Remember when we started this series a month ago and I said we were moving into dangerous territory that requires a lot of prayers, based on when you reveal the real story of what’s going on behind the scenes. There is a major battle going on for your heart and mind for whatever has your mind, has you. In this month, I have felt not only greater distraction and attack, but greater power based on your prayer and love returning this way, that I can feel during my week.

 At 58, when someone messes up you don’t smile, you realize how easily that can be you.  So throughout the year I continually go to Matthew 4 and Luke 4 about the temptation of Jesus and in the face of this battle, Jesus' counter attack tactics. We see this strategy of evil that will always attack us on three fronts. It is always the same three fronts in all of the temptations throughout the scripture. You see it with Eve and you see it with Jesus in the passage we are going to read. I want to identify those three fronts.

The first front from which we are attacked is your appetite and any time that you make a decision based on your appetite, your passions, your desires, it’s always based on the immediate without thought to future consequence. So Jesus was first tempted at this front of his appetite. We read in Luke 4:1-4, "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for 40 days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry." Your appetite is what sometimes, whether it is sexual, whether it is materialistic, whether it is food, comes to the forefront of your mind when that is your key motivation. "The devil said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, turn this stone into bread.' Jesus response was, 'It is written: people do not live by bread alone but every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"

 Now the second front or place of attack is the worldview in which we have been immersed. You and I have been immersed in a secular, materialistic, humanistic worldview that denies spiritual interpretation for life so it affects our faith in what God can do. Faith and God's activity are directly connected. Jesus said, "According to your faith, it will be done to you." So the most obvious place to attack is this place that makes us skeptical. Verses 5-8, "The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, 'I will give you all their authority and splendor, it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.' Jesus answered, 'It is written: worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'" This secular worldview that we have been raised in teaches us that truth is relative and it is up to each human being to determine what is right or wrong for them. Jesus said truth is not relative; we must align ourselves with the will of God and serve his purpose only.

 The third front or temptation that evil will come at you with is the temptation of false religion that you think is biblical. Look with me at verses 9-12, "The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 'If you are the Son of God,' he said, 'throw yourself down from here. (Even the devil quotes scripture.) He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against the stone.' Jesus answered, 'It is said: Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" False religion is when we use God for our own earthly ends rather than be used by God for his eternal purpose. We will notice that there are times in our life when we are having victory against all temptation, but it's not going to end there because evil looks for an opportune time to return.

I want us to look at Jesus' strategy of counter attack for us to break addictive cycles of sin in our own life. Sin requires aggressive treatment. Any of you every go through therapy for cancer? My aunt had chemo treatments for about a year and she said that every time she had the chemo, for two to three days afterward, she felt like she had the flu. She was a teacher so she had to take three days off work and stay close to the toilet. She couldn’t keep food down for anything. Why are treatments so aggressive against cancer? Young women today can discover that they are just carrying the gene for breast cancer and then they have bilateral mastectomies. If there is even one cancer cell left in your body that is not eradicated, the results are just what Jesus said evil was, it will kill, rob and destroy. What we have to recognize is that sin is a spiritual cancer that has eternal and generational consequences. 

Here is Jesus' counter attack strategy from which all of us can learn. Jesus maintained a constant state of mental and spiritual alertness. It didn’t matter that he was famished 40 days in the wilderness, he left no lag time between Satan's temptation and his response and he was expecting the attack. Homeland Security was an office that was founded after 9/11. It sure makes traveling harder, doesn’t it? But I am so glad it is there. How many of you travel fairly frequently? Right after 9/11 there were soldiers with M-16 rifles in airports, in the Dayton Airport. Now you have to get to the airport early. I traveled twice this week and it is so hard, especially if you are in crowded airports like Philadelphia or New York City or some of those places. Even in winter, you have to take off your shoes and your winter coat. You have to take off your belt, I quit wearing one. You have to take off your watch, take your cell phone and computer out of the bag. You have to have all of your toiletries in a quart-size Ziploc bag. How do you go to Darfur for two weeks with everything you need in a quart-size Ziploc bag? I’ve got it down; it’s kind of like a puzzle getting that stuff in there. What we have learned is that you can’t fall into a false sense of security. Remember this Christmas and the Christmas bomber on the Delta flight into the Detroit Airport; you'd better not fall into a false sense of security. It's what the word says in 1 Corinthians 10:12, "If you think you are standing firm, be careful you do not fall."

How many of you locked your house before you left your home? How many locked your cars out in the parking lot before you came in here? I am even anal about this. I take my little key remote thing and when I get out, even though I know I locked it, I hit it twice to make sure the horn beeps. Do you do that? I do it every time and then just in case I accidentally hit the other one, I do it a second time. Why do you lock your house? Why do you lock your car? It is just like Jesus said in Matthew 24:43, "If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into." The thief doesn’t come when you are aware. That is the counter attack strategy of Jesus to maintain this constant mental and spiritual state of alertness. This state of alertness is especially critical in wilderness dry seasons. We all have wilderness dry times in every area of our life. If you are married, I don’t care how good your marriage is, sometimes you have dry seasons in your marriage. You might be in geographical proximity, but emotionally and relationally it might be dry. Especially for young parents it is easy to fall into.

Carolyn and I were married over six years before we had kids. We were enjoying each other. It was really kind of great. So we were getting around age 30 and we said we want a family, we want more than one kid, so we had kids. Then you have kids and all of a sudden you know what you want to do, but your attention goes to your children. Parents, don’t do this, it wasn't until our oldest was 13 years old that Carolyn and I left and spent a week together - a whole week. We had left them one or two nights with grandparents, but we didn’t think we could do a whole week. That is a bad recipe. Don’t do that. You are learning from someone who is older and failed and learned. We went to Cancun, probably this time of year when our oldest was 13 and after about two days there I thought, "I like this lady." We are, whether you are single or married, we are sexual people, created as sexual people in a sexually charged culture, so it is really important that we work hard in building this bond of emotional relational connection. It is that strong emotional bond with your spouse that affair proofs your marriage. So Carolyn and I are leaving after this worship celebration and we are going to spend a week together. I bet you are glad we are going to spend a week together.

 Another thing that I am seeing right now - and is painful to me - is depression. Please continue your emails. We keep them on our computers and Carolyn and I are really praying. This is a way we can really minister to you. Right now we are seeing some real depression. We have many unemployed people. In America, one out of 10 people are unemployed, in Ohio it is worse. What I am seeing is people who are in my age group who really want to work and we are seeing that we are not very marketable right now in a very competitive job situation. And with idle time, there is strange temptation, especially when you’re not feeling good about yourself and have low self-esteem. But there is a positive thing too about dry times, wilderness times. It is why the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. It is in dry times that we can learn to depend upon God the most. Really trust God and not just believe in God. Counter attack is it’s coming at me, and I am coming back. I love that C.S. Lewis movie; I want to be with Jesus in that last battle - how about you?

 Besides maintaining this state of alertness, the second strategy I see in Jesus is that he immersed himself in the word and prayer. His response here is interesting; it didn’t come from his own reasoning. When I am faced with temptation, one of the worst things I can do is think about it because my deceitful heart is going to get me to contemplate the bait and think of a way to get the bait without getting the hook - and you are never going to get the bait without getting the hook. Jesus' response was not out of his own reasoning, it was right from the word of God. "Jesus said, it is written: 'One does not live by bread alone but every word that comes out of God's mouth.'" Every decision Jesus made was by every word that comes from God's mouth. Some of you you might be thinking that seems like an awfully narrow way to live. I want to tell you it is a freeing way to live.

 Carolyn and I saw a great movie a couple of weeks ago, I recommend it, but not for children because it is pretty violent. It is called The Book of Eli. Any of you see it? It's a powerful movie. I thought it was one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. Denzel Washington plays Eli in this movie and it takes place 30 years after some kind of apocalyptic event where the world looks like Port-au-Prince. Eli has the last Bible on earth and the whole movie is about how evil is trying to pursue him and find this Bible because evil knows the power that is in this book. This amazing story is how Eli's (Denzel) life is transformed through the word of God.

