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Text: Proverbs 30:5-9; James 1:2-4,
9-15;
X 6th Lent Midweek 1 Corinthians 10:7-13; Luke 4:9-13 Lead Us Not into Temptation In the name of him who was tempted
in every way just as we are—yet without sin, dear friends in Christ: We have been covering the petitions of the
Lord’s Prayer in our evening devotions this year. And as we have been going through them, a few
weeks back we noted a shift from the grand global needs of mankind addressed in
the first three petitions, that the Lord would send us his Word and Spirit, for
example, to the more personal and immediate concerns of our day to day lives
addressed in the fourth and fifth petitions; namely that the Lord would give us
our daily bread and that he would forgive the sins that we’re constantly
committing. And even in these last two
petitions just named, we can detect a change in the rate of how often we need
what it is we’re praying for. That is,
most of us feel the need to eat three times a day or so, however often our
stomachs send us those “I’m registering empty” signals; but if we are at all
spiritually aware of ourselves, we recognize that our need for God’s
forgiveness is quite a bit more frequent than that. No doubt about it: we need forgiveness more often than
food. And it happens that the same
pattern continues this evening as we consider the sixth petition of the Lord’s
Prayer, “lead us not into temptation”, because there is nothing that we face
more often and more steadily than the continuous stream of temptations that
keep coming at us like machinegun fire. We are surrounded by temptations. They come at us from all sides. They even come from within us. That’s because, as Luther explains in the
Catechism, the three sources of temptation are the devil, the world, and our
own sinful natures. And as long we’re in
this life, none of these three sources of temptation is going away. With this in mind, we’ll do well to spend a
few moments considering the enemies that we’re up against. We’ll start with the last one first, the sinful nature,
because that’s the one that’s closest to home.
In the Scriptures it’s also called the “fallen or weakened flesh” or the
“Old Adam”; and what it is, is the part of us that naturally gravitates toward
sin because it enjoys sinning. It’s the
seared conscience that refuses to acknowledge that certain pet sins are
sins. It’s the self deception in us that
believes that through certain other sins happiness can be achieved – sort of
like an alcoholic believes that another drink is going to make him feel
better. It does for a moment, maybe, but
then come the consequences. And with sin
there are always consequences – though part of the deception is never to see
them until it’s too late. The sin nature
in us is the part that is inherently self centered and that drives us always to
look out for number one – to think about how this is going to affect me
before considering the needs of anyone else.
It’s the part of us that’s full of pride and wonders how this is going
look on me, whether to my exultation or my being humbled, and that
always drives us toward the path that leads to glory. The sin nature in us is the part that
imagines that despite my sin, I’m still a pretty good person, because, after
all, what few sins I’ve done (that I can’t explain away or excuse) are small
and easily overlooked. Everyone else’s
sins, by contrast, are far more obvious and odious – especially the ones that
have been committed against me: those are absolutely unforgivable. You know, it’s a good thing for our sin
natures that they live within us; because if they lived next door they’d be the
kind of neighbor that you’d really hate and maybe even want to kill. But as it is we tenderly feed and care for
them. We shouldn’t. Through repentance we are called to put them
to death – and that’s more than a justifiable homicide: it’s the just and lawful execution of a
traitor within. The second source of temptation is the world in which we
live. It’s our friends and colleagues
who tell us to lighten up and go with the flow because “everyone’s doing
it”. It’s our culture that tells men
that they aren’t real men unless they make so much money and drive this kind of
car; that tells women that they aren’t real women unless they have the ideal
figure, the grand house, the great career, the obligatory 2.6 children (all in
that order), and that through it all they still must manage to keep themselves
100 percent independent of men; and that tells our kids that to be accepted by
their friends and to properly express their own unique personality they must
wear these certain clothes and listen to this certain music, and that they are
hopeless rejects if they’re not actively engaged in promiscuous sexual behavior
by the time they’re in their teens. The
world is the rationalism that tells us that science is the key to all knowledge
and that religion is for the weak, ignorant, and superstitious. It’s the spiritual philosophy that says all
paths lead to the same heavenly reward. It’s
the spirit of the age that proclaims that there are no absolutes and that all
that matters is personal freedom, personal choice, and the right to murder
babies for birth control or to extract stem cells for medical research. It’s materialism, and pornography, and drugs;
it’s the pursuit of wealth and fame; it’s hobbies, sports, food, entertainment,
travel, television, radio, internet, and books – yes, there are a few people who still read –
with which we are entertaining ourselves to death while we neglect the things
that really matter. All of these belong
to the temptations of the world. And then finally there’s the devil who tempts us – though he hardly needs to considering
everything else that we have stacked against us. But in any case, I think that the temptations
of the devil are often misunderstood. Popular
images of Satan suggest that he wants you to sell your soul to him in exchange
for goods and services, or that he encourages his devoted followers to worship him
through ritual sacrifice, murder, and black masses. That’s pretty much the stuff of legends. Bear in mind that Satan doesn’t tempt you to
sin because he’s particularly fond of sin.
No, his biggest goal is to get you to distrust the Gospel of Jesus
Christ; because if he can do that, you lose.
