There is no transcript available

There is no transcript available at this time The devil wants us to give up our dreams, he wants us to give up our hopes, he wants us to feel doubt, to undermine our faith and all the time God is there, in the desert with us.

You know, it’s an amazing fact that whenever God is up to something good in our lives, the devil wants to oppose us. It’s as regular as clockwork, you know, you can just predict it. Earlier this year, in February, I started back lecturing at the Bible College that I studied at. And you can imagine, I’m a Bible teacher, I was excited about this, there was a sense of anticipation, a sense of joy. I had the largest class at the college, there were forty nine students in the class, and most of them are young people, you know, I just love to share God’s wisdom and build people’s faith and so I was excited. I was leaving on the Tuesday evening when I was about to give the first lecture and just at the end of the street, I missed out on having a car accident by, I don’t know, two inches, three inches. Another hundred meters and two different people at different intersections, pulled out in front of me without giving right of way and after that there was a huge traffic jam and fortunately I had given myself plenty of time to get there. The devil is not very imaginative. The devil’s opposition means that God is up to something good.

Last week we began a new series. It’s a series called,” Jesus, the Devil and Me”, and last week we looked at God’s ideal plan. You know, whenever we are looking at the devil, it is really important for us first to get God’s ideal plan firmly fixed in our heads. Why is that important? Because when we look at the devil, he is a murky character, and we look at murky things, and we can end up dropping our vision, dropping our view and end up in the quagmire. So it’s so important that when we are looking at the devil, and understanding how he attacks our lives, that first and foremost, we have God’s wonderful, rich, abundant plan firmly fixed, because that is the plan that the devil is trying to upset.

If you were with us last week, you’ll remember we went to John’s Gospel, Chapter 7, verses 37 to 39, to look at what God’s ideal plan for us is. Let’s just read that quickly again. John 7: 37-39, “On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, He cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me and let the one who believes in Me, drink. As the Scripture has said, out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”’ Now, He said this about the Spirit, which believers in Him were to receive, for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified. So the plan that Jesus has for our lives is that rivers of living water, rivers of God’s Spirit, of His power, should flow out from us. We get thirsty, we go and drink, we go and get filled by Jesus. And then the natural outcome of that is rivers, a flood of living water, comes out from us, to bring life to other people. Now sometimes, we as Christians look at this and go, “I don’t know. I don’t think that’s me, I don’t think God has that plan for me.” Yet Jesus says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me, and let the one who believes in Me, drink, as the Scripture has said, “Out of a believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water. Jesus is talking about everybody, because His master plan is to win the lost for Him, is to bring eternal life with Him, into this world, through you and through me. That’s His plan, to win the lost through us.

But the devil wants to oppose that plan. Remember, we looked at John 10:10, where Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy but I have come that you may have life in all of its abundance.” Here’s the stark plan, the battle plan, between Jesus and the devil. Jesus wants us to have abundant life and the devil wants to ruin the plans that Jesus has for our lives. Now the reason that we started with that ideal plan last week, is so that we would all have a really clear picture in our minds of what God’s ideal plan is for us. The moment we start looking at the devil, the moment we start looking at how Satan wants to ruin those plans, the tendency is that our view and our vision drops, that we start looking downwards. We are going to do that this week. We are going to look at how the devil tries to ruin God’s plans. So it’s great to have God’s perfect plan firmly fixed in our hearts and our minds, before we look at what the devil does. And I encourage you, if you missed last weeks program, at the end of this program, I’ll give you a telephone number or a web site that you can visit, where you can order this series and listen to that first message, “God’s Ideal Plan for Your Life and for mine.”

The Apostle Paul says to the Corinthian Church, in II Corinthians, chapter two, verse 11, that we should not be unaware of the devil’s schemes. For ten years I was an officer in the Australian Army and we studied warfare throughout history, we studied war in the present day, we learned to fight wars and one of the principles of wars is to know your enemy. I guess over the time we have left today, we are going to spend some time looking at our enemy, which is Satan, so that we can understand the ways in which he tries to ruin God’s plan for our lives.

