Matthew 6:5-13, Psalm 23
Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent – which means we’ve made a lot of progress through the Lord’s prayer. Following Jesus’ example we’ve asked God for daily bread, for heaven on earth, for forgiveness of our sins. We’ve asked God to give us a lot of things!
But now, for the first and only time in this prayer, we will ask God *not* to give us something: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Has this ever struck you as strange? Isn’t it a little bit weird to ask God not to do things that we might assume God wouldn’t do? The God I know isn’t out setting booby traps for me. Frankly, I don’t need God to tempt me – I’m pretty good at tempting myself. James 1:12-14 says it better than I could:
Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test… No one who is tested should say, ‘God is tempting me!’ This is because God is not tempted by any form of evil, nor does he tempt anyone. But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it.
So why does Jesus instruct us to pray for God to do something God doesn’t do?
Adam Hamilton wrestles with this in his book on the Lord’s Prayer. He suggests a small grammatical change that creates some important space in this petition. He likes to think of a comma coming after the first two words. In that way, “Lead us” is distanced from the rest of the petition; we’re asking God to “Lead us, not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”
That makes a difference. “Lead us” is the foundational prayer for anyone who’s attempting to be a follower of Christ. For many of us it’s a prayer we say instinctively. I might not use the words, “lead me,” but I ask for God’s guidance every morning. I think about my day ahead and pray, “Give me wisdom for that meeting, give me compassion for those people; help me to do the right things; help me to do what you want, God.” Sometimes I say it explicitly; other times it’s just there, in my heart, a desperate desire to be led like the 23rd Psalm says: “in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.”
If you haven’t been in the habit of asking Christ to lead you, then this is your nudge to start. If you want to follow Jesus, start every day by asking him to lead you. Where? Christ has described the destination for us: a complete love of God and a balanced love of neighbor and self (Matthew 22:34-40).
In your bulletin, you may have noticed an image below the sermon. It has a picture of a road leading off into the distance, with a blank space at the end.
In that blank space I want you to write something that reminds you that you are a follower of Christ, one who is being led to the ultimate destination of perfect love for God, neighbor, and self. You could write the words, “Lead us.” You could draw a heart or a cross. Put something there that reminds you to ask Jesus to lead you toward this big, far-off goal.
And it is a big, far-off goal, right? Being made perfect in love takes a lifetime. It’s out there, over the horizon somewhere. And when we’re trying to get somewhere that we can’t see yet, well we can only get there by playing follow the leader. We have to be led, we have to recognize and follow the way described by Jesus’ teaching, example, sacrifice, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Over days, over months, over years we hope to make progress to that ultimate end.
But this petition isn’t just about where we want to go – it’s also about the places we want to avoid.
Such as:
“Evil.”
That sounds awfully extreme, doesn’t it? Evil? I prefer to focus on the positive so this extreme negative kind of rubs me the wrong way. But being a Christian isn’t about putting on rose-colored glasses and pretending like everything’s OK when it’s not. Evil does exist. It’s big and corporate, a system that’s hard to stop. Evil is bigger than any one person’s actions – although countless individual people get caught up in it. Evil lives in patterns of family abuse, in a culture of materialism and greed, in a history of racism and sexism, in systems that make the poor poorer and the rich richer, in the disregard for creation that is leading to crises in our natural systems.
Although only God can deliver us from evil, that doesn’t mean we throw in the towel and give in. Oh no – our call, by our baptisms, is to “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.” That’s verbatim in our baptismal vows.
How do little ol’ people like us resist the big, nasty thing that is evil itself?
By living into the middle part of this petition: “not into temptation.”
In between the place we want God to “lead us” and the powers of “evil” lies a transition place that we can take advantage of: temptation.
Temptation is the allure to do something that we shouldn’t. We feel a gravitational pull toward an action aren’t doing it yet but we’re looking at it; we haven’t taken action but we’ve thought about it. That’s temptation.
If you look in your Bible, you might see this phrase translated differently. Mine says, “Do not bring us into the time of trial” (Matthew 6:13). The Greek word, perasmos, means “trial” or “putting to the proof,” a testing. That’s what temptation feels like, doesn’t it? A moment of testing – and when we fail, when we give in, we feel miserable.
But the gift of being tested and failing is that we can now see something that was previously hidden. We recognize a temptation zone, a set of circumstances that suck us into behavior we want to avoid. I once heard Andy Stanley describe this as a place where we need a “guardrail.” We here in the mountains know something about guardrails – they give us a lot of comfort when we’re driving on steep mountain roads. The guardrail isn’t typically right next to the road, but a few feet off – right before we’d get into real danger.
In your bulletin you’ll notice some guardrails along the road. I want you to take a moment and think with me: where are your temptation zones? Where do you need to set up some guardrails?
As an easy example, let’s talk about ice cream. I have learned that if I keep a gallon in the freezer, I know it’s there, it tempts me, it tests me – and I’ll eat it all in two servings on two consecutive days. I’ve made this mistake more than once, and my stomach paid for it. But I also learned something – I learned that it’s too tempting for me to have it in the house. So now I resist buying it at the grocery store and instead make a trip to the Hop if I really want a scoop.
That’s a mild example. Eating too much ice cream isn’t going to prevent me from moving toward perfect love. But there are other “temptations” that do. Those are the really important ones to recognize and figure out how to avoid – those are the places we really need guardrails.
What are those places for you? In the blank space on the bulletin you’ve got an opportunity to write down something that’s meaningful to you. You could write simply, “not into temptation.” You might write down a temptation you keep tripping over – something you need to figure out how to avoid. Or maybe you know what that guard rail needs to be: something you need to take on, give up, or change in order to build a guardrail against a test you can’t pass.
To me, this is the answer to the question, “Why would Jesus want us to ask God not to do something we don’t expect God to do?” The purpose of prayer isn’t so much to change God, but to change us. The act of prayer transforms us. In this case, we are reminded every time we say these words that temptation is the very real boundary between where we want to be led and the very real evil that exists. So we pray:
Lead us
Not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
And the God who is bigger than any evil and stronger than any temptation – the God who is ready with all the grace we need – is with us, all the way to the end.
Amen.
Prone to Wander 
Leave a comment