Lead Us Not Into Temptation
Matthew 6:9-13
A boy was in confession: Bless me Father for I have sinned... Father, I had bad thoughts... PRIEST : Did you entertain them? BOY : No Father... but they entertained me!
A mother told her son not to go swimming. However, when he came into the house his mother noticed that his hair and bathing suit were wet. "Johnnie," his mother scolded, "I told you not to go swimming." "I couldn’t help it mom," he defended himself. "The water looked so good." "But why did you take your bathing suit with you?" "In case I was tempted."
A man and his wife were shopping at a mall and a shapely young woman in a short, form-fitting dress strolled by. The man’s eyes followed her. Without looking up from the item she was examining, his wife asked, "Was it worth the trouble you’re in?"
Temptation. It’s something each of us wrestles with and what Jesus asks us to pray about in the Lord’s Prayer. One theme of Scripture is that the human story could be summarized as the story of human temptation, how we often succumb to temptation and God’s efforts to save us from the tragic consequences of temptation. The story begins with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. God says you can eat anything in this Garden I have created and given it to you, there’s only one rule: don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So one day the snake begins to say, Are you sure that’s what God meant? Did he really say you couldn’t eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Did he really mean that? And surely you won’t die if you eat at that fruit. Look at how beautiful it is and think about how wonderful it must taste.” And so after mulling over the beauty of the fruit until one day they took that fruit and ate of it. Now you now that the power of that story is that it is our story. It is the story of our life from the earliest time we can understand. We have two voices in our ears: one is the voice of God who calls and beckons us to live in his love and pursue his will and the other voice of self says, That’s not right. It doesn’t really matter what you do, especially if it doesn’t hurt anybody else. You want it. You deserve it. You’ve earned it.” Now you know this. We hear these two voices every day and in every situation we face. And the question is: “Which voice will you listen to?”
Today’s phrase may be the most perplexing part of the Lord’s Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation.” When we pray these words, it sounds like the Lord might do just that. Why would we pray for God not to lead us into temptation when we know he would never do that? And yet James, at least part of his Epistle, writes in response to this misunderstanding in the Lord’s Prayer. “When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone.” If God doesn’t tempt us then why do we need to pray, “Lead us not into temptation”? Some people have tried to solve this dilemma by saying this should refer to a time of trial and testing. So the NRSV says, “Do not bring us to the time of trial.” But then why do we need to pray for God not bring us to the time of trial? If God wants to do that, shouldn’t that be OK with us? Let’s answer this dilemma with a question. What happens when you move the comma? Normally we see the passage like this: “Lead us not into temptation, comma but deliver us from evil.” What happens if we move the comma and put it here: Lead us, comma not into temptation” which says, Lord, let me listen to your voice, lead me in a way so that I won’t go into temptation because I have a natural tendency to do just that.” Not that God is leading us into temptation but we’re pretty good at leading ourselves into temptation.
First, we are to pray about leadership. This part of the Lord’s Prayer is about: “Who is going to lead you in your life?” Lead us. God throughout the Scriptures is continually trying to lead his people. He tries to lead the Israelites in the wilderness by a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. God gives them the law and the 10 Commandments and says, “If you listen to my commands and obey them, I will bless you.” God tries to lead Israel as a young nation but in the face of mounting threats from the surrounding Gentile nations, the Israelites cry out for their own king like the Gentiles. When they people do stray from God’s law, God sends prophets when the people have strayed to call them back to the law and God’s will, “No it’s this way. Follow this voice.” The psalmist says, “He leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” Psalm 23:2-3 In the New Testament, Jesus defines what it means to be a disciple as those who are followers of His: “If any would be my disciple, they must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.” Luke 9:23 “I am the Good Shepherd, I know my sheep and my sheep follow me…” John 10:14 So to be a Christian is to be a follower of Christ and that means to be led by him. That‘s what it means to follow Jesus and call him Lord. And so each day, we need to pray, “Lead me Lord, Help me to hear your voice and to choose to do your will.” This is in part what it means to be a Christian.
So how does God lead us? One is by the nudging of the Holy Spirit. You’ve all experienced this at one time or another. You have felt the nudge to call someone and when you did, you came to realize it was the very moment they needed you to call. Or maybe you’ve been in church and seen an announcement in the bulletin and never really thought of getting incvoled int that ministry but when you did it transformed your walk with Jesus and you said, “How greatful I am I listened top that voice.” The longer we’re Christians, the better we are at differentiating His voice from ours. Second is the word of God. When you read God’s word every day, we seek to hear God’s voice for us in this particular time in our lives. Or that can happen in s small group BS when you hear God speaking as you study God‘s word together with other Christians. Third, God can speak to us in the quietness of meditation and prayer. Fourth, it can happen in worship. Fifth, it can happen in a sermon when you feel as if that sermon was speaking directly to you. That’s one reason why we give you an outline so you can write down what you hear and what speaks to you. So those are some of the ways God speaks to us and the question becomes which voice are you listening to? Sixth, it can be through another person. Your talking to some one and suddenly their words hit you as if it was God speaking.
