TEMPTED THROUGH THE WORLD
‘If Thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be Thine.’
Luke 4:7
I. The spirit of the world.—When our Lord was offered the kingdoms of the world in return for an act of homage, in His mind the proposal would assume the aspect of an expedient for advancing His Kingdom, with the policies and prudences and compromises of this world. Yet we can hardly contemplate a ceremonial and bodily prostration as being the first and last of what was proposed. By falling down and worshipping the spirit of the world, I understand lowering the ideal of Christ’s intended kingdom, and enlisting in its favour, and employing as agents in its extension and maintenance, the passions, the methods, and the ambitions which might without harshness or exaggeration be included in the word ‘worldly-mindedness.’
II. Our Lord does not hesitate in His answer.—He replies, ‘Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.’ Thou shalt make Him no more co-ordinate than subordinate with any other object of worship. The Gospel of grace must contract no contamination from an alliance with sin, or by a coalition with anything that deserves the name of worldliness.
Illustration
‘Satan has no more ready, potent, or successful instrument of assault upon the personal religion and Christian usefulness of the believer than the world. Failing, in the case of our Lord, to secure homage and worship by the presentation of worldly blandishments, he plies his arts with His followers, wounding the Lord in the person of His disciples. The world, that had no attraction for Christ—save only its redemption—alas! constitutes one of the most seductive temptations of the Christian. Satan is constantly presenting it in endless forms of attraction, wearing as many disguises and backed by every species of argument. There is not a ruse he does not employ by which to bring the world to bear upon the Christian. The eye delighting in beauty, the ear ravished with sounds, the taste delicate and dainty—“The lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life”—are so many media through which the attractive power and ascendancy of the world attain an easy conquest in the mind of the Christian.’

PROPHECY FULFILLED
‘This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.’
Luke 4:21
Jesus had returned to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. It was now some months since He had left His home to go away to Jordan’s side, where John was baptizing. Now He returned alone. In the meantime many things had happened. The fame of Him had gone through all the region round about. He had taught in their synagogues, being glorified above all; so that now, when He returned once more to His own home and stood up, as His custom was, to read the lessons, He was received with eager, if somewhat critical, interest. Unrolling the scroll as the minister handed it to Him, and finding the beautiful passage in Isaiah 61, He read it aloud. In the middle of reading the second verse our Blessed Lord stopped and, rolling up the scroll, gave it back to the minister and sat down. Sitting among the Jews was the attitude of the preacher; when, therefore, Jesus sat down after His reading, the people knew that He would preach, and the eyes of all men in the synagogue were fastened upon Him. And the sermon? The Evangelist gives us but the opening sentence, yet that one sentence is a clue to all: ‘This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.’
I. What was fulfilled?—He tells us that the good things which Isaiah spoke of are coming true now in a way far more wonderful than the prophet could have dreamed. ‘This day is this scripture fulfilled.’ Now is the new era; now the acceptable year indeed has come. We ourselves know how literally the Lord fulfilled His Word. And we know, too, how, in another sense, more deep, more wonderful, more spiritual, He made His words good. He did indeed bring in the year of jubilee, the Gospel era. The whole New Testament is but one long story of light and hope and freedom, and all the comfort which Jesus brought to men. Thus, in a burst of inspired enthusiasm, Jesus gave to His own people, in His own old home, the joyful tidings He came to bring to men.
II. The message the same to-day.—And still the message of Jesus is the same to-day, and still His Word goes out to England as it went out to Nazareth long ago, and still He is present among us with His power to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and to make His words good. To the spiritual sufferer Jesus is present with us in power to-day, as He has ever been. We are bound to assert that He in His Divine Spirit, through His Word, His ministers, His sacraments, and in whatever other way it may seem good to Him, is preaching good tidings, is binding up the broken-hearted, is breaking the power of the wicked, is making men see deep things which they only can describe. We are bound to think and assert that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is a living power here in England to-day.
III. A simple faith needed.—These are Christ’s words. At first, indeed, men wonder and admire; soon comes the critical and controversial spirit. Better is it far for us if we could accept our Lord and His Gospel in simple faith. The world may laugh at simple, childlike faith, but simple, childlike faith is about the best thing that man can have. Happy is the man who can still take Jesus at His word, who can believe that He is the Son of God Who came to save the world, who can trust to Him every burden, who will look to Him for the hope of everlasting life, and who can live in the power of that faith.
—Rev. P. M. Smythe.
(SECOND OUTLINE)
DIVINE ENDUEMENT
Standing on the summit of Old Testament prophecy, and gathering about Himself the fullness of its glory, He declares Himself as the realisation of Isaiah’s grandest language: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me.’
I. Christ uses this prophecy as entirely personal to Himself.—Witness this fact, said He, the ‘Spirit of the Lord is upon Me’; Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled; the Holy Ghost testifies through Me, and this is all-sufficient for your belief in My Messiahship. Here is the keynote to His ministry, the assertion of His own Divine consciousness, and, on this basis, He rests His claims to be accepted and trusted. What else save this consciousness of Himself could impart spiritual life to their consciousness?
II. The Lord Jesus asserts distinctly that the Holy Spirit was the anointing or unction for His Divine ministry.—The words are explicit: ‘Because He’—not an influence, but a character; not an attribute or quality, but a Divine person—‘because He hath anointed Me to preach the Gospel’; therefore stand I here as the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy. He claims attention and homage on the ground that the Spirit rests upon Him. The stress which the Lord Jesus laid on the Spirit’s co-operative agency with Him is one of those truths on which He insisted as cardinal. Recall the message He sent to John the Baptist in prison, and you find it little else than a quotation from Isaiah’s prophecy. Throughout the ministry of three years it was His supreme vindication against vexatious doubts, the hasty judgments, the querulous impatience of His most trusted friends.

