1 Lead Us Not Into Temptation
Matthew 6:9-13
Here are 3 stories to start us off today:
One time a young man went to confession. And he began, “Bless me Father for I have sinned...Father, I’ve had bad thoughts...”
Well the priest said, “Did you entertain them, son?”
And the young man said: “No, sir... but they sure entertained me!”
A mother told her son not to go swimming. She didn’t want him going into the pond. But, when he came into the house his mother noticed that his hair and bathing suit were wet. "Hey," his mother scolded, "I thought I told you not to go swimming."
"I couldn’t help it mom," he said. "The water looked so good."
His mom said, "But why did you take your bathing suit with you?"
He said, "Just in case I was tempted."
A couple was out shopping at the mall and a very good looking young woman in a short, form-fitting dress strolled by. And naturally, the man’s eyes followed her. Without looking up from the item his wife was looking at, his wife said, "Well was it worth the trouble you’re in?"
Temptation. It’s something everybody wrestles with and it’s a subject Jesus includes in his model prayer. One theme running through Scripture is the fact that humans are prone to give in to temptation, and the lengths that God goes to, to save us from it’s tragic consequences.
Temptation started a long time ago. It began with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. God said you can eat anything but, there’s only one rule: don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
So one day the snake approaches them and says, “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 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 you know, when you eat it, you’ll be like God!”
So, they ate it and they fell from God’s good graces. And we’ve been struggling with temptation ever since. Their story is our story too.
Have you ever noticed that when we give in to temptation, it’s really easy to offer excuses why it happens: "It’s my boss’ fault"..."I just couldn’t help it"..."Everybody is doing it"..."Nobody’s perfect"..."I didn’t know it was wrong"..."I was pressured into it"..."I didn’t have any other choice...” “That’s just the way I’m made…” “She drives me to drink.”
2 Paul says to the Corinthians, "All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything" (1 Corinthians 6:12).
You know, the devil may tempt us, but we get to decide whether to yield to it or not. The sin isn’t in the temptation. Temptation is neutral. There’s good temptations and there’s bad temptations. The sin is when we give in to something that we really shouldn’t. So our sin, really, is no one’s fault but ours. We are responsible for our actions.
We have two voices in our ears: one is the voice of good that invites us to live in his love and pursue his will.
And the other voice is evil, and it accuses and tempts us to do the opposite of what God says. His aim is to derail us and disrupt our relationships and destroy our souls. It’s called the battlefield of the mind where we hear those two voices every day. And we have choices to make.
“Lead us not into temptation.” It may be the most confusing part of the Lord’s Prayer because it sounds like the Lord might do just that. So why would we plead for God not to lead us into temptation when we know he would never do that?
After all, James 1:13 says, “When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone.” So if God doesn’t tempt us, then why do we need to pray, “Lead us not into temptation?”
3 Well, normally we see the passage like this: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” 4 What happens if we move the comma and put it here: “Lead us, not into temptation,” which is saying, “Lord, let me listen to your voice, and lead me in a way so that I won’t head towards temptation because I have this natural tendency to do just that.”
Maybe the best way I’ve heard this explained is from Max Lucado. He writes in his book, The Great House of God, “Imagine a father and son walking down an icy street. The father cautions the boy to be careful, but the boy is too excited to slow down. He hits the first patch of ice. Up go the feet and down plops the bottom. Dad comes along and helps him to his feet. The boy apologizes for disregarding the warning and then, tightly holding his father’s big hand, he asks, ‘Keep me from the slippery spots. Don’t let me fall again.’
The Father is so willing to comply. ‘The steps of the godly are directed by the Lord. He delights in every detail of their lives. Though they stumble, they will not fall, for the Lord holds them by the hand.’ (Ps. 37:23-24 TLB). Such is the heart of the petition. It’s a tender request of a child to a father. The last few slips have taught us – the walk is too treacherous to make alone. So we place our small hand in his large one and say, ‘Please, Abba, keep me from evil.’” (pg.146-147)
5 Hebrews 12:2 says it like this. It’s one of the capstone verses that we, as a leadership always look towards to help guide us. It says, “2 We must keep our eyes on Jesus, who leads us and makes our faith complete.”
6 So it really all comes down to who’s steering the ship? Who’s leading our lives? That’s the million dollar question and it’s answer requires complete honesty. Could Jesus be saying that we’re to pray about leadership?
