Teaching Text

Matthew 4:1-11

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:

“‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.

Sermon Recap

This Sunday, Pastor Raegan continued our FOLLOW series by teaching from Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness in Matthew 4. If apprenticeship to Jesus means learning His way of life, she suggested, then it also means learning how to resist what pulls us away from Him.

She began by reframing temptation itself. The enemy's goal is not simply to lure us into sin, but to draw us away from our identity as beloved children of God and distract us from lives of eternal significance. Looking at Jesus' three temptations in the wilderness, Pastor Raegan showed how the same patterns continue today: the temptation toward comfort over dependence on God, cynicism over trust, and God's gifts apart from God Himself. Quoting Tim Keller, she noted that idolatry begins when a good thing becomes the ultimate thing. Temptation, then, is rarely about the thing itself. It is about what we love most.

At the heart of the message was the question, “What is your ultimate prize?"" If anything other than intimacy with God becomes our highest pursuit, temptation will always have something to offer us. But when God Himself is the prize, even the wilderness can become a place where our faith is refined rather than undone. The invitation was not simply to resist temptation, but to cultivate a deeper desire for God that reshapes every other desire.

Pastor Raegan closed by reflecting on her own journey through grief following the passing of her father, reminding us that God does some of His deepest work in the wilderness. He does not waste those seasons. He uses them to draw us closer to Himself.