The First Forty Days (of Freshman Year)

SUMMARY

On Senior Sunday at Broadway Church of Christ, Bryan Brunson addresses graduating seniors Spencer and Evelyn through the lens of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. Drawing parallels between Jesus' graduation into public ministry and the students' transition to adulthood, Brunson explores three key temptations that both Jesus and modern graduates face. The first temptation involves taking shortcuts to satisfaction - turning stones to bread - which he relates to seeking quick dopamine hits through shallow pursuits rather than addressing deeper spiritual hunger. The second temptation is the "identity stunt" of jumping from the temple to prove oneself, which parallels the pressure graduates feel to perform or compromise their values to gain attention and belonging in new environments.

The final temptation involves bowing to worldly kingdoms for easy success, which Brunson warns against as he encourages the graduates not to put their faith "on the shelf" for four years in pursuit of worldly achievement. Throughout his message, Brunson weaves in personal anecdotes from coaching T-ball and his own college experience, creating a relatable and conversational tone. He specifically addresses Spencer's proximity to home (going to San Angelo) and Evelyn's distance (Harding University in Arkansas, 9 hours and 44 minutes away), warning against letting either distance or proximity make their faith lazy. The sermon concludes with the reminder that just as angels attended Jesus after his victory over temptation, the church community serves as support for those facing life's challenges.

TRANSCRIPTION:

It's been a few minutes since I cried, and that has happened twice this morning. And it didn't feel any better when, as I was sitting in the fellowship hall just before worship started. And we're gathering together as the people who are organizing worship, and there's students coming in and out, looking at all these senior tables, and a boy with a pink polo T shirt runs in, and he shows me this little picture of how big he is today and how tall he is and how much he weighs. And I thought, Carol would do this on a Senior Sunday to give each of us a reminder of just how big or small our children were at one point. And as I think about our seniors and all of the amazing accomplishments that they've had over their high school careers, it's long and it's extensive.

If you walked in this morning, hopefully you got one of their little bio sheets, and you're able to see that these kids do not have a free second whatsoever. But if they do have some free time, that it is spent with people that they love in the context of community. And so today is a sort of interesting day at Broadway for Senior Sunday as well. As long as I've been here, which this is now my fourth senior Sunday, we do not have a single student. And again, we have two this year that are not staying in Lubbock.

We have one that's going to the next thriving oasis of West Texas. Drumroll, please. It's San Angelo, Texas. I can't tell you which one is more beautiful, San Angelo or Lubbock. But we also have this place that has trees and it has grass, but it's just a bit further away.

And just to be sure, as I got to church this morning, I wanted to double check, how far is it from the Broadway Church of Christ to Searcy, Arkansas? 9 hours and 44 minutes away. And that scared me. I'm somebody who. I love getting in the car and I love the long road trips.

But. But as I think about Evelyn going away, I think that this story that we'll talk about today is one that will find all of us. And of course, it's Senior Sunday. We're thinking about Spencer and Evelyn. But I invite you to begin thinking about what your graduation into, what adulthood looked like.

Maybe you went straight to the workforce, maybe you went to a university. But I want you to begin to think about what it looked like for you to launch, who were the people that were around you, and maybe even some of those temptations that we may have faced over along the way. And oftentimes we like to view graduation as this finish line. Hooray, we got to the end and then it's time to load up your entire life and to go to somewhere new to maybe where a couple of people know your name. You might have some roommates that know you somewhat well.

But then you get to your very first class and realize none of them are with me. And there's 40 to 50 people that have no idea who I am. And I used to I was somebody. And then you're in a 50 minute lecture over health and science like I was. And I'm like, this is not exactly what I thought this was going to be.

I thought it might even be just a little bit more exciting. In fact, you normally enter what is the desert. And we see this in Jesus life. So as we walk through the story of Jesus first temptation, his graduation into public ministry, right? He comes from being baptized where the Holy Spirit has come down.

It's descended in the form of a dove. And it said, this is my son in whom I am well pleased. And I know that the Fishers and the Friars and the McMahans today can look and say, this is Spencer, my son. With him I'm well pleased. And I know for a fact with Evelyn because I've sat on a plane with Brian talking about this.

