Romans 12 Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Luke 4:1-13New International Version (NIV)
Jesus Is Tested in the Wilderness
4 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted[a] by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
3 The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”
4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’[b]”
5 The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7 If you worship me, it will all be yours.”
8 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’[c]”
9 The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. 10 For it is written:
“‘He will command his angels concerning you
to guard you carefully;
11 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’[d]”
12 Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’[e]”
13 When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.
Christ still building his ch urchThe wild side
There is a kids movie that came out some years ago called Madagascar – I am sure that you have heard of it - The film opens with Marty the Zebra pining for the wild on his tenth birthday. Living in New York’s Central Park Zoo, Marty and his friends – Alex the Lion, Gloria the Hippo, and Melman the Giraffe – have spent all their years inside this concrete jungle.
The adventure begins when Marty escapes from the zoo with a crack quartet of penguins – Skipper, Rico, Kowalski, and Private – and his three friends follow him, trying to make him see sense but to no avail. On reaching Grand Central Station, the animals are mistaken to be aggressive and are shipped off to a Kenyan wildlife preserve by the zoo authorities.
The animals are no longer tame pets in a zoo but are in the edgy dangerous world they were created to be in.
There is something in Marty itching to be in the wild and there is something in us itching to live outside of the secular world we find ourselves in. Very often Christian can end up being little more than tame exhibits to the communities they are in rather than effective agents of salvation to the world they were recreated to save.
jesus' ministry is launched not out of Nazereth but out of the wilderness.
Maybe to discover our true purpose we too need to return to the wilderness.!!!
The wild – The wilderness – or being outside or on the edge of society has always been the natural environment for the body of Christ.
Even when we are in the world we are not of it!
John 17 verse 16 Jesus speaking of us to his heavenly Father says:- …15I am not asking that You take them out of the world, but that You keep them from the evil one. 16They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.Often as Christians we can feel that we are in a very very small miniority - but
in the Otago Daily times in 2016, Tim Cooper is associate professor of church history i at the University of Otago writes -(seriously edited by me.)
At the beginning of the 20th century around 96% of people ticked some sort of Christian box in the census.
By the time of the 2013 census that figure had dropped by half.
It is easy to see that as a catastrophe, but 48% remains a high figure.
Think about this for a moment: today, nearly half of the population consider themselves Christian.
Yet we are told this is a secular country.
But in the last census around two-thirds of the population declared their adherence to some variety of religious faith.
In that sense, taking the population as a whole, New Zealanders remain mostly religious.
Yet the distribution of Christian belief is uneven.
It is weakest of all among younger, Pakeha, university-educated people.
It is the university-educated - academics, politicians and journalists - who are in a position to shape this country's self-narrative.
It is possible they tell us we are a secular (i.e., non-religious) country partly because they are non-religious.
A lot of the decline can be traced back to powerful cultural and technological changes that swept through the Western World in the 1960s.
As a result of all these changes many of the generation of the 1960s stopped doing what so many of their parents and grandparents had done - they stopped going to church.
And their children in turn became one more step removed from church attendance.
So, there is no denying the downward trajectory.
But the latest estimates are that one in five New Zealanders - go to church at least once a month.
They do not do so because it is socially desirable, as it was in the 19th century, but out of genuine conviction.
And while many congregations comprise mostly the elderly, that is far from true of all.
Large portions of the Church are vibrant and growing.
The biggest change has been in the practice of irregular attendance.
Up until the 1960s most people found themselves in church at some point during the year.
That is no longer the case.
What I am suggesting is that despite the unmistakable statistical decline there is also encouragement.
Plenty of New Zealanders still go to church on a Sunday morning. Even more think of themselves as Christian.
The Church may have lost its former place of speaking from the centre of society, but the margins may be a safer place for the Church to be.
Perhaps the Church ought to be the prophet at the gate, rather than imagining itself as a chaplain to the nation.
The Church can now get on with the business of being church, of bearing witness to the love of God through Christ in ways that make sense to the culture around it.
It does not need to be discouraged or defensive in the face of a gloomy and pessimistic narrative of decline.
Christians can continue to trust Christ is building his church, just as he promised, even in New Zealand.
In a strange way like the Madagascar lions we need to return to our natural environment. We are firstly and foremostly Kingdom people.
In many ways we have to acknowledge that God is doing a new thing. But one of the lies in our society is that there are almost no Christians around and any tall poppy Christian who stands up either has to be a tame poodle like a unbelieving gay clergy man or woman or someone like Brian Tamaki who is treated like the Donald Trump of New Zealand Christianity. Meanwhile on the treadmill there are countless dedicated followers of Jesus Christ doing what dedicated followers of Jesus Christ have always done – Following Him.
This is a long run up for a long jump into a sermon on wilderness living but I believe the Churches self understanding has to take a long jump forward in it’s thinking.
Jesus' profound experience in the wilderness shaped his future ministry.
Instead of thinking of ourselves being at the very core of society a profound and indispensable wheel in the machinery of our nation we need to regard ourselves as a discarded wheel cast out onto the scrapheap of relevance in the worlds eyes.
In fact to do so is like taking a vital cog out of a machine and saying it will function without it. The world can not function without God and it really needs you.
The world will inevitably end up in a tangle and then it will all on God.
Sign seen in a textile mill, “When your thread becomes tangled, call the foreman.” A young woman was new on the job. Her thread became tangled and she thought, “I’ll just straighten this out myself.” She tried, but the situation only worsened. Finally she called the foreman.
“I did the best I could,” she said.
“No you didn’t. To do the best, you should have called me.”
Source Unknown.
But and here is the big - but – God’s voice has always been best heard when his people are in the wilderness. God is building something special with the vital cog out here in the wilderness. What was John the Baptist?
Greatest man who ever lived and a voice crying out in the wilderness.
John the Baptist so impacted his society that huge crowds made their way out to be baptised by him at the edge of the Jordan even though some of them hated him.
From the edge he profoundly affected the centre and he not only survived in the wilderness but flourished –
We can often feel in the wilderness that we are missing out on something but Romans 12 Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God
As Christians today live increasingly on the outer edge of society marginalised and intimidated by the devil and his servants we need to adjust our model of Christian life, reexplore the New Testament to discover what wilderness living is like because much of the bible centres around this issue. Imagine the laughter and derision that Noah endured as he painstakingly built a boat where no water could flow – he looked a fool – until it rained then it was said of him – He walked with God!
This morning I want to encourage you about import wilderness principles that can help you live as a Christian in the modern era from the wilderness experience of the book of Exodus.
The first lesson I learned from the book of exodus is The blood of the lamb very naturally will lead you into the wilderness. Jesus describes this as Kingdom living.
Exodus 12 verse 7 he First Passover
…7Moreover, they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. 8They shall eat the flesh that same night, roasted with fire, and they shall eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.
What was sacrificed. – a lamb – what did it’s blood do? Saved them from death. The lamb looks forward to the day when Jesus the son of God will come and by his blood set us apart from this world and all it’s brokenness – John chapter 17 verse 6 says Prayer for the Disciples
…15I am not asking that You take them out of the world, but that You keep them from the evil one. 16They are not of the world, just as I am not of theworld.
As a Christian you are not of the world – In a real sense you are in a different place it is like you live in the wilderness – because in a real way you do not belong here.
But that is a place of transformation romans chapter 12 and verse 2 says 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
The Israelites lived in Egypt – The blood which bought the blessing because they were passed over by the angel of death also meant that they could no longer live in Egypt – They no longer belonged to Egypt and immediately had to move out into the wilderness. One of the great sadnesses that you can witness in the Christian faith is that many give their lives to Christ but still in some way want to live as the world does – Billy Graham talks about how he led a gangster called Micky Cohan to the Lord who wanted to follow Christ but decided he would be a Christian gangster -That didn’t work for him and it won’t work for anyone else.
I think today we are compelled by both the bible and circumstances to not confuse the world we live in with the Kingdom of God. When the church merges or even compromises with the world it becomes powerless and ineffective but the temptation is strong – The Israelites could not stay in Egypt and the Church can not partner with the world.
What this means, then, in situations we find ourselves in is we put Jesus first.
The Worlds ways and responses versus Jesus the way the truth and the life.
The blood of Jesus – is so important
Moody once said these 3 things.
—Into every house where the blood was not sprinkled, the destroying angel came. But wherever the blood was on doorpost and lintel, whether they had worked much, or whether they had worked none, God passed them over.
—Look at that Roman soldier as he pushed his spear into the very heart of the God-man. What a hellish deed! But what was the next thing that took place? Blood covered the spear! Oh! thank God, the blood covers sin. There was the blood covering that spear—the very point of it. The very crowning act of sin brought out the crowning act of love; the crowning act of wickedness was the crowning act of grace.
