Luke 4:1-13 · The Temptation of Jesus

1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, 2 where for forty days he was tempted 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 does not live on bread alone.' "

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, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7 So if you worship me, it will all be yours."

8 Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.' "

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.' "

12 Jesus answered, "It says: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.' "

13 When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.

The Wild Within
Luke 4:1-13, Mark 1:9-13, Matthew 4:1-11
Sermon
by Lori Wagner
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“Then as the Lord our God commanded us, we set out…through all that vast and dreadful desert that you have seen…” (Deuteronomy 1:19)

When writing and thinking, your imagination is your “wild place.” It’s that disorderly place of imaginative dreaming in which we let our mind roam the wilderness of images, a wide open range teeming with randomness of thoughts, synthesis of uncommon ideas, mines of raw intuition, then swirling it all up into a mind tornado that can forge any number of new directions, creative urges, projects, or new trails.

But our “wild place” is also where the trappings of our manners, our conventions, our courtesies, our decorum fall away, revealing the default modes of our untapped potential, our unexplored emotions, our untamed intuition, our unchained thoughts. Here our f…

ChristianGlobe Networks, Inc., by Lori Wagner