 Psalm 119:105 says, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path" so that we do not take missteps. People tell you to take a mag flashlight every where you go, even when you travel around this country, you should have in your backpack or in your briefcase a mag flashlight. When Jim Taylor and I went to Darfur in 2005, the situation was so dangerous that they rented a private jet for us - an old Russian jet. We got to the airport around 5:30 in the morning in Khartoum, and we had left all of our clothes in the hotel because we were coming back that night. We just had day packs with water and Jim's Nutter Butter cookies. Jim didn’t trust the native food and he took a suitcase full of Nutter Butters. I am telling the truth. So we flew into Darfur, went out and visited our agricultural project and got the footage we needed, and we were busting back to get wheels up before 6:00 in the evening when it got dark. We couldn’t find fuel to get out so we had to spend the night in Darfur. So they took us, pitch black, to this place where they cooked chicken for us over a fire. I ate it, Jim didn’t. He ate Nutter Butters. He still tells people he can’t believe I ate that chicken. I did have diarrhea the next day – he was right. But here is the amazing thing that just blows me away: wouldn’t you think that when you are in a place like Darfur, all five in our group would have a mag flashlight? Guess who was the only one that had a mag flashlight? Jim, do you remember how dark it was and that uneven ground where we had to walk? And remember me with that flashlight? The problem was it was one of those little mag flashlights that you could use for a key chain holder. That is the purpose of the word of God. When we align every decision that we make, even when we don’t feel like it, even when our appetite says that’s not what we crave, it makes sure that we don't take missteps.

 Do you know why I tell you I am up every morning between five and six in the word of God? It is not because I am religious, it’s because it is spiritual radiation for a sick soul. The word of God and prayer exposes artificial bait. Every lust is a perversion of a good desire. I want you to notice in Luke 4:5 - and I want you to underline these words: "The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world." Notice that in an instant. Here was the good desire. We are going to see how the good desire becomes a perversion. The good desire is that Jesus came to claim all the kingdoms of the world. But for us to fulfill the blessings that God has for us is tied to obedience, discipline and self control. Jesus could not claim the kingdoms of the world apart from obedience to God and the discipline and pain of the cross. Here is how the devil perverts it. Jesus, I will give you exactly what you want without having to obey or submit yourself to the discipline and the pain of the cross. You can have it instantly. Material blessings are not aesthetic; material blessings are gifts from God. From Deuteronomy and all throughout the scripture you see that there is a connection between our obedience, discipline and self control - and blessings. "Do not be deceived" the word says. "If you sow to the flesh, you will reap flesh; if you sow to the spirit you will reap spirit." How perverted is it if you want a blessing of God but instead of obedience, discipline and self control you use a charge card. So you now go into debt and debt creates a cycle of slavery in our lives. Every lust is a perversion of a good desire. One of the good desires that God has given us is for peace. So we come home and take a drink to relax instead of prayer, meditation and exercise. Think about food, every lust is a perversion of good desire. We will walk through the grocery store and Carolyn will say, "Isn’t it amazing how God created food for our body." We didn’t have to have food so tasty and good and she always points out the colorful sections of the fruits and vegetables and grains. She’ll go on, "Isn’t it amazing that the way God gave us grain that it’s not the processed bleached out kind of stuff." So the perversion of healthy nourishment becomes gluttony. Think about relationships and sexuality. Guess who created sex? It wasn’t some porno king, it was God. Sex wasn’t just for procreation. If God wanted to do that, then it could have been something like mixing earwax on a Q-tip or something like that. But God had a better idea. So what is the perversion? Lust, which is instant. Love is a lifetime commitment of work. When I immerse myself in the word and prayer, I am most aware of Jesus' presence with me. I don’t listen to this guilt trip that comes from the accuser, but I hear how Jesus understands my weakness and he is helping me in my time of temptation. I read in the word that it is his power that works in us and the gates of hell can not prevail against us, that’s what I see when I am in the word on a constant basis.

 We just introduced C.S. Lewis. I hope we have enticed you to read some of his work. The Chronicles of Narnia are great, we read them to our kids when they were little. His Space Trilogy is really good. One of the things he said is "the real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as himself." Isn't that good? It has taken a lifetime, but he has done a work in me that makes me a lot different than I was 20 years ago. I have been a Jesus follower for 40 years.

I see this first counter strategy of Jesus was to maintain this constant state of mental and spiritual alertness. Second was that he immersed himself in word and prayer and here is the third strategy I see in Jesus: he fully embraced his identity as the Son of God. You and I have to fully embrace this new identity that we have as children of God. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, "If anyone is in Christ Jesus, they are a new creation. The old has passed away. (That means done, finished.) All things have been made new." We have been saying it all month. That means my past no longer defines me or controls me. A healthy self-identity is really connected to your understanding of God and Jesus had this revolutionary understanding of God as his Father. A lot of people ask me how Christianity is unique. Christianity is the only religion in the world that sees God as Father. This is why it is so important that we get this because our home or household of origin, our dad, determines our understanding of God. "We need to have a Friday night just you and me hang out and we will paint ourselves and run around like Braveheart and really get in touch with what it means to be men of God." Men and women, you understand what I am saying. If your father was harsh, abusive, critical, punishing, absent or weak, then your understanding of God is harsh, abusive, critical, punishing, absent or weak.

