And so it begins. Pitchers and catchers reported Friday for spring training. The countdown to opening day has begun: we’re under 40 days. And for us Texas Rangers’ fans, this is going to be the year, finally.

But why go to spring training out there in the Arizona desert? These ballplayers stay in shape all year long now. Some play winter ball in the Dominican Republic or Mexico or Venezuela. They know how to play. But before the games count for real, they need to bond as a team and compete against themselves in order to be ready. They practice the fundamentals all over again—throw to the right base, hit the cutoff man, lay down the bunt. They want to master the little things in spring training that will make a big difference in the outcome of games in the dog days of summer.

Today is the first Sunday in the Christian season of Lent. The word lent originally meant the spring season, and it had to do with the time between winter, when people ate what they had stored up from the fall harvest, and summer, when things would grow again. During springtime you might be forced to do without, and you had to learn to manage yourself when you were deprived of things you wanted.

You can see how the Lenten idea fits nicely with this as you intentionally train yourself spiritually in a period of fasting and prayer. Lent lasts 40 days to commemorate Jesus’ 40 days in the desert, which itself commemorated Israel’s 40 years in the desert between leaving the winter of their discontent in Egypt and experiencing their eternal summer in the Promised Land.

During this spiritual season we are in our own kind of spring training. Instead of cultivating soil, we cultivate soul. We put a spade in it and turn it over to see what turns up. We break up what has hardened inside us. We plant seed in it. We let God get to us so that we may grow again.

Even Jesus underwent a kind of Lenten discipline. Sometimes we Baptists wrongly think that Christian holy days and seasons are the invention of the Roman Catholic Church, and one way to prove we’re not Catholics is not to observe such seasons. That was the reasoning 400 years ago when Baptists began, but we know differently now. Our forebears acted on the best information they had then, but in the late 1800s several documents from the early church were discovered that proved that the apostles themselves observed this 40-day period of spiritual training. The church in Rome was actually slower to adopt customs like Lent than churches in places like Britain and Gaul.

So nowadays Baptists and other churches that we call “free churches” are not only free from things we have to do but free to do things that we want to do, even if Catholics and others do them, too. A big part of who we are has always had to do with restoring the practices of the early church. And now that we know what the apostles did, we have begun to renew such practices for our own good.

But in doing so, we find our best help in looking to Jesus. As always, don’t you know?! Immediately after his baptism and before he began his public ministry, Jesus went alone into the desert, we are told by Luke, to be tempted by the devil. He went apart from other people because he wanted to be a part of God’s kingdom. And to be a part of God’s kingdom, he had to be apart from the kingdoms of this world that seek to tear us apart from God. In the desert, Jesus learned how not to come apart on the inside when the pressure became too great.

Jesus learned in the desert to overcome temptation before he faced it in other forms among people. He faced up to trials in the desert so that he would endure his time of trial in Jerusalem. He passed his tests in the desert so that he was prepared for the hardest test, which led to the cross.

If we ourselves can keep from coming apart within by learning what Jesus learned, we will be better prepared to walk his way. And Jesus taught us what the old gospel hymn says, that “The Way of the Cross Leads Home.” There is no being at home with God in the end if it doesn’t go the way of the cross in the meantime.

So let’s begin with Jesus in the desert. The first thing we notice is that Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit. Now that shouldn’t surprise us, but the next thing does. Being full of the Holy Spirit did not lead him away from temptation but to it. The Spirit actually led Jesus in the wilderness, Luke says, where he would be tempted by the devil.

Most of the time we think of temptation as a bad thing. We are taught by Jesus to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” And yet, because we are human, we will encounter it one way or another. What we learn from Jesus here is the one way to encounter it so that we don’t choose another. We should face it full of the Holy Spirit. If our defenses are strong, temptation will make us stronger, not weaker; it can raise us up instead of knocking us down. It will be a trial we can win, a test we can pass. And in doing so, we will be better prepared for the way of the cross.