He does this by convincing you that your sins are somehow not covered by
Christ’s atoning death – that they are too many or too severe, or by having you
believe that you have to do something in addition to what Christ has done to
make up for them. He does it by
questioning God’s Word, by casting doubt on the means of grace, or by distorting
the truth of the Gospel – anything that might undermine the assurance of
salvation you have in Jesus. Don’t
expect to find Satan in dark alleys, grimy taverns, and red light
districts. You’ll find him instead in the
church, and in Christian bookstores, on Christian television, yes, even on the
highest point of the temple, wherever false doctrines are being taught and
false prophets are proclaiming his lies. Like I said, we are surrounded by
temptations – even in the church. And absolutely
anything has the potential to be a temptation.
And the devil of it is, so to speak, they all work together against
us. An effort to escape one temptation often
leads us strait into the jaws of another.
Let me give you an example: I’ve
heard of Christian men who like to watch football on television and especially
the Super Bowl; but they make a point of not watching the commercials for fear
of seeing one of the many ads in which some scantily clad swimsuit model is
hawking beer or some other product. In
this way, they say, they are trying to avoid the temptation to lust after those
nubile young bodies on the screen. Okay,
good for them; it sounds very pious. The
trouble is that they then sit there either imagining what salacious scenes of
revealed flesh they’re missing (their imaginations being far more explicit than
anything that might actually be shown on television), or they fall into the
trap of self righteously thinking how much better they are than all those guys out
there who say they’re Christians and yet watch those awful commercials. Worse still, they could very easily be doing
both the graphic fanaticizing and the smug self congratulating at the same time,
without even recognizing that by doing so they’re twice as guilty as the guy
who drooled on himself watching the commercial – and ten times more guilty than
the guy who saw the bikini clad girl in an ad, said to himself, “Hmm, that’s
nice”, and promptly forgot about it. You see, it’s impossible to avoid
being tempted altogether – which sort of begs the question, “Then what exactly
is it we’re asking for when we pray, ‘Lead us not into temptation’?” I mean, it seems that the only way for the
Lord to do that for us would be to remove us from this life entirely. And one day, of course, he will do that for us, and then we’ll be
free of temptation and sin forever; but for the time being what we are actually
praying for in this petition is not that the Lord would keep temptations away,
but rather that he would give us the will and strength to overcome the
temptations that do come to us, and give us the means to escape the temptations
that we are not equipped to withstand. How does he do this? In many ways; but first we need to stress
that merely to undergo temptation is not sin.
Jesus was tempted and yet committed no sins. Now, of course, compared to him we are at a
decided disadvantage because of the sin nature in us – the result of which is
that to some extent everything we do is sin. This means too that temptations are naturally
going to appear more attractive to us, and to the extent that we entertain them
favorably at all, we are indeed sinning.
But Luther said it this way: “I
can’t prevent the birds from flying over my head; but I can prevent them from building
nests in my hair.” And what this means
is that you can’t prevent the passing thoughts of temptation, nor can you make
them seem less attractive to your sinful nature; but you can keep yourself from
welcoming and dwelling on them. And certainly the Lord helps us to
do this. He does it primarily in the
same way he accomplishes everything that’s for our spiritual good: through his Word. By the Word he shows us our sins and brings
us to repentance, by the Word he sends his Spirit to give us faith in Christ
who died for our sins, and by the same Word and Spirit he raises up in us a new
person that delights in his will and truly desires to do what’s right. It’s this new nature in us that wants to
resist temptation – and wants to do it for the right reasons: not because it imagines itself to be
righteous in the eyes of God by doing so, but trusting in the righteousness
which is ours by faith in Christ it wants to behave in ways that show forth his
love. All this being
said, the most obvious way that we can resist temptation is to let God’s Word
into our lives where it can do its work. Another way the Lord helps us
overcome temptation is through our external circumstances. The fact of the matter is that to keep us
faithful – to keep us relying on his Word and grace – we must be under a
certain amount of stress. If life for us
is too easy, then we don’t see our need for the Lord and his Word and we fall
by forgetting him; but if things become too difficult, we might fall by giving
in to despair. That’s why the writer of
the proverb asked to be neither too rich nor too poor. He saw the wisdom of the being under the right
amount of stress. The point is that for
each of us the Lord knows exactly how much stress that is, and what we’re
asking for in the petition is for him to provide it. We need this stress too in order to
keep us from another form of temptation that I’ve not yet mentioned, and that
is the temptation to abuse the Gospel by testing God. I’m talking about is what’s sometimes
referred to as “planned repentance”.
This is a sin unique to Christians in which someone says to himself, “I
have this sin I want to commit, and I’m going to do it; but afterwards I’ll
repent and ask Christ for forgiveness and then everything will be all
right.” What this foolish notion
imagines, however, is that repentance is something that I can work in
myself. That’s not true. It takes the Spirit to bring us to repentance
– the same Spirit that’s being rejected the moment I say, “I’m going to commit
this sin” and begin to do it. So what a
person who does this is effectively doing is throwing himself off the Instead we are to honor, uphold, and
trust in God’s love and forgiveness in Christ Jesus all the more knowing that
we are surrounded by such persistent peril on account of the continuous bombardment
of temptation to which we are subject.
We know too that Satan, our adversary, is always about looking for
opportune moments to lead us astray – and unfortunately for us, pretty much
every moment is opportune. All the more
reason our Lord Jesus taught us to pray and pray often, “Lead us not into
temptation”. In his
holy name. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |
