This Is My Desire: Consume Me Like A Fire

I just started reading the book of Matthew. I know all of the gospels are similar in that they all tell the story of Jesus but not all of them have the same stories and they all have different writing styles. I was reading about how Jesus just started his ministry...craziest thing. We hear about his birth and a little about his childhood and then BAM! All of a sudden Jesus is almost 30 or already 30 or so and he's ready to start his ministry. I wonder what Jesus was doing during his teen years, and during his 20s. Like that will be a question I will have for God when I get to heaven. Haha! But anyways, so Jesus gets baptized by John the Baptist...blah, blah, blah. And then Jesus gets led away into the desert by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil. So Jesus gets in to the desert and he fasts for 40 days and 40 nights and THEN the devil comes to tempt him. First the devil tempts him with the idea of food. He tells Jesus that since he's God he can turn the stones into bread. And Jesus says back to him that humans don't live on food alone, but that they do (and should) live on EVERY word that comes out of the mouth of God. This is interesting...I've never really thought of this passage as saying those words. Most pastors try to relate that statement to just what's written in the Bible. And I think they are right, the Bible is definitely made up of words that come from the mouth of God, but I don't think we should limit it to that. God still speaks to us in very real ways today, whether we get a sign or we feel God is speaking to us in our hearts, or even, but extremely rare, we hear an audible voice. So anyways this next part is interesting to me. It says that the devil took Jesus and had him stand on the pinnacle of the temple. Some versions say that the devil took Jesus and set him on the pinnacle of the temple. This is how awesome Jesus is...he let the devil tell him where to go and what to do and he still resisted the temptation of the devil. That's so opposite of us as humans. When WE let the devil tell us where to go and what to do we end up giving into the temptation...maybe because we figure, "Hey, we're already here, I've practically committed the sin already, may as well just do it" or whatever other reason we come up with. So the devil tempts Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple with a straight-up weak temptation. He told Jesus that if he was really Jesus, if he was really the son of God then he would be able to throw himself off the top of the temple and the angels would save him from getting hurt. Jesus just has a few words to say this time, "It is written, do not tempt the Lord thy God." And then for the last temptation the devil takes Jesus to this super high mountain and he showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world (as if Jesus, who was there and helped create the world and is 100% God, didn't know that these kingdoms were there). The devil tempted Jesus by saying "all these kingdoms that you see here can be yours Jesus, if you bow down and worship me." Two things wrong with this statement: (1) God would never bow down to the devil, and (2) if Jesus would have bowed down to the devil he would have actually had to have given ownership of those kingdoms to the devil. See God already owned these kingdoms. They are his, not the devil's. The devil had no right to give them away. So if Jesus would have bowed down to the devil then he would have actually given up his ownership of everything. I like to think that Jesus gets pissed off here and yells his response back to the devil. He says, "Go Satan! For it is written: You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve him only." After this, the devil leaves and Jesus is ministered to by the angels. What I take away from this passage of scripture is that Jesus resisted the devil's temptation's by quoting scripture. I think this gives us all the more reason to be in the Bible so that we know how to combat temptations when they come up. This is just another way in which I would like to be like Jesus. This is my desire, Lord: consume me like a fire.