The famed chemist Louis Pasteur said, When the time to perform arrives, the time to prepare is past. Chance favors only the mind that is prepared. When we go deep into the wilderness of our soul and inspect our capacity to say no to temptations like those that Jesus encountered, we will be prepared for victory over them in the public arena of our life.

Looking more closely at what happened between Jesus and the devil in the desert will help us. The devil tempts Jesus. The word for devil is diablos. It literally means to throw down. The devil throws down verbal assaults in order to overthrow Jesus and take him down. He tempts him. He tries him. He tests him. The word that translates all three—tempt, try, and test—is the same word in Greek: peirozo. It means to pierce. It’s like sticking a stick in your heart. It means being poked at by the opposition. We don’t like it, and we don’t want any part of it.

But the devil doesn’t come to us as an adversary; he comes to us exactly the opposite way— posing as a friend, appealing to us in appealing ways. I mean, if you looked at a donut and your first thoughts were how fat it would make you, you wouldn’t eat it. But if your first thought was about how good it would taste, you might. The devil doesn’t growl at you; he grovels over you. He flatters you and appeals to your ego.

If you are the Son of God, the devil says to Jesus. He knows who Jesus is. Jesus knows who he is. And the devil tempts him with a sense of entitlement.

This is a big part of what we all have to overcome in temptation. And it’s something we have had a vivid example of this week. In his public statement on Friday, Tiger Woods may not have satisfied everyone about his sincerity. Mostly, I think that’s because he doesn’t know how to do genuine emotion. He’s never learned that side of life. But at least he said some things that prove he’s getting it. Listen: I stopped living by the core values that I was taught to believe in. I knew my actions were wrong, but I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only about myself. I ran straight through the boundaries that a married couple should live by. I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them. I was wrong. I was foolish. I don’t get to play by different rules. The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me.

Jesus understood that, too. If he had chosen to separate himself from what normal human beings have to go through because he was the Son of God, he could never have saved us. He could save only those parts of us that he experienced. And so he experienced everything we did in order that we can be healed. You can never say that God doesn’t know your pain, because in some deep and mysterious way in Jesus, God did feel what you feel. And because Jesus did not give in to it, you can conquer it, too, with his help.

But you have to give up the idea that you are entitled. You are truly free only if you are as able to say no to what you may have to as you are able to say yes to it. And sometimes it’s not even that you will never have it, but that you will not have it right now.

One way the devil tempted Jesus and tempts us is by taking shortcuts to what we want, convincing us that we can have things now without waiting and working, without going through the pain and instead avoiding it. That’s what psychiatrists call magical thinking. It’s the idea that we can magically have things without effort. And this feeds into religious thinking when we assume that God is there to make our life easy.

It’s like the guy who decided to lose weight. He took his new diet seriously, even changing his driving route to avoid his favorite bakery. One morning, however, he showed up at work with a gigantic coffeecake. Everyone in the office scolded him, but he just smiled and explained: This is a special coffee cake. I accidentally drove by the bakery this morning and there in the window was a host of goodies. I felt it was no accident, so I prayed, ‘Lord, if you want me to have one of those delicious coffee cakes, let there be a parking spot open right in front.’ And sure enough, the eighth time around the block, there it was!

We delude ourselves when we play games with God in order to justify our wants. Tiger cited something from Buddhism in his speech that rings true in Christianity, too. Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint.

This is what Jesus learned in the desert. He was famished after 40 days of fasting, and the devil even used scripture to make him cave in to his desires.

The writer and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor says it this way about Jesus’ struggle with the devil: What this dialog proves among other things is that the devil is biblically literate. He knows exactly where to find the Bible verses he needs to put Jesus to the test, but Jesus knows more than what the Bible says. Jesus knows how to do what the Bible says, which is how he passes his wilderness exam. Every time the devil offered him more—more bread, more power, more protection—Jesus turned him down. No to the bread, Jesus says, no to the kingdoms, no to the angelic bodyguards. He is full up, he says, on worshipping God and serving only him. So by the end of the story, the devil still has all his bribes in his bag and Jesus is free to go.

Free to go the way of the cross, actually. But as we shall learn, that is true freedom, because the way of the cross leads home.