He’s just taken us through a progression from looking at the Father as a loving God, who provides for us, extends grace and mercy to us, and is worthy of our respect; to then acknowledging where all of our blessing come from; and then bowing before God as we talk about the things that are important to us with him, realizing – or concluding that it is God who should be leading our lives because of all of that.
This part of the Lord’s Prayer is about: “Who’s in charge?” God, lead us. And God, throughout the entirety of Scripture is continually trying to do just that: 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 said, “If you listen to my commands and obey them, you’ll be blessed.”
God tried to lead Israel as a young nation, in the face of mounting threats from surrounding Gentile nations, even though the Israelites cry for their own king, like the Gentiles have. And when they strayed from God’s law, God sent prophets to call them back into his will.
Remember these words from Psalm 23? “1 The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing. 2He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, 3he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths.” Psalm 23:2-3 There is blessing when we follow God.
And in the New Testament, Jesus introduces the term, disciple, as anyone who would follow him: “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 that he leads. He’s the Lord. He’s the one who’s piloting the ship. And so each day, we need to pray, “Lead me today, Lord, Help me to hear your voice above all the others and to choose to do your will. Help me navigate around the ice.”
Several years ago at a Promise Keepers conference, Dennis Rainey, one of the main speakers for the event, placed some animal traps on stage. They were big ones too. There were a dozen or so traps, and he set or opened all of them.
Then Dennis Rainey instructed a father to blindfold his teen-age son, and then walk to the other side of the stage. When he got there, he called his son to come to him. The son was to follow his father’s voice.
Well, the boy took only one step and the Father called out, “Wait! I’ll keep you from stepping in the traps.” So his Dad went back across the stage, took his son by the hand and “lead” him through the difficult maze of traps.
That’s the picture that’s at the heart of this petition – Lead us, not in to temptation. We’re saying, "Father, keep me out of the traps."
So how does God lead us, then? One is by the nudging by the Holy Spirit. Maybe we’ve experienced that at one time or another. You felt the nudge to call someone and when you did, they say that’s just what they needed.
Or maybe you’ve been in church and someone asks you to do something, but you never really thought of getting involved before, but when you did it turned out to be something great and you said, “I’m so grateful I listened to that voice.”
It almost seems like the longer we follow Jesus, the better we are at differentiating His voice from others that want our attention.
Second is the word of God. When we read God’s word, we seek to hear God’s voice. That can happen a lot of different ways – in a Bible study, in our quiet times with God, by following along with a sermon where we feel as if that sermon was speaking directly to us, or in the middle of a conversation with someone when we hear God’s voice.
God can speak to us in the quietness of meditation and prayer. Or it can happen in personal and in corporate worship. Or it can happen through the kindness and hospitality of another person.
God can get our attention in a lot of different ways.
7 And after we recognize that it should be God who is doing the leading, secondly, Jesus says, pray for direction. “God, lead us away from temptation.” Jesus knew we have an inclination to give in to temptation, so he includes it as something to pray about.
The September/October 1996 Issue of Campus Life ran a story about Justin Armour, who was a wide receiver, at the time, for the Buffalo Bills. Before he played his first pro game, Justin joined some of his teammates for a night out on the town. They ended up by the docks, where one by one his teammates started disappearing on boats with these beautiful women. And he said he’s pretty sure they weren’t going fishing.
So he reacted the only way he knew how: “I got out of there as fast as I could,” he said. He wasn’t about to find out if his faith could stand up against the temptation if he listened to the little voice that said, “Stay.”
The same thing happens to us: we hear people talking about some juicy details about someone’s life and we’re drawn to the conversation. Or we’re flipping through the channels and something I shouldn’t really be watching grabs my attention. We’re vulnerable to temptation. Do I stay, or do I go?
2 Timothy 2 says, “22 Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. 23 Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels.”
So as we pray, “Lead us, not into temptation,” it opens up the doors of our hearts for God to replace negative temptations and steer us in the right direction. Easier said than done, I know, because temptation always looks so good! Otherwise, we wouldn’t be tempted!
Part of what we’re praying in, “Lead us not into temptation,” is Lord, please help me not to be in a place where I can’t resist.
8 And then, Jesus said pray for deliverance from evil. Evil. That’s a strong word, isn’t it, that gets tossed around kind of flippantly sometimes? But, the evil one is the one who’s sole purpose is to destroy us and our souls.
And when we’re talking about Satan, we’re talking about one who is not co-equal with God. Satan’s power is limited compared to God’s. Sometimes we give him way too much credit. He can’t make us do anything. But what he delights in doing is tempting us and testing us and trying to convince us that the truth is a lie and lies are the truth, twisting things around and trying to coax us to do things that end up hurting us.
