Temptation, what's that all about?

Introduction: Recap of the Series

Welcome and Intro

Good morning friends! Thanks for joining us both here in person and online. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Clint. I’m married, with two little girls. We spent the day on the beach yesterday, that’s my families happy place. I used to work here, but recently stepped down and took a new position working with kids and families. Now that the church isn’t paying me by the hour, I’ll try to keep this message quick and get everyone out at a reasonable time so that we can enjoy the day. Also, usually when I speak publicly I do it from my Ipad, but I got locked out of it this morning, so here we are!!

Series Recap

I get the Honor and privilege of wrapping up this series we have been doing on the Lord’s Prayer. As a confirmed Catholic, I’m a big fan of the Lord’s Prayer. I’m pretty sure it was the first prayer I ever learned, and it is said by, I don’t know, millions of people in churches every Sunday. This prayer, it’s kind of a big deal. If we look at the Bible, this collection of books the detail God’s interactions with Humans, and humans interactions with God, we see in the Old Testament there is this belief in a good God, a perfect, all powerful being, who creates a good world, and then creates humans, “in his image” to care for and steward this world. God loves humans, he breathes a divine, life giving spark into them. We see humans use the power that’s been given them to do all sorts of things, some of these things are great, and some of these things are terrible. We see tons of instances all through the Old Testament of people who should represent God, doing a really bad job of it. We also see, over and over again, God sending folks to intervene. He would speak to prophets, calling folks back to the Good Path that he always intended humans to walk. And yet, humans still continued to be this mixed bag, sometimes listening and doing incredible things, and sometimes hurting each other, the planet, and breaking God’s heart.

Finally, in what we call the New Testament, we see God the Father, send God the Son, Jesus, into the world, to teach folks once and for who God was, what God was about, and how to live the best life possible, a life immersed in God. As he was doing this, as he was correcting false beliefs and assumptions about God, and showing what a life steeped in the love of God looked like, Jesus students said, ‘Lord, will you teach us to talk to God like you do?” And he taught them the Lord’s Prayer.

When you really take a moment to stop and think, isn’t that incredible. And I feel like here would be a good point to clarify something about this prayer. It doesn’t appear like Jesus’s intent was to give us an exact list of words to say in order to earn God’s favor. This isn’t a magic spell, it’s not an incantation, it’s not a recipe. This prayer, is Jesus teaching us things he thought his disciples should know about God, and things that he felt like he disciples should talk to God about. Seem’s pretty important to me, so lets do a short recap.

Our Father in Heaven

This shows the parental nature that God has with us. This is a close relationship. And I know that some of us had parents that weren’t great. What this verse is pointing us towards is that God truly cares for our well being, God loves us deeply and cares about us, that God desires a relationship with us. It also shows the divine Nature of God. God is in heaven, they are higher than we are. God is the Creator of the Universe. God loves us, and God isn’t our drinking buddy that we pal around with. God is Love and Power, and this Loving Powerful God wants us to draw close.

Hallowed be thy Name

This reemphasizes that Holy Part, and the desire that we should see the Name of God be a sacred thing. Now I’m not just talking about using God’s name as a swear word. When we are asking God to makes his name Holy, that is something radical. We are asking that God would make his name known across the entire Universe, that everyone would know that God is powerful, Holy, and good. This is something that only God can do, and what is crazy, is God does it big ways, mircales, healings, things like that, but he also does it through you and me. Through our actions, how we treat others. Are we so transformed by the love of God that when people think of Jesus they go “There is something about that Jesus guy, I know because I see him shine through Clint’s life” Or, do our actions, our thoughts, our behaviors desecrate the name of God. Lord.… would you make your name Holy in us, and through us

Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done, on Earth as it is in Heaven

The next three phrases in the prayer are all kind of tied together. When we talk about the Kingdom of God, we are talking about a place where everything is how it should be. Everything is right, and whole, everything is complete. This is a place of perfection, where there is no more hurt, and no more tears. And we get glimpses of this, we see this future reality, a perfect future break into the here and now. I was praying yesterday, and I asked something like, God will you let me see your goodness break in.......I paused, and then I heard my oldest daughter call to me from the other room “Daddy!” That’s a kingdom moment, to feel that love of a child and parent.

