Do We Want To Avoid Temptation? Series

AVOIDING TEMPTATION: Do I want this for my life?

- Matthew 6:13.

- Now we come to the close of the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus has invited us to pray about a number of important subjects and now we have a final one about spiritual victory.

- What does v. 13 mean? I think a summary statement would be that we are praying, “Father, I don’t want sin to win in my life.” Or “Father, help me avoid sin.”

- The first request is “lead us not into temptation.” Keep temptation away from me, Father.

- The second is closely related: protect me from Satan.

- This speaks to a call for God to help us live lives that are close to Him and not overwhelmed by sin and evil.

- This raises a simple but important question: do I want this for my life?

- Now if we think of it in terms of the second one and feeling as though we are under demonic attack, with lots of bad things happening in our lives, the answer would be an obvious and simple yes. But, of course, that's not the typical way that this manifests.

- The typical battleground for these issues is an everyday desire (or lack of desire) to see sin decrease in my life and to have more of Christ in me. “Father, show me where my sin is so we can get it out!”

- Many of us have gotten pretty comfortable with much of the sin in our lives. We aren’t crying out for deliverance. We’ve accepted that this is the best we can do. As we discussed in an earlier sermon in this series, we settle into “sin management” and just try to control the consequences rather than excising the actual sin.

- The simple question (do I want this for my life?) can be answered by looking at how actively we are trying to get sin out of our lives. For many of us the answer is “not very actively.”

- This is us crying out to God: “I don't want to be near temptation and I want to be delivered from the Evil One.”

- This is a world of temptation and trial.

- It’s just the nature of our current world.

- The question that raises for us as Christians is “how am I going to deal with that?” Am I just going to continue to sin, believing that I’m not called to do any better or that I am incapable of doing any better?

- Am I going to fight the big stuff and accommodate the small stuff?

- Or am I going to actively pursue Christlikeness in all that I do?

- There is an interesting connection between the end of the Lord’s Prayer and the end of the Sermon on the Mount that it is a part of.

- At the end of the Sermon on the Mount there is a repeated call to actually follow the teaching of Christ. Look at Matthew 7:13-14, 16, 21, 24-27. Again and again, He concludes with a call to actually live out what Jesus has taught. It’s a call to live out the victory that Jesus is offering.

- There is a definite connection to the end of the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus is calling us to live out the victory that Jesus is offering.

- In many ways, this is the whole point of why Jesus came. He didn’t merely come to forgive us and leave us in our messed-up condition. He came to change us into creatures who can actually live lives that bring honor and glory to Him. He came to change us.

- All of this leads us to a question worth pondering: if given the tools to be more like Jesus, would I do it?

- This is a moment of honesty this morning. If a path opened for me to be like Jesus, would I eagerly walk it? Of course, this touches on issues like “how much do I like what Jesus stands for?” and “do I want moral and spiritual change in my life?” and “is religious belief something I say or something I do?”

- The original question is important because the reality this morning is this: we have been given the tools to be more like Jesus. It’s just a question of whether we avail ourselves of them or not.

- At a practical level, what do those tools look like? Let me talk about four of them.

HOW DOES GOD HELP US IN THIS?

- I should note as we begin that everything I’m about to share is only true for Christians. That's because this is what God is able to do in our lives when we invited Him in. If we stubbornly refuse His help in general, we are not in a position when temptation strikes to avail ourselves of the impressive resources that God has made available to us. The victory requires that we need the power of God into our lives.