This is Evelyn Fisher in whom he is well pleased and very excited about all that this has to go. This first temptation that Jesus faces. He goes into the desert for 40 days without eating and a pretty good person. Just last week told us how important it is for our own spiritual formation to do two things, eat some food and take a nap. Jesus has not been like taking care of himself like Carl I've told us to do just last week.

There's been no food in this desert whatsoever. He's hungry. He's at his physical breaking point. And here we see this that Jesus was led into the spirit or led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And in fact, these high points like graduation are also normally followed by these deserts of our independence where our opinion or our choices are our own for the very first time.

Jesus is hungry. He's at his physical breaking point. And Satan, I love kind of making these conversations, right? I'll talk to a tree if it comes to it, right? I've sat there and talked T ball strategy with people for the last six weeks.

It's become a little bit of my life. I'll talk all the time. And in this conversation the devil's saying hey Jesus, you're at your absolute physical breaking point. And if the Holy Spirit has just descended on you in power and you're about to begin your public ministry, surely you've got the power to do this. You're a hungry guy, all you got to do is snap your fingers and what you immediately need is right there in front of you.

In fact, we might say today the devil's saying, take the shortcut to satisfaction. Everybody else is cutting these same corners. Jesus, why don't you go and do the same thing? Why don't you cut those corners? When you're going to be tempted, you're going to be tempted to turn stones into bread.

You'll look for a very quick hit of dopamine. You'll look for a very quick jolt of energy or something that's going to give you just a little level of excitement to get through that day. The Brunson's right now we have two very young kids, a four year old and almost one year old. And sometimes our motto is survive the day. There's a lot of stuff on the calendar.

There's elders meetings, there's baseball practice, there's Wednesday night worship, then there's baseball games and then we have things with in laws. Sometimes it simply is just to survive the day. In fact, we oftentimes are tempted to turn these stones into bread. We'll look for these very quick hits of dopamine in a bottle or a screen or maybe even in a significant other in a relationship where we're trying to find our self worth and value and inside of them we'll try and satisfy soul hunger, this deep longing for a relationship with God, with something simply physical but shallow. Bread won't sustain the deep calling that Jesus is inviting you and me to be a part of today.

Being a disciple of Jesus costs us something like we've been talking about over the last few weeks. It costs us our time, it cost us our energy, it even costs us our status. Oftentimes we create this great picture for what we want our world to look like. We only for once we get to adulthood to realize it's all gotta come crumbling down so that there would be more of him and less of me, so that others, so that Jesus might be glorified in every word. And then Jesus, I have to imagine that it went down this way because if you're a person who's just gotten the Holy Spirit that's come upon you in power, that he looks Satan right in the eye and he just says man does not live on Bread alone.

Mic drop moment. I'm Jesus. Get wrecked, Satan. I don't think that that's exactly how it went, but we know that Jesus looks him straight in the eye and says, this is who the power and authority comes from. Jesus looks him right in the eye and says, I live on every word that comes from God my father, and he's not going to fuel his body with anything that is outside of the spirit.

As we go to this next temptation that Jesus faces, I call it the identity stunt. Satan takes him to the highest point and says, Jesus, just prove that you're the son of God. The scripture says that you're going to be rescued if you're really the son of God. Just jump. Just take one little step right there.

Make a scene and God will surely catch you. This is normally our temptation to perform, to do something outside of our own limits so that others might notice us. And whenever we're at a place where nobody knows our story, there's more of a temptation to be become less of who we're called to be and more of what the world is trying to get us to become. And if you have to jump in order to get somebody's attention, you will have to jump every step of the way in order to keep it. They're gonna continue to ask you to go over and over and over again.

It's the pressure to perform and maybe do something reckless to change your personality or to compromise your own boundaries just to see if you can get something from this new crowd. A lot of us do this in order to feel a sense of belonging. But Jesus simply again looks Satan right there in the eye. Don't test God. And we don't have to audition for a role that we already have a seat at Jesus table.

He's given us these good works beforehand for us to do. We do not have to audition for God's love. We do not have to fight for this seat at the table. Oftentimes as a T ball coach, this is happening. Okay, so all my analogies go back to T ball.