THE POWER BEHIND
‘His word was with power.’
Luke 4:32
Christ’s word was with power, and it was the consciousness of this that enabled the first Christians, with all their knowledge of human weakness and moral evils, to aim so high, and yet to go forward so hopefully, so triumphantly, into the struggle.
And if we ask in what the power of Christianity lay, as distinct from the authority which a high and pure ideal exercises over the conscience, we find that:—
I. It placed the Christian in organic relation with a higher and supernatural life.—Nothing could have brought the high ideal of Christianity within the region of practical effort for the ordinary man but the belief that a new power had entered into human nature, and that man had become something different from what, in sad experience, he knew himself to be. ‘Teach a man,’ it is said, ‘that he is something greater than he is, and he will soon come to be what he believes himself to be.’ Christianity did not merely teach men that they were greater than they thought; it claimed to make human nature greater than it had been. As Jews, the first Christians were familiar with the thought of a people singled out to a kind of priesthood among the nations brought near to God and entrusted with His oracles, that through them He might educate the world. But that old idea would not contain the wider truth, the larger hope of Christianity. So the new wine burst the bottle. Jewish exclusiveness must be abandoned if the world is to receive the idea of the redemption of man as man, through Him in Whom differences of Jew and Gentile, male and female, barbarian and civilised, disappear, because He is the perfect Man. That notion of the universality of Christianity, though but slowly realised by the first disciples, is yet implicit in Christ’s own teaching; and the Incarnation, both in the order of time, and in the order of thought, is the ground of belief in the brotherhood of man, in it is the justification for that ‘enthusiasm of humanity’ which has become a catchword of the day. And the sure hope which carried the Christian forward was a supernatural hope. Chosen out of the world, the object of the world’s hatred and persecution, he was yet, as he believed, the purpose of God, the world’s conqueror. By the mere fact of his being a Christian he was (if we may use such a phrase) on the winning side in the great moral struggle between light and darkness. The future was with him. For a moment his faith might fail, when Christ, the embodiment of all his expectation, died upon the Cross. But with the new assurance of the Resurrection, the new presence of Whit-Sunday, he went forth fearlessly to overcome the world, the forces of the world, the forces of evil within and around him, knowing that he was endued with power from on high for the regeneration of man.
II. Again the Divine touched the human in an intensely personal relationship.—We see this most plainly in that virtue in which the Christian stood most opposed to the heathen world—the virtue of purity. Here, more than in either of the other parts of temperance, Christianity was committed to an ideal, unknown and unintelligible to heathen morals. We know how the controversy with heathen impurity showed itself in the early days of the Church. What were the weapons which the Christian teacher used? What was his appeal? We have been told of late years that ‘there is no true foundation for the strictest sexual morality other than the social duty which the Greeks asserted.’ Did he appeal, as we might now, to reverence for human personality? To a chivalrous respect for womanhood? To the theoretical, the actual, equality of all members in the body politic? There is not one word of this, nor could there be, for as yet there was, outside the Christian Church, no recognition of humanity as a family with equal rights. What, then, is his appeal? It is direct, personal, immediate. ‘What! know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?’ There were also for the Christian two kinds of love, love to God and love to man. Charity was always a theological virtue; it was love of God, and of our neighbour in God. It was that personal relation of the Christian with God in Christ which saved his service of God from melting away into a dreamy pantheism, and his service of man from being dissipated into a generalised feeling of benevolence. The Master had said, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.’ And the disciple was quick to interpret the thought. If Christ gave up His life for us, we ought also to give up our lives for the brethren.
III. Once more the power of Christianity consisted in the fact that it dealt with man as a social being.—Hence Christianity is not cast upon the world to triumph by its own intrinsic truth and beauty. Nor are individuals, as individuals, drawn to Christ without designs to their fellow-men. The Christianity of Christ is truer to human nature than the Christianity of many Christians. For if we honestly ask ourselves, How did Christ will to give to humanity the salvation which He has wrought for it? we are bound to answer, whatever our prejudices may be, He did not write a book; He did not formulate a creed—He founded a society. He selected and trained its first members for the work they were to do, and then sent them forth to gather into the spiritual kingdom, by the power of personal influence, those who were far off, as well as those who were near, ‘Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’ In these days we spend so much anxious thought on the development of the Church that we are tempted to lose sight of this primary fact. But all these questions as to what is permanent and what is transient in the organisation of the Church serve to throw into the shade the fact which lies behind them all—the fact, namely, that the Christian, just because he is a Christian, is a member of a spiritual society, of which Holy Baptism is the initiatory rite, the Eucharist the living bond of union, while its Magna Charta is the Sermon on the Mount. In the early days of Christianity there were no Christians unattached.
Rev. Canon Aubrey Moore.
Illustration
‘Judged, at least, by those among whom He lived and wrought, our Lord’s claim justified itself in that region where a pretended authority would be most easily found out. Evil spirits recognised His voice. With authority and power He commanded, and they obeyed. If men question His power in the moral world, His power to forgive sins, Christ refers them to that which is open to the eyes of men. “Whether is it easier to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (He saith unto the sick of the palsy), … Arise, and take up thy bed, and go unto thy house.” Thus by proving His power in the world of nature Christ prepared the minds of the Jews to believe in His power in the moral world. With us it is necessarily different. We have exchanged the naively objective attitude of ancient thought for the distrustful introspectiveness of modern days. And it is easier for us to believe in miracles on the strength of what we know of Christ’s power in the moral world, than to base our faith in that power on the evidence of miracles. We must begin with what is nearest to us. And the present power of Christ in the moral life is nearer to each one of us than the miracles which witnessed to that power in days of old.’