“It makes light of the temptation of Jesus, doesn’t it, to compare it to that feeling we have when the waiter asks us if we’d like to see a dessert menu? Yes, we’d like to see a dessert menu. We’d like to have dessert. But we shouldn’t. Still, we say…“Tempting!” There’s that and then there’s what Jesus went through in the wilderness for forty days, which is something else altogether,” says Jim Somerville, pastor of Richmond’s First Baptist Church and co-founder of A Sermon for Every Sunday. In today’s passage from Luke 4:1-13, Somerville says that the Greek word translated as temptation means more of a test, “a testing that is done to see what something is made of.” The devil tested Jesus three times. “He couldn’t get him to do anything other than what God would do…What about you?…What are you made of?” What does temptation/testing reveal about you?
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