—It is said that old Dr. Alexander, of Princeton College, when a young student used to start out to preach, always gave them a piece of advice. The old man would stand with his gray locks and his venerable face and say: "Young man, make much of the blood in your ministry." Now, I have traveled considerable during the past few years, and never met a minister who made much of the blood and much of the atonement but God had blessed his ministry, and souls were born into the light by it.
The entrance to the wilderness is through the blood of Jesus – it is through that entrance that we leave the world behind.
The second thing about the wilderness is that the world will follow you and try and pull you back. More than that there will be something within you that would want to go back.
There is an incredible gravitational pull trying to pull you back into the World. Egypt beckons. The Egyptians tried their hardest to stop Israel pulling out – to the point having been beset by plague upon plague because they were maltreating God’s people. You would think that when they lost their firstborn they would have said just let them go- for heavens sake.
But they didn’t. They pursued Israel and trapped them on the edge of the red sea.
Here is some scriptures to support this:-
Deuteronomy 1:40
'But as for you, turn around and set out for the wilderness by the way to the Red Sea.'
Exodus 14:27
So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its normal state at daybreak, while the Egyptians were fleeing right into it; then the LORD overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea.
Exodus 14:28
The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen, even Pharaoh's entire army that had gone into the sea after them; not even one of them remained.
Incidently Egypt’s Antiquities Ministry announced that a team of underwater archaeologists had discovered that remains of a large Egyptian army from the 14th century BC, at the bottom of the Gulf of Suez, 1.5 kilometers offshore from the modern city of Ras Gharib. The team was searching for the remains of ancient ships and artefacts related to Stone Age and Bronze Age trade in the Red Sea area, when they stumbled upon a gigantic mass of human bones darkened by age.
Scientists lead by Professor Abdel Muhammad Gader and associated with Cairo University’s Faculty of Archaeology, estimate that more than 5000 other bodies could be dispersed over a wider area, suggesting that an army of large size who have perished on the site.
It was hard for Israel to get out of the grip of Egypt – and it is hard for Christians to get out of the grip of this world because friends I want to tell you that this world will pursue you. This world will pursue you it wants to drag you back the moment you commit your life to Christ. It will reach out to you with its flesh and its money with promises of power and prestige that inevitably will drag you into hell.
We are called to escape the gravitational pull of the world. And it is hard because we live in an incredibly dark age. We are taught that the love of self is paramount.
Sociologists are saying this is the most narcistic culture in all of human history – by a long way we are growing up in the most self centered culture in all of history. That is what they are saying – It is so strange to the rest of history but we think it is Ok that everyone lives in a world based on their own facebook page. 1 Timothy 3 says in the last days this is what will happen.
(Francis Chan.)
Thirdly – We need to learn when we live in the Kingdom of God, apart from the world, God will meet our every need.
When the Israelites left Egypt their thoughts about their provision led to murmuring
Exodus 16:1-36
The Israelites come to the wilderness of Sin. They murmur for food, God promises bread from heaven. (1-12) God sends quails and manna. (13-21) Particulars respecting the manna. (22-31) An omer of manna to be preserved. (32-36)
Verses 13-21 At evening the quails came up, and the people caught with ease as many as they needed. The manna came down in dew. They called it "Manna, Manhu," which means, "What is this?" "It is a portion; it is that which our God has allotted us, and we will take it, and be thankfulI think I am correct in saying we can often feel that we are, as Christians, in the wilderness – yet when we understand that that is the position we are in before God then it helps a lot.
We need to change our thinking about that our bible verse this morning said
Romans 12 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
In the wilderness
The salvation of God is critical – Recognise that there will be a pull to go back to the world and understand that God will provide for your every need there.
Contributed by Tim Zingale on Dec
"In late 18th century Poland, the Kaiser’s forces were burning all the Jewish villages. One village had been burned and nothing was left standing. As the sun came up the next morning an old Jewish gentlemen pounded a few boards together, made a sellers stall and opened it up for business. A young man walked passed, stared in disbelief and asked, "What are you selling among these ruins. The man smiled and said, "I am selling hope. You can sell water on a dry desert, so the place to sell hope is on the ash heap of destruction."
Out of the wilderness often flows Christ's rivers of living water.
Jesus said – Heaven and earth will pass away but my words will never pass away.
