"The Lord's Prayer: Lead Us, Not Into Temptation but Deliver Us from Evil"

Pastor Laura Guy

February 15, 2009

Here's an instant replay of what happened in worship:

We thought about why Jesus would teach us to ask God to lead us not into temptation. Doesn't that imply that God does sometimes lead people into temptation? Why would God do that?
We read about Jesus' temptation in Matt 4:1-11. We saw that it was the Spirit who led Jesus into the desert to be tempted. Jesus needed to be strong to face his ministry. Just like our muscles need resistance in order to get stronger, our "spiritual muscles" also need to come up against resistance once in a while to get stronger. For Jesus, facing the most difficult temptations right away prepared his "spiritual muscles" for what was ahead.
We learned that the word translated as "into" means more than simply moving your body from one place to another. It means changing the condition of your heart, submitting to the dominion of this new place. Jesus invites us "into" the Kingdom of God, but we sometimes choose to go "into" temptation. When we ask God to lead us not into temptation, we are asking God to lead us not to places that are beyond our ability to resist. In this line of the Lord's Prayer, Jesus is teaching us to pray before we sin, not to wait until we've already done it. He is teaching us to ask God for help to resist temptation that is too much for us. But we know that when we follow God, we will sometimes face temptation so that we may become spiritually strong and mature.
We also realized that the original Greek did not have punctuation. It is possible that the way Jesus said this line of the prayer actually had a comma in a different place - "Lead us, not into temptation..."
We prayed for God's help to resist temptation.
We celebrated communion around the table of love.