Well, we read in God's Word in the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew chapter 27, and at verse 32. Let me just quickly set the context for you. The Lord Jesus Christ has been betrayed by Judas. He has been denied by Peter. He has been arraigned before Pilate at the behest of the Jewish conspiracy, the leaders of the Jewish church, the church of God. And he now has been declared guilty, the innocent declared guilty. And what we read in the section from verse 32, We read of the sinless one becoming the sin-bearing one and refusing even at the last, though the suffering is engulfing his human soul, refusing to give in to the temptation of Satan, because the Son of God is the better than Adam, who had come into the world to stand, and having done all, to continue standing. As they went out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name. They compelled this man to carry his cross. And when they came to the place called Golgotha, which means place of a skull, They offered him wine to drink mixed with gall, but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. And those who passed by derided Him, wagging their heads and saying, You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself. If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross. So also the chief priests and the scribes and elders mocked Him, saying, He saved others? He cannot save himself. He's the king of Israel. Let him come down now from the cross and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him. For he said, I am the son of God. And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him. in the same way. If you have a Bible with you, then please turn with me to those verses in Matthew 27 and follow carefully with me as we consider together what the Lord would speak to us from His Word this morning. One of the most striking texts in the New Testament concerning the Lord Jesus Christ is found in Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, chapter 8, verse 9, where he says, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you, by his poverty, might become rich." Paul is writing to a church that needed reproof and correction in many areas of life. not least regarding their sluggishness, their slowness to give to the needs of the believing people of God. In Jerusalem, Paul was seeking to bring a collection from the various churches that under God he had founded, And the Corinthians were being somewhat backward in their resolve to share their abundance with their poor brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. And it's in the midst of that very practical context where Paul first sets before them the sacrificial example of the church in northern Greece, the Macedonian churches. He sets before them how the Macedonians gave generously and sacrificially, first giving themselves to the Lord. But it's not the example of the Macedonians that Paul most wants to impress on the Corinthian church. It's the selfless, sacrificial example of the Lord Jesus Christ, who expended himself for the sake of and for the good of others. And so he writes, for you know. They knew this, but they needed to be reminded of it. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, grace is a word that we use so easily in evangelical Christianity. We use it so easily and frequently, but we are so rarely moved by the wonder and the glory of it. And Paul goes on to bring them to the very heart of the glory of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. For though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. And what I want to consider with you this morning for a brief time is one aspect of the poverty of our Lord Jesus Christ. One area of life into which he who was rich beyond all splendor became poor. And it is the poverty of experiencing temptation. The Lord of glory, the Creator of all things, finding Himself in the midst of a fallen world, in the frailty of our flesh, experiencing what He had never experienced throughout the ages of eternity, experiencing in our humanity the reality, the pain, the suffering of temptation. Now, you remember a little earlier in Matthew's narrative, Matthew writes of the agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. And you'll remember there how he says to his disciples that they needed to watch and pray lest they entered into temptation. And these were almost the last words our Lord Jesus Christ spoke to His disciples prior to His cross. And they are very remarkable words. He knows they're going to be assailed with temptation. He knows that not only will they be tempted, but that they will face the danger of falling into temptation. And so He says to them, watch and pray. The Lord Jesus Christ knew how relentless the devil would be in his determination to bring these men down and through their fall bring disgrace and dishonor to Jesus Christ himself and his cause and kingdom in this world. But what we need to understand, and perhaps we do, but