Matthews Gospel chapter 4. I'm going to start in verse 1.

And we're going to look at the story of the temptation of Jesus.

The Lord kind of put this on my heart a few weeks ago, and I've entitled today's message,

when in the wilderness. When in the wilderness.

I almost wanted to entitle it, when calls the wilderness, but I felt like that

sounded like too much hallmark. You get my, okay, anyway. But as we study this, I really want

the Lord to just open our minds and our hearts to see how Jesus combated temptation and not just temptation from anyone, but temptation from the enemy, Satan himself.

And we're going to see what the Bible has to say about combating temptation in our own lives.

We have many verses in the New Testament we're going to look at.

But temptation, I'm here to say, it's always around us. We can't escape it. It's going to be here

to the day we die. So I know that sounds really uplifting, but it's just truth. We're going to

experience it on a daily basis until we are with the Lord forever. But for now, we can glean to God's word cling to it.

We can read Galatians chapter 5 when Paul talks about the flesh and the spirit are always at war with each other.

And even Paul himself would say, why do I do the things that I don't want to do?

So temptation is all around us.

And we're going to see this story of Jesus going into the wilderness and being tempted by Satan nonetheless.

It's a funny thing with just my own story of just, you know, some minor temptations that aren't even like evil.

You guys know the progressive insurance commercials where you're becoming like your parents.

Yeah, that's me.

The one thing, the one thing I swore when I was a teenager living under my parents' roof is I would not embarrass my kids or my family as like a dad.

But I'm doing that now. I found it's real. I remember growing up

and going to restaurants, mainly restaurants, and my dad would just have to ask the waiter or waitress

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