Matthew 6:13
This morning we come to the last petition, the last request of the Lord’s Prayer. We have asked for the name of Our Father to be seen as holy by all the earth, for His kingdom to come and live within us and for His will to be accomplished through us. We have learned to ask Him, every day, to supply our essential needs, to forgive us of our sins and in our forgiveness to teach us how to be forgivers. The request for forgiveness leads us to the last request, technically you could call it the last two requests but I see them as so connected that they can’t or shouldn’t be separated and yet much of our struggle is the very fact that we have separated them: “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. Most of the time when we read this verse we concentrate on the objects of the sentence temptation and evil, but the objects are irrelevant without a firm grasp of the verbs. In this request we are asking God to do a specific action in our lives and in doing so we are surrendering ourselves, our thoughts, our lives, our plans and our ideas to His action. The request is simple: “Father, lead us and deliver us.” We have already asked for and received forgiveness now we need to be led and delivered; we need for God to come and direct all of our steps and remove us from the grips of sin. At the moment we ask for forgiveness, I believe our sins are forgiven, but then we have to ask for and surrender to God’s leadership so that He can lead us out of the effects, the grips, the residue of the sins that we have been stained by. The petition, “lead us not into temptation” is not us asking God to keep sin away from us, it is us surrendering to God’s leadership to guide us out of sin, along that path there will be enemies, there will be familiar feelings, there will be fleshly desires and there will be temptations but understand this, when we surrender to be led, God will lead us not into temptation but out of it but we will have to pass it by in order to ever be completely free from it. Today I want us to see that God will not tempt us, but following God will lead us through temptation because the only way to get back out of a dark cave we have traveled into is to travel back through the darkness until we can see the light again, the request is not for God to turn the lights on in the dark cave it is for Him to lead us to where He knows the light to be and it is a promise that we will follow Him and that we will trust Him to lead us in every step on the path that leads to freedom and deliverance.