A Lenten Sermon Series 5/6
Matthew 6: 9-13
by Rev. Carson Overstreet
Van Wyck Presbyterian Church
March 18, 2018
The season of Lent helps us to prepare for the ultimate claim of the Christian faith which we celebrate on Easter Sunday: Jesus’ death on the cross and his rising to new life changes the world and changes us. Jesus’ demonstration of God’s unconditional love is a climactic moment revealing God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
The Lord’s Prayer builds up in bold intensity with each petition. Jesus instructs us to pray by his lived example.
The baseline of any relationship is trust. Therefore, Jesus begins his prayer with a foundational relationship of great intimacy and trust with God as a divine parent Matthew 6:9).
Jesus gives up his will for God’s purposes in his life and requires us to do the same as a cost of discipleship (Mathew 6:10).
Jesus proclaims as we trust God to provide our daily bread then God also moves us to be generous to empower all of God’s children to flourish (Matthew 6:11).
Jesus requires our relationships to bear the weight of God’s mercy and grace by forgiving others as we have already been forgiven (Matthew 6:12, 14-15).
And today Jesus’ sixth petition reaches the most intense point, the climactic moment, of his prayer. Listen to Matthew’s account in chapter 6, verse 13: “And do not bring us to the time of trial but rescue us form the evil one.”
We hear Jesus’ petition, and some ask, “If God is loving and trustworthy, then why should we have to pray for God to NOT lead us into trials or temptations?” It’s a real question, isn’t it?
I want for you to remember that Jesus’ prayer comes through his lived experience.
As soon as Jesus was anointed for his ministry in baptism and claimed in God’s purposes for salvation, Matthew says, “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” (Matthew 4:1).
That word tempted also means tested. The devil or the advocate tempted Jesus to not rely upon God. God tested Jesus’ human obedience. And yet Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited (Philippians 2:6).
Jesus was tempted to be self-reliant, to put God to the test, and to trust his own pride to rule the kingdom of this world, thereby forsaking God and God’s purposes (Matthew 4: 4,7, 10).
Jesus was tested to be faithful to God. He was filled with the Holy Spirit and strengthened to fully obey God by affirming we live by every word that comes from the mouth of God; we do not test God but trust God’s presence and covenant love; we worship God alone.
Christ sympathizes with our weaknesses because he has been tempted as we are, yet without sin – he lived in perfect relationship with God and with humanity (Hebrews 4:15).
Jesus’ ministry came to a close with temptation and testing too. As he knew his hour had come, he threw himself on the ground to pray three times in the Garden of Gethsemane, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup (of bitter suffering) pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” (Matthew 26:39).
And as Jesus’ wrestled and prayed to be centered upon God’s will and not his own, his disciples were not filled with the same vigor; in their confusion and misunderstanding of what Jesus was doing, they fell asleep. And Jesus says, “Could you not stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial” (Matthew 26:41).
The Christian faith does not remove temptation and testing from the journey of life; rather it is our spiritual compass to navigate through it. To follow God’s direction with this compass, we need to cultivate time for prayer and steeping our spirits in God’s Word.
Jesus teaches us to pray for our obedience to God to mature daily so that we may not fall into temptation to trust ourselves over and against God’s will and God’s purposes. Sin deceives us to think we do not need God.
However, when we do fall short of God’s glory because of the condition of human sin, we pray that Christ’s redemption will raise us up, reconcile what is broken, and free us. Christ frees us to live in the mercy of God’s forgiveness and to live into the wisdom that our true sense of humanity is found in Christ’s example.
Jesus teaches us to pray for testing to develop our faith daily in positive ways. God tested Israel in the wilderness to reveal their weakness would only be made strong by fully relying on God. God tests our faith too in the hope that we will do the right thing, especially when no one is looking.
I am deeply reminded of the Psalmist’s prayer about this: “Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 138: 23-24).
Jesus also teaches us to pray for God’s deliverance to lead us into complete victory when his kingdom fully comes. “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, or the evil one” (Matthew 6:13).
Scripture does not tell us where evil comes from.
But Scripture does say that God created all things and humanity good (Genesis 1:31). When humanity was tempted by the serpent to reach beyond the boundaries of God’s will in the Garden of Eden, sin entered the world and tainted humanity’s thoughts and actions. Even as humanity was exiled from the Garden, God’s grace claimed us. And God’s grace will always have the ultimate claim upon all of creation and humanity overcoming evil once and for all at the end of time when the new heaven and new earth are created (Revelation 20:10; 21: 1-5).
Shirley Guthrie, Jr. was the Professor Emeritus of Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. He says, “Evil, by definition, is what God does not will and does not do.”[1] There are two kinds of evil: natural evil and moral evil.
Natural evil is the destruction we see from natural disaster. This is part of the natural order of the world. It bears evidence of the brokenness in which we live – the groaning pains of creation – as it too waits to be set free from its bondage to decay (Romans 8:20).
Moral evil is what humanity does to each other when we deny being our brothers’ keeper (Genesis 4: 8-10). Guthrie says, “The evil we do to each other has three dimensions. It is always rebellion against God and the order of God’s good creation. It is always indifference or enmity toward our fellow human beings. And it is always the self-destructive contradiction of what we ourselves were created to be.” [2]
Moral evil is all too real when we think about the human violence that killed Jesus on the cross, the horrors of the Holocaust and even the mass shootings of today.
Let me be clear that humanity is not evil.
We are created in God’s image and we have all fallen short of God’s glory. Nevertheless, we indeed struggle to understand our capacity to inflict physical, emotional, and spiritual harm upon one another.
The Reformed tradition takes evil seriously. It is a threat against God’s kingdom and to our faith. It is a serious force of darkness that we cannot fully explain. It is an enigma that will not win.
Our tradition warns us to not consider the forces of evil to be equal to the power of God. Guthrie says, “Whenever Satan (the Adversary) or his demons appear in Scripture, it is always the story of God’s power over them and of their defeat and destruction. The devil and his demons are by definition those powers that God in Jesus Christ has already opposed and defeated (Matthew 12:28; Mark 3:22; Luke 10:18; John 12:31; Colossians 1:13).” [3]
Our tradition warns us about personifying Satan or the devil. When we hear the phrase, “The devil made me do it,” we may giggle about it, but in reality a personal concept of the devil can easily become a theological scapegoat denying our condition of human sin.
Evil is not just the utter violence we do to one another, an oppositional force to God and our faith, but also the power of greed, fear, prejudice, and hatred within you and me which threatens the integrity of our faith and the coming kingdom of God.
“Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
Jesus is saying:
Lead us into deeper obedience to die to sin and rise to new life in Christ.
Lord, turn our tests into triumphs that give you glory!
Deliver us from the agony of evil around us and even that we do to one another and bring us ever closer into your presence, O God.
Jesus’ prayer emboldens us to claim the victory of the cross.
And as we actively wait for God’s kingdom to fully come…not passively wait but ACTIVELY wait… we renounce evil and work together with God to risk shining the light of Christ into the darkness.
The darkness shall never overcome the light!
In the name of God our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen.
Sourced Referenced:
[1] Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr. “Christian Doctrine” (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), p. 176.
[2] Guthrie, p. 174.
[3] Guthrie, p. 180.
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