There’s this very strange encounter really when you think about it. This encounter between the freshly baptized, spiritanointed, spiritfilled Messiah Jesus, and the devil himself. The devil meets Jesus and challenges him here in the desert. And the Bible makes it clear that the devil is a real and personal enemy. He’s not just a a figment of some kind of you know abstract evil out there.

No, he is a real enemy who wants to destroy you. He He hates you and he wants to devour you. The Bible says like a hungry lion. He opposes God’s people at every turn. He is relentless in his onslaught and he’s it’s like a a minefield.

He’s laid a minefield of temptations. He’s studied the human race and he’s tried to figure out how can I cause these people to blow up their lives. And I’m going to lay out all these minds in this field to do that. Now, if [snorts] you’re a fisherman, you’ll appreciate this. Temptation is basically it comes in the form of bait on a hook.

Bait on a hook because every temptation it’s there and you see that that bait that’s so appetizing and so appealing. And what he doesn’t want you to see is that there’s a hook underneath. There’s a cost with every sin. And we’ll consider some of the ways that Satan will try to bait the hook with temptation. And we also get to see how Jesus countered those temptations.

Jesus looked at evil in the eye and he was able to overcome. He is our champion. Jesus faced our ancient foe and he was able to defeat the devil in the desert. And so he also serves as our example. But what’s clear in this passage is that while temptation comes from Satan, the test was planned by God.

God wanted Jesus to go out and meet him. That’s why it emphasizes he was filled with the spirit and then the spirit led him into the wilderness to be tested or tempted. >> [snorts] >> Here’s the big idea this morning. Jesus faced the devil to give us the victory in our battle against sin. If you would please stand for the reading of God’s holy and perfect word if you’re able.

Jesus beginning in chapter 4, the temptation of Jesus. Luke 4:1 says, “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for 40 days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate [snorts] nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry.” The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.”

And Jesus answered him, “It is written, man shall not live by bread alone.” And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you then will worship me, it will all be yours.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.” And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the son of God, throw yourself down from here.

For it is written, he will command his angels concerning you to guard you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.” And Jesus answered him, “It is said, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time. Thank you. You may be seated.

It’s interesting. Just about every world religion or backwater cult out there has something in common. Every one of them believes that there are evil spiritual beings out there in the world, unseen, but no less very real and very dangerous. And all of these beliefs out there about these spiritual beings, they come in different flavors, but they all have the same idea that these are out to get us. And somehow we need someone to help us in this battle.

The [snorts] Bible teaches that in the beginning everything God created was good. God created angels to serve in his kingdom. And one angel in particular named Lucifer grew proud in his heart and decided he wanted to be in the place of God. He wanted to be the most high being. And so he made a bid for the throne of the universe.

But he was given the royal boot and was kicked out of heaven. And because of that, he he brought he recruited a third of the angels with him. They fell with him in their rebellion against God. And now these fallen angels, we call them evil spirits or demons, are at work in the world. The result of all this was a war that has been waging in the unseen realm since the dawn of time.

And this explains why evil runs so rampant in the world. And this explains also why human beings u are inbornne with this desire to live first for themselves and not for the god who made them. It’s a following after what Satan first began. He he started when he first deceived our parents, our first parents in the garden. He tempted them with a lie and they followed after him.

And that fall into sin. When that happened, that was in some sense Satan recruiting Adam and his offspring to come under his rule and to serve him. All of this is at the beginning and and that’s sort of the backdrop for what happens in the rest of scripture, this battle that ensues. But from that beginning point, God promised that there would be one who would come who would defeat that ancient serpent. He would come and he would be your champion and he would crush the skull of the snake.

And then you enter Jesus and we come to the Gospel of Luke. The incarnate son of God shows up and he’s led by the Holy Spirit into the desert to face this enemy. Jesus is not a baby in a manger anymore. He is a man fullgrown and he is the son of man, the promised king. He intends to rescue humanity from our capttor.

And this of course requires him to face our capttor to face the enemy head on. He can’t as the perfect man, he cannot fail as Adam failed when he brought everyone down. He has to win the victory in Arstead. Verse one says, “The spirit led Jesus out into the wilderness and he’s out there without food for an incredible 40 days.” 40 days of no food.