If I go back to that example of starting to teach at the Bible College where I studied some years ago. I could have let the devil rob me of my joy and peace. I could have got angry in the traffic and started beeping my horn, and I have to tell you, that’s my natural tendency. That’s what my flesh would really, really like to do, when some, dare I say, idiot pulls in front of me, without using their blinker and without giving right of way. But as these three or four traffic incidents happened quickly, one after the other, there was a pattern. It’s a pattern that I have learned to recognise in my life and it was the pattern of Satan trying to rob me of my peace and my joy and the power of the Holy Spirit that was on me, to do God’s work that evening. He didn’t do that, because I understood what was happening, and when I got to the Bible College, we had an awesome night of ministry. It was just a real blessing to all of us to be there, because I understood what Satan was trying to do. We should not be unaware of his schemes.

Well, the best place to start in looking at how the devil tries to ruin God’s plans is right back at the beginning of the New Testament, at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel. If you could flick there now, we are going to Matthew Chapter 3 and this is the story of how the devil tried to tempt Jesus at the beginning of His public ministry. Before we look at that, we need to look at just the little sequence that happened before Jesus went out into the desert and was tempted by the devil. So I am going to start reading here, in Matthew Chapter 3, and the final verses, 13 through to 17. “Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordon, to be baptised by him. John would have prevented Him by saying, “I need to be baptised by You, Lord, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so for now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then He consented and when Jesus had been baptised, just as He came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to Him and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and landing on Him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

So Jesus at the beginning of His public ministry decided that He needed to be baptised. Now, it’s interesting. Why did Jesus need to be baptised? Today we’re baptised when we believe in Jesus, because we need to have our sins forgiven, we need to do something visible and public, to say. “I’m dying to my old life, I’m dying to my life of sin, and I’m rising again to a new life in Jesus Christ. But Jesus didn’t have that problem, because Jesus hadn’t sinned. What happened in the Old Testament is when people, who were not Jews, came to faith in God and decided that they wanted to become Jews, they were called ‘proselytes’. And to show that they were submitting to God and that they would be under the law, as an act of obedience, they would allow themselves to be baptised. So what Jesus was doing here was saying, “I am under God’s law and as an act of obedience to My Father, I will be baptised.”

Just as an aside, an important aside. If you believe in Jesus, if you are a follower of Christ, and you haven’t taken that step of obedience of being baptised, I would encourage you, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to consider that. If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for you and its good enough for me. So Jesus had spent 30 odd years growing up, He’d learned to be a carpenter, and He was about to enter public ministry, and God’s plan for Him here was to be filled with the Holy Spirit and God encouraged Him – pretty spectacularly – “This is My beloved Son,” a voice from heaven, “in whom I am well pleased.” So that’s the scene for Jesus’ temptation now, by the devil.

Let’s read Chapter 4 of Matthew’s Gospel, verse 1. “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit, into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil”. Sometimes we quickly read this sequence of the temptations of Jesus by the devil, and we think, “Oh, the devil took Him into the desert”. Let’s read it again, “Then Jesus was led up by the Holy Spirit, into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil.” In fact, Mark, in his Gospel, in Chapter 1 of Mark’s Gospel, verse 12, he literally says, “Jesus was thrown out into the desert by God, by the Holy Spirit.” Now let’s just think about that for a minute. Jesus does an act of public obedience. He goes to John to be baptised. He is filled with the Holy Spirit and the Spirit descends on Him like a dove, from heaven, and an audible voice of God comes from heaven, to say. “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” This is amazing stuff. If it happened to me, if it happened to you, what we would expect – maybe a band, some applause, some angels gathering around, praising God. Well, at least we’d expect a pat on the back from our Church. At least we’d expect a rest; at least we’d expect some amazing things to happen immediately after this. But here it says, “Jesus was thrown out into the desert, by God,” and it said He fasted for 40 days and 40 nights and afterwards He was famished. I reckon that has got to be the under-statement of the century, He was ‘starving’ after 40 days. And not only that, God allowed the devil to come to Jesus when He had starved in the desert and to tempt His Son.