let me simply remind you of it this morning, is that temptation was a reality that our Savior Jesus Christ himself knew, painfully knew. And here in these verses that we read in Matthew 27, we find our Lord Jesus Christ experiencing, even to the bitter end, the insidious, relentless temptation of the devil to turn Him aside from the mission entrusted to Him by His heavenly Father. And what struck me in past weeks as I was reading through these verses in the gospel of Matthew was that as our Lord Jesus Christ began his public ministry, you remember how Matthew tells us that the devil boldly with effrontery came even to the Son of God in our flesh and said, if you be the Son of God, cast yourself down from the temple. If you're all that you claim yourself to be, if you really are the Son of God, then do something to prove it. And now it's the self-same temptation. If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross. Prove it. It's the same temptation that's being hurled by the devil. to the Lord Jesus Christ. And of course, it's the temptation to avoid the suffering of the cross, to avoid and to abandon the sin-bearing propitiation that he was to become in the will of his heavenly Father, upheld by the Holy Spirit. He had committed himself in the covenant of redemption and times eternal to be obedient unto death, even the death of a cross. He had pledged himself to be the Redeemer of God's elect. He had pledged himself to be the better than Adam, who would not cave in under the temptations of the evil one, who would stand and having done all, continue to stand. And here, almost as it were, with the last throw of the dice, we might say, the devil comes back to him again, thinking, I'm going to try to the bitter end to get this man. If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross. Abandon the way. of the cross. Turn your back on the covenant of redemption with your Father and the Spirit in times eternal. Look out for yourself. And of course, the temptation is all the more powerful and painful because of our Lord Jesus Christ's circumstances. He's no longer in a wilderness experiencing thirst and famine. He's on a cross. His body is unimaginably wracked with pain. His whole humanity is crying out. As he will later say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And in that circumstance of utter extremity, the insidious voice of the serpent comes again, the serpentine nature of Satan. If you are the Son of God, prove it. Show the world. Come down from the cross. I want to notice a number of things with you regarding this circumstance, this experience of our Lord Jesus Christ, that hopefully we will see applies to us all, because our Lord Jesus Christ is the prototypical man of faith. He is, of course, as far removed from us as the heavens are from the earth, but in another sense, He is truly bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. And what the Holy Spirit first accomplished in the life of the Savior, He comes to replicate in our lives. He comes to overlay the template of holy humanity that was first etched out in the obedience unto death of the Lord Jesus Christ. He comes to take that holy template of humanity and overlay it on our lives. And at the heart of that replicating, holy humanity of Jesus Christ, we find that temptation is woven into the very fabric of it. Let me mention just a number of things. If I told you the number, you would sigh and think we'll be here all day, but we'll see how we get on. First of all, very simply and very basically, temptation to sin is a never-present reality, even for the most faithful of Christians. The Son of God was not excused the experience of temptation. He was not inured, protected from, isolated from the exigencies of the evil one. Here is holy humanity at its purest, at its most ineffable, and it is being assaulted by the prince of hell. Temptation to sin. is something that not only every Christian knows and experiences, but the holiest of Christians, those men and women you most admire, that you've most read about throughout history, that you most look to to set before you a path of godliness. They were assailed and assaulted from womb to tomb by the Prince of Darkness. And so it was here with our Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, we are told in the letter to the Hebrews, aren't we, that He learned obedience through the things He suffered. Because in the midst of our temptations, God is bringing His trials of grace to bear upon our lives. Our Savior learned obedience, not in quiet contemplation. He learned obedience not in a study surrounded by volumes. He learned obedience through suffering. And part of that suffering was being assailed and assaulted by the evil one, Temptation is a reality we daily need to reckon with. That's why our Lord's almost last words before the cross to his disciples were, watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. You're not beyond it. Secondly, we see in this