Get out of your head the picture you've always had of temptation. (Yes, I mean you. I know what you're thinking!) You've always pictured temptation as that wheedly whiney voice that says, "Wouldn't you reeeally like to have one of those cookies? Your mother would never know. And it wouldn't hurt anyone..."

In other words, you think of temptation as that pulling of your heart toward something you desire, some illicit thing that you keep looking at longingly, salivatingly. You are tempted by chocolate. You are tempted by sex. You are tempted by drink. You are tempted, and you can feel this aching in yourself that makes you want it.

If that is what temptation is, then we can't quite tell when we cross the line from temptation to sin, can we? Is our desire itself sin? Jesus says that lusting in our heart is wrong, so if he even wants the bread that Satan suggests he could create from stone, is Jesus sinning then?

But all this is a dead end. Temptation is not primarily an emotional condition (even though our emotions may also be involved in our sin). Temptation is, first of all, a TEST.

The word that Luke uses (in Greek) is peiradzomenos. It means "a trial, attempt, endeavor... to put to the proof, to attempt." In Martin Luther's Small Catechism, when he says "God indeed tempts no one" the German word there is versucht, which also means "attempt, trial... try one's hand."

In other words, if the Devil "tempts" Jesus it is much like a man might lean on a stick to see if it will break. He progressively puts pressure on Jesus in the effort to find his limits. The devil does the same to us. He places burdens on us with the intent of crushing us.

But if God "tempts no one" as Luther says, then why are we tempted? James says that we're tempted when we are drawn away by our own desires and enticed. Now, "entice" is more the sense that we think of temptation - but notice: we do that to ourselves! But if God places a weight on us, a burden of any kind, it is not for the purpose of crushing us, but he himself desires to sustain us, and gives us "a way out" or a way to bear up under the testing.

So Paul says (2 Corinthians 4) that we are "hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed." In our testing, we carry around in our bodies the death of Jesus. That is, we share in some small measure of the burden that Jesus carried so that his life and resurrection may also be seen through our troubles.

Jesus was tested and he didn't break. No surprise, of course. But more importantly to us, when we are tempted we need not break either, because our Savior bore our severest testing for us. The weight of our sin, an impossible burden for us, has been removed. The weights we bear now we carry only for the sake of those who do not know him, and only for a time, and only with our Savior's help.

p.s. If there are any fans of Madeleine L'Engle out there, the word before "tempt" in our text is tesserakonta. See if you can figure out what that means, and how L'Engle chose her word for trans-dimensional transportation.