And so we pray, “Deliver us from evil.”
James 1:14-15 describes the progression of sin for us. Here’s how it works. It 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.”
Paul said it like this: “The wages of sin is death.’ Romans 6:23
It could be the death of our character, our dreams, our influence, the relationships with the people around us, our relationship with God, or literal death. 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
So, sin isn’t something trivial. Jesus said pray about it because the problem with sin is that it can sneak up on us and get us when we least expect it. So, God, deliver us from evil!
9 The (Hebrew) word for deliver from the original language, is rhuomai, and it’s 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 sack him.
That’s the word that Jesus uses when we are praying to be delivered from the evil one, rush away from him. Flee from every kind of evil.
Maybe think of it like this: Many of us saw what tornados do to trees. They just snapped them in half and knocked them down. But there is another kind of threat to pine trees (in particular). It’s the pine beadle. It’s just a half inch in length and what they do is burrow into the bark and begin to eat it. They lay eggs and for 6 months the tree looks perfectly healthy. And what they do is eat the tree from the inside out.
It can look perfectly normal, but the damage is already done. And that’s what happens to us. Sin eats us from the inside out. It starts out so innocently and we look fine to everyone else until one day we crash and it all comes down around us. So Jesus says pray like this, “Deliver us from evil.”
Maybe some of us are struggling with some sin or we know someone who is, the kind of sin that can destroy us. And maybe nobody else knows about it because we’ve been able to hide it, but the beetles are chewing away at our souls and we feel helpless and vulnerable and it’s eating away at us from the inside out.
So for all of us who have stepped across those lines, it’s not too late. We can be forgiven and restored and given a second chance because God is great at giving second chances. When we look at the Bible, we see people falling to temptation all the time, but we also see God helping us pick up the pieces and put them back together.
And in the end, God will still bring about his good purposes through the temptations and through our failures and in spite of Satan’s best efforts to tempt us to fall.
Beating the things that tempt us is possible. Paul said, "I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me" (Phil 4:13). Jesus can alleviate or liberate us from the negative urges within us.
And when it’s all said and done, heaven will be a place where we’ll be free from the presence of sin. Our paths will no longer be icy. We won’t have to look out for potholes or hazards.
But in the meantime, we struggle with pressure to violate our conscience and trespass God’s Law. The big difference in the lives of believers is that, while we used to be sinners running after sin, we are now sinners just running from it.
10 Let’s close today with this picture from the Andrew Golota – Lamon Brewster fight from May 21, 2005. Andrew Golota fought Lamon Brewster for the WBO heavyweight boxing title. Golota, was a strong fighter with a powerful punch. At the time, he had 38 wins, 5 loses, and 31 knockouts to his credit.
In preparation for the fight, Brewster studied tape after tape of Golota's boxing style, looking for an opening. And after watching so much film, he noticed that the way Golota held his hands left him open for a left hook.
Within seconds after the first round began, Brewster found the opening and threw a left hook. Golota went down to the mat and within a few seconds, got back up. Seconds later, Brewster threw another left hook and Golota went down again. He stood up after the 2nd knock down and the fight resumed. After only a minute and a half of the first round, Brewster threw another left hook to the same opening, and Golota went down for the 3rd time, which counted as a knockout.
Lamon Brewster won the fight with a first round knock out because he was the smarter fighter. All he had to do pound on his opponent's weakness.
When it comes to temptation, Satan is looking to pound on our weakest areas. And when we leave an opening, he'll take advantage of it and throw us a hard left hook. But if we can resist temptation, we'll close off the area and cut off his opportunity.
The Apostle Paul said it this way: "Do not give the devil an opportunity" (Eph. 4:27 NAS).--Kent Crockett
So Lord, “Lead us, not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” And he’ll do it because it’s in our best interests and he loves us and desperately wants an eternal relationship with us.
Prayer
Lord, we love you. You’re a special friend to us and we ask that you stay close to us as we find our way around the things that seek to pull us off course and damage our relationship with you.
As we approach our time of Communion today, we are humbled because of our tendency to sin and your tendency to show us your grace and forgiveness.
As we look at the bread and juice, we’re reminded of how the body of Jesus was broken and how his blood was spilled and how he conquered death, so we could live together for eternity in heaven. So help us to live daily in a newness of life and to live righteously all the days of our lives out of our gratitude – this we ask in Jesus name,