passage that temptation is most powerful when we are most vulnerable. Now we see this, of course, first of all in our Lord's temptation in the wilderness. Forty days and forty nights. And it's only then that Satan comes. And he comes when our Lord is at his weakest, the most vulnerable. The Lord's humanity was a true humanity. He ached. for thirst, for water. He ached and longed for food. His humanity wasn't a charade. And Satan waited till he was at his most vulnerable. And so we find it here once again. As the vulnerability of our Savior's humanity is placarded to all around Him, Satan thinks, now's my chance. I've got Him where I can best access Him. And that may be where you and I are this morning. We're at our most vulnerable. Maybe life is hard and people we love are struggling and suffering. Satan comes, and as we'll see in a moment, he comes reasonably. He rarely, rarely, rarely comes egregiously. He comes reasonably. But you know, we can be vulnerable but not know it. I think if you had said to King David, you're very, very vulnerable, King David, to adultery and murder, I think he would have had your head. How dare you impugn me? Do you not know I'm the friend of God? Do you not know that I'm the man after God's own heart? He was vulnerable but didn't know it. Remember how 2 Samuel begins? 2 Samuel 11 begins. At the time when kings go off to war, what was David doing? He was wandering about the balustrade of his house. He was indolent. And in his indolence, in his passivity, in his not being where he should have been, in not embracing the duties, the righteous duties of kingship, He was vulnerable, but didn't know it until it was too late. Indolence can leave us vulnerable. Think of Peter, pride. Though they all desert and deny you, at least, Lord, you can count on this. You can count on me. I will never leave you. I'll never deny you. I'll never forsake you. I'm not like them. And in the blink of an eye, he was gone. Satan's most baited traps wait until we are at our most vulnerable, sometimes at our most emotionally vulnerable, sometimes at our most physically vulnerable. sometimes at our most mentally and spiritually vulnerable. And so we need to watch and pray every day of our lives. We need to cultivate the art of watching. It's an art and not a science. And praying, Lord, guard and keep me. Lord, but for your grace, I'm gone. I need keeping grace every moment of every day of my life. Then thirdly, notice here that temptation often has a predictable pathology. What I mean by that is temptation is often very reasonable. Who in their right mind wants to suffer? Do you think our Lord Jesus Christ enjoyed the suffering of Calvary's cross? Do you think He bore with equanimity? Well, you know He didn't. Who wants to suffer? Come down from the cross. Remember in the garden, even our Lord prayed in His holy humanity, Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. That's holy, sinless humanity praying. Suffering is not something that humanity naturally embraces. I often wonder if that's why our Lord Jesus said right in the midst of His public ministry, if anyone would come after Me, he needs every day to take up his cross, deny himself and follow Me. Because if you're going to follow Me, is going to be a life of suffering. And that's not natural. Maybe someone will come to you later today and they'll say, Stephen, he just catches my eye, Stephen, you're a believer. I want to follow Jesus Christ. I want to put my trust in Him. What will that mean for me? And Stephen says, be ready to die. Be ready to die? Does Jesus not mean that there'll be a few uncomfortable moments in my life, that we've got crosses to bear? No, Jesus didn't mean that. He didn't mean that. He meant be ready like your Savior to die. And that's why there's often a reasonableness to temptation. and allied to the reasonableness, there is this idea that if you succumb, there will be immediate relief and gratification, relief from suffering, relief from pain. We need to watch and pray and not be seduced by the reasonableness of temptation. Number four, temptation has an ultimate trajectory. You see, your downfall and my downfall is not the serpent's ultimate concern. Nor actually is the church's gospel witness the serpent's ultimate concern. His ultimate concern is that the Lord's name be blasphemed among the nations. Now, he wants your downfall. And he wants the gospel witness to be rendered incredible by it. But we, if you like, are pawns in the game. And Satan is out not so much to get you and to get me, but to get our blessed Savior, Jesus Christ. To cause people to malign him. Oh, look at those Christians. They are no better than anyone else. You know those words in Genesis 39, Joseph has been abandoned by his brothers, sold into slavery, life. Life just must have been an utter, unimaginable turmoil for this young man. And then things begin to pick up. And he finds himself in the household of Potiphar. And Potiphar's wife takes