Sermon for February 22, 2026, First Sunday in Lent

Matthew 4:1-11 (First Sunday in Lent—Series A)

“Christ, Our Redeemer, Lived and Died in Your Place”

Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer, Enfield, CT

February 22, 2026

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

The text is the Gospel Reading recorded in Matthew 4:

¹Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. ²And having fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. ³And the tempter came and said to Him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stone become bread.” ⁴And He answered and said, “It stands written, Man will not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” ⁵Then the devil took Him into the holy city and stood Him on the highest point of the temple ⁶and he said to Him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it stands written that He will command His angels concerning You and upon their hands they will bear You up, lest You strike Your foot against a stone. ⁷Jesus said to him, “Again it stands written, You shall not test the Lord your God.” ⁸Again the devil took Him into a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory ⁹and he said to Him, “All these things I will give to you, if you fall down and worship me.” ¹⁰The Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan [Adversary]! For it stands written, You shall worship the Lord your God and you shall serve Him alone.” ¹¹Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and began to serve Him.

          The name of our beloved congregation is Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer. Jesus Christ is Our Redeemer. To “redeem” means “to buy back.” In the explanation to the Second Article of the Creed, Martin Luther taught, “I believe that Jesus Christ . . . is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned person, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil.” He emphasizes how Christ bought us back saying that He redeemed us “not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death.”

          When we come to Good Friday at the end of this Season of Lent and Holy Week, we will again hear the Good News of Jesus’ death on a cross in our place. In fact, this is the Good News that we hear weekly—that Jesus has died for our sins. As our substitute, Jesus went to the cross in our place, suffering the death we deserve because of our sins. Christ shed His holy, precious blood so that our sins would be atoned for before God the Father, so that we might receive from His sacrificial death the forgiveness of our sins and rescue from death and from the power of the devil.

          Our sins and sinfulness had to be punished according to God’s justice and holiness. The curse of sin and death was upon humanity beginning in Genesis 3, as we heard again this morning. Adam’s sin, his failure to obey God’s will, had collective and universal results. St. Paul speaks of this in Romans 5, as we heard in the Epistle, that “one trespass led to condemnation for all men . . . .” And, “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” (Rom. 5:18-19 ESV). In, with, and under Adam’s sin, we sinned. In, with, and under Adam’s guilt, we are guilty. In, with, and under Adam’s death, we die. Again, Paul in Romans 5, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12 ESV).

          And so Jesus, God’s Son, took on human flesh so that He might be able to suffer for us the punishment of sin which is death. On the cross, Jesus bore the punishment for our transgression of God’s Law as He suffered hell and death in our place. Jesus redeemed us with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death. This aspect of our Redeemer’s saving work is called Jesus’ passive obedience.

          But there is another equally important aspect of Jesus’ saving work—His active obedience. Christ’s life was also lived in our place, as our substitute.

          Adam had, and all his descendants had and still have, the obligation to keep God’s Law as we know it from the Ten Commandments. In his questions and answers for those desiring to go the Sacrament of the Altar, Luther wrote: “Do you believe that you are a sinner? Yes, I believe it. I am a sinner. How do you know this? From the Ten Commandments, which I have not kept.” The Law show us our sins and failures always to love God and to love our neighbor. Like Adam, we have sinned. We have not been, as Jesus proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount, “perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48 ESV). As the Lord’s brother James wrote in his epistle by the power of the Spirit, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (James 2:10 ESV).

          We are the guilty, every one! If we are to be partakers of heaven, we must obey God’s Law perfectly. As lost people, sinful people, sons and daughters of Adam, we cannot! As our guilt was charged to Jesus on the cross, so He also assumed our obligation to keep the Law of God perfectly for us, as our substitute, in our place. We read in Galatians 3 and 4, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’ . . . But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 3:13; 4:4-5 ESV).

          Our Lord Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit “to be tempted by the devil.” Having taken the sinner’s place in the Jordan River to be baptized by John with “a baptism of repentance” for sins that were not His own, Jesus was then led up into the wilderness to face the temptations of Satan on behalf of all sinners.

There, Jesus overcame the devil’s tempting. Unlike Adam or us, He did not fall or fail. He obeyed God’s Law perfectly. We read in Hebrews 4 that Jesus in His life was “in every respect . . . tempted as we are, yet without sin.” That makes Jesus our perfect substitute in His obedient life. Where Adam and Eve and all of us have fallen short of God’s glory, Jesus did not. “He satisfied the Law; He fulfilled the Law perfectly, for He loved God with all His heart, and with all His soul, and with all His strength, and with all His mind, and He loved His neighbor as Himself. Therefore, when the Law comes and accuses you of not having kept it, bit it go to Christ. Say: There is the Man who has kept it; to Him I cling; He fulfilled it for me and gave His fulfillment to me” (Luther, quoted in Pieper, Christian Dogmatics III, 375).

As a result of Jesus’ perfect, righteous life of obedience, God the Father credits us with Jesus’ perfect life as if it were lived by us. Jesus, by grace, gives to us His perfect righteousness. Christ indeed is our substitute in both His life—His active obedience—and in His death—His passive obedience. So we believe that Jesus’ “obedience (not only in His suffering and dying, but also because He was voluntarily made under the Law in our place and fulfilled the Law by this obedience) is credited to us for righteousness. So, because of this complete obedience, which He rendered to His heavenly Father for us by doing and suffering and in living and dying, God forgives our sins. He regards us as godly and righteous, and He eternally saves us” (FC:SD III.15, emphasis mine).^[1]

In Jesus’ victory over the devil the wilderness, we are victorious. In, with, and under Christ’s keeping of the Ten Commandments throughout His earthly life and ministry, we keep the Ten Commandments. His perfect life is credited to us, and we are declared righteous and obedient. In exchange for His perfect life, Jesus freely took our sins upon Himself as if they were His own. The perfect Son of God in human flesh suffered and died on the cross to redeem us and to purchase our forgiveness and eternal life.

Our Redeemer’s active and passive obedience isn’t some abstract thing that only seminarians and pastors and theology professors toss around. Jesus’ perfect life was lived out on your behalf. Jesus’ death on the cross was carried out also as your substitute. And the blessing of Jesus’ obedient life and sacrificial death is received by you and me in Holy Baptism. Pastor Luther stood as sponsor (or godfather) for Bernhard von Anhalt at his baptism on April 1, 1540. The next day, Luther preached on Baptism and Christ’s work in His life and His death: “Is not this a beautiful, glorious exchange, by which Christ, who is wholly innocent and holy, not only takes upon himself another’s sin, that is, my sin and guilt, but also clothes and adorns me, who am nothing but sin, with his own innocence and purity? And then besides dies the shameful death of the Cross for the sake of my sins, through which I have deserved death and condemnation, and grants to me his righteousness, in order that I may live with him eternally in glorious and unspeakable joy. Through this blessed exchange, in which Christ changes places with us (something the heart can grasp only in faith), and through nothing else, are we freed from sin and death and given his righteousness and life as our own.”^[2]

          This is the work of our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, whose baptized people and congregation we are. He has redeemed us from sin and death with His perfect life of obedience to God lived in our place and with His sacrificial death on the cross which He died for you and me. His righteousness given to us in exchange for our sins; His precious blood shed in death to give us forgiveness and everlasting life. Amen.

     ^[1] Paul Timothy McCain, ed., Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions (St. Louis: Concordia, 2005), 537–538.

     ^[2] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 51: Sermons I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 316.