Go Jesus!

[Matthew 4:1]
It was when Wild at Heart quoted this passage that I knew that book was going to suck. It used "the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness" as Biblical proof that macho bear-wrestling men are God's favorite kind of men, leaving off the rest of sentence that says the wilderness thing was so Jesus could have a run-in with the Devil.
Eldredge's brainwashing crap aside, it's interesting that the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness specifically to be tempted. Immediately after Jesus publicly accepted his death and resurrection, He gets to take a test over what it's going to take to pull this off.
Know that when you make a decision, you're immediately going to have to face tough choices about it. The devil likes to attack your decisions to convince you that you're not able to commit things in hopes that you'll stop trying, and God tends to allow these temptations so that you can see that you can overcome them.

[4:2-4]
To prep for the adventures ahead, Jesus fasted for forty days. After a forty-day fast, He was hungry. This brought on the first test: the devil told him "well, you've got your magic Jesus-powers, and I assume your fast is over since you Jews like your forty-day things, so why don't you just zap yourself up some bread out of these here rocks?"
Jesus replies with the Scripture "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."
So the first test was basically for Jesus to "cheat" and get Himself some bread using His privileges as God. We'll see later that Jesus is not hesitant to use a miracle or two when it comes to making food for people, so it's interesting that this miracle is one He won't do. Part of it is that this miracle would have been only for Himself, and not others. But I think the biggest issue here is that He's fresh off of His baptism, committing Himself to the mission of coming and dying for our sins. This requires that He comes and lives life as human being completely: that He walks as we walk, eats as we eat, and resists temptation using the same willpower that we use. If He were not fully human and able to fall for all the same reasons we could, His sacrifice would not have been as transferable as it was and teh redemption of the human race would not have been complete.
If Jesus had gone through with this desire and miracled up some bread, that would have been a step away from His commitment to live life as a human. If He can conjure up food whenever He feels like it, it's a slippery slope from there to just poofing around everywhere with teleport powers and making sure other temptations come nowhere near Him, cheapening and possibly nullifying His victory over sin. There probably was nothing wrong with making some bread, but it was the beginning of a path He did not want to travel.
It must have been hard for Jesus to go through life, knowing this power was there and not using it. It's like playing a video game and trying not to use a guide, when the internet is just sitting there going "Come on...you're stuck... look up the solution to this one puzzle... you're not even having fun right now, what could it hurt?" but that first solution you look up pretty much dooms you to using a guide for the rest of the game, and your achievements are hollow and fake.
So don't compromise anything about your goals, your promises, or your work. Even if you skimp on something that's not technically wrong, compromise leads to compromise and you'll likely end up destroying what you set out to do.
Actually, I don't really feel good ending on that note. While that's a good lesson, it's not the point of this passage. We don't learn about Jesus just to get pithy advice for our everyday life. We learn about Jesus so we see how awesome Jesus is. So when you're praying and you're worshiping, add this bit of information about what Jesus went through for you to your awareness. When you're thanking Jesus for who He is and what He's done, let there be a little more awe behind your praise because of everything Jesus had to put aside and not use, even though it was staring Him in the face. At any moment, He could have said "Forget this, I'm living like the King I am" and zapped Him up the best food in the world, spawned a palace under His feet, and said "you guys suck. I don't feel like destroying you all, so you can all come be My slaves and feed Me stuff," propped His feet up, and lived as our eternal earthly King. But He didn't. He didn't do it because He loves us so much that the death on cross route was more appealing to Him. He refused to even make bread for Himself so that He could empathize with our lives. He didn't compromise at all so that we could have eternal rewards that we don't deserve.
This took way too long, so I'm gonna cut it off short here, but yeah. Think about that.