Lead Us Not Into Temptation
“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” —Matthew 6:13
God never leads anyone into temptation, but Satan does. God never tempts His children; He tests them. Satan tempts us for destruction while God tests us for victory.
Everything that Satan does against us is against our faith. Every attack leveled against us is designed to weaken or destroy our faith, and those attacks can be powerful.
So there will be attacks from the enemy, but God designs boundaries. We see that in Job 1. Satan can only do what God allows him to do; he cannot go beyond the boundaries set by God. Satan will bluster at those boundaries and say things to cause us doubt, but he cannot break through God’s boundaries.
Satan is a master at proclaiming our demise, and at times, we believe him. If Satan could do those things, he would have done them a long time ago, but he can’t—you’re still here, and God is still on the throne.
Satan sets his sights on the child of God not only to weaken his faith, but also move the Christian’s faith away from the finished work of Christ. His greatest attacks are leveled against those whose faith is anchored in Christ and Him crucified.
Satan doesn’t really care about your faith if it’s not anchored in the cross. When a person understands and engages the message of the cross, that’s when the true battle begins. Satan knows where your victory lies, and he knows that you have now found the secret to victory. He will stop at nothing to see that your faith is moved from the cross to something else, anything else.
Paul told Timothy to “fight the good fight of [the] faith,” (I Tim. 6:12). Timothy was instructed by Paul that no matter what happened in life, he was to never look away from the cross of Christ relative to his sanctification.
This will be a fight, but Paul said it’s a good fight because it’s a fight already fought and won by Christ. There is nothing that Satan fights harder than the truth of the gospel—Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Satan does everything within his power to diminish the spread of the gospel. While Satan levels attacks against us for our destruction, God tests us to bring about victory in our lives. Such tests are for our spiritual growth. “Faith must be tested, and great faith must be tested greatly,” is a statement I’ve heard most of my adult life, and it’s so true.
Every child of God who has ever lived has had his faith tested at some point. In fact, the word temptation really means “testing.”
The Holy Spirit must bring us to a place where the cross of Christ is the sole object of our faith. This often comes through varied trials in our lives. During those trials, and some are difficult, remember this: everything that happens to the child of God is either caused by God or allowed by God.
Trials show us that our faith is, at times, imperfect; we must keep our faith anchored in the finished work of Christ.
Deliver Us From Evil
Christ said, “but deliver us from evil.” The word deliver refers to a pitfall designed by Satan from which we cannot free ourselves. These pitfalls are meant to destroy us and our faith. When faced with this, remember that the only means of deliverance comes through the power of God.
When it comes to deliverance, many believers have no experience with how it takes place, so they look to other methods that will never work.
When Jesus began His earthly ministry, He started by proclaiming what His ministry was all about. He began by reading from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18-19).
Notice that when He spoke of deliverance, He said, “to preach deliverance to the captives.” He didn’t say, “to deliver the captives,” but “to preach deliverance to the captives.” Christ was saying that so many are bound by sin and held captive by Satan that the only means of deliverance is through the preaching of Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
That means when someone preaches the message of the cross, he is preaching deliverance.
It takes a greater power to bring a person out of darkness, and that power is the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit desires to bring about the victory we so desperately need, but He can only do that if our faith is anchored in Christ and the cross. The Holy Spirit works exclusively through the guidelines of the cross (Rom. 8:2).
Evil is all around us, and the only way that we can be delivered is by placing our faith completely in Christ and Him crucified.
The Kingdom, And The Power, And The Glory
In closing the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus said, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” He instructed His disciples to pray this.
Satan attempted to take control of the kingdom away from God and wrestle away the power and the glory for himself. But the kingdom does not belong to Satan, and it never will. The kingdom belongs to God, forever. The power and the glory also belong to God, and there is nothing that Satan can do about it. Matthew 6:13 closes with “Amen,” which means that in the mind of God, Satan’s defeat is inevitable.
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