Grab your Bibles if you will. We get a dive straight into the Scriptures. I know that you're a Bible-loving church, and that's one of the great reasons and the privileges that I have being here.

We're going to go to Matthew, and most of you would know that there are four Jesus stories, four different laser beams, if you wish, by four different recorders of this Jesus story.

Matthew was a particularly interesting one because he was a tax collector before, aka accountant, CPA.

And so you find details on the text that are oftentimes not written in the others, and it gives us both a detailed historical narrative, but a watedly spiritual and transformative one.

If you're not used to the Scriptures, you just kind of find the middle, keep going to the right, and if you go past, you will recalculate.

Every chapter four will pick up in the first verse, and I am reading from the E.S.V., which may be slightly different to the translation you have.

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

After fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. This is not a Netflix fast, or a Daniel fast, or a vegan fast, or this is like no food, water, by himself, in a desert place, no people.

The silence of the desert echoing was his every minute of every day, until another came to whisper in his ear.

And the tempted came and said to him, if, after 40 days of no eating, you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread, but he answered, it is written,

and shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Then the devil took him, physically or not, we are not sure, I think it was, to the Holy City and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, if, you are the Son of God,

throw yourself down for it is written, he will command his angels concerning you. And their hands, on their hands they will bear you up, less you strike, your foot against the stone.

And Jesus said to him, again it is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.

Temptation number two, temptation number three. And again the devil took him to a very high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, all these, I will give you.

If, you will fall down and worship me. And Jesus said to him, begon Satan, for it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. Then the devil left him, Luke chapter four says, for an opportune moment. In other words, another time, I'll be back.

And the angels came and were ministering to him. Lord, as we gather around the scriptures, what a joy and a Sunday night, to be gathering around the text and once again to be mesmerized by your beauty, your majesty, your boldness, your courage, your sacrificial surrender to a divine life, to live a human life just like us. And yet, you never sinned.

In order that we, who do sin, can find hope beyond our sinless disposition, sinning disposition. Grant us grace tonight as we gather around the scriptures, speak to us. We so dearly want to hear in Jesus' name. Amen.

August 1996, Maryland, I and our girls who were eight and ten moved from South Africa, where we'd let a delightful church for 13 years planted it, this little grubbitty group that grew. It was fun, it was exciting, it was loaded with ignorance, stupidity and error, and God was kind and merciful and something really wonderful happened.

It wasn't, LA was not our city of choice, but then God never asked us. And we landed with this broken community, a little bit like a seven-year-old abused girl is the picture that I have in my mind, there'd been three church splits, moral failure, financial impropriety, it was a mess.

We landed there on a Tuesday by Friday, and remember we immigrants, we're never caught and we've never toaster, we're never washing machine, we're sitting on a house.

On a Friday, the elders gave us the church, on Sunday we were said in and the church was ours. It was an absolute tumble dryer of culture and church that we found ourselves at times not knowing which was up and which was down.

In the busyness and the confusion and the chaos of it all, I unfortunately was very sluggish to notice that as we bought our house and moved into it, that Dana, my second daughter, was who is very prophetically sensitive, would have sleepless nights.

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