 I was working all week with pastors from New Jersey and one of the things I am seeing as I travel around the country is young people, particularly 18-35 year olds, who are really struggling with Christianity. They have come out of Christian churches and homes. And the thing I heard this week was, "Okay, pastor, I am struggling with a God that would do stuff like what Pat Robinson is talking about." They reminded me that Pat Robinson said that God did this to Haiti because God was upset and that God is judging them or condemning them for some voodoo contract 200 years ago. Robertson did the same thing with The Gulf when Hurricane Katrina hit. He said this is the judgment of God for the strip joints and so forth. Then remember when the hurricane was going to hit Virginia Beach and he prayed it away? And it hit Boston instead? I guess Boston is not as important as Virginia Beach. The young people ask how can we follow a God that is so destructive. I disagree with my brother Pat on this. Where is Pat’s harsh understanding of God coming from? I think it must be connected to rigid parenting that happened in our brother’s life, because that’s not the Jesus I read about in the New Testament. What I read in 2 Peter is that God is not slow in his promise for Jesus to come back and begin judgment, but God is patient. For God is not willing that any should perish but all come to repent. God will discipline, do not get me wrong, when we live outside of God's will, you are going to reap what you sow, but God does not destroy.

 The problem is we’ve not fully embraced this new identity and we are living in this bipolar spiritual place where we still assume the roles that we played in our family of origin and this is how sin is generational. This is so important to understand. I don’t care what kind of home you grew up in or how healthy it was - all of our homes have some dysfunction. So we all assumed roles in our family to bring balance when it was out of balance. It is called co-dependency, but there are lots of kinds of co-dependencies. Let’s say your parents went through a rough patch in their marriage, they didn’t get divorced but went through a rough patch; what you did was assume a role at that time to try to bring harmony. We had different roles. Like some of us were the scapegoats - it’s your fault your mom and dad are fighting. Or it’s your fault that your spouse drinks or it’s your fault that your parents got a divorce. All of us might have heard something like this: "If you would straighten up in school and they didn’t keep calling us, your father and I wouldn’t be having this discussion." I heard that at times. So the whole problem is you. Now think about this, were you ever playing that role in your family?

 Another one is the perfect child, the one who realizes that they get smacked if they express any kind of need. Or they see an older sibling get punished so the perfect child expresses no need and they are rewarded for it. So right now you are still living that role and when you have real needs, you can't express those needs so you squelch those needs and act out in another way. Whether it's compulsive overeating, pornography or other ways, because you were this perfect child that couldn’t express real needs and you got rewarded for that.

 Another is the family hero, the one who was out to redeem the family name so they were the star in every thing they did, the athlete, the academic. But what happens now in the family is they are driven by this perfectionist thing and instead of being really affirming and affectionate they don't talk about the four A+s, they ask, "How did you get this A-?" You can never be good enough and that is the kind of role played by the hero.

 And then there's the comedian. If you were the comedian in your family, your whole purpose was to distract from the real problem. I remember when I went into my comedic routines my dad would look at my mom and say, "You'd better call the principle, he is failing something again."

  And then there is the surrogate parent. I remember when I was in the fifth grade, my mom and dad were having one of those rough patches and there must have been an argument. I was on a little league basketball team and we would meet at the local dry cleaner. Our coach would pile all of us in the back of his station wagon and take us to our game. I remember on a cold winter night sitting in the back of his station wagon wondering how I, a fifth grader, was going to take care of my little sister who was three-and-a-half years younger than me if my parents got divorced. That’s like a surrogate parent, and that’s a heavy thing to be worried about as a kid.

 Then there’s the parents' parent. What is so hard for us in all of our temptations is we’ve got this bipolar identity going on where we are still assuming roles. It especially gets tough when your parents are aging, like our parents, and they try to put you back into some of those roles being parents' parents, so sometimes you may need to go through some counseling. Carolyn and I have been in a little counseling recently about how to have healthy, defined boundaries with our parents who are trying to put us back into some of those roles. We are still allowing this junk to define us and control us when Jesus said it’s finished, it’s done. That no longer defines me or controls me. This is what we have done in the institutional church, we have reduced it to a worship event, so you come in, you spend an hour, you go out, you’ve done your duty. That’s false religion. God created the church to be this re-parenting community so we could really be re-parenting as we live our life together to live fully into this identity of what it means to be children of God.

