Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday 2025 – Luke 4:1-13
I’m not sure about you but to me the year seems to be flying by so quickly. It feels only yesterday we were preparing to celebrate Christmas and here we are now in the season of Lent, looking toward, and longing for Easter day to arrive.
A few weeks ago, we celebrated Candlemass, the Sunday in the year where the Church recognises and places a heavy emphasis on the connection between Christmas and Easter. A stark reminder that in the joy of Epiphany season we must soon turn our eyes toward the cross on which the saviour dies in our place.
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, we have once again stepped into a season of self-examination and preparation. The ashes are a personal act of remembrance as a sign and witness to others of what Christ has done for us on the cross. It’s an outward sign of the inward sorrow we bare for our sins and a sign that we are repentant and wish to change. It is a sign to the world that we acknowledge a higher lord and our willing to live a life dedicated to the pursuit of Holiness. To abbreviate Tom Wright, justification is instant, but sanctification, that takes a little time.
It is of course traditional in the western world to give something up for Lent. We are of course called by the Church to truly fast and pray with renewed enthusiasm. To deny the thrills and distractions of the world and to prepare ourselves for when Christ returns in glory to take us home.
Rather apt then that today’s gospel reading is the attempted temptation by the Devil. What temptations might we face and do we deny them as Christ denied all that was placed in front of Him?
The first thing we see in our reading is that Jesus is full of the Holy Spirit, before anything else this is what we are presented. Then Luke tells us that he had recently returned from the Jordan and now at the prompting of the Holy Spirit goes out into the wilderness.
Sometimes as Christians we like to take on major projects, or we like to make grand plans to change something about ourselves, or promise to commit to something that’s unrealistic. The problem with these things is that typically the prompt for them does not come from God but from either ourselves or the world around us.
When I was bible college the first time round I met a man called X. Now X was a very charismatic and cool guy from Nigeria. One of the jobs X had was as a bodyguard to the Nigerian president. He was rather dapper. Now at College we had a Tuesday night celebration and every time X was invited to preach you could hear a pin drop, that’s how much people hung on his words. He got up every morning at 5am to go on a prayer walk of the grounds and then he would sit with his bible. X worked out that if you read ten chapters a day you could read the entire bible four times in a year. Challenge accepted, challenge duly failed.
The problem came in that I was not X. I did not have the military discipline or the Godly prompt to read the those ten chapters every day. It was a good idea, but not a God idea. I think I could half way through Genesis before life pulled me away from it.
As Christians we rely on God’s strength to get us through, and it’s important not to take on challenges that God is not calling us to engage in. Jesus walked into the wilderness, and faced the Devil, notice however, He was filled with the Spirit, He did not go in unprepared or without prompt from the Spirit to do so.
You may have heard the question, “so what are you giving up then?” If in lent you are giving something up, have you first consulted God as to what that should be? Do you feel prompted by the Spirit to give it up or instead is a good idea which will probably fade by the end of the week.
The classic bible college joke is that they should actually be called bridal colleges, and that the way a male attracts a female is by how many stackable chairs he can carry. While a trivial example, there is something in there that’s important. This “helpful” act is a good one, but done with the wrong purpose. It becomes less about serving and more about showing off. We have to be careful that our Lenten fast does not become about showing off, but rather remains solely about growing closer to God.
The devil is not stupid, he is of course without true power, but he has the ability to lead us astray by lying to us. As humans we are naturally quite concerned with our physical well-being, we are after all physical beings. But I think we can all agree the spiritual wellbeing of our souls is a much higher good than our physical well-being. After all, our souls are eternal, and our bodies are not.
It should come as no surprise then that the first temptation was physical. For forty days Jesus was walking in this wilderness, He would have been hungry and tired, in a physically weakened state. The first place the devil tries is to try and get Jesus to succumb is to His hunger. “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”
Jesus knew the true sustenance He needed came from the Spirit and not the natural sustenance of bread which would fade after time. The fast we endure in Lent is a reminder to us that what truly sustains us is not the natural elements of life but rather the Spirit of God Himself.
The second temptation is over power and glory. The devil promises Jesus that he will give everything over to Him, He only needs to worship the devil. What are the idols of our worship in our lives. Worship literally means to acknowledge the worth of something. What is most worthy of our time, our praise, our adoration in our lives? Our we engaged in right worship or are there things in our lives, statues and idols, money and power, hopes and desires, that need to be knocked down and our worship realigned towards God.
The last temptation is the most sinister of them all. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, He will command His angels concerning you, to protect you.”
The last temptation is, in my opinion, the worst because the devil twists scripture to try and meet his agenda. The devil is a master theologian and will try to use the scriptures in false ways to lead us off course. How in this period of lent will we devote ourselves to the study of the word? I wouldn’t suggest X’s ten chapters, but do we have a disciplined approach to our time in God’s word?
Lent is a very special time in the Christian calendar. It encourages us to reexamine our lives and to repent of the things that separate us from God. Pray brothers and sisters that the Spirit fill you and strengthen you this Lenten season so that when the Lord returns he might find all of us ready to meet Him.
Amen.