Have you had these Kingdom moments, maybe you got to experience God’s power through a physcial healing. Maybe you got a dose of courage to do the right thing when you were terrifie, or maybe you felt connected to something bigger than you when you were standing down on the edge of the Lake. Those are Kingdom moments. Where in your life have you experinced those breakthroughs? Where is God inviting you to experince more of them?

Give us this Day our Daily Bread

I thought Steph did a great job talking about this two weeks ago. God is a god who desires to meet our needs. God meets us in the here and now and gives us what we need for the day. When we pray this prayer, we customize it for what we need. Lord, today, grant me patience so that I can be loving towards my kids. God, fill me with courage so that I can speak up in moments when I’m scared. Lord, finances are tight, I need you in this moment to provide. God is a god who wants to provide what we need day to day. Go back and listen to that sermon, Steph did an amazing job.

And Forgive us our Trespasses, as we forgive those who Trespass against us

And last week Becca tried her best to talk to us about forgiveness. Just kidding, she did a great job. She talked about how Forgiveness is difficult, but God meets us in the difficult and brings freedom, healing, and hope when we need it most.

You see how this prayer not only teaches us the things that are most important to pray about, but it also teaches us some of the more important things about God. God cares for us deeply, is holy, has an other worldly kingdom that is breaking into the hear and now, and as citizens of this kingdom, God meets our daily needs and helps us forgive, because he has forgiven us.

Today, we get to explore one more quality about the God that Jesus new. The last Verse says

And Lead us Not into Temptation, but deliver us from Evil.

For a long time, this part of the prayer confused me. I could kind of follow the other stuff, but this one seemed weird to me. Lead us not into temptation? Deliver us from evil. I guess I kind of always pictured a road that I’m walking down and I come to a fork in it, one way there is temptation, but the other way is deliverance, and God is standing at the fork, and I’ve got to beg him to send me towards deliverance.

Pause: We are going to take a small detour quick. I want to clear something up, let’s make a distinction between temptation, and testing. God tests, temptation is different. Testing refines us. Testing is when we walk through something, and by going through it, it makes us better. Temptation, is something that is trying to entice us to sin. Can the two go hand and hand. Sure! We see this happen in Jesus’s life. After his baptism, he is lead away into the wilderness and is tempted to turn away from God. He overcomes the temptation, passes the test, and starts his ministry. Testing refines us, and, here is the thing, testing isn’t really about getting the right answer....it’s about the process making us better.

I had a boss once that would ask you questions to test you. This testing though, often times, didn’t make me better, it just taught me how to answer questions the way the boss wanted me to. That’s not the type of tests god offers, you know, get the answer wrong and be sent to hell for eternity. When I think of this testing to make me better, I think of fitness tests in the army. We would train not only so that we could pass the test on test day, but also that we could physically do the job of a soldier when we needed to.

When we walk through a trial, we are being refined so that we can live the life God intended for us to live. So that we can be blessed, and be a blessing to others. Make sense.

Okay Unpause, back on track. This verse says lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. This teaches us a few things. It teaches us about ourselves, about the nature of God, and about how God sees us. Lets start with what this teaches us about ourselves. Let’s take an honest look

Take an Honest Look

As humans, we should pray against Temptation because we are susceptible to temptation. We want what we want and sometimes what we want isn’t good for us. Now, please don’t hear me say that all your wants and desires are bad, and that you need to shuck off the desires of this mortal world, and commit yourself to a life of complete and total denial. I’m not saying we should spend our lives miserable, I don’t think that’s God’s desire for us either. Rather, we need to check and see if things are moving us towards God, or away from God. Is this thing I desire making me more kind, more gentle, more loving, is it allowing me to grow in self control. Is this thing that I want going to hurt me or others? If it is helping you grow, if you feel connected to God, and it’s not hurting anyone, you can probably rock on. But sometimes that isn’t the case. We pray keep us from temptation because we can break, we can stumble, we can make unhealthy decisions.

This looks lots of different ways. There are folks here that struggle with substance use. What’s your trigger, what tempts you? Is it work stress, is it financial stress, relational stress. Lord, keep those things from me, because I don’t want those things to rise up and push me towards meth, towards drinking, towards whatever it is. Lord, I’ve got a good thing going right now, and I don’t want to get knocked off the path, help me!