You're just going to have to go with me because this is the stage of life that we're currently at right now. We're. We're drawing this line, and I was talking about it with another coach last night, that we want them to be competitive. They're five and six years old. Barrett's the youngest kid in the league.

We want them to have a level of competitiveness, but we also just want them to learn the game. We want them to learn to love all of that. And in fact, these kids will begin to do these identity stunts of slamming their bats down on home plate to see I've got great power. And it happened so much last night that I just almost screamed my head, head off. Thought somebody might have come and done that.

That it seems like they have to audition for the attention and appeal to all of these people, when in fact you just, you know that at the end of it, the outcome of that has nothing to do with who they are. Sweet little Barrett last night got tagged out going from first to second and it's happened twice this week. And luckily we were down a coach last night. So a second coach Brunson emerged from the crowd and, and came there into the dugout. And as sweet little Barrett, Brunson walked all the way back to the dugout, the first person he saw sitting on the bucket of balls was mom.

And she just wrapped him up in this really big hug. And I was like, okay, Sarah might need to be in the dugout every game because we all need this. We need to be able to tell people, you don't have to perform for my love or for my affection. Don't have to jump high. You've just got to be you.

And I sat there and she hugged him for about four or five minutes almost until we went back into the field and he plays catcher. And so as many of you know, getting the catcher's gear on is not the easiest thing in the world to do, especially for a squirming four year old who can claim, and I quote, he told Sarah, I know how to do it. So as I was running back in from the field, they were. The top one was at the bottom, the middle ones were all mixed up. We were all sorts of bent out of shape.

We don't have to jump in order to get these people's attention. We don't have to put our God to the test. In fact, we even see this in this final temptation of what the easy kingdom looks like. Satan again takes Jesus to this very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and all of their splendor. All this I'll give to you.

He said, if you just bow down and worship me, you're going to see people win by playing dirty. In fact, there was a coach Gyro stepping all the way to the mound the other day. It's almost like he was just tossing it to him right in front of him. And I went, ref, come on, he's cutting the corner. And we lost by like 30 runs.

But like it was okay because it was T ball again, right? But I began thinking about all of these, these moments that I wanted to tell my son, that's not the right way to do it. Or as we see other people who are abusing their power. Son, they're doing that for their own glory. They're not doing that for the glory of God.

And we have to be able to call all of those things out. And Jesus does that so perfectly. Here you'll see people getting internships. Spencer and Evelyn, you'll see them getting internships. You'll see this popularity, especially at a place like Harding University.

It's very similar to Lubbock Christian where like there's lots of students that go there, but the cultures inside of them are really small. Everybody knows everybody, you know what club they're in. You know, the ones who are involved in student life, you know, the ones who are really good at intramural. I was not known as any of those things. I was known as the 130 pound Bible major in Sub-T.

That's essentially all that I was known for.

In fact, one of the easy temptations that the devil kind of whispers to us. And again, we know that the devil comes in all shapes and sizes. As he's right there on top of the mountain. I imagine that there might even be a moment where he had to shout. But we know he's close enough to just Jesus to have this conversation, this whisper of, you know, just do this.

Oftentimes that's how each of our temptations come for our young people. It looks something like, hey, you just put your, just put your faith on the shelf for four years. If you can work really hard to get really good grades and graduate on time and graduate with less student debt, if you can get this awesome internship, then maybe, just maybe you'll have a step up on everybody else in this competitive, competitive culture just to get ahead. You can put your faith on the show for four years again. Maybe you can just be a Christian again when you're 30, maybe when you figured it out.

Whenever your brain has fully formed. And then you can really begin to grasp the psychosocial realities of the world as well as the cost of following Jesus. And that's a lie that's told to us by the devil. And if you have to bow for the world to get your. Or if you have to bow to the world to get your kingdom or the attention, the world owns you.

