Teach Us to Pray · Stop 6
Does God tempt us? What are we asking to be kept from?
After his baptism, Jesus spent forty days in the desert without food, and the devil came with offers. Jesus answered each one with words from Scripture. Today you'll look at the last two petitions: help when you're tempted, and rescue from every kind of evil.
Start this stopDeliver Us
“Lead us not into temptation” can sound as if God might trip us up on purpose. The Bible says the opposite: God tempts no one. Luther explained that we're asking God to guard us, so nothing drags us away from faith, and so that when we are tempted, we win in the end.
Temptation covers more than doing something wrong. Luther named despair as one: the voice that says God has given up on you, or that you're too far gone. This petition is a prayer against that voice.
The last petition is the widest. Luther called it the sum of all the others. Trouble in body or soul, trouble with money or reputation, and finally death itself: we ask our Father to rescue us from all of it, and at the end, to bring us home.
Read it in your Bible
- Matthew 4:1–4. The Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness, where he fasts for forty days. When he's starving, the devil tells him to turn stones into bread. Jesus answers from Scripture: people live by every word God speaks, and not by bread alone.
- 1 Corinthians 10:13. Paul writes that no temptation you face is unusual. God is faithful, won't let you be tested past what you can bear, and will give you a way out so you can get through it.
- James 1:13. When you're tempted, don't say God is tempting you. God can't be tempted by evil, and God tempts no one.
The sixth and seventh petitions, with Luther's explanations
And lead us not into temptation.
What does this mean? God, indeed, tempts no one; but we pray in this petition that God would guard and keep us, so that the devil, the world, and our flesh may not deceive us nor seduce us into misbelief, despair, and other great shame and vice; and though we be assailed by them, that still we may finally overcome and gain the victory.
But deliver us from evil.
What does this mean? We pray in this petition, as the sum of all, that our Father in heaven would deliver us from all manner of evil, of body and soul, property and honor, and finally, when our last hour has come, grant us a blessed end, and graciously take us from this vale of tears to Himself into heaven.
Words to know
- Temptation. A pull toward something that would hurt you or others, or pull you away from God. Everybody feels it, Jesus included. Feeling it isn't failing.
- Wilderness. Where Jesus fasted forty days and was tempted. Jesus has been in hard places. He knows the way through yours.
- Despair. The feeling that God has given up on you. Luther named it as a temptation. If you hear that voice, it's lying. Tell someone you trust, and pray this petition.
- Deliver. To rescue, to get someone out of danger. The last petition asks God to rescue us from every kind of evil.
- Faithful. What Paul says God is when you're being tested. You won't be tested past what you can bear. God doesn't leave.