And Luke says that at the end of those 40 days, he was hungry. Now, I know that sounds like a bit of an obvious statement, like 40 days without food. Who wouldn’t be hungry? [snorts] But Luke is doing something. He’s reminding us over and over again.

He does this in his gospel. Jesus is fully human. He’s saying, don’t forget that. You know, we we’re tempted to look at that and say, well, Jesus went without food for 40 days. Yeah, but he’s God, so you know, he had that advantage.

But no, that misses the whole point. He lived his life completely as a man, fully human in every way. And all the limitations that we deal with, he dealt with. And he lived it. And he did that for 40 days.

40, of course, is a interesting number that shows up a lot in the Bible. There’s times where, you know, Moses will go on the mountain for 40 days. The people of Israel will go in the wilderness for 40 years. And just as they crossed through the waters of the Red Sea before they were in the desert for 40 years, Jesus crossed into the waters of the Jordan, was baptized, and then went was out in the desert for 40 days. And we need to remember because he was fully human, this was a real temptation.

This was not a facade. This wasn’t some show. Jesus really was feeling the pangs of hunger and he his condition at this point would have been critical. This was in fact this was the closest in his life he came to death apart from the cross. Some of you maybe have seen the the show alone where an individual is placed in the wilderness and he has to survive on his own and find food and sometimes they go weeks or so without food.

Well, here’s Jesus. He’s at that critical condition. They would have sent a chopper in at this point to pick Jesus up because he would have been so hungry. And that’s when the devil comes to him and says in verse three, “If you are the son of God, command this stone to become bread.” He is literally starving when Satan shows up.

And so, Satan uses this time when Jesus is at his weakest, physically speaking, he is feeling very weak, very vulnerable. And he comes to him and says,”Wh don’t you just make yourself some nice warm oven fresh bread? Wouldn’t that be good, Jesus?” In your notes, the first temptation, Satan wants to use your suffering to cast doubt on God’s love. He wants to use your suffering to cast doubt on God’s love.

And the counterattack that Jesus is going to show us is we need to use the sword of the spirit to slice through doubts and be assured of God’s love. [snorts] Jesus has apparently been spending a lot of time in the book of Deuteronomy like all of you have I’m sure the fifth book of the Bible. But he’s been spending a lot of time meditating on the passages in here because he quotes from it in every temptation here. He’s been, I think, identifying himself as the true Israel who is going into the desert to face the enemy. And he’s going to be the what Israel was not.

And he says in response, “It is written.” In other words, the Bible says, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” In Matthew’s gospel, the full quote given is, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Now, sometimes people will say it it’s too simplistic to just quote Bible verses and say, “The Bible says,” and I’d agree, we don’t want to take scripture out of context. That’s important.

But notice the simplicity of Jesus’s response. He just quotes the scripture. And and no matter how spiritually mature we become, we should never try to become more sophisticated than Jesus. Jesus operated this way all the time. He’s constantly quoting scripture.

And he does that here. In fact, Jesus, if you look throughout the gospels, he quotes scripture 78 times directly. He alludes to scripture many more times than that, but 78 direct quotes of scripture. And so for those who would say it’s too simplistic to just say a Bible verse as if that’s going to be enough, that’s what Jesus did and I want to be like Jesus. [snorts] He viewed it as the final authority.

So if you want to be a disciple of Jesus and you’re telling yourself, I want to follow Jesus, you need to have the same view of scripture that Jesus did. He saw it as coming from the mouth of God. It is divine revelation. It is supernatural and it is something that you need to be filling your mind if you’re going to def defeat the devil’s lies. You need to be filled with God’s truth.

And notice Satan attacks Jesus’s identity. He says, “If you really are the son of God, why don’t you do this, Jesus? Why don’t you take care of yourself? Make make some bread. You’ll be fine.

You’ll you’ll go on your way. No one will be the wiser. No one’s watching you. No one’s going to look down on you.” Now, is it a sin to make bread and eat it?

