Scripture: Genesis 2:15-17; Matthew 4:1-11; 1 Corinthians 13:4; 2 Corinthians 6:14; Micah 6:8 Series: Lent
First Sunday of Lent sermon pairing the Eden temptation with Jesus’ wilderness temptation to argue that temptation is always personal: it takes something genuinely good (food, relationships, power, adoration, self-care, self-awareness) and distorts it. Such distortion is downstream from idolatry (Calvin’s idol factory), and popular culture’s fixation on only food and relationships blinds us to the many other ways we twist God’s goodness. The point of temptation is not willpower but grace and humility when we fall, with fasting reframed as discipline over disordered desire and a stripping away of false necessities (Micah 6:8). Closes with the assurance that we already have what we need from God and should go forth offering mercy and grace.
Illustrations: seminary-food-book, unequally-yoked-church-camp, natural-gardener-tree, teacher-apricot, calvin-idol-factory, capybara-lenten-meat, catholic-fish-fry, sports-fall-down-cliche
February 22, 2026
First Sunday of Lent
Genesis 2:15-17 Matthew 4:1-11
If You Fall Down
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” - Genesis 2:15-17
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ” Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and 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.” Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ ” Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him. - Matthew 4:1-11
Temptation is always tempting. It is a banal phrase that needs to be said. Temptation is always tempting.
Usually in our day, if there’s language about temptation in secular discourse — movies, TV shows, social media — it’s going to have to do with either food or relationships. These are the two great sins of popular morality, and I think it’s important to say that there is a secular moral discourse around food and around relationships. People have different schools of thought, but it’s there. Almost all language around food is filled with moralism: good food, bad food, good diet, bad diet. Should you take a GLP-1? Should you not? What are the distinctions? How much sugar? How much dessert? What is good?
When I was in seminary, I wrote a book on food in the Bible that I haven’t looked at in many years. I might take a gander at it again. The crux of it was that in scripture and the Christian tradition, the importance of food is about who you eat with, not what it does to you or for you.
Similarly, the Bible doesn’t have a lot of helpful language about relationships. For instance, most every verse read at a wedding doesn’t have to do with weddings. 1 Corinthians 13 epitomizes this. Love is patient. Love is kind, etc.Paul isn’t talking about marriage at all. He is more guarded words about marriage earlier in that letter. On the other hand, I don’t know if I’d call it helpful, but Christian culture has a lot of language about relationships. For instance, in my Paul class last week, we were reading from 2 Corinthians 6, and there’s this beautiful passage where Paul says, “Don’t be unequally yoked.” Someone in the class mentioned how at church camp, this verse of the Bible was saying that you shouldn’t date someone who’s not in your youth group — which is reading deeply into the passage. It turns on what we mean by “yoked,” but again, there are these glasses that look at Christian thought and scripture and say, “Gosh, it must be talking about dating or marriage.”
Temptation Is Personal
As we move into the season of Lent, which began on Ash Wednesday, and especially today, as we read these two temptation narratives — from Genesis 2 with Adam and Eve, and from the Gospels when the Spirit takes Jesus into the wilderness — temptation is always tempting, but your temptation is not mine, and mine is not yours.
The account of Genesis 2 is filled with metaphor and allegory. The fruit meant something. It was on a tree none of us have ever seen before. You can’t buy a knowledge of good and evil tree at the Natural Gardner. It meant something. I still believe there was a fruit. My teacher thought it was an apricot because she loved apricots. The heart of it is not the food but where the food is, hanging on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However we are to understand the deep meaning of the fruit, it wasn’t simply food. In Genesis 2, Adam and Eve both fail the temptation given to them.
Jesus isn’t tempted by food or relationships. His temptations come in a different manner. Jesus is tempted by power, by authority, by adoration. Every temptation takes something that is good and twists it. Eating is a good human activity. Relationships are good. Temptations are found in the distortions we make. For Jesus, power is good; adoration is good.
The tempter says, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
Jesus basically does this with the feeding of the five thousand. Feeding people who are hungry is good. Using the power of God to further your own power is not. With each temptation, there is a distortion.
But the distortions that the devil offers twist it and make something that has been created good into something that is destructive. It takes something that can build up and uses it as something to tear down.
