An old man, a little boy and a donkey were going to town.  The little boy rode on the donkey and the old man walked.  As they went along, they passed some people who remarked that it was a shame that the old man was walking and the boy was riding.  The old man and the little boy thought their critics might be right so they changed positions.  Later, they passed some people who remarked, “What a shame, he makes that little boy walk.”  So, thinking their critics might be right, the old man and the little boy decided they would both walk.  Soon they passed some people who thought they were silly to walk when they had a decent donkey to ride.  Thinking their critics might be right, they both decided to ride the donkey!  Next, they passed some people who shamed them by saying, “How awful to put such a load on a poor donkey.”  The old man and the little boy thought their critics were probably were right so they decided to just carry the donkey.  But, as they crossed a bridge at the edge of town, they lost their grip on the donkey and it fell into the river and drowned.  And, the moral of the story is that if you only listen to your critics and try to please everyone, you will eventually lose your – donkey.

Before we can make the difference for which we were born into this world we must come to a point of uncompromising conviction about who and whose we are.  That sense of conviction serves as a sort of spiritual gyroscope that gives balance and direction to everything else we believe and do.  Without it, we will be forever at the mercy of our need to please everyone and mold our lives according to what our worst critics say is best.  Coming to that point of conviction is so fundamental that it should not surprise us that we find Jesus in the desert.  This desert place was going to serve Jesus invaluably in discovering the purpose of God in his life.  It could well be argued that, had he not spent time in the desert place, he might not have made it to finish his work on the cross. 

Ben Loring recently led our staff retreat and told us of an acronym familiar to those who participate in Alcoholics Anonymous.  The acronym is HALT.  Those who want to battle the addiction to alcohol successfully learn never to let themselves get too Hungry, too Angry, too Lonely or too Tired.  Any one of those conditions, not to mention all four of them in combination, can set someone up for leaning on destructive crutches for comfort.  And, anyone who has had a silly squabble with their spouse or children at the end of a long day and just before dinner knows that, when you are too tired and too hungry, your emotional defenses tend to be down and you do and say things in that weak moment you wouldn’t normally do or say.  You might even go so far, in trying to explain your inexcusable irritability, as to say, “the devil made me do it.”  Maybe that’s not altogether too far from the truth.  Not that we can lay blame for how we live on anyone but ourselves.  But, just as Satan caught Eve off guard in the garden while she was away from Adam, he comes now to visit Jesus while he is very alone, and at a minimum, extremely hungry.  “For forty days he was tempted by the devil.  He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished.”

The location is one thing.  Jesus is in the “wilderness” or, as some translate the word, “the desert.”  (RSV)  What in the world is Jesus doing there, by himself?  The location aside, the timing is something else altogether.  Jesus had just gotten what most men spend their entire lives seeking, his father’s blessing,  “‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,” Jesus heard his father say after being baptized by John in the Jordan river.  (Luke 3:21)  This would have been, for most men, the highest point of their life.  But, having just received the blessing, Jesus finds himself in a very low place, alone and emaciated in a desert.  Those two events, especially as one follows the other, just don’t go together.  It would seem that, if he had his father’s blessing, he had nowhere to go but up.  So, what is he doing down in the desert?

When Commander Scott Waddle’s nuclear attack submarine collided with a Japanese fishing trawler while surfacing off Hawaii on February 9, one of the first people he called was his father.  Waddle, who is 41, went over every detail of the procedure he’d followed with his 70 year-old dad trying to make sense of it to himself.  (“In Harm’s Way,” People, 3/12/01, p.65)  Commanding a nuclear attack submarine is probably a very lonely job at best.  Now, this man, who will stand before a Naval court of inquiry tomorrow, is even more alone than ever; he’s watching his own career sink before his very eyes.  My best guess is that he called his dad first because, when you feel that alone, there’s nothing you want more than your father’s blessing because that may well be all you’ve got left.

And, with nothing more than his father’s blessing, Jesus finds himself, in the desert, alone and emaciated, staring down the devil.  What did he do to deserve this?  It is true, isn’t it?  If you find yourself in the desert you’ve done something wrong, right?  The desert place, the wilderness, is the place to which God banishes those who’ve disobeyed or disappointed him.  It’s a place of isolation and danger, hunger and exposure.  The desert of economic failure or the desert of divorce or the desert of terminal illness, all of those, are they not, the places to which God banishes those who’ve failed him. 

If you listen closely, most health and wealth preachers these days devote the bulk of their preaching to helping you discover the practical steps you can take to find your way out of whatever desert you find yourself in.  They assume, from a very poor reading of the Bible, that health and wealth and abundance in any form are the surest signs of God’s presence and blessing.  So, if you find yourself sick or broke or alone or all of the above, then, you’re in that desert because you’re anything but blessed.  If you are in the desert it’s because you’ve done something wrong they seem to believe.  Is it possible that there is another way of seeing the ways of God when we find ourselves in the desert places? 

