet when, for the sake of Christ, our heavenly Father draws us in faith to worship him and serve him, we begin to look to him for every blessing in our lives. Salvation in Christ is for all of you, every bit of you. He leaves out nothing except sin that he took and left on the cross. How high his love towers and how broad his holiness sweeps! As God s Word says, The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin (1 Jn 1:7). A former missionary to India once told of needing assistance in transferring a critically ill man from his house to the local hospital. She requested help from two holy men who were sitting not far away, intoning their devotions. She said she would never forget the fire of resentment that blazed up in the eyes of one of them, as he replied: We? We are holy men. We never do anything for anyone (Not so with our holy God! Before he died, our Lord prayed for his disciples, saying, Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me (Jn 17:11). By his holy name, God renders us holy in Christ. Hallowed be his name, on earth as it is in heaven!