So if something amazing happens to us in our lives where God is doing something, where maybe God is taking us in a transition from doing ’a’ to doing ’b’, when God is stepping us up in what He asks us to do, in that wonderful plan where rivers of living water stream from our bellies. Our expectation is success. Our expectation is adulation, our expectation is other people gathering around us and saying, “Well done, isn’t it fantastic, that God’s using you this way.” Our expectation is comfort, but sometimes, in fact often, God’s plan is the testing of our faith, and the bigger God’s plan is for our lives, the bigger our dream is, the bigger sometimes that test can be. We can feel that God has placed a call on our hearts, we can feel that he’s commissioned us to do something for Him, great or small, something that is so well suited to who we are, and then all of a sudden we find ourselves in a waste land. The road seemed so clear before. But now there’s sand across the road and every direction we look, there’s heat and there’s sand and there are hot tears rolling down our cheeks sometimes, and there is fear and there is doubt. And we can end up saying, “The devil must be getting in the road of God’s plans,” but here it said that the Spirit led Jesus into the desert. It was God’s idea that His Son should be tempted. It was God’s plan for Him to go through this. Just as it is God’s plan sometimes in our lives, to deal with unbelief, to refine our faith, to burn out the impurities, to make sure that we are ready to do what it is that God has called us to do.

We can make a mistake about the devil. We can think that every bad thing that happens to us is from the devil. Everything that feels slightly uncomfortable, everything that doesn’t fit the worldly images of success, can feel as though they’re coming from the devil. That is not so. God created everything, He created the heavens, He created the earth and He created Satan, and those things are God’s tools, they are there at God’s pleasure. The devil is God’s tool in our lives, who is used to refine our faith. You find that confronting? I find it comforting. I find an enormous amount of comfort in the fact that Satan is subject to Jesus Christ. Let’s not make the mistake of thinking Jesus and the devil are two equals, fighting it out for your soul and for mine. That’s not it at all. Satan is subject to Jesus Christ, he is subject to God, he is God’s tool. And God is faithful, the Apostle Paul says, “And He will not let us be tested or tempted beyond our strength, but with the testing He will also provide the way out so that we will be able to endure it.” Sometimes when we are wandering around in that desert, it feels as though God isn’t there. It feels as though we do not have the strength to do what we need to do.

I Corinthians Chapter 10 and verse 13, says, “God is faithful and He will not let us be tempted beyond our ability to endure,” and what’s more, He will always provide a way out, so that we can endure it. So, the sense of God’s sovereignty in this act, gives me peace and it says that there is some wisdom that we need to apply, that when we are going through difficult times, we need to discern what is going on here. Is this difficult time something that is in God’s plan? Is this difficult time involving the devil? When I look back and I see the thing that God has done with me in the wilderness that He prepared for me to do what I am doing today, I kind of shake my head in awe and in wonder.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago I began doing radio programs, sitting right in this chair, sitting in front of this very microphone, looking through the glass partition, at Max Harding, who is the technician, who helps me to do these programs, and that program was called ’Handbook for Living”, and I guess I would have recorded several hundred of those programs over the years. I was a volunteer – I was a volunteer at Christianity Works and I was called to do this and burning in my heart was this passion to proclaim God’s Word through the media. I knew that God was calling me to do this and then one day the director of our organization, my predecessor, decided that we would stop doing those programs. I was devastated! I thought, “Lord, what’s going on? You’ve called me, I can feel it in my heart, I know I’m made to do this. Why Lord? Why have You allowed this to happen?” and then for two to three years, there was a dry period, there was a period where I did no radio recordings. Where there was no opportunity to preach the Gospel. I would have preached the Gospel maybe a dozen times in those two years, and it was in that time, hidden from everybody else, that God tested my faith.

