Lead Us Not

“Therefore, you should pray like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Matthew 6:9-13

Have you ever become so acquainted with a song that you find yourself singing the words without even thinking about them? It is your brain in auto-pilot mode not requiring any cognitive attention. It is simply an automatic and subconscious response from a past familiar event. This morning in my Bible Study, the Lord’s Prayer was the biggest part of my concentration. It is a prayer that most of us have known as long as we can remember. I was determined to allow God to breath fresh life into the teachings of prayer from Jesus to His disciples. I began writing my version of the prayer line by line as Jesus instructed in Matthew. The thoughts that I came up with are that we are to call on God and recognize His holiness and purity. We are to acknowledge that we are citizens of another kingdom instead of the kingdom we have built on earth. We are to commit our will to Him and to embrace His will for our lives. We are to fully know that He governs over all things, in all places, and at all times. We must ask for His daily provisions, both physical and spiritually since everything comes from Him. We must repent of the sinful things in our heart, our words, our actions, and our attitudes. We must borrow mercy from God to apply that same mercy to those who have hurt us.

When I got to the line asking for God not to lead us into temptation, I knew I had been stumped. God cannot contradict Himself, and as James 1:13 states, ‘God will not tempt us.’ So, after a little googling from my trusted Bible Tool website, I discovered that this prayer request was more of a plea to God to protect us and guide us around circumstances that might lure us into ungodly action. In essence, an acknowledgement that evil will find us, but God has the power to set boundaries around it or minimize it. I wonder if Jesus was remembering those 40 days in the desert? He entered the desert strong in the Lord after His baptism, but as days turned into weeks, He became tired, thirsty and hungry. No doubt He had plenty of time to pray and took advantage of that. But then while He was the hungriest, evil entered the wilderness and tempted Him in several ways. I wonder if this was when He formed this part of the prayer. The devil offered things that the flesh would have wanted, but God honored Jesus’ plea of being guided around the temptation. God replaced that temptation with His words from the Bible as Jesus’ response to evil.

I love that God can breathe fresh breath into any stale thought when it comes to His Word. When the temptation of sin has found us, we are to ask God to deliver us from it, or to not allow it to overtake us. And when we feel weak, we must examine everything around us looking for God’s merciful escape. And when we ask for all these things Jesus asked for, thus ends the beautiful words with the final blessing. 'For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.' 'And while we remember this prayer, while we keep repeating it, our life is opened towards the kingdom, is filled with power, shines with glory, in the face of which darkness, hatred, and evil lie powerless.' Our Father by Fr. Alexander Schmemann broadcast.