Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What's Your Legacy? | New Testament | Matthew 4

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in 2023. Get your FREE reading plan here. What do you want to be known for? How do you spend your life? In today's episode, Patrick shares what Jesus did and didn't live for in Matthew 4. Listen to find out how you can make your life more like Jesus's. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Matthew 4

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. Okay, so I promise that I'm not a morbid person, but I used to have this habit back when I did college ministry of taking small groups to graveyards. And what we do when we get there is I would just send the members of the small group around the graveyard to look at what the tombstone said. Now, a lot of them were normal.

They just had names and birth dates and dates of death. but a lot of them also had accomplishments written on them. I remember one tombstone was from a former governor of Missouri, and it listed out all of his lifelong accomplishments. There were others that had Bible verses that suggested what those people had accomplished in their life. There were others that talked about people as parents or as business owners. And the whole goal of this was to get everybody to ask, what do you want to be written on your tombstone? When you die, what do you want your legacy to be? I mean, one day you won't be here. They'll be people in a church or maybe a funeral parlor and they'll be remembering your life. And I wanted

them to ask the question in their early 20s, what do you want your life legacy to be? What about you? What do you want to have written on your tombstone? What do you want your legacy to be? And I want you to think about your life. Are you spending your time on the things that matter most? I ask us because if I look at my own life, there's so many ways where I'm spending hours and hours of every week on things that really don't matter in the long term, on things that maybe aren't going to be the most important thing on the day that I die. I'm also asking this because in today's culture, if you ask people, what's your legacy? What are you living for? Well, there's kind of a ready-made answer. We're told to live for ourselves. And we don't say that directly because it sounds a little

proud and a little selfish, but we see it in how we live. We talk about treating yourself, or treat yourself, I guess, is what the phrase is. We talk about actualization and understanding your personality. We try to train 18, 19, 20-year-olds to go off into the workforce and to make a splash and to be successful in their vocation. We tell people to get into therapy, to do self-care, to take care of their bodies. And I'm not saying that any of these things are bad things in and of themselves. I'm just asking the question, if our culture is telling us that living for yourself is the best thing that you can do, is that really the legacy that we want to have. I remember a few years ago, a friend of mine went to a cemetery. Again, maybe he's

another kind of morbid guy like me. And he took a picture of this mausoleum, you know, one of those giant tombstones with a building attached to it. And the picture is striking because on top of the mausoleum, there's just one word, self. Now, to be clear, I'm pretty sure that it was the last name of the guy that the mausoleum was remembering. But when he took the picture, it just reminded me that living for yourself really is a death sentence. That living for yourself really is a tomb. It's not a legacy worth living for. And yet if you look at how we spend our time, how much of it is just on ourselves, making ourselves happier, making ourselves more comfortable, making ourselves more self-actualized, making the world around us such that it matches what we want for ourselves.

And I think in America, we all run the risk of living for ourselves and making that our legacy. In Matthew's Gospel chapter four, he describes the beginning of Jesus's ministry. And in this chapter, he's showing what Jesus's legacy is going to be. I mean, what would be written over Jesus's tombstone? I mean, I get it. He's resurrected. He doesn't have a tomb to speak of. So there's nothing to go look at in that sense.

But you see the big picture. What was Jesus's legacy going to be? I mean, if anyone could live for themselves and do it in a not sinful way, surely it would be Jesus. And maybe it would be justifiable. I mean, he's God after all. also living for himself is living for God. But was that Jesus' legacy? Did he live for himself? Well, in Matthew chapter four, I think we get an answer to that question. There's a number of stories that get told here, and they tell us what Jesus lived for, what his legacy would be. But the way

Matthew opens it is by telling us what Jesus didn't live for. You see, in Matthew 4, we read the story of how the devil took Jesus out into the wilderness, and he tempted Jesus there. And what did he tempt Jesus with? well, he tempted Jesus to live for himself. Let's just pick up the passage in Matthew 4, verse 3. The tempter, that's the devil, came to him and said, If you are the son of God, tell these stones to become bread. Now, context, Jesus had been fasting, so he was hungry. And so, again, is Jesus going to live for himself?

If he wanted to, he could turn those stones into bread. But catch out Jesus answered. Jesus answered, it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. Then the devil took him to the holy city. So this is Jerusalem. And he set him on the highest point of the temple. If you are the son of God, he said, 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. But Jesus answered him, it is also written. Do not put the Lord your God to the test. And again, in today's world, focusing on yourself, building a platform, doing something that everyone can see, that's amazing, that everybody celebrates. Well, that's something that we think we should do. That's a legacy we should want. And so why wouldn't Jesus go to the top of the temple and throw himself down and let angels catch him and show to the world?

I really am a big deal. But Jesus rejects the offer. He's not going to live for himself. The story continues. Verse 8. Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their splendor. All this I will give to you, he said, if you 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. And then the devil left him and angels came and attended to him. Again, that last temptation is perhaps the ultimate temptation of the self to want to become the greatest, to want to become the best, to want to become the most famous, to rule over every kingdom of the world. We not only want power, we want prestige,

we want notoriety, we want celebrity, we want to live for ourselves. But Jesus rejects the offer to live for himself, to make himself great. Instead, he tells the devil, get away from me. I want nothing to do with what you're offering. You see, if we could go and find Jesus's team so much again doesn't exist. If you can go and find it, we know one thing. It wouldn't say self on the top of it. Even though he was God, he didn't live for himself. The story continues in the next few verses, and it describes how Jesus called his first disciples. He went around the cities of Galilee, and he, One by one called people to follow him, to learn from him, to become apprentice to him. And why does Matthew tell us this? Because Jesus didn't live for himself. He lived for others.

Jesus didn't live to make himself great. He lived to make other people great. He didn't live to make himself a big deal. He lived to train up disciples, to mentor them, to care for them, to make much of them. You see, if there was anything written over Jesus's tombstone, I think it wouldn't be self. I think it would be others. Matthew concludes this section by just summarizing Jesus' early ministry. This is verse 23. Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and illness among the people.

Stop and think about that. What was Jesus' ministry? He told people good news. And then he healed them. Matthew goes on to say that people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon possessed, those having seizures and the paralyzed, and he healed them. Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and the region across the Jordan followed him. Again, Jesus gets a following. Sure, that's true, but it wasn't for himself. Why were people

following him? Because again, he was about others. He was there to heal them. He was there to set them free from demonic oppression. Jesus didn't live for himself. That wasn't his legacy. His legacy was dying for others. His legacy was forgiving their sins at the cost of his own life. Yes, Jesus is the king. He got everything that the devil promised, but he didn't get it by putting himself first. He did it by laying down his life for those who were his enemies. What's your legacy going to be in your life? What will be ridden under your tombstone? When people go to your funeral, what will they say about you? Is it all the things that you're spending your time focusing on and worrying about? or do you think it should be about something else? See, I think God has called us to live for him.

He wants us to make our lives about him, his glory, his goodness. And when we do that, or perhaps the best way to do that, is by loving others, by putting others first, by sacrificing ourselves for their needs. That's a legacy worth living. Thanks so much for listening. Before you shut your podcast app off, I want to invite you to read the New Testament with us. It's great that you're listening along with these podcasts, but if you want to take one step further and get through the entire New Testament in a year, click the link in our show notes. If you do that, you'll get a PDF with the reading plan that we're going through. You can use that plan to read one chapter of the New Testament every weekday and then listen to the corresponding episode where we'll explain

some of what it means for you and your life.