No. So, why was this a temptation for Jesus? Well, in order for Jesus to live the life we were always meant to, to be the perfect man, to live as human beings are meant to live, he had to live in total dependence on the father. That’s how we were all designed to live. Jesus will later say, “My food is to do the will of my father.”

He lived to please his father. But Satan challenged the fact that God even was his father. And if you’re a Christian, he will do the same to you. Satan will come to you and and pose some fiery dark questions of do you really think God is your father? Do you really think you belong to God?

Because if you did belong to God, why would you be going through this challenge? Why would you be going through this suffering? That’s how Satan sounds. He wants to cast doubt on the fact that you really belong to God. And remember at this point the father had just spoken a blessing over Jesus.

He went down into the waters and then he came up out of the water and the father said, “You are my beloved son. In you I am well pleased.” So Jesus’s hair was still wet from his baptism as he goes out into the desert and already Satan is trying to cast doubt on his identity. He says, “Are you sure you’re God’s son?” This is what Satan always does.

He casts out on what God has declared. This is what he did in the garden. He looked at Eve and he said, “Did God really say, “Are you sure, Eve?” Satan’s grand strategy is to get you to doubt the truth of God’s word. Because if you doubt God’s word, then he has the advantage over you.

You have nothing to stand on if you don’t have the foundation of truth. If you’re struggling to believe the Bible is really from God, if there’s times where you stop and you wonder, you know, where the gospels really handed down to us faithfully, do do we really have a reliant scripture that we can depend on, that I can stake my life on, my eternity on? If you begin to doubt that, you can bet that Satan’s strategy is hard at work. Whatever God affirms, Satan will try to deny. Satan’s point here seems to be, if you are the son of God, Jesus, then what are you doing out here in the desert?

Why are you starving? Why are you barely able to move? You’re so weak. This is not the way that a son of heaven would be treated. Didn’t Jesus have a divine right to eat bread when he wanted?

Wasn’t that something? As God, couldn’t he do that? Satan’s basic strategy here is to urge Jesus to consider only what’s immediately in front of him. Don’t don’t look beyond this. Don’t look to the eternal.

Just look at what’s right in front of you, Jesus. Right now, all I see is you are a suffering, weak man out alone. It looks like nobody cares about you, Jesus. That’s how Satan will come to you. He’ll come with that same strategy.

He’ll say, “Is this how a good father treats his children?” And he’ll point at your suffering. See, Satan doesn’t want you to exedute scripture. He wants you to execute your suffering. He doesn’t want you to see God through the lens of the gospel.

He wants you to see God through the lens of your suffering and only through your suffering. But dismisses the fact that God can have a good purpose in your suffering. That he can use trials to mold you and shape you into the person he wants you to become. Just like the father had a good purpose in Jesus’s suffering in the desert and in his suffering on the cross. Remember, it was the spirit that led Jesus into the desert.

This was not an accident. This was planned by God. This encounter was meant to be. He needed to square off with Satan and be victorious where Adam had failed. >> [snorts] >> And in the same way, God will often call us out of our comfort zones.

He will call us to face challenges and trials. And it’s not by accident. It’s not as though God has suddenly lost control of the universe and oh no, what has happened to my kids? No, he knows exactly what he’s doing. And he’s doing it with a good goal in mind.

He has a purpose to benefit you eternally. Even if the immediate result is it looks like I’m just hurting here and I’m alone. God has a purpose. Jesus was tempted to use his power as God to alleviate his suffering as man, but he resisted the devil with the sword of the spirit. And notice [snorts] Jesus chose the verse that says, “Man shall not live by bread alone.”

Jesus intentionally uses a verse to say, “Look, I am facing you, Satan. I have nothing to prove that.” First of all, he just quotes scripture. He’s not trying to defend his his right to be God or anything like that, but he identifies himself as a man because he is facing the devil as the perfect man in dependence on his father. But Satan isn’t through yet.

That’s just round one. And then we go to another temptation. And this reminds us that despite his many faults, Satan is relentless. He is not one to quit easily. He’s persistent and he comes back to Jesus with more temptations just like he will come back to you.

And it’ll often be those times where you feel like you’re you just had the spiritual victory and you’re kind of riding this wave and you feel like God is with you. Things are going well. And it’s at that moment that Satan will look at it and say, “You know what? Now I can get to now I can get to her.” That’s why when James 4:7 says, “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.”