Second, We are to pray for direction. This is a prayer for God to lead us away from temptation. The reason we have to pray for that is we need God to not only lead us but help steer us away from temptation. The problem is we have a nose for temptation. Stan was trying to lose weight, but came to the office one day with 2 Krispy Cremes. His co-workers asked him why he got them if he's trying to diet, and he answered, "Well, as I came to the corner where the donut shop was, I told God that if He wanted me to buy some donuts to have a parking spot open right in front of the door. And on the 8th time around the block, there it was!ยจ The same thing happens to us: we hear people talking about some juicy details about someone’s life and we’re just drawn to that gossip. Or flipping through the channels and something I shouldn’t really be watching catches my attention. We have a nose for temptation. We tend to be drawn to it which is why we need God to deliver us from it. When we pray that then it opens up the door of our heart for God to steer us even more and it becomes the desire of my heart not to look toward temptation. But we need God’s intervention. When I was a kid, I got back from trick or treating and my parents told me to go to bed. The next evening we went out to dinner and when we returned, we found candy wrappers all over my room. I had put the candy sack on the floor of my closet but kept the door open and Winnie found it and ate almost all of it. Why did we care that she ate all of that candy? Because chocolate is poison for dogs. What we learned is that Winnie had a nose for temptation and there are some temptations she can’t resist and so to help her I needed to close my closet door. Part of what we’re praying in “Lead us not into temptation” is Lord, please close the door so I don’t find myself in a place where I can’t resist.
God does close doors for you. You’re going to be headed toward temptation and someone from the church will call you and then you’ll go the other direction. God will try to lead you away usually through the whisper of his Spirit saying, “Don’t do this.” God will close the door but God doesn’t lock it. In the end, you still have to decide. You see the roadblock and hear the voice of God and you still have a decision to make. If you decide to go forward, he will let you. There are always two voices which speak to you: which voice are you listening to?
Third, we are to pray for deliverance. Jesus goes on to tell us we are to pray for God to deliver us from evil. Evil. That’s a strong word, isn’t it? The evil one is that one who will destroy us. When we’re talking about Satan, we’re talking about one who is not co-equal with God. Satan has limited power compared to God. He can’t make you do anything. But what he does delight in doing is tempting us and testing us, trying to convince us that the truth is a lie and the lies are truth, twisting things around and trying to coax us to do things that hurt us and things that diminish our impact and our witness in the world and can shorten our life. So we are to pray to be delivered from this one.
The evil one continues to whisper in people’s ears and ask them to do things against God’s will. When we listen, we find his voice very seductive. James 1:14-15 says, “Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” Catholics dileneate between menial sins and ordinal sins. Menial sins are the garden variety sins. These are some sins that are not that big a deal, right? The problem is that when we look at sin in such a manner, we find that then we start small but then partake of a little bit bigger sins and then bigger sins and it becomes a very slippery slope. Sin has a way of luring us and leading us and in the end? Paul said it this way: “The wages of sin is death.’ Romans 6:23 It could be the destruction of our character, our dreams, our influence, the people around us or our relationship with God. Jesus said sin was so serious that if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. If you hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Mark 9:43-47
Deliver us from the evil one, the tempter, the adversary, Satan. The problem with sin is that it can sneek up on and knock us out of the game. The Hebrew word for deliver, rhuomai, is the word from which our word rush is derived. If you think of a pass rusher in football, their goal is to rush the quarterback and to knock him down. That’s the word that Jesus uses when we are to pray to be delivered from the evil one, rush him, knock him down and out of our lives. Many of you saw what Katrina did to the pine trees in our area. They just snapped them in half and knocked them down. But there is another threat to the pine trees on the northshore. It’s the pine beadle. It’s just a half inch in length but what they do is borrow into the bark and begin to eat. They lay eggs and for 6months the tree looks perfectly healthy. And what they do is eat the tree from the inside out. It can look perfectly normal until the damage is already done. And that’s what happens to us. Sin eats us from the inside out. We look fine spiritually to everyone else until one day we fall, which is why Jesus is telling us to pray this prayer. By doing so we we are being empowered to listen for the voice of God and to pray, Lead me! Lead me where you want me to go, in the paths of righteousness for your names sake and deliver me from the one who would destroy my soul. Help me Lord to follow you. This is a prayer if you pray it daily, you will find that it will help you in combating the evil one.
Some of you have been struggling with sin, The kind of sin that will destroy. Perhaps nobody knows this and you’ve been able to hide it but you know there’s beedles chewing away at your soul. You may be in a place that if you don’t do something now, death may be the result. For all of us who have stepped across those lines and we have all done that at some point, I want to invite you to ask for God’s forgiveness. God is a god of second chances. The Bible is a story of us falling to temptation but it is also a story of God picking us up afterwards and making us whole. Let’s pray for God’s forgiveness and ask for God to lead and guide you.
