A Tempting Study: Part 3

Today's Three-minute Bible Study
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Title: A Tempting Study: Part 3 ------------------- Date: 7/3/2001
Keywords: "devil" "temptation"
Welcome to eXXit, the web site designed to help you stand strong in the face of sexual temptation.

Passage: Matthew 4:1-4*

1. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

2. And after He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He then became hungry.

3. And the tempter came and said to Him, "If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread."

4. But He answered and said, "It is written, ‘MAN SHALL NOT LIVE ON BREAD ALONE, BUT ON EVERY WORD THAT PROCEEDS OUT OF THE MOUTH OF GOD.’"

Questions

1. What name, besides, "the devil" does Scripture give to the devil in this passage?

 

2. What temptation did the devil place before Jesus in this passage?

 

3. How did Jesus handle the temptation?

 

Practical help

Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread to satisfy His hunger. After 40 days, the Bible says "HE THEN BECAME HUNGRY." Physiologically, the forty day mark is about the time that starvation often begins to set in. He legitimately could say, "I need food!"

Yet to use His divine powers to satisfy His appetite would have been illegitimate. So, He waited for God to provide for Him what He needed, relying on the Bible’s truth to sustain Him while He was hungry.

Porn is an invitation to satisfy a perfectly legitimate hunger illegitimately. You and I wouldn’t be terribly tempted to turn stones into bread because we CAN’T. However, when we are sexually hungry, we could be tempted to use what little power we do have to surf to an Internet site that contains sexually graphic images that would arouse and then satisfy us. That satisfaction, though, is illegitimate because it violates the woman or man or child who is photographed and the people in our lives who are harmed by our cheapened view of sexuality.

Learn from Jesus! He determined to feed on Scripture in the absence of a legitimate food source. Likewise, turn to the Bible in your hour of temptation and tell "the tempter" to take a hike!

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*"Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, © Copyright The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission."