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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Sunday Drive to church. It's Pastor Wolf Mueller. It's InvoCavet. The first Sunday in Lent.
[00:00:07] Today, February 22nd, the year of our Lord 2026. Let's pray because we got a lot to talk about. Oh, Lord God, you led your ancient people through the wilderness, brought them to the promised land. Guide the people of your church that following our Savior, we may walk through the wilderness of this world toward the glory of the world to come, through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
[00:00:34] That collect. And prayer for the first Sunday in Lent is really.
[00:00:38] It's not a today prayer, it's a season prayer. It's like, hey, we're on this journey now.
[00:00:43] So just like the Lord led the people through the wilderness for 40 years.
[00:00:48] So now he's going to be with us during these 40 days. And we're going to be fasting and praying and walking towards the cross and the story, the hearing of our Lord's passion, suffering and death.
[00:01:05] Don't forget to take a look at the bulletin cover. And especially for the children, but for everyone. Notice it's a picture of the devil tempting Jesus. And there he is with this kind of monk's thing on.
[00:01:17] But he's got his horns there and he's got this rock offering it to Jesus.
[00:01:22] But don't miss that. All three temptations are there. Take a look at the background.
[00:01:27] It's kind of cool.
[00:01:29] That is the theme for today. In fact, the first three Sunday, we got again, too much, too much to talk about today. And I don't know, I'll tell you, I do not know how to do it. Because when I tell you the Bible passages that we have, and then when you hear that I'm trying to keep it short for the sermon because we got so much other stuff going on, you're going to wonder how it's going to be possible. And I'll be honest, I'm wondering the same thing. But we're going to make it work.
[00:01:57] The first three Sundays in Lent are all devil Sundays, I suppose they all have the devil and the demons. So we start with the temptation of Jesus. And then we have the Syrophoenician woman, My son is demon possessed. And then another demon possession that Jesus heals.
[00:02:15] Or the parable, the strongman that Jesus tells how he binds the strongman and then loots his house. So really, the first three weeks of Lent are for us to give our attention to spiritual warfare.
[00:02:33] And that's important for us, that we would do that, that we would remember that there's more to life than what's seen, that there's angels and there's demons. And to know that there are maleficent.
[00:02:49] Does that mean intend our bad? There are spiritual powers that intend our hurt, that want to do evil, that are working towards the undoing of the world, of the church and the state and the family, to know that we are under attack.
[00:03:11] This is really important for us. Every single Christian is under demonic assault, and that's why we need to be reminded of it. But we also don't need to be reminded of it. So we can be afraid, so we can rejoice in the Lord who gives the victory.
[00:03:28] That's part of the great comfort of the Lord's temptation, is that he stood where Adam and Eve fell and he stood for us. He's our warrior. He's our champion fighting for us. There's this guy, Elias Shakur is his name. He was a priest, Coptic priest in Ibelan in Israel. And he was building a Christian school there. And I went to see him one time, and he would always talk like this.
[00:03:56] He'd say, christ is our champion, Our champion. He's the one who fights for us. In fact, we have that in the hymn the Day Today. We Got a Mighty Fortress. Okay, well, let me tell you what we're looking at.
[00:04:07] We're looking at perhaps the greatest of all psalms, at least one of them. Psalm 32, the greatest of all Old Testament texts, the fall and first promise, Genesis 3, 1, 21.
[00:04:19] The gradual and the tract are both from Psalm 91, which is the psalm that the devil quotes when he tempts Jesus in the wilderness.
[00:04:31] The Hebrews 4, 14, 16, which is maybe amongst them all. But it's great, too, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God. Let us hold fast to our confessions. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin.
[00:04:53] Let us then, with confidence, draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. That confidence there is with boldness of speech, so that the Lord makes us bold to draw near to him, because he saved us and forgiven our sins and bringing us to the joys of eternal life. That's beautiful.
[00:05:12] And then the gospel passage, Matthew 4. The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.
[00:05:18] And then the hymn of the day. The greatest of all hymns. A mighty fortress.
[00:05:22] You picked a great day to be driving to church. I mean, every day is a good day to drive to church. But this one, I mean, this is the highlight reels.
[00:05:30] This is so good. All right, one at a time. Let's see what things. I'll just touch on a few things since it's Sunday morning. I'm recording now. Yesterday was a full day. So Psalm 32 is one of the seven penitental Psalms. And it has to do with imputation, which is really important for our doctrine of justification. Remember, imputation is how the Lord gives us the righteousness of Christ.
[00:05:56] He imputes it to us. He doesn't infuse it into us like a spiritual vitamin.
[00:06:01] He applies it to our account.
[00:06:04] He accounts us to be righteous. It's beautiful.
[00:06:08] Psalm 32 takes that idea and goes the other way and talks about the glory of the one to whom sin is not imputed. It says, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
[00:06:22] Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.
[00:06:30] That's why Paul will quote this passage in Romans and Maybe in Galatians 2. It's quoted a number of times in the New Testament because it says that the Lord is not only imputing the righteousness of Christ to us, but he's not imputing our sins to us. He's not counting our sins against us.
[00:06:50] Well, who does he count them against? They can't just disappear into the ether or something.
[00:06:54] I don't even know what the ether is, but apparently it's where things can't disappear to.
[00:06:59] Sins just don't vaporize or whatever. They've got to go somewhere. Well, he imputes them onto Christ.
[00:07:07] That's the whole lesson of the scapegoat, that the sins are on that goat and not on us.
[00:07:15] Notice that there's three words for sin that are in this passage. So transgression, sin and iniquity.
[00:07:25] I think transgression. The best way to think about that is to go beyond what's allowable.
[00:07:31] Sin is just our normal word for sin. To do what God said not to do, or not to do what God said to do.
[00:07:39] Disobedience and iniquity is the guilt that results from sin.
[00:07:46] So the Lord forgives our sins, covers our sorry, forgives our transgressions, covers our sins, does not count our iniquity.
[00:07:58] When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.
[00:08:02] Day and night your hand was heavy on me. Strength was dried up like the heat of summer. But then, look at this. I acknowledge my sin to you. I did not cover my iniquity.
[00:08:11] I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. And you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
[00:08:17] That little verse there, if you want to show it to the kids. Verse 5 is what we call a chiasm.
[00:08:23] It's a part of. It's Greek, too, Hebrew poetry. A lot of times you have parallel, so you see it all like verse seven. You're a hiding place for me. You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with shouts of deliverance. It'll say one thing that I say the same thing in a different way. And you have these parallelisms, like A, B, ab. Then you have a chiasm, which would be like A, B, B, A.
[00:08:50] But you got a nice little one in verse five, which we use for almost every Sunday, part of the liturgy. Sin, iniquity, transgression, iniquity, sin. So it'd be A, B, C, B, A.
[00:09:04] Right there. It's a nice little Hebrew poetry. And it's. And it. It does it to highlight kind of wherever that middle part is that we put our attention there. I'll confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. It's gone. It disappears when we hand it over to the Lord. It's a Be not like the horse of the mule without understanding, which must be curved with bit and bridle, or they won't stay near to you.
[00:09:34] Many are the sorrows of the wicked. But steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, shout for joy all you upright in heart. Imagine it.
[00:09:48] Here's this prayer of repentance, this prayer asking for forgiveness.
[00:09:53] And it ends with joy, gladness, rejoicing.
[00:09:59] And not just like a little bit of joy. It's a shout for joy.
[00:10:05] Shout for joy. I mean, you got to be pretty joyful to start shouting.
[00:10:11] That's the joy that we have in the forgiveness of sins.
[00:10:15] Genesis, chapter three. It's a familiar story. The. The Lord God, well, the devil is there, and he grabs a hold and possesses seemingly this little dragon and wanders into the garden to tempt Adam and Eve away from obedience to God's word. The Lord had put them in the garden, given them everything they possibly could want or need. All the fruit is theirs, except for this one, the tree of the Knowledge of good and evil. We talked about this too. You know, it's a big question about why God put that in there, that tree in the garden and our free will. Theologians are Catholics and Baptists and everyone else committed to the doctrine of free will. You'll hear them say things like, well, you have to have a choice in order to love, so that God had to give Adam and Eve a choice so that they could love him.
[00:11:14] I do not think we should see the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as the occasion for love, but rather as the occasion for faith.
[00:11:22] And here's why. Remember how faith believes, even though it cannot see. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the confidence of things not seen.
[00:11:31] We walk by faith and not by sight, so that faith and sight are opposed to one another in some ways. So if you believe something, it's because you can't see it, it's because it's not right in front of you. I might say, hey, it's going to rain tomorrow. I wouldn't say if it's raining, say, hey, you better believe me, it's raining outside.
[00:11:51] Because you look outside and see it's raining. I mean, maybe if you were inside and didn't know it was happening outside, and then you would have to believe me. And that's the point.
[00:11:59] You have to believe something because you can't see it.
[00:12:01] Well, the Lord always wants to be worshiped by faith.
[00:12:06] So what was he supposed to give them a promise of in the Old Testament? He can't promise the forgiveness of sins in the Garden of Eden, they have no sins to forgive.
[00:12:16] He can't promise them eternal life because they have eternal life. He can't promise them provision and paradise because they are in paradise.
[00:12:23] So the Lord sets up this tree where they can go and worship God and believe not seeing, but believe that on the day they eat of it, surely they will die.
[00:12:34] So this knowledge of the tree of good and evil, Adam and Eve are supposed to go there and they are supposed to confess their sins. I believe that on the day we eat the tree, we will surely die. They weren't supposed to eat it, they were supposed to confess it and believe it and therefore never taste death at all.
[00:12:49] But the devil tempts them away from this confession and towards this disobedience, and the result is that they eat it. I think there's a key verse here that is in.
[00:13:10] Verse five, starting in verse four. Let me read it to you how I read it for years and years and years and see if you pick up on what words? I drop out of the passage.
[00:13:24] The serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die when you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God. No Knowing good and evil.
[00:13:36] Did you get it? Let me read it to you how it really is without dropping the words. You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
[00:13:50] God knows.
[00:13:52] So the devil doesn't just lie about the fruit, he lies about God. And you see what he's saying here? Oh, God just said that, but he didn't mean it, because he knows that when you eat it, you'll be like him. And he's jealous. That's why he said, don't eat it, because he doesn't want you to be like him.
[00:14:09] Oh, my. The Lord made Adam and Eve like him already. That was the whole point. And now the devil comes in, and he's not so concerned about what Adam and Eve think about the fruit. He's concerned about what Adam and Eve think about God. And more specifically, he's concerned about what Adam and Eve think about what God thinks about them.
[00:14:28] God doesn't. He's trying to keep you down.
[00:14:31] His rules are his constraints. They're for his benefit, not for yours.
[00:14:35] So foolish. This is how the devil always does it, though. He tries to sell us slavery under the guise of freedom. Buy your own shackles.
[00:14:45] And it worked. And Adam and Eve ate the fruit and they knew that they were naked and they hid themselves well. They first made loincloths and they thought, well, that was easy.
[00:14:55] We got some fig leaves. The Lord is all worried about us eating the fruit. But look, we fixed the problem.
[00:15:01] We made our little fig leaf outfits.
[00:15:05] Remember the joke that I wrote? The best joke that I've ever written, when Adam. When Eve comes out and says to Adam with her fig leaves, how do I look? These are my fall colors.
[00:15:17] Fall? Yeah, it's leafy.
[00:15:21] They fell into sin.
[00:15:22] It's all right.
[00:15:26] I can't tell if you guys are groaning or laughing because I'm recording and you're listening in your car. Makes it hard.
[00:15:33] Comedy by podcast, anyhow.
[00:15:36] Or attempts at comedy by podcast. So they think that they've done fine. Like, hey, look, we solved the problem. We got our clothes, we're not ashamed of being naked, etc. Until they hear the sound of the Lord in the garden. And then, oh, these fig leaves don't all of a sudden look so adequate anymore. And they run and they hide from the Lord, which is the worst of all.
[00:16:01] I try to impress this on people by asking if you could. You know, when your kids were little and you got home from work or from whatever, and they're hiding from you because they're afraid that you're going to beat them or kill them because of what you've done, that's so bad that you deserve it.
[00:16:21] That's the kind of fear that's here. And it was never meant to be this way.
[00:16:25] Adam and Eve were supposed to hear the sound of the Lord in the garden and run to him to find him.
[00:16:33] It's amazing.
[00:16:35] But to hear the Lord comes to Adam and Eve and he's going to curse two things, the ground and the serpent. He doesn't curse them. He's going to give them some trouble.
[00:16:44] To the woman, I'll multiply your pain in childbirth.
[00:16:48] And to Adam, you're going to have to scrape the ground.
[00:16:52] It's not going to be fruit trees anymore. You're not going to live in a garden. You're going to live in a.
[00:16:57] You're going to live on the farm. You're going to have to plant and harvest, and it's going to be hard for you to make a living.
[00:17:04] But the most important part is verse 15, this. Genesis 3:15. I hope you'll circle it in your bulletin. Get a pencil.
[00:17:12] Take a look at it. It's a riddle, but it's one of the most important passages.
[00:17:16] In fact, I'll put this before you. I think this is the most important passage to understand.
[00:17:22] To understand the entire Old Testament.
[00:17:25] And it's the Lord talking to the devil. It's called the Proto Evangelion, the first preaching of the Gospel.
[00:17:32] And he says to the devil, I'll put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring should be probably better, your seed and her seed. Because this is going to be the great seed promise. And this golden thread of the seed of the woman is going to extend through the Scriptures, to Noah, to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah and David.
[00:17:56] And the promise of this particular seed, who is going to destroy the serpent, the dragon's head by crushing him, is going to run through the Old Testament. It's the thing that we're waiting for.
[00:18:12] He will bruise your head or crush your head, and you will bruise or crush his heel.
[00:18:17] So the picture is like a barefoot farmer crushing the head of a poisonous viper and being bit at the same time so that the snake's destroyed.
[00:18:27] But he delivers a not as bad death blow to the man.
[00:18:33] So here we have already the idea of the virgin birth. It's the seed of the woman.
[00:18:39] The idea that the devil will.
[00:18:42] That he'll become a man, but it'll be God in the flesh. Because while Adam and Eve could resist the devil, this one can destroy him, but that his destroying the devil will also be his own destruction, but it'll be only temporal.
[00:18:56] I mean, Adam and Eve really could confess the Apostles Creed after the Lord gave this promise in their hearing to the devil. And then the Lord is going to illustrate it by taking some animal.
[00:19:11] The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them. He's going to take some animal, kill it, which is going to be the first death in creation, as far as we know.
[00:19:25] I mean, this animal dies at the Lord's hands so that he can wrap the still warm hide around Adam and Eve's naked body to cover them.
[00:19:39] Can you imagine the horror of Adam and Eve in that situation?
[00:19:44] Is this what it takes to cover our sins? Just you wait.
[00:19:50] And one more thing here, maybe two more things.
[00:19:53] You know, the Lord didn't promise to Adam and Eve, but it was there.
[00:19:59] On the day that you eat of it, he said, you will surely die.
[00:20:02] But also on the day that you eat of it, I will surely die.
[00:20:07] And how amazing for us that the Lord takes upon himself our suffering, our sin, our guilt, our shame, our dying, so that we can be his children.
[00:20:22] It's amazing.
[00:20:24] And then the last thing, verse 20. The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all the living.
[00:20:30] That is a confession of faith.
[00:20:34] I think if I was Adam in this place, and I would have been. All right, you want a name Now, I'm going to call you Most Death or whatever trouble.
[00:20:42] Thorn. I'm going to call you Thorns.
[00:20:48] I knew a family growing up, their last name was Thorn. Anyway, doesn't matter. You know, this is whatever Adam, Thor, you know, Devil. I'm going to call you devil listener. No, Adam is a Christian, and he sees that Eve is also a Christian and that Eve is going to be the mother of all people, and that Eve is going to be the mother of the Messiah.
[00:21:11] From her the seed will come who will crush the head of the serpent so that he looks at Eve and says, life, Eve.
[00:21:23] How beautiful is that?
[00:21:26] This Adam right there is a champion. I mean, earlier that day, he kind of messed up everything.
[00:21:34] But this giving Eve the name Eve was right on.
[00:21:37] Remember that we don't have the Alleluia verse during Lent.
[00:21:44] Instead of the verse, it's called the tract, which is normally a longer series of psalms, again without the festive hallelujah. You'll notice that the gradual and the tract are both from Psalm 91, the traditional introit, which we are not using. Also Psalm 91, we're using the Psalm, which is okay.
[00:22:06] But the interesting thing about Psalm 91 is that it's the psalm that the devil uses against Jesus.
[00:22:16] In fact, if you want to pay attention to it, at the top of the text, top of the page, the gradual is there. Psalm 91, 11, 12.
[00:22:24] He'll command his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.
[00:22:34] And then you go down to the bottom, and you can compare that with what the devil on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.
[00:22:43] And Luther reminds us that the devil here doesn't use the Scripture rightly. He never does. He uses it for his own wicked purposes. And so he misquotes it by taking out the maybe most important part of the promise of Psalm 90, 91. He'll command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways, in other words.
[00:23:04] And here's how Luther gives it to us, which I think is brilliant.
[00:23:08] The angels aren't just there to protect you when you're doing whatever you want.
[00:23:13] The angels are there to protect you when you're doing what God has commanded according to your vocation.
[00:23:19] So when we're living according to our vocation and our calling, we have the support of the Lord. And this is important for us to think about. I mean, I have to think about this. Whenever it's time to preach, there's this great sacristy prayer. It's on the door of my closet, my office, where my robes are. And it's from Luther. And part of it says, if this would have been up to me, I would have destroyed it a long time ago.
[00:23:48] I need the Lord's help. But here's the point.
[00:23:51] I have the promise of the Lord's help.
[00:23:54] And it's not just the pastor that has that promise. Every single Christian has the promise of the Lord's help for your vocation. When you wake up in the middle of the night to take care of the babies, when you go run around chasing grandbabies, when you're going to work faithfully, when you're hoping and praying for a spouse, or when husband and wife are hoping and praying for children, or when you're going through all the hard stuff in school, when you're sitting there late at night doing your homework, or when you're worried about what the co workers are going to think during the day, when you're going about your vocation as a Christian, you have the promise that the Lord is supporting you not only with his spirit, which is enough, but also with his angels, that they're protecting you in all your ways.
[00:24:46] But if you're jumping off the top of cliffs, asking the angels to carry you down, no, doesn't work that way.
[00:24:55] Psalm 91 is the tract also. He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High abides in the shadow of the Almighty. He'll cover you with his pinions.
[00:25:04] Under his wings, you'll find refuge.
[00:25:06] When he calls to me, I will answer him. I will be with him in trouble. This reminds me that prayer of Jesus when he's going into Jerusalem and he says, oh, how I long to gather you to myself. Like a chicken gathers her chickadees. What are the little baby hens?
[00:25:23] The chicken gathers her hens under the wing. Just hide up in here.
[00:25:28] I gotcha.
[00:25:30] That's how the Lord wants to gather us to Himself. Okay, now that brings us to the gospel. I wonder how we're doing on time.
[00:25:38] This is. Oh my.
[00:25:42] I told you this is going to be a problem. We're going to work it out and it's going to be great because we got lots of baptisms and lots of confirmations today too, which is amazing.
[00:25:51] Okay.
[00:25:52] Jesus is led immediately into the wilderness after his baptism. And that's just a couple of highlights. It's a reminder to us that baptism doesn't send us into paradise. Baptism sends us into the wilderness. We're not baptized straight into heaven. We're baptized into a life of trouble. But the Lord is with us. And that's why Jesus goes into the wilderness first to go for us to stand where Adam and Eve fall. Remember John Milton wrote those two great poems? He wrote a bunch of great poems, but the biggest famous one, Paradise Lost, we all know, that's about the temptation of Adam and Eve. But then he wrote another one about Jesus in the wilderness, and it's called Paradise Regained.
[00:26:34] So that Jesus stands where Adam and Eve fall. It's amazing. And then the three temptations, stone to bread, and then up to the pinnacle of the temple, 450ft, they think that was. That's pretty tall. That's like a 45 story building.
[00:26:49] I was trying to find the equivalent of that height in Austin. I can't think that I Found it yet? And then he takes him to a high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world.
[00:27:02] Lays it all out before.
[00:27:04] Worship me, I'll give it to you. The devil says, you can avoid the cross altogether. Jesus says, get behind me, Satan. And he quotes the Bible three times. Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy.
[00:27:17] And sends him packing so good the devil left him for an opportune time. I think it says in Luke, behold, the angels came and were ministering to him. Then we see a mighty fortress. You say, wait a minute. Hold on, hold on, Pastor. A mighty fortress. That's Reformation time. This is a spiritual warfare day.
[00:27:36] Well, there is no better spiritual warfare than a mighty fortress. Pay attention to the demons in a mighty fortress.
[00:27:45] I told you the story about how we were at camp on the top of the hill and I told the kids to imagine the mighty fortress. Though devils all the world should fill. There's all these demons in the forest creeping around.
[00:27:58] I mean, it's a scary hymn. The pastors are a bit put out at me that I was like, pastor Brian, what are you saying? These kids are never going to sleep tonight. But this is the point. Devils all the world should feel all eager to devour us. We tremble not, we fear no ill.
[00:28:19] They shall not overpower us.
[00:28:23] Our attitude towards spiritual warfare is not a fearful, quivering attitude. Look, what's the worst thing that the devil's going to do to us?
[00:28:32] Send us to heaven.
[00:28:34] And everything in between is not so bad.
[00:28:37] Anyway, we'll talk about it more in the sermon and then we're going to dig into the Gospel of Matthew in Bible class, which is also glorious.
[00:28:46] We're past the genealogy. Well, almost past the genealogy. I figured out why someone asked last week, why does it not name Bathsheba? It just says the wife of Uriah. And I figured it out this week. I think I figured it out.
[00:29:03] I'll let you know what that is. Also in Bible class, so we'll see. Drive safe. God's peace be with you, Blessed invoke convent. We'll see you soon. Sunday drive to church.