a liking to Joseph and she seeks to seduce him. And you could imagine the reasonableness of the evil one. Joseph, seize life while you can. Life has been bad and hard. Your family have given up on you. God's clearly abandoned you. Seize a little bit of happiness while you may. And Joseph says, how could I do such a thing? and sin against God. You see, he understood that the issue was not ultimately Joseph, it was God. How would his testimony as a Hebrew be to the faithfulness and truthfulness of Yahweh? How would that be in the eyes of others, these pagan Egyptians, if he succumbed as many others would perhaps have succumbed to the blandishments of this serpentine attack by the evil one. I think as one of God's preservatives to help us yield not to temptation, to remind ourselves daily that the ultimate issue is not my standing, but the public honor of my Savior Jesus Christ. Number five, temptation is always well-planned and methodical. Now, I hinted at that earlier. Clearly, Satan here has bided his time. He has been relentless and remorseless in his temptations of the Son of God in our flesh. is that in Luke's account, he tells us after our Lord repulses the evil one, plucking not out of nowhere, but out of that storehouse of Scripture that he had learned morning by morning, those three quotations from Deuteronomy, chapter 8, twice in chapter 6. And then Luke tells us, Satan left waiting for an opportune moment. I've lost this round, but I'm going to wait for another. You see, Satan's attacks are always well-planned and methodical. The Bible tells us that, Ephesians 6, our warfare is not with flesh and blood, with principalities and powers, with the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. And Paul tells us there that Satan comes with well-constructed, he even uses the word methodea, methods. There's method in his madness. He well plans his assaults and attacks. You see, we have an intelligent enemy, not an omniscient enemy, not an all-powerful enemy. Not an all-seeing, all-knowing enemy, but a powerful enemy, an intelligent enemy. Remember 2 Corinthians 2, verse 12, where Paul says, we are not ignorant of his devices. The serpent is out to get you by any serpentine device that he can devise. And until he is cast into the eternal lake of fire, he will be planning, constructing, methodically, your downfall and mine. And maybe you're thinking, well, you know, life's relatively untroubled for me, and life's been very sweet these past months, years even. That's Satan simply lulling you into a false sense of security. The sweeter life is, the more guarded you need to be, actually. Actually, that's true. Do you not know that? The sweeter and most blessed your life is in the goodness of God, the more vigilant you need to be. That's one of the great lessons that, if you read the narrative of 2 Samuel, shines out. God had blessed David. The boundaries had expanded tremendously. And David clearly had left off watching and praying. Number six. Temptation, no matter how powerful and pressing, can be resisted. Now, probably our first thought will be 1 Corinthians 10. No temptation has come to you, but what is common to man. But God will provide a way of escape, and He does. But there is something prior to that. When the first servant song in Isaiah begins to etch for us the glorious depiction of the servant of the Lord, the better than Adam who would come and fulfill his son servanthood perfectly, what's the first thing we are told? I will put my spirit upon him. The Lord Jesus Christ could not have lived his holy humanity without the upholding, helping ministry of the Holy Spirit. And so Paul writes in Romans 8, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. It's a double Greek compound. It's got 17 letters, and we translate it with help, which is a very anemic translation, but I don't think there's a better translation, but it's anemic. It speaks of the Holy Spirit coming alongside us and saying, we're going to do this together. You're never going to be passive. You're never going to be inert and inactive, but together we will do it. The Spirit helps us in our weakness. He is the helper. He helped the Lord Jesus throughout His holy humanity. He sustained and supported Him. We have an indwelling helper who is more than a match for the wiles of the devil. We are indeed in Christ more than conquerors through Him who loved us. We have a helper. The Lord has not left us to battle alone against the serpentine methodology of the evil one. Number seven, we're almost there. How we respond to temptation reveals much about who we really are. What is this resisting of temptation? What is this refusing to come down from the cross? Tell us about our Savior. That He would be obedient unto death, no matter what. He would be faithful to His Father, no matter what. Even though He slay me, Yet I will trust Him." That's what verse 46 is going to say. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The personal pronouns were never lost. You see, we never really know how steadfast, how faithful, how courageous, how Christ-like we really are until we find ourselves in the crucible of temptation. Temptations and trials have a God-ordained way of uncovering the real you and the real me. And here we find our Savior resisting and refusing with a body wracked with pain. You know, we rightly say to Romanists, you make far too much of the physicality of the cross. I think we make too little of the physicality of the cross. the unimaginable. You see, it's not just suffering, it's holy, pristine, sinless suffering. It's not just a man suffering a cruel Roman death, true though that be. It's the Holy Son of God in our flesh suffering that death, bearing the pain and all that it revealed. was that no matter what, no matter what, He would stand. And the last thing, our Lord Jesus Christ knows how to help us in our temptations because He Himself has been tempted in all points such as we are, yet without sin. He is never aloof from us. He's never merely dispensing omniscient, omnipotent power to us. He is ministering divine human sympathy to us because He has been where we are. He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. But what Psalm 103, verse 10 says comes to its fullest flowering in the Incarnation, because He knows our frame not by divine omniscience alone. He knows our frame by personal experience. I've been there. In all points such as we are, He is able to help us, because He has been there and triumphed. He has been there and triumphed. Maybe you're here this morning, Maybe the issue for you is that you have actually fallen into temptation, that you've become ensnared by sin. I want to say to you this morning, if you're a Christian believer, the last word need never be your failure, because at the right hand of God, you have a divine human intercessor. whose blood makes the foulest clean. And Satan will say to you, you've sinned yourself out of the grace of God. But God never turns away anyone who comes to Him by Jesus Christ. Yesterday, Joan and I heard of a very dear friend who died of cancer. She was our age. The cancer had begun some nine months ago or so. Well, at least she was told about that. But the decline in the last week was just rapid. I remember the first time I met her. She turned up at an evening service. I was the parish minister in New Mills in Scotland. I didn't recognize her. She'd come from another town just three or four miles away. She came the next week. I said, I would love to come and visit you. And she lived with her husband, who wasn't with her at the time, on a small farm about seven miles from where we lived. And she said, I would like that. And so I went to visit. And she was there with her husband, Mike. I said, it's been lovely to see you. I said, what brings you along to a church? You're passing your own parish church to New Mills. Oh, she said, well, someone told me you preach the Bible there. I said, well, I tried to do that. She says, I need to tell you something. 15 years ago, I wrote to all my friends publicly abandoning Jesus Christ. publicly turning my back on Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. I denied the faith. My heart's been changed. Is there any hope for me? I think I just smiled and said something like, there are oceans of hope. Because the blood of Jesus Christ makes the foulest clean. And whoever comes to him, he will never turn away. She had been ensnared by the serpentine methods of the devil. But God had mercy. He had begun to reawaken her. And now he has healed her into heaven. The last word need never be with your failure, your sin, because of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. So we have a Savior who knows, who understands, who is able to draw near and say, I can help you. I can help you. Because I know exactly what it takes to be faithful and obedient unto death. You see, ultimately, it really is all about the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. May God bless to us His Word this morning. Our closing praise is in Trinity Hymnal 255. O Jesus, we adore you. 255. O Jesus, we adore thee. Upon the cross, our King. And we stand to sing. ♪ O Jesus, we adore Thee ♪ ♪ Come upon us, our King ♪ ♪ We bow our hearts before Thee ♪ ♪ Thy gracious name we sing ♪ ♪ That name that brought salvation ♪ ♪ And may midlife forsake ♪ ♪ Our peace, our consolation ♪ ♪ When life shall fade away ♪ ♪ And of the world this day be ♪ ♪ Still fasting by the cross ♪ Lord, may our hearts retain Thee, all else we have but lost. Ah, Lord, our sins arraign Thee, and nail Thee to a tree. Our pride, O Lord, is faintly, yet gain our hope to Lord grant to us remission Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, lift up your heads, open your eyes, and by faith receive the blessing The Triune God, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you, be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, give you his peace. Amen.