Temptation and Idolatry
If we understand temptations in this manner, they are always downstream from idolatry — that is, giving the praise due to God to something that is not God. John Calvin once said that the human heart is an idol factory. Not i-d-l-e, which is a factory that’s not currently working, but i-d-o-l — a factory for the making of idols. We make idols of everything. We can make an idol of everything.
This is the problem with the common cultural fixation on temptation as only going in two directions. We become blinded to the other temptations in our lives — which is another way to say we get blinded to the other ways that we distort God’s goodness in our life and in the world. We are blinded to the ways that we take something good and make it not good, or use it in a not-good way.
We take how we treat our neighbor and use it as a way to avoid loving our neighbor. We can take self-care — supporting ourselves, not exhausting ourselves to the point of desperation — and then distort it by turning that into an excuse not to care about the people around us. We can take “love your neighbor as yourself” and use that to say, “Well, I’ve got to love myself before I love my neighbor, so therefore I don’t have time to love my neighbor.” We can take “love your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength” and generalize the word love so much that it’s indistinguishable from what we would do if we didn’t even think God existed. Love becomes things we like as opposed what we see in the life of Jesus.
Grace When We Fall
But what I want us to think about with temptations finally is not how to avoid them or how to willpower over them, but to acknowledge their existence in this broken world — and that we are going to be knocked down by the temptation to use something good and distort it. How we get back up again is grace. Being knocked down can teach us humility — the humility that we can’t save ourselves, and that our life as an island on our own is insufficient for the life that God created us to live.
The old sports cliché has this right: it’s not how you fall down, but how you get back up again that counts.
It’s easy to fixate on our failures and insufficiencies, on the ways that we’ve hurt the people in our lives or not done enough, or avoided, or hurt ourselves. This fixation is also a distortion and a temptation, because it takes something good — self-awareness — and turns it into something that is destructive, which gets us to fasting.
Fasting and Desire
Like I said earlier, Jesus is tempted in specific ways. Jesus is tempted after fasting for forty days. For many of us, we may think that made Jesus weak — he must not have had a lot of energy. Instead, the fasting helps Jesus to be strong. Fasting ultimately is not about food, but about desires, and about whether our desires are under our control or not.
Lent as a season is famous for its fasts. The Eastern Orthodox especially have a stringent fasting regimen that, by the end of Lent, gets down to even fasting from oils and salt as well as all meat. Catholics famously fast on Fridays from meat — but they don’t count fish as meat, and if you’re in Argentina, they don’t count capybaras as meat. I’m not criticizing; I just think it’s funny. That’s why there are a lot of fish fry fundraisers at Catholic churches in Lent.
Fasting works directly against the habits of our daily life. Whether food or chocolate or alcohol or social media, a fast never impacts who we think we are. It is always addressing how we actually live.
So often our habits of daily life are built upon what we think is necessary for us to do, and this is where temptation really hits home — by convincing us of all the things we think we need, which weighs down our daily life and adds guilt when it’s not fulfilled. Our lives become filled with necessity upon necessity upon necessity, when in reality, as children of God, our needs are very minimal.
As we have in Micah 6:8: “And what does the Lord require of you? What do you need to do? Love justice, seek mercy, and walk humbly with God.” There’s nothing about all our stuff. There’s nothing about our to-do list or a curated life’s There’s nothing about standard of living. That’s an expectation we add. The world adds it. There’s nothing about the size of our home, or even about — all these things we add, and we don’t need to.
Reorienting Our Lives
In this Season of Lent, if you fall down, may you remember that God is with you. So often we fall down because we’re not even doing what we need to do to begin with. May we all use this season to reorient our lives. May we not be blinded by the world to think temptation only comes in two flavors, but realize that all our activities, all the things in our life can be distorted. The temptations of the devil can look a lot of different ways, but that doesn’t give them extra power — because just as we admit that we can be tempted in a lot of directions, we also admit that we don’t need to be. God offers us and gives us what we need.
You already have what you need. Receive the mercy of God and go forth and do likewise. Offer mercy. Offer kindness. Offer grace. Respond to the amazing gift of a life fulfilled.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.