Lead us not into temptation

Most Christians can quote most if not all of the Lord’s Prayer, and many people pray it on a regular basis. But as is true with so many things we do repetitively, it is easy to pray something so many times that we don’t even think about what we are saying anymore. Because this is true, we need to keep a constant vigil in certain areas of our faith, so that those things that are precious and powerful do not lose value and their power through constant use.

With this in mind, I recently thought through the Lord’s Prayer again, phrase by phrase, and I noticed something that I had not noticed before. In the last phrase of The Lord’s prayer, Jesus taught us to ask the father to, “Lead us not into temptation” (Luke 11:4). This phrase is recorded a little differently in Matthew 6:13, with the addition of another phrase: “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

It is pretty easy to see from this passage that Jesus was instructing us to ask God to lead us around or away from the temptations of the devil. In Genesis 4:7 God described sin as a predator, just waiting for an opportunity to pounce upon the unsuspecting man or woman: “sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you.” The apostle Peter described the devil in similar terms, saying that he “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8) When we begin to see the enemy like this, it isn’t too hard to understand why Jesus would teach us to pray that God would lead us away from the devil’s traps.

But what is very interesting is that in Matthew 4:1 we are told that Jesus Himself was led, by the Holy Spirit, into the wilderness in order to be “tempted by the devil.” The word translated “tempted” in this passage is very same root word from which the word translated “temptation” in the Lord’s Prayer is derived. There really is no way around this verse – it was clearly the leading of God’s Holy Spirit, and it was clearly for the express purpose of being tempted by the devil.

What this tells us is that even though Jesus taught us to pray that God would not lead us into temptation, there are times when that is exactly what he will do. James 1:13-14 says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God’ for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone.” God will never tempt us to do evil, but there are clearly times when God will allow and even lead us into the temptation of the devil, in order to test us.

The same Greek word that is used to refer to being tempted is also used to refer to the testing of precious metals to determine their value, strength or purity. Satan’s goal in tempting mankind is to get them to fall into sin, so that he might steal from them, kill them, or destroy them in some way. (See John 5:14, John 10:10) But when God leads us into a temptation, it is for the purpose of testing us, so that we might be made stronger and “approved” as precious metals are. (See James 1:12)

As Christians we should by all means continue to pray that God would lead us NOT into temptation. But we should also strive to always be on the alert because we know that at some point, like Jesus, we will all be tested in order to “prove” His holy nature living in us – the nature that “loves righteousness and hates iniquity.” (Psalm 33:5, Hebrews 1:8-9) In 1^st Corinthians 10:13 we are assured that God will never allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to resist, and that he will always provide a way for us to escape, so whether into temptation or out, we are assured of victory if we follow His Holy Spirit!