Passages: Luke 4:1-13, Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1:12-13
What was Jesus facing when fasting for 40 days? Our discussion took some interesting paths: 1) our own thoughts/opinions about fasting for 40 days colored our thinking 2) we wondered how “out of your mind” someone would be after 40 days – leading us to be inspired by the focus of Jesus in this moment and 3) the fact that this exercise was really hard because we don’t know what is/isn’t sin after 40 days/nights (could doubting God if you are God be considered sin?). We were not sure on where to land in this whole discussion, but I think I believe that whatever is short of sin here, Jesus felt it.
The Father and Spirit let Jesus (drove Him to it, even) go through the wilderness for our benefit and to perhaps redeem all the broken prophets that failed in these places in the past (Moses, Abram, Elijah, etc). Jesus needed to be tempted and tried to fulfill His Father’s will and to legitimize the ministry in general. What are your other thoughts?
Finally, we spent some time mulling over this equation for sin – doubt leads to disbelief leads to disobedience. The Devil is a crafty one that starts us down this path, “Did God really say…” and we fall for it too often. May this post be a blessing to you if you are struggling with sin right now. Be free, study His word and focus on what is true! Jn 8:32
To buy the study for yourself and follow along (we will be doing days 8 and 9 next week) go here
christopher stukenberg 
Would you say that your equation for sin is typical and/or the only way? Does all sin start with doubt? I know that God judges if something is a sin or not – and that people are sinful by nature, but isn’t one definition of a sin something that you do intentionally? You know its wrong and choose to do it anyway? This could just be the Catholic theology background leaking into my brain again but I find it hard to narrow the causes of sin into such a simple formula because it appears that there are levels of sins – human nature that we do before we even know the difference between right and wrong and intentional.. I would say in my life the Devil isn’t tugging on my intellectual understandings of God’s truth as much as on my human selfishness and lazy side and my poor self-image (you can’t reach everyone so why try, nobody wants to hear what you have to say, why do you always have to question and make things so complicated).
It is not really “my” formula as much as how things seem to start and many have pointed this out. It is not that doubt is “Is God real?” or something like that, but doubting that God is good or all that He says He is… Satan starts sin off with “Did God really say…” and that is the start of our sin. The very thoughts you end your post with are what I mean – there is doubt there… we are not always doubting God, but perhaps doubting His power in us, etc etc etc. Does that help at all?