I Am - Stronger Than Temptation | Crossroads Students

What's going on Crossroads students? My name is Rob. Hi Rob. I'm one of the student pastors here at Crossroads, specifically at our Florence site. And I'm excited to be with you this morning as we continue in this series we're in called I Am. What we're doing is we're looking at the person of Jesus and trying to learn more about who he was, not just as a way for you to get to know him, but our hope is that at the end of this series, you will be able to make a decision about Jesus. And what I want is for you to know that he can be trusted by you, that you and I can trust him with the best things in our life and the hardest things in our life. Have you ever been to the grocery store and your parents put you in charge of the cart? Maybe some of you go shopping on your own, but when you're an adult, you have no choice. And so when I go to the store, I get my own shopping cart like an adult and I shop and I get all the stuff that I need. Recently I was at the grocery store. I'm an Aldi guy. And so I was at Aldi. I didn't have bags with me. You have to bring your own bags for Aldi. And I got all this stuff in the car and I paid for it. I get all the way back out to my car. I load all of the groceries individually, no bags into the back of my car. I'm tired. I'm worn out. And I got this problem because I'm sitting by my car ready to leave. But I got to take this cart all the way back to the cart return. And I had this little voice in my head that started talking to me. I said, Rob, you've had a long day. Rob, that cart return is like 40 yards away.

That's practically a marathon. You don't know these people anything. I even had this thought, like there's some high school girl, it's her whole job to push this cart back. If I don't leave it here in the middle of the parking lot, what is she going to do to make money? I got to help her. I wish I could tell you I made the right call, but instead I left that shopping cart right where it was. I got in my car and I left because I'm a terrible person. And the whole way home, I thought about it and I've thought about it ever since. If you are a high school student or a middle school student who works at Aldi, I'm very sorry I made your job hard that day. I was tempted when I was tired, when I was ready to go home to do the easy thing, take the shortcut and leave the shopping cart exactly where it was so I could go about my day. Now, can I tell you something? Having this thought, like, man, I don't want to take this shopping cart back. I want to leave it. That doesn't make me a bad person. That wasn't a wrong decision. The wrong decision was when I actually left the cart there and went home. The reason I share that story with you is because this week we're continuing in a series that we have called I Am. We're looking at the person of Jesus, trying to figure out more about who he is, because I think you have a decision to make about who Jesus is in your life. I can tell you a lot of really cool stories about Jesus, a lot of things he did, a lot of things that he's capable of. But it's important to me today that you know, and you maybe have never heard this before, Jesus is a whole lot more like you than you think.

Jesus was 100% God. If you were with us last week, we talked about his baptism and how God gave him this identity as his child. And that's a big deal. But we also believe that Jesus is 100% man, human, which means he faced everything. A lot of the things, maybe some of the specific things that you and I face in our everyday life. And one of those things that he faced is temptation. What temptation is, is it is the desire, the pull on you and I to do something that we know isn't for us. We believe that God wants to give you life. He wants to give you eternal life, a life that starts today that's really rich and full and with purpose. And sadly, we have an enemy who would love to keep you from that life. That enemy is often called the tempter. In Luke chapter four, right after Jesus's baptism, he heads into the wilderness. It says he was led there by the spirit, which means it wasn't an accident. He was led by the spirit to be tempted by the devil for 40 days. Now I don't know about you, but when I hear wilderness, I think maybe this guy's just going camping, but, but it wasn't like that at all. It was a desert. It was hot, hot, hot during the day. It was super cold at night. There was sand everywhere. Jesus. probably smelled terrible. He was uncomfortable. He didn't have all this food and water, all these things that he carried with him. It wasn't just a glamorous trip.

It was a really, really harsh environment. And it says that he was there for 40 days. And for all 40 of those days, he didn't have anything to eat. That's insane. Guys, I can't go 40 minutes without something to eat before I'm ready to rip somebody's head off. If you've heard of hangry before, Jesus has every excuse to be more hangry than anybody's ever been in history. And that, it's really important. This is really important. Because that is when the enemy, the tempter, started to try and lead Jesus towards sin. Now, let me stop right there. Jesus never sinned. He was perfect. But Jesus did face temptation. Think of it this way. If temptation is the offer, sin is the agreement. It's when we say yes to that. And although Jesus never agreed and sinned and fell short or made a mistake, he was led and tempted in a lot of ways. And we see a few of those ways here in this story. So after 40 days, no eating, Satan comes to him and he gives him a few different temptations. But the one I wanna focus on is this first one,

where he tells Jesus, he says, hey, I know you're hungry. It's been 40 days. But if you are the son of God, why don't you just turn this rock into a loaf of bread and then you can eat. And it'll sustain you. The temptation here is that Jesus is there and he is fasting. He's not eating on purpose, but he could just use his power and take something and take the easy way out, take a shortcut. But instead, Jesus knows something that maybe we struggle to know sometimes, which is that what God has for him is better than what the tempter has for you. And that's true for you too. What God has for you is better than what the tempter has for you. Temptation comes to us in a lot of different ways. And maybe you're thinking, why is a loaf of bread in the desert that tempting? Clearly you have never been to Texas Roadhouse where they bake bread that is literally from the oven of God himself. There's no wrong with it. If you've never experienced that, then I guarantee you've never experienced the kind of temptation Jesus felt

after 40 days of no eating and being offered bread, being offered a way out. But Jesus knew that God had a better way for him than the enemy. And so the way he responded is by turning away from temptation and instead of agreeing to that invitation, that pull, Jesus said, no. That's not something that I have the strength to do all the time. I fall into temptation a lot. I make the wrong call a lot. You have too. But Jesus is perfect and we can follow him and we can trust him because he has felt the full weight of temptation, temptation in ways you've never even felt before. The book of Hebrews says that Jesus felt every kind of temptation, which means on the days when you and I think it's really hard to choose the right thing, Jesus did that every single time and he never made the wrong decision. He never messed up. That is pressure. And Jesus experienced that just like you and me, which means we can look to him and learn how do we handle it when we're led towards something that is not what God has for us.