Jesus then says to the devil, worship the Lord your God and serve him only. And then we see the devil simply have to leave at the sight of Jesus or at the sound of Jesus proclaiming the truth that he has seen and heard all through scripture. As we think about what it looks like for us to practically live this out here at the end of our week, as we think about this, we know that right here at the very end, I love this very last line and I feel like we probably overlook it sometimes. And the devil left him and the angels came and attended him. Man, it's really easy for us to just forget that part.

We know that Jesus championed and beat all of these different temptations that the devil threw at him. We have the angels come and attend to the Son of God. Is that not what we do coming here every week? I'm not saying any of us are angels, but what I am saying is we come here every single week knowing some of the temptations that our friends and family are facing on an every week basis. There's people that recently that I've talked to that are just like, I'm at the end of myself.

The things that my work is asking me to do are making me lose my hair, it's making me go gray, and I'm just sick and tired of it. But once a week I get to come here and be surrounded by this holy community, that they might come and lift me up so that I might be honoring God every step of the way. It might be maybe just this moment of being here for an hour and a half or an hour with your small group or on Wednesday night where you get encouraged about that to fill your cup in order to do what it is that you have to do every single day of the week.

Jesus didn't just survive in the desert because he was strong. And of course, Jesus is incredibly strong. But Jesus was more anchored in what the truth of scripture said and the call that God had placed on his life. You can be super powerful, guys. You can know all of these different things.

You can know how to do finance. You can know how to cut a person open, how to administer medicine, what all of those do. Congratulations and kudos to you. I know none of that. You could be like Evelyn and decide to, like, triple major in everything that Harding has to offer.

That's powerful. Her combination of power and knowledge and strength and being anchored in God's word and knowing in that moment when she needs to be surrounded by those who love her and know the truth about what God has called her to, that's where we find this. And even for Spencer, I want you to think about this. So as we have these dichotomies that we got just a few hours away, right? And 10 hours away.

Spencer, don't let the proximity to home make your faith lazy so many times. I could tell you this from experience in that first year of being here in Lubbock and there's so many great churches that you could be a part of. I chose to be a part of not many of them that very first year. And it wasn't because I didn't believe in Jesus or all of these other things. I did the temptation to cut every single corner.

Well, what if I just, you know, did that later? What bit me in the butt in the way of a spring break? My parents saying, we know your grades, we know your habits, and we've seen your bank account. And it's not reflecting the kind of person that we have raised. And it's like, okay, I did not realize they had access to that many things.

Might need to reevaluate that.

But they sat down and they challenged me and they said, we think that you probably have made home a retreat, right? That you probably just said you're going to cut the corner every single place else. And that I had made the proximity to home lazy for my faith. That if I ever just needed a quick little recharge, I could drive two hours to the golf course road Church of Christ to all the people that I knew, feel really encouraged. But then I would go back to Lubbock in that same tiny little dorm in JH that hasn't been updated since 1914, and I would still feel lost.

And for Evelyn, for this 10 hour situation that you've got going on, that it's not just a, I'm feeling homesick. I need to hang out with Marianne right this second. I guess Ewan can be involved in that too. I even think about as we were celebrating the life of Rebecca Talley just a few weeks ago, as they talked about all of the singing that happened. This is another family who sings if they wanted to get together and have that ensemble.

It's not just quick for Evelyn to be like, I'm gonna hop in the car so that those things can happen. Don't let the distance from home make you think that you're out of God's reach or even out of the reach of this church family. As I even look around at the people who are just behind you. And as I've looked over here, I've heard you over the last few years mention these people by name. And Spencer's sitting next to one of his greatest friends in life right now.

These are the people who we've lived relationally with. None of this can make us further from God's reach. Jesus is anchored in the Word. Every time the enemy spoke a lie, Jesus responded with the truth of Scripture. As we close in this time together, I'm going to invite the worship team to go ahead and come back up.

If you have made plans to join us for lunch, that is going to be in the fellowship hall just immediately after worship has ended. If you did not RSVP for that lunch, I would still encourage you to stop by if you didn't have time in between Bible class and worship to go and look at those. These are some of the most well done senior tables that I have seen. They are decorated from corner to corner. They put in a lot of work over the years to make sure that you knew about all of their passions and how they're aligning with Christ.

So church, would you stand with us as we close out our time together in worship?