Listen again.  “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness . . ..”  Blessed of the Father.  Full of the Spirit.  In the isolation of the wilderness.  How do you explain that?

Well, first, you explain it with just a small refresher course in the geography of faith.  The God who created the mountains and the rivers and all of the oceans also created the deserts and lives and moves there just as he does in all of his creation.  The Psalmist asked, “Where can I go from your Spirit?  Where can I flee from your presence?  If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.  If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.”  (Psalm 139:7-10, RSV)  There is no such thing as a place where God is not.  And, since separation from him by sin is a matter of relationship and not geography, what makes being separated from God by sin so miserable is that you can lock God out of your heart but you can’t lock God out of your life.  Wherever you go you’re on his property.

On a cold winter night, years ago, I went to visit some prospective church members who lived in a trailer house in the country.  When I arrived, the husband was sitting outside in the bitter cold.  He and his wife had just had a horrible fight.  He’d decided it was colder inside than out and that’s why he’d relocated himself to the cold dead winter place.  But, as we talked, I heard him struggle with the fact that, when you’re not right with the one you promised to love, you can physically go anywhere you choose but you carry the broken relationship with you.  Again, with God, wherever you go, you’re on his property.

There’s also great comfort in that.  You can’t remove yourself, as the Psalmist said, from the presence of God.  When you are on the mountaintop of spiritual or financial or physical or relational victory, it may be easier to feel his presence there.  But, even in the desert where he seems most absent and none of his blessings seem evident, he is present even there and so is his blessing.  There is no illness, no heartbreak, no loss or threat of loss that means God has removed his blessing from your life.  The apostle Paul asked, rhetorically, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?  Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?  And, just in case you’ve not read his answer to his own question lately, he went on to say, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  (Romans 8:35, 38-39) 

You will always have the blessing of God’s love even if you run yourself into hell trying to get away from it.  For that matter, what could make hell more hellish than knowing that when you finally got there the love of God had followed you through the door?  That’s the lesson faith’s geography teaches.  Moses found God on top of a mountain.  Paul found him in the middle of a raging storm at sea.  The Psalmist said that, even in the valley where death’s shadow looms, it can’t overshadow the presence of God. 

Jesus wasn’t in the wilderness because he’d done something wrong.  He was there because the Holy Spirit led him there.  “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit . . . was led by the Spirit in the wilderness . . ..”  Do you see it?  Before Jesus could climb a hill called Calvary to do the work God had called him to do, there was something he had to settle in the desert. 

On the surface, it looks like nothing more than temptations to turn stones into bread, use his power to impress people or use it to gain control of the world.  But, there’s more.  Look deeper.  Listen closer.  “‘One does not live by bread alone,’” Jesus said as he stiff-armed the devil.  There’s more to life than what physically sustains it.  There’s more, so much more. 

One of the signs that you are growing spiritually is that the list of that for which you are willing to fight is growing smaller by the day so that, in time, the only thing left on that list is that for which you are willing to die.  The process of spiritual maturation brings with it the joy of selectivity.  We get to actually discover the joy of paring down the list of things we would be willing to fight and die for so that we don’t waste our lives on what is fundamentally trivial.  And, the list of what is sacred keeps getting shorter and shorter until it is divinely short, as in, as Jesus finally told the devil, “‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

Here is what this story of Jesus in the desert place teaches.  Before we can make the difference for which we were created we must come to some point of conviction about what that difference should be, about who and whose we are, so that it guides us like a spiritual gyroscope, giving direction and balance no matter where we may find ourselves and no matter who may be the critic.  And, we will never reach that conviction about what matters most until what we hold most sacred is threatened by the temptation of trading it for something lesser. 

The desert place for Jesus, and the temptations he faced there, were as much as anything about Jesus getting clear within himself about what really mattered.  If you want to follow and serve the living God above all else, there is a desert in your future, too.

Jesus did have one other such experience on the other side of his ministry, near the end.  It was in Gethsemane.  He’d gone there to pray just before he died.  He’d begged the disciples for their company but they kept falling asleep so that he found himself very much alone.  He was tempted, yet again, to walk away from what mattered most.  But, in the end, that, too, proved to be a moment in which he clarified what mattered most and only embraced it more as, in self-surrender to that one thing he said, “‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’”  (Matthew 26:39)

There came a day when Jesus needed a donkey, a special donkey, one chosen specifically for the task of carrying him into Jerusalem where he would complete the work for which he had been born into the world.  So, he sent his disciples to find the animal and, when they returned, he got on the donkey and rode it all the way to his appointed place.  (Matthew 21)  From the desert to Gethsemane, Jesus spent his whole life proving that the difference between losing your donkey and finding it is in knowing, for absolute certain, who and whose you are and that for which you were born.  So much so that no one can talk you out of it. 

Not even the devil himself.