 How many of you know Tim Allen, the actor of TV's Home Improvement fame? You remember Tim? A lot of you know him as an actor but you didn’t know that he spent time in jail in the late 70s for a drug charge. Tim was like a lot of us and just got into some bad habits being a college hippy and not your typical kind of criminal. So when he was arrested, he was thrown into a holding cell and he said it was the scariest thing in the world. It was with about 14 big, hardened kind of criminals with multiple kinds of records. The kind where a guy blinks and he’s got tattoos on his eyelids. He said what was so scary about this scenario was there was one toilet right in the middle of the room. So he thought here he is, thrown into this holding cell with 14 monster looking guys and he thought, "I am not going to use it no matter what." Now you know that the more you think about you’re not going to, the more you have to. Am I right? So he started walking back and forth and thinking. Then he thought, "Oh my gosh, what’s going to be more embarrassing? To soil myself?" So he went over and sat on the toilet right in the middle of the cell. Fourteen guys came at him at one time. Then they turned their back, formed a semicircle around him to protect him from the view of the guards standing in the hallway looking into the cell. Tim Allen said all of a sudden he realized that this is what it means to be human. Not doing your own thing but having each others' back.

 A lot of people ask me why I am United Methodist. United Methodist isn’t the best church or the only church by any means, but the reason I am United Methodist is the United Methodists were this community that surrounded me and when every one else was saying you better call the principle he’s failing something again, they were speaking God's promise and purpose into my life. There are a lot of churches that want to ordain me. I know that’s surprising to you. So every time I travel and I speak to the United Methodist conferences, I say to them, "Thank you for letting me play." I represent all of you; I am just an example of an ordinary person who’s messed up but being redeemed and restored and coming to fully embracing who I am as a child of God. You’ve got to be in a community where people are telling you that’s who you are until you live into that. Before I spoke to the New Jersey group for my final presentation on Wednesday, I was sitting right in front waiting to be introduced for the last time and a guy I went to seminary with, his name is Ron, I hadn’t seen him in 30 some years, came over to me and said, "Mike, I really wanted to tell you we’re proud of you. When we hear about your stuff and all that you are doing, we are proud of you and we are praying for you." I thought "whoa." I mean you’ve got to live inside my skin to know what that means, to really see the miracle of what this community has been. You need a community. If this is all you’re doing coming here once a week, you are not going to make it. I promise you someone will be standing here reading a letter about your wrongdoing. If not about you, about your children or your grandchildren. Sin is a spiritual cancer that has eternal and generational effects. You need a community of people who are not going to demonize you for dealing with your demons.

When Carolyn and I were going through our worst stuff, we were in a cell group here in this church and one of the people in the cell group was on the board and they didn’t say, "We’re going to stand in front of the church and tell them that you are contemplating a divorce." No, they had our backs. They walked up toward us and turned and faced out, but they also didn’t allow us to rationalize our sins. They made us confront our stuff. Do you have that kind of community in your life? If you don’t, you won’t make it. This is serious and we need to see that we are in a universe of multiple kinds of spirits; and yes there are things that are real that we can’t see. There is a power greater and that greater power is the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not be deceived. The only place we find life is when we submit ourselves, every decision, every lust, every desire, to every word that comes from the mouth of God.

 I want to encourage you again to continue to email Carolyn and me with your prayer requests. Were any of you able to identify some of the roles from your home of origin that you played? I played several of those parts at different times in my life. Isn't it good to identify that and know that no longer defines you or controls you?

I want to pray for you before we are dismissed. Will you bow your head with me please?

"Father God, I am so thankful that You allow me to be a part of this community. For people who pray for me, love me, pray for my family and love my family. I thank You that You allow us to participate in Your mission in the world before we have our stuff together. I thank You for having our back. I have no idea, Lord, how many times You have protected me and my sisters and brothers from our own stupidity, but, Lord, we are awake and we understand that apart from Your grace - tomorrow it could be me. So, Lord Jesus, we pray for the courage and the discipline to do the hard work of what it means to follow You as a disciple. Lord, we want to stand with You in that final battle. We desire nothing more than to be who You need us to be and who our families believe us to be. In Jesus' name. Amen."