It uses a tense that suggests you’re going to have to keep resisting the devil. It’s not just a one-time thing. Resist and continually resist. Here’s the second temptation. Verse 5.

And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you then will worship me, it will all be yours. With every temptation is the urge to seize what we want when we want it. We call this autonomy. And it’s at the heart of every sin.

It’s elevating ourselves to be in the place of God and deciding for ourselves what we want, what’s good for us. We don’t need to listen to anybody else. Just what does my heart say? And in essence, this is Satan preaching a prosperity gospel to Jesus. He’s saying, “Jesus, you can have it all.

Wealth, health, prosperity, prominence, you’re entitled to it. And the best part is you don’t have to sacrifice anything. You don’t have to suffer one bit. I’ll give it all to you right now.” We hear the same temptation every time.

We think we deserve more than what God has given us. And so we try to take things into our own hands and we and get it apart from God’s plan and timing. And Satan, keep in mind, he’s been studying the human race for so long. He knows our limitations. He knows the things that really push people over the edge.

He knows what really draws us away from disciplehip to Jesus. So he tempts us to take the easy way, the way of comfort and convenience, the path of least resistance. And in the heart of this temptation is this cultivation of discontentment. In your notes, Satan tries to cultivate discontentment so that you will want to take the shortcut. [snorts] And the counterattack we see from Jesus is to trust God’s provision and timing, knowing his boundaries are for your eternal good.

See, Satan is always running an ad campaign for sin. He if he he his thought is if he can convince you that you need something or deserve something that is just outside of God’s boundaries, well, he can bait the hook. And while Satan can’t read your thoughts, he can present ideas to your mind. He can plant thoughts. And nearly always, he’s trying to cultivate this discontentment in your life so that you’ll be dissatisfied with the way things are.

God wants you to practice gratitude for all he’s given you. And Satan, by contrast, wants you to focus on what you don’t have and then resent God for it. He wants you to be dissatisfied with what you own, so you’ll always feel the need to buy one thing more. He wants you to be dissatisfied with your appearance, so you’ll always feel ugly and worthless. If you’re married, he wants you to feel dissatisfied with your spouse, so you’ll look elsewhere for love and attention.

If you’re single, he wants you to feel entitled to cut corners sexually. He is always looking to stir up this discontentment in your heart and say, “Hey, how come you don’t have this? The person over here has it. Why don’t you have it?” And if Satan had his way, you would always feel like the victim in every conflict.

The world would owe you. And you’re always deserving, but not having those things that God is withholding from you. Remember how the offer in the garden worked? They had all the fruit. Every tree.

They could eat from all of it except for one. And Satan says, “Look at that tree, Eve. What about this tree? Why can’t you have fruit from this tree?” Seems a bit unfair, doesn’t it?

And if you had this fruit, think of how amazing your life could be. And he’s not particular about what gets you, just so long as he gets you. All he cares about is you getting your eyes off of Christ and getting on his path to destruction. He can bait the hook with power, a relationship, money, sex, food, comfort, convenience, popularity, entertainment, material possessions. Whatever it takes, he is looking for ways to bait the hook and putting it in front of you and saying, “Look at this.

You don’t have this yet. You need this. You can have it all, he seems to say, if you just surrender to me. Now, most of us when we choose sin, we don’t think of it consciously as I’m now serving Satan. We don’t think of that because we imagine Satan coming to us as this hideous beast.

But the Bible says he disguises himself as an angel of light. He looks attractive and what he offers always looks good. In the first season of Rings of Power, a TV show based on Tolken’s epic fantasy, the elf Galadriel meets this man and and at first they they she’s not so sure about him, but he seems to prove that he’s loyal and brave and and pretty soon they become closer and closer friends until eventually finally he reveals himself to be the dark lord Sauron and she is offered the chance of being his queen and ruling Middle Earth together with him. Very similar is Satan and how he operates. He will try to make you really comfortable, really cozy with all these compromises bit by bit until he has you.

