We complete our look at the Lord’s Prayer this evening with two petitions which remind us why we need to pray in the first place–because of temptations and evil. As the Sixth Petition says,
Lead us not into temptation. What does this mean? God indeed tempts no one. We pray in this petition that God would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful nature may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame or vice. Although we are attacked by these things, we pray that we may finally overcome them and win the victory.
We are under constant attack, as Christians. I don’t mean that people come up to us and threaten our lives for following Christ, although that is the reality for some of our brothers and sisters in the faith, especially in the Muslim-dominated areas of Asia and Africa. But we are under attack in many more subtle ways.
First, there is apathy. There is a general carelessness and lack of desire toward the things of God. The general picture of God in most churches today is not, sad to say, a very Scriptural picture. We like to view God as a kindly old soul who tut-tuts at our sins and patronizingly winks at our failures. How different a view of God this is from what the book of Hebrews gives!
See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, "Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens." This phrase, "Yet once more," indicates the removal of things that are shaken–that is, things that have been made–in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews 12:18-29 ESV)
Apathy is disallowed by such a picture of God. Another big problem is a lack of reverence for God. Reverence and awe toward God’s presence is missing when the atmosphere of worship is one of entertainment. Yet that is what ‘sells’ in our entertainment-based culture, the culture which one writer noted is “amusing ourselves to death.” If the central focus of worship is about making me feel good about God, then so much of the richness of God’s Word is missing, so much of the richness of the life of faith is missing. There’s nothing wrong with feeling good about God–but that can’t be all there is to worship.
A lack of reverence toward God can attack us in liturgical churches very easily too. Instead of paying attention to the words of what we sing and say, week in and week out, we simply do the same thing over and over, not paying attention. Our services are by design not entertainment focussed, rather centred on the hearing of God’s Word and the receiving of His gifts, but all too often we want to make them more that way. Gradually we get bored, because we stop listening–bored of God’s Word, which is primarily what our liturgies are! We get bored because we’ve become used to the consumer-based style of life–you don’t like what you’re reading, grab a new book. You don’t like what you’re eating, go to the supermarket and get something else. You don’t like what you’re seeing, change the channel. You don’t like the way your Bible says something, change translations so it fits what you want it to say. Rick Warren’s books are perfect examples of that. In both Purpose Driven Church and Purpose Driven Life he picks and chooses from translations to make the Scriptures say things, at times, that they really don’t say if you were to just stick with one translation. You don’t like the pastor, a sermon made you uncomfortable, or maybe you don’t like the hymns, or maybe your friend’s church has a bigger youth group, you change your church. It’s all part of the same cultural package. It’s a habit we are in because we have everything so very good. We have such choice in everything that we think we have the same choice when it comes to God, when it comes to faith, when it comes to eternal life–and that is one of the devil’s greatest lies.
You see, temptations are tricky things. We struggle with temptations of the flesh–wanting to be constantly amused or self-satisfied. “We dwell in the flesh and carry the Old Adam about our neck. He exerts himself and encourages us daily to unchastity, laziness, gluttony and drunkenness, greed and deception, to defraud our neighbour and to overcharge him. In short, the old Adam encourages us to have all kinds of evil lusts, which cling to us by nature and to which we are moved by the society, the example, and what we hear and see of other people.” (LC, III, 102)
This old Adam is our sinful nature, the part which the Catechism instructs us to put to death daily by contrition and repentance. It is that nature which gets in the way of us doing what God desires and requires of us, which turns our eyes looking for greener grass on the other side of the fence.
There are also temptations of the world. The world around us would drive us to sin in a number of ways, either through its enticements or through its offenses. It is easy to become enraged at the things we see in the world around us, and to sin in our hearts or with our lips because of them. Hear how Luther describes the world and see if this picture from nearly 500 years ago is not still the case today: “There is nothing but hatred and envy, hostility, violence, and wrong, unfaithfulness, vengeance, cursing, railing, slander, pride, and haughtiness, with useless finery, honour, fame, and power. No one is willing to be the least. Everyone desires to sit at the head of the group and to be seen before all.” (LC, III, 103)
And there are the temptations of the devil. These are especially spiritual agonies and temptations. The devil is the one who would have us question the power of God’s Word, to question the uniqueness of salvation through Jesus, who would have us doubt that our sins are forgiven, who would drive us to treat God’s church as just another consumer item to be comparison shopped and rated. The devil drives us into security in our sins, makes us compare ourselves against our neighbour rather than against God’s law. The devil plants seeds of doubt into the hearts of the faithful, trying to get us to utter the words of Job’s wife, “Curse God and die.”
