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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Tempter (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 058. Our Lord's Unfailing Response
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Our Lord's Unfailing Response
The second point that I want to speak of is our Lord's response to the temptation. He was "in the Spirit." That means this, He yielded the control of His life to the Holy Spirit. That is the first "how" of meeting temptation, a surrender, complete, unfaltering, habitual, to the sovereignty, the gracious mastery of the Holy Spirit. That is the first bit in His response. He was "in the Spirit," yielding to the mastery of the Holy Spirit.
And the second bit here is this: full simple obedience to the Father. You search through these records in Matthew and Mark and Luke, and mark the emphasis more and more on this, that our Master's strength in all His temptation, as in all His life on its purely human side, was this, His full, simple, cheery obedience to His Father's will, because it was His Father's will. I would say, not because it appealed to His judgment, but because it was His Father's will. Doubtless it did appeal to His judgment, but if our Lord had been obliged to obey the Father where He did not understand why He should, He would have obeyed blindly.
That is the very key on the human side to His whole marvellous career from Nazareth on to Calvary. There was an acquiescence in the Father's plan because it was the Father's plan, and there was a confidence in the Father's love. He knew He could trust His Father. This is the very underneath basis of His side of this whole story. I may open my Bible to the first chapter of the first page of Genesis, and if I were to read every passage or illustration of obedience or failure to obey I must stop at every page clear through. Obey! obey! obey! simply, intelligently, the will of the Father, because it is the Father's will, whether you see your way out or not. That is the very underground work of our Master's victory in the wilderness.
And then the third bit is this. He used the Word of God. I suppose it is true that men have superstitiously worshipped the old Book of God, merely as a book. And yet, keeping that in mind as a thing to be avoided, the use of the Word of God cannot be over magnified. It is God's own Word. There is more than print here. There is a Person here, in these very pages, speaking to us of our need and touching our hearts. Our Lord Jesus used the Word of God in meeting the adversary. And we shall see by and by what the adversary thought of that method.