That’s his goal. Satan probably didn’t come to Jesus as a redhorned creature with a pitchfork. More likely, he showed up as a very sophisticated, very brilliant looking masterpiece, this angel of light. And he was offering Jesus what was rightfully his. Jesus is the king.

All the kingdoms of the world do belong to Jesus. And Satan was saying, “I’ll give it all to you. The splendor of Persia, the the wisdom of Athens, the power of Rome. I will lay it all at your feet. Jesus, they’re going to serve you.

You get to be the king. You will rule all of them. I’m only asking for one little thing. Just one little favor. Bow the knee to me.

Ju just one one little worship of me. Just that’s all I’m asking for. One little acknowledgement that all of it came from me and then you can have all of it. No questions asked. You get to be king.

And I think the power of Satan temptation here is that he’s offering something that is already rightfully Jesus’s. It’s already going to Jesus. It’s already going to be his inheritance. Many have wondered, was this a genuine offer? Did Satan really own these kingdoms?

Was it his to offer to Jesus? And we first have to remember that Satan is a liar. At the heart of all he does, he is lying. And and his natural language is lies. And so even if he speaks the truth, it’s a distorted version of the truth.

It’s true that when mankind fell into sin, Satan did gain dominion over the hearts and kingdoms of mankind. That’s why Paul calls Satan the god of this world, the prince of the power of the air. It’s why Jesus also would call him the ruler of this world. But he always had this rule by divine permission. Satan never truly owned the world in the ultimate sense.

All of creation belongs first to God. It’s his to give to whom he wants. So Satan was always ruling as a usurper, not as the rightful heir. And so when he’s offering this to Jesus, he doesn’t really have the right to offer this. This is again one of his ploy.

He he’s trying to leverage the fact that that all of mankind has has been serving him and come under his dominion. He’s now saying, “Look, I can give it to you, Jesus.” Satan will do this in temptation. He’ll offer us things beyond what he has the power or authority to offer. And he will always oversell the benefit of sin and hide the cost.

That’s the way he sets the trap. This temptation was you can have messianic victory without the atonement. God’s way was for Jesus to suffer an excruciating and terrible death, but then he would receive a glorious and eternal kingdom. So, Satan offers Jesus ecstasy without agony. He offers him triumph without tribulation, advancement without adversity, and privilege without payment.

So just stop and think about this. Satan was offering a chance to skip the cross. He was saying, “You can have all the things that are rightfully yours that should be yours, but you can skip the torments of crucifixion. So why go through the scorn, the scourging, the suffering, the shame? People are going to mock you and spit on you.

Jesus, you can skip all of that. You can just get all the glory instead. And I’ll give them to you today. This was Satan’s bargain. You can sense how tempting this offer would sound.

He’s the ultimate opportunist, the devil. He’s holding out to Jesus the offer of a shortcut. Skip Calvary. Enter into glory immediately. And [snorts] just imagine for a moment that Jesus had taken the bait.

If Jesus had taken the bargain, it’s not an overstatement to say that the fate of the entire universe rested on Jesus’s response here. Because if he wasn’t true to the father, then the entire gospel would fail. We would be lost forever. Jesus might have all dominion and power and glory, but we would still be under the crushing weight of our guilt. We would be enslaved forever to the devil and we would have no hope.

And besides all this, God had already promised to give Jesus the nations. Psalm 27 and8 says, “I will tell of the decree. The Lord said to me, you are my son. Today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your inheritage, your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession.

God would give Jesus the nations. But he had to first go through the cross. The father’s eternal plan of redemption included the cross. It could not be avoided. It would not be avoided.

And when it came down to it, even when Jesus said, “I would rather avoid this,” he was always willing to accept the cup offered to him to drink. Jesus refused to bow to Satan. And once again, he quoted scripture as his anchor. You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. And then came the third and final temptation.

Somehow, Satan transported Jesus to the very tiptop of the temple in Jerusalem. So there they were at the very center of Jewish religion and he’s looking down at all the the scribes and Pharisees and and priests and here Satan says you know what let’s have a little [snorts] Bible study and you know he opens up his Bible and he says Jesus it seems like you really love quoting the Bible so let’s talk about the Bible and this is something else Satan will do because he is very knowledgeable of the scriptures. Jesus is not going to be taken in by this. But Satan has a good knowledge of the scriptures. But that shows that a biblical knowledge is not the same as a relationship with God.

