Dharius Daniels - Not Today Satan

So, we want to keep that priority. Amen. How many are ready for the word? I’m ready! Matthew, chapter four, verse one, is where we’re going to begin our reading today. Man, we’re in part six. I just thought y’all liked it; I love it, so we just kept going, and it’s a respectfully serious topic. So, we’re in part six today. We’ve been talking about going to God’s Word, getting tips for tough talks, and we’ve had tough talks with everybody. Today, Jesus is about to teach us how to have a tough talk with Satan. We’ve got to talk to him too.

Matthew chapter 4, verse 1 says, «Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, 'If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.' Jesus answered, 'It is written: Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.' Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple and said, 'If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written: He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.' Jesus answered him, 'It is also 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 this world and their splendor. He said, 'All of this I will give you if you will bow down and worship me.' Jesus said to him, 'Away from me, Satan! For it is written: Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'

Verse 11 contains what I think is the most powerful phrase in the passage. It says, 'Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended to him.' I want to talk from this subject during our time together: Not today, Satan! Not today, Satan! Many of you who are watching this are probably unaware of this. Maybe you’ve recently been exposed to our ministry and are not aware of the reality that in 2014, I published my first and probably, in my mind, my most important book. It was called „Represent Jesus.“ It was based on a series of sermons that I did probably around the year 2010, where I spent six months walking our church through the Gospels and only teaching the character traits of Jesus. The premise of the series that was eventually turned into a book was this: There are two Jesuses that exist in most Christian spaces—the Jesus that’s made in our image and the Jesus that’s made in the image of God.

Another way of saying it is this: Within the Christian space, there’s a tension we need to address between the Jesus we have in our heads and the Jesus that’s actually in the Bible, and these two don’t always align. This dissonance between these two Jesuses can be destructive because, as Christians, those of us who are striving to be Christ-like—not just those who like Christ—how we behold Jesus affects how we behave in our lives. So, if the Jesus we see is a judgmental one, we will be judgmental. If he’s mean, we will be mean. If he’s fundamentalist, we will be fundamentalists. If he’s sexist, we will be sexist. If he’s racist, we will be racist. If he likes what we like, we’ll like what we like.

It’s as Frank Sanchez of Assisi said: God made us in his image, but unfortunately, we returned the favor. So, what we have then in many spaces is a misrepresentation of Jesus by Christians because of a misunderstanding about Jesus that’s not often addressed in church. See, the Bible’s clear that Jesus died to be my Savior, and that’s what we hear regularly repeated in church spaces. But the Bible also says he lived to be my example. So, we need more than the dead Jesus; we need more than the resurrected Jesus. We need the Jesus that lived for 33 years before he died. We need the Jesus that said, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ We need the Jesus who lived because in his life, he teaches us how to live. Am I making sense here?

So, my argument when I did the series and wrote the book is this: What we need is not just better methodology in Christianity. We don’t just need to make Jesus cool. We need to relearn who Jesus is. Jesus needs to be represented to the Christian first so that the Christian can properly represent that Jesus in their life. One of the areas where I’ve seen great misrepresentation is an area I want to address during our time together today. Y’all not bored, are you? Okay, here it is!

I want to address this misconception about a personality trait of Jesus. I want to address the misconception that Jesus was a person who was passive. That is a misrepresentation of the Jesus of the Bible. There is an assumption that because he was meek, this means he was weak. This is inconsistent with Scripture. Weakness is a lack of ability or power; meekness is power under control. So, meekness is actually the ultimate expression of strength because it means you make a decision about how you really want to use it. Jesus displays meekness when he’s taken into custody by religious leaders and Peter takes out his sword and cuts off an ear. Jesus heals the ear.