Led There by the Spirit

The path up from the road is the same path it has been for about two hundred years and Rob has walked it maybe forty times, which is why he can afford to think while he does it.

Wednesday. Middle of the day. He has taken a day and told two people it was for the garden.

He is forty-four. It has been a hard two weeks, and I am not going to describe it and he would not want me to. Something has been coming at him, more insistently than it has in years, and it has not let up.

And for two weeks he has been doing one thing with the whole of his interior life, and it is this.

He has been retracing.

Where did I go wrong. That is the question, and it has been running underneath everything, and it is not a vague feeling. He has been genuinely working. He has gone back through the last eight weeks, day by day in some places, looking for the turn.

Was it the Tuesday he did not get up. Was it that conversation in February that he handled badly and has thought about eleven times since. Was it the run of Sundays where he was there and not really there. Was it a habit that quietly slipped in the fall, some small thing he stopped doing without noticing, and if he could just identify it he could put it back and this would stop.

Two weeks of forensics. Two weeks of a man auditing his own life for the mistake that let this in.

He comes up to the fork where the track splits and stops, out of habit, because there is a view there.

And he stands at that fork and something goes through him that is almost funny.

He knows exactly where he is.

He has walked this path forty times. He is not lost. He could tell you the name of the ridge opposite and roughly what time he will be back at the car.

And he is still, at this moment, in his own head, looking for a wrong turn.

You have been running that audit. Yours might be shorter or it might have gone on for years. But you know the question, and you know you have been treating this as evidence of a mistake you have not yet located.

Read the verse before it, and then the verb

Matthew 4 opens with one sentence that ought to have ended your audit years ago, and the way to feel it is to read the end of chapter three first.

Chapter three finishes with the baptism. The heavens open. The Spirit descends like a dove. And a voice from heaven says: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

That is the clearest public approval in the gospels. There is nothing ambiguous about it and nobody standing there could have missed it.

And then the next sentence.

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.Matthew 4:1

Then.

It is a sequence word and Matthew uses it on purpose. Immediately after the voice from heaven. Immediately after well pleased.

You are in a place that can follow directly on from God's approval, and Scripture puts them in adjacent verses. That is the written word and not my read of your two weeks, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the join between two chapters and lays it at a fork on a dry path in the middle of a Wednesday.

Now the verb, which is the one your two weeks have been arguing with.

Led up of the Spirit.

Led. He did not wander in. He did not take a wrong turn at the Jordan. He did not slip on a Tuesday and find Himself out there wondering what he had done. He was led, and the text names who did the leading, and it was the Spirit of God.

Which means being in a hard stretch is not, by itself, evidence of a mistake. It cannot be, because the one perfect man in history got there by being led.

What the leading is and is not

I want to be exact here, because there is a way of hearing this that would be false and I will not hand it to you on a hillside.

The Spirit led Him there. The tempting was the devil's work. Matthew is careful about that and so is the rest of Scripture: God tempts no man, and James says so in as many words.

So this is not a message about God putting things in front of you to see what you will do. That is not what the verse says and it is not what I am saying.

What the verse says is about location and about verdict. The Spirit led Him into a place where He was going to be tempted, and therefore being in such a place is not automatically a report on your obedience.

That is all, and it is enough, because it is precisely the thing your audit has assumed for two weeks.

This is yours, and being in it is not a report card, and it is already settled. Matthew 4 uses the verb led with the Spirit as the subject, and the same Spirit who descended in chapter three is the one making it a present fact in a man standing at a fork he knows.

And notice, while you are here, that Jesus does not spend the wilderness auditing His own recent conduct. He answers with Scripture, three times, and comes out of it in the power of the Spirit, and Luke says so explicitly. There is no retracing anywhere in that passage.

Let me guard it. I am not telling you that self examination is bad or that you should never look at your own life; that would be a foolish thing to say. Sometimes there is a thing to see and God is kind enough to show it, and when He does it arrives with clarity and not with two weeks of frantic auditing.

And I am not ranking anything and I am not guessing yours.

And this, most of all: a harder two weeks does not mean a worse man. There is nothing in Scripture that reads intensity as a measurement of standing, and the man in Matthew 4 who had the hardest forty days anybody has ever had is the one the voice had just called beloved.