These two realities are as much true for us as they were for Jesus. Our greatest temptations as followers of God's grace will always come immediately after we have been blessed and inspired by a new revelation of what we might be or become, and the temptation is always the same. To give up the new vision, turn away, to declare that's not really for me. That's not who I am. Jesus had been given the assurance and revelation that He was to be the Son of God, and now immediately he goes into the wilderness and confronts the temptations to abandon that calling, to settle for something less, to decided that he really did not understand the message correctly. "If you are the Son of God," because maybe you just misheard the voice. Maybe the voice wasn't for you. If you are the Son of God, then maybe you better do things to show you are the Son of God. Maybe the style and the manner you have for the Son of God is wrong. Maybe you ought to try a little magic. Maybe you ought to be a messiah who gives the people what they want. If you are the Son of God, you ought to have power and rule kingdoms, not look forward to a crown of thorns and a cross. To be so caught up in the enthusiasm and excitement and passion of the new revelation of who and what you might become, and then the struggle and the testing when all those questions come up about whether or not you can really be all you were meant to be, whether you really want to have that kind of power and to bear that kind of responsibility, whether you are really willing to make the sacrifices necessary to become the new vision.
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Somewhere you find yourself inspired and assured that inside your body there is a new slender, healthy, agile, and beautiful body just waiting to be released. That is the new revelation of the new you, and then comes the temptations in the wilderness. Are you willing to make the sacrifices to become the new you, do you really want that new you badly enough to do the work. All kinds of questions come that challenge you about whether or not you would really be happy being that slender and that hungry all the time. Always and everywhere the essential quality of temptation is the same — whether or not we will live in accordance with the understanding of ourselves that is the real us. Mid-life crisis are that kind of testing, for someone is supposed to be finally deciding that they want to be something different, either that who they have been is not the real them and it is finally time for them to be real or they are tired of being who they are and they think that they want to try to be somebody different.
I had one of those crisis in the fourth grade. My mother and father were both school teachers and always active in education. My mother was so active in the PTA and room mother that she attended school more days than I did. My older sister was one of those bright perfect first child. Smart, nice, perky. I was one of those boys who was big and chubby until the eight grade when I grew about 8 inches one summer and gained no weight. So in the fourth grade I decided to yield to the temptation and try a different version of me. In the fourth grade I decided to be a bully. To abandon the vision of who I was that my parents, my church, my baptism were encouraging me to become and to try the role of the tough guy. I tried to be the smart mouth. I punched and picked on others. I misbehaved in school. I would be late and not do my work. I was tempted by the idea to be somebody else, to be feared instead of liked. The only problem was I never really got comfortable with trying to pick fights with people and when a young girl blooded my nose in one of those situations, my zeal for the image of myself as a thug diminished. That wasn't who I was. Temptation is always to try to be something you are not or not to be the something that you are.