In February this year, we launched this program, Christianityworks. In March, we launched another program, called “Just a Minute” – in May we launched another program, a daily program, called “A Different Perspective.” God was ready to deal with me and to use me, after the time in the desert. And it would have been easy to rebuke the devil and say, “This is from the devil,” but clearly it was God’s plan to perfect faith. That’s how God does things. The exciting thing for me with the Lord is that He is less interested in what we do, than who we are. He is much more interested in what is happening in our hearts, so that we are ready to do the things He has called us to do.

Today I have a grueling schedule. It is a schedule where, producing daily radio programs, day after day after day after day is something that needs faith, and I honestly believe that I would not have been ready to do what I’m doing today, without that period in the wilderness, where the faith was strengthened, where it was tested, where it was purified. Testing is God’s plan. I know we have spent a lot of time on this one verse here. Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness. Jesus was thrown by the Spirit into the wilderness, but it’s important. We should not be surprised when God tests us. We should not be rebuking devils when adversity comes against us.

Let’s look at the three temptations. The first temptation begins in the third verse of Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 4. “The tempter, that is Satan, came and said to Jesus, “If you’re the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” but Jesus answered, “It is written, one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” So here’s Jesus, He’s been starving for forty days and forty nights, and the devil comes to Him with an eminently reasonable, very attractive proposition”. Well, Jesus, if you’re the Son of God, why don’t you turn these rocks into bread. It says that Jesus was famished, it would have been very tempting for Jesus to go, “That’s a good idea, I’ll turn the rocks into bread?” Jesus was in the wilderness. It had been forty days since that remarkable experience of being baptised and being filled with the Holy Spirit and hearing God’s voice say, “This is My beloved Son.” What’s the very first thing that Satan says to Jesus? If you’re the Son of God!”

Forty days in the wilderness has an amazing way of eroding our faith. It is amazing how we can forget the promises of God when we are in the midst of the wilderness and its then that Satan comes to us with seeds of doubt, and says “Well, if you are the Son of God!”

We experience that too in our lives. We experience that in the wilderness. For Jesus it was food, for us it might be money, it might be recognition, it might be comfort. Sometimes it’s a delay, sometimes it’s the feeling that the dream has gone. Sometimes it’s a lack of emotional support. Our flesh, our soul, our body, is craving for something, and the devil comes along and sows a seed of doubt. “If you’re the Son of God,” he whispers in our ear, “If you were a real Christian this wouldn’t be happening to you. If God loved you, you wouldn’t be in the desert. Berni, if God’s plan for you was to teach His word on the radio, would your own organization have taken ’Handbook for Living’ off air? Would you be sitting now with no opportunity to preach the Gospel?” Listen to God’s Word. God sends us into the desert to refine our faith. And if we have a call on our life, sometimes in the desert, the dream feels like its a million miles away and it feels as though our flesh is dying. That’s His aim and the devil comes along with words of doubt.

Peter in his letter, in his first letter, puts it this way. “In the fact that we suffer, we should greatly rejoice. There, for a little while, you have had to suffer grief of all kinds. These have come to you so your faith, being of greater worth than gold, which perishes, even though it is refined by fire, may be proven to be genuine and may result in praise and glory and honour, when Jesus the Christ is revealed.” Now, for me, when I come against obstacles, I’m ready, I’m prepared because of what I have endured and the temptation of giving up the dream in the wilderness. The devil wants us to give up our dreams; he wants us to give up our hopes. He wants us to feel doubt, to undermine our faith, and all the time, God is there – God is there, in the desert with us.

The second temptation. “Then the devil took Him to the Holy City,” this begins in verse 5 of Chapter 4. “Then the devil took Him to the Holy City and placed Him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to Him,”If you’re the Son of God, throw Yourself down, for it is written, “He will command His angels concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” So the devil takes Him now from the midst of the desert to the most public place of the Jewish faith that is the pinnacle of the temple, the House of God, in the middle of Jerusalem. He puts Him right up on the top and he says, “Ok, now make a public spectacle of yourself, if you are the Son of God.” See the seed of doubt again. “If you are and if God cares about you, step out in your own direction and He’ll look after you.”