So what does this mean for you and me? What does it mean that we have a God who is fully man, who is tempted in every single way that you and I have been tempted, if not more, and he never sinned? It means that my life, your life, our goal as best we can is to try and be like Jesus. So we should be facing temptation and doing our best to run the other way. But that is so hard to do. When we have feelings, when we have things we want, when we have things we want people to see in us, when we think there's things we deserve, it's really hard to make the right choice every time. The truth is, it's not really hard to know what the right choice is, but it's really hard to consistently make the right choice. Thankfully, Jesus set this really great example for us of things that you and I can do today to face temptation with more confidence and run the other way towards what God does have for us. Do you know what we know about Jesus when he was young, like really young, like a teenager, early twenties? We don't know much at all. The Bible actually doesn't have a ton to say about Jesus's life

other than maybe one story when he was like 12. But there is this verse in the book of Luke, chapter two, verse 52. And it's really short. Here's what it says. It says, Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. That means Jesus got really smart and he became capable of knowing answers to really hard questions. And it means that Jesus got bigger and taller. Now, growing in stature, Jesus didn't have much choice in that. You probably don't either. Some of you wish you had control over growing in stature. You'd be a lot taller than you are. But the thing that Jesus did have control of was to grow in wisdom. And the way he did that was he studied the Bible. I said it earlier. The Bible is our. of truth and while Jesus didn't have the New Testament, which is all the stories about him and about the church, he did have all the Old Testament available to him. And Jesus spent all of those years before his baptism, before he was tempted, learning the Bible. He made it a practice in his life to know what it said so that when temptation came, so that when the tempter started to feed him lies, Jesus would know what the truth is. Every single time Jesus was tempted in the wilderness

by the enemy, by the tempter, his response was something true that was found in the Bible. If you wanna resist temptation like Jesus did, and he had 100% success rate of never falling into sin, one of the things that you and I have to get better at is knowing what the Bible says. We love reading the Bible, we love sharing about it here, but if this is the only time your Bible is being opened, or maybe you're only going into scripture when you're feeling tempted or when you're in the middle of the struggle, you could be missing out on the ability to say no to things that are drawing you away from God. He wants so much more for you than that. And just like Jesus had to put in the work and study, that's something that you have to do too. That's something that I have to do. It's a practice that needs to be a part of our lives. But that's not the only thing Jesus did. The whole reason we even know that this temptation story happened is because at some point after he was tempted, Jesus was with his disciples and his friends, and he told them about these temptations in his life. Maybe he was sitting around a table and they were about to eat a meal together, and he saw a piece of bread or a loaf of bread, and it reminded him of that time he was in the wilderness. And I imagine he just told his friends,

guys, I gotta tell you about this time I was tempted. I gotta tell you about this time that the enemy tried to lead me towards something that wasn't good for me. They probably would have been shocked. They're like, Jesus, you get tempted too? Like, that's our story. I didn't even know that was your story. It's a way that we can get closer to Jesus. And the thing that he did, one of the most important things, something I love about our church here at Crossroads Students is this thing called C-Groups, where we get together with our friends and we talk about not only all the good things that are awesome in our lives, but we wanna talk about the things that are hard, the things that are challenging. Jesus told his disciples, his friends, what he was being tempted with, where he was being drawn. And I think that that, bringing temptation into the light is what makes it lose a lot of its power. So maybe there's something you were being tempted with, drawn to, that you know is not good for you, you know it's not what God wants. The good news is, if you are willing to be bold, like Jesus was, and bring some of those things to the light honestly,

I think that you will have a much greater chance of standing against temptation and looking more like Jesus. The other thing that we have that Jesus never did when he was being tempted is we have a perfect example to follow. Nobody before Jesus has ever faced temptation perfectly and never sinned. Nobody since Jesus has ever faced temptation perfectly and never sinned. So if we wanna face something that everybody faces, even Jesus, and we want the best chance of standing against it and walking in a life that God wants for us, we have to look at the person of Jesus. He is 100% man, 100% God. He is for you, he has a life for you, and he wants you to experience it in the best way. No shortcuts, no easy ways out, but instead with joy, with purpose, and a life that's really, really rich. Let's pray. God, thank you for the example of Jesus. Thank you for the ways that he faced down the things I did wrong so that I don't have to face the punishment for it. God, I'm thankful that even though I sin, there is grace. I'm thankful that even though I can look in my past and I can see a ton of things that I did wrong, I can look forward with hope

because I'm following Jesus who never got it wrong. God, I pray for the students that are carrying weight or feeling bad about the things they've done. God, would you extend to them forgiveness for themselves as you have forgiven them? And God, I pray right now for strength as we face temptation and hardship and this desire to not do what we should do. Instead, will you help us fix our eyes on you and who you are so that we can become more like you tomorrow than we are today? It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.