Satan knows the Bible. He knows what it says about God loving sinners. He knows what it says in Revelation about him one day being cast into the lake of fire. Satan knows all this, but he hates it. And he hates the God who wrote it.

James says that the demons know the truth about God, but they shudder. That they should be glorifying Jesus. They should be glorifying God, but they hate God, even though they know the truth about him. And so, Satan turns to Psalm 91 and says, “Jesus, do you want to prove to the world that you really are the Messiah once and for all? I’ll give you that opportunity right here.

Leap from this pinnacle.” Because here in Psalm 91, it says that if you were to fall, God would send his angels to bear you up. At this time, you got to remember messianic expectations were very high. People were looking for this Messiah to come. And there was even a famous rabbitic saying at the time that said that when the king, the Messiah arrives, he will stand on the temple roof.

And so this is what they were looking for. And so Satan urges Jesus to take a swan dive right off the temple roof. And he says, ‘Look at what will happen. Those angels will catch you. God’s not going to let any harm come to you.

He’ll catch you and then you will be shown to be the Messiah that people are waiting for. They’re hungry for. But Jesus was not bound by tradition, only by the word of God. The temptation here is to use God for our own glory rather than worship him for his glory. It’s to twist scripture to fit our plans rather than to submit our plans to scripture.

But God is not mocked. In your notes, Satan urges us to use God to get what we want. And the counterattack that Jesus uses is to find your satisfaction in the bread of life rather than the things of this world. The final temptation was sly. It was crafty because here, not only is Satan quoting scripture, but he’s saying, “I will give you the opportunity to prove to the world that you’re the Messiah.

This will vindicate all your claims.” But God already had a plan to do that, not through leaping from a temple, but through a public death. And more than that, through a resurrection that left a tomb empty. It was always God’s plan that the Messiah would die for all to see and that he would rise from the dead. And this would vindicate the claim to be the Messiah.

Satan would have us put God to the test and demand miracles from him. But God can’t be manipulated. That’s why even in our prayers for a miracle, we ask according to God’s will. And we ask in the power of Jesus’ name. We’re not demanding God do something for us.

We’re asking him. We’re requesting that he do something that only he can. To love God means we find our joy first in him and only secondarily in his gifts. God still does miracles and he’s a good father that loves to bless his children in tremendous ways. But if God says no to our requests, then we don’t deny God’s goodness.

If it’s truly our request, then it’s not about putting God to the test. Once more, Jesus let scripture speak for him. Verse 12, it is said, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.” See, he would come back around.

That opportune time, this wasn’t the end. [snorts] But no matter what, Jesus would never take the bait. Never. He always committed himself to his father and his plan. He wouldn’t demand the father do a miracle for him.

And all of this matters because when Jesus went to the cross, he was not only defeating sin. He was in bearing sin and removing all ground for condemnation against you. He was defeating the devil and all his cronies. Colossians 2:15 says, “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him.” See, when we face temptation, it’s [snorts] not just me and God and my sin that’s at stake.

When we face temptation, this is the forces of darkness assaulting the kingdom of God. That’s what’s really happening. And the king faced the devil and won. Jesus is our champion. And because he was victorious in the desert 2,000 years ago, we can have spiritual victory in Christ.

That’s the great promise of the gospel. I’ll leave you with this these two questions here. If Satan was looking to bring you down, what temptations might he use? If he was crafty and he was looking for a way to bait the hook personally for you, what would he use? And do you have a strategy for victory when temptation comes?

Let’s look to Christ together. Let’s bow in prayer. Thank you Lord for being a good father who is always aware of our needs. And though we go through times of testing and trials and temptation, we know that you have not abandoned us. And Lord, I thank you that Jesus, our champion, was victorious.

He defeated the devil in the desert. And he will continue to defeat the devil all the way to the point when he will be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity. And so Lord, we are trusting in that promise. We’re looking to you an

Transcript machine-generated from the sermon audio, so it may contain errors. 6,026 words.