I love it, the way that the devil takes the Scriptures out of context and twists the truth. He is actually quoting Psalm 91. If you have time, flick there. He is quoting Psalm 91, verses 11 and 12. Which says, “That God will command His angels concerning you, on their hands they will bear you up,” but he leaves the next few verses out. The next few verses say, “You will tread on the lion and the adder. The young lion and the serpent, you will trample underfoot.” Now I wonder why the devil didn’t quote those verses to Jesus. Even the devil knows the Scriptures. Even Satan can take the truth and twist it and say, “Berni, why don’t you go and step out in your own strength, why don’t you go and chase recognition and success in another way? Why don’t you go and promote yourself to the radio station? Forget the guy who took you off radio, he’s not important.” That was exactly the temptation that the devil came to for me.

When things aren’t going our way and we think that God has deserted us, the next temptation, because we want recognition – you know, we want to do what we want to do for God, God must have forgotten us, therefore we have to go and do things in our own strength. Let me tell you something, We go and step out in our own strength, God is not going to be in that place with us. We are called to do it God’s way.

The third temptation is the last roll of the dice. It comes in Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 4 and verse 8. “Again the devil took Him to a very high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour, and he said, “All these things I will give to you if you will fall down and worship me.” and Jesus said, “Away with you Satan, for it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve Him alone.” The last roll of the dice, was – come on, change camps, here you are in the wilderness. OK, you might have heard a voice forty days ago but you’ve been starving, you think you are the Son of God. Come on! If you were the Son of God you wouldn’t be here. It’s time for you to change camps. It’s time for you to do something entirely different. I’ll give you the world – and Jesus rebuked him.

Towards the end of my time in the wilderness, I was tempted in exactly that way. I was a consultant in the information technology business and one of my clients hinted at a job that they really wanted me to do, for three or four times the salary that I’m on now as a minister of Christ. It was status, it was position, it was money – I could have it all, or I could chase some foolish dream that seemed to have died, but it was a dream that the Lord put in my heart. I guess you know which way I chose! I was having a cup of tea with someone the other day and they said, “You look like you’re having a ball,” and I said, “I am absolutely having a ball because I am doing what I was hand-crafted, by God, to do.”

James in his letter, Chapter 3 and verse 7, summarises the choice clearly. “Submit yourself, therefore, to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Sometimes we think it’s only the second part, often you hear the second part of that quoted without the first part. People say, “Resist the devil and he will flee from you,” but there is something that comes before that. It is submitting ourselves, therefore, to God. Each time when Satan tried to tempt Jesus, he went back to God’s Word. He was faithful to what God had said to Him. “One does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” “Away with you Satan, for it is written, worship the Lord you God and serve Him alone.” And Jesus didn’t forget the dream that God had been building in Him since He was old enough to remember, a dream that called Him to suffer and to die on the cross.

I believe that in this brief passage where God shows us what happened to His Son, there is some critical teaching that builds us in our faith. The first is this, that when we are wandering through the wilderness, it is often God’s plan. Every day of my life, every day of your life has been written is God’s Book before time began. God knows what’s happening next, it is not a surprise to God. And then when we are in the wilderness, He takes Satan and He uses him like a piece of sandpaper in a carpenter’s hand and when someone is rubbing us in the carpenter’s shop with sandpaper, it hurts, but remember this. Two things will happen – firstly, at the end of the day, Jesus will take that sandpaper and throw it in the fire – that’s where Satan is going. And secondly, when it comes to that final finishing, when it comes to that final polishing, you know something; He always uses the oil of the Spirit. He always polishes us so beautifully and so wonderfully, and fits us for the purpose that He has for our lives and that purpose is this – that rivers of living water should flow from our belly, life giving water, to the people around us, to the hurting world, to the people who don’t know Jesus, to the people who aren’t mature in Christ, that they should get life, the life of the Holy Spirit, and the plan is, that as we drink that Spirit in, He will flood through us, into the rest of the world. That’s God’s plan.

There is no transcript available at this time

There is no transcript available at this time