Temptations are a real and ever-present dimension of the life of faith. A Christian who claims to not have temptations is no true Christian but one who is utterly deceived. But there is hope in temptation, as the Apostle Paul writes: “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” (1 Corinthians 10:13 ESV) God is not the one who tempts us, as James notes, but He does help us out of temptation. We pray in this petition that God would guard and guide us and help us in all our times of struggle, all our times of weakness, all our times of temptation, that we may bear up under them and stand firm in Him, using the whole armour of God–the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit. In this way we can stand firm, but only when we rely wholly on that which God has given and not on ourselves. For we know that Jesus was sorely tempted, yet resisted the devil’s assaults through God’s Word. Let us look to His example and follow His lead when we also are tempted!
All of these temptations come from the power of sin, the power of the evil one. As such, the sixth petition connects into the seventh petition quite well: But deliver us from evil. What does this mean? We pray in this petition, in summary, that our Father in heaven would rescue us from every evil of body and soul, possessions and reputation, and finally, when our last hour comes, give us a blessed end, and graciously take us from this valley of sorrow to Himself in heaven.
Evil. In the Greek the word is in the genitive case, which means that the word for evil can either be “evil one”–masculine or “evil thing”–neuter. What this means is that when we pray for the Lord to deliver us from evil, we are asking for deliverance of every kind–from the devil and his forces and from the results of evil in this world–sin. We ask this, knowing that deliverance is precisely what we need the most. As the Large Catechism notes, “The entire substance of all our prayer is directed against our chief enemy. For it is he who himself hinders among us everything that we pray for.” (LC, III, 113) We dare not give the devil more than his due, but on the other hand, we need to be aware that there is such a thing as the devil, and that the devil is evil. We need to be aware that there are deeper spiritual realities than the face of the day-to-day world would indicate, and that our struggles as Christians are not just flesh-and-blood struggles.
When we pray, “Deliver us from evil,” we are praying that God would be our champion and fight the ultimate battle against the devil for us, to conquer the devil and his forces so that they have no more dominion. The good news is that this battle has already taken place, that the result is already complete and assured. For the battle was fought and won at the cross, where the Lamb of God became the willing sacrifice for sin, the sinless one defeating the power of sin, death, and the devil by offering Himself.
When we pray “Deliver us from evil,” we remind ourselves that this deliverance is already complete before God’s throne, where Jesus ever sits at His Father’s right hand to intercede for us. We remind ourselves also that Jesus has not left us defenceless but has given us His Word and His Sacraments, His grace and His Holy Spirit to aid us in our constant battle against temptation and against evil.
When we pray, “Deliver us from evil,” we pray also that God would grant to us eternal life, that He would be gracious to us for the sake of Christ our Lord and not deal with us according to our sins but according to Christ’s sinlessness. We pray that we would, when this life is over, be released from this vale of tears and be freed to dwell in God’s eternal presence, awaiting the day when our bodies will be raised from their graves and made perfect, when we shall live once again, body and soul, as the creatures of God that He had intended us to be right from the beginning.
When we pray, “Deliver us from evil,” we sum up all for which we pray. We place our needs before the Father’s throne, knowing that salvation from sin, from death, from the power of the devil–from evil–is our greatest and deepest need. We do this, knowing that our Father in heaven also knows that we need this and is delighted to give that which His children ask for in firm faith.
So we say Amen. We pray not merely hoping that God’s will should come to pass, but trusting that God can do what we, as sinful human beings, cannot. We pray Amen, it shall be so, knowing that although with us it is impossible to please God, to stay in the faith, that yet with God all things are possible.
We say Amen. “This means I should be certain that these petitions are pleasing to our Father in heaven, and are heard by Him; for He Himself has commanded us to pray in this way and has promised to hear us. Amen, amen, means, ‘yes, yes, it shall be so.’” God grant that we daily pray to Him for all our needs boldly and faithfully, always giving the Amen, not doubting, but believing. In Jesus. Amen.
Last updated March 2008 by the webmaster.