Take an honest look, what’s the thing that tempts you. Maybe it’s apathy, you’d rather zone out than engage in the things that are going on around you. Lord, keep me from that temptation of emotionally shutting down, deliver me from it.

I could sit here all day and name different things that tempt us, but you know what that thing is for you. Acknowledging it doesn’t make you weak. Knowing what tempts you and leaning into prayer, that’s what makes us strong. Prayer, it’s not this passive thing. It’s not like when my oldest daughter is sitting on the couch, and asks me to plug her ipad in for her. “Daddy, I don’e want to, will you just do it” When we pray, it’s not us trying to take a lazy short cut to getting what we want. Lord, I don’t want to deal with this thing in me, and I don’t want to put the work in, so will you just bippity boppity boo, and change me? No, prayer is this wild, powerful, collabrative practice. We, in humility acknowlege that we don’t have all the power, we bring that into the presence of a holy, powerful, and loving God, and we let that God burn away tings that aren’t healthy, and deposit things that are. This can be a process. It is good, it can be painful, but it is transformative. Taking an honest look in humility becomes this pathway that we get to experince God’s love, his power and transformation.

So, let’s practice this right now, just for a short moment. If you’d like, I’d invite everyone right now to bring to mind something that Tempts you to become a person you don’t want to be. This could be something that may seem small to others, like maybe you don’t like that you swear, or this could be something that may seem bigger, like that coworker that, every time you see them, you start contemplating violence.

And right now, just bring that before God. Lord, lead me not into temptation. Deliver me from evil. Holy Spirit, keep me from doing evil, deliever me. Let me not be tempeted. Amen

We do that, everyday, multiple times a day, and we let God transform us. That’s what this verse is about. but this verse also teaches us about God. It answeres the question:

What Type of God are you?

Remember, Jesus is teaching us what types of things we should pray for. He is teaching us that we should pray against temptation. The commentaries that I read (and I’m sorry I didn’t APA Cite them, if you want them to fact check me, let me know and I’ll get them to you) pointed out a couple of things about this. One thing was that it’s not Gods desire for us to be tempted. God doesn’t want his kids to be tempted all the time.

I recently read the first three Hunger Games books for the first time......In these stories the main characters are thrown into a big, basically futuristic gladiator pit and forced to fight to the death. And there are Game makers, that, when things get boring, throw random stuff in the arena to spice it up a bit. No one has died in awhile, what if we lit everything on fire, that should be great. Oh, I’ve got an idea, how about giant killer bees that make folks hallucinate before they day, that sounds like fun!

For some folks, this is their view of God. That God is this cosmic game maker, who throws temptation in our path, to see if we will “pass the test”. How do you think about God? Do you see God this way, the Game maker? And maybe we wouldn’t say that, but when something unexpected happens we roll our eyes and go “Really God?” Or maybe you see God as detached. You know, God is more of a big picture God, an ideas man, he sent Jesus, so now everything is good to go and those day to day temptations and problems, they don’t matter in the grand schemes of things.

Do you see God like Jesus did. A god who wants us to to pray and say “Lord, don’t let temptation come my way today. Deliver me from evil, keep the bad things from happening to me”. That’s the type of God we serve, a God who desires to keep the bad things away from us. And, someday, there will be no more bad things. Unfrotunately, that’s not the case now. Bad things happen. Sometimes it’s random chance, sometimes its the consequnce of our actions, sometimes its the consequcne of somebody elses actions.

We will have to walk through things that we don’t want to walk through. I’m sure some of you are experiencing that right now. You might find yourself in a situation that you never expected to be in. You’ve been lied to, you’ve been cheated on, you’ve been abused, hurt, scared. Please don’t hear me say that “If you pray hard enough you will be protected from all the bad things.” I wish that was the case, but it’s not. I could give you a big theolgically sound answer as to why bad things happen to good people.....and if you want me to, grab me after the service. For right now, let me say, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry, that shouldn’t have happened to you. You don’t have to walk through that alone.

What this verse promises is that God want’s to draw close, his heart is protecting, and as his kingdom is breaks in more and more, that protection will increase.

If you are here today, and you’ve been hurt, know that you are not alone, and you don’t have to be alone. Not only is God with you, but there are people here who want to come alongside you and support you in anyway that you would like.

Couple of ways to make that happen. You can scan that QR code and go to our connect form. Put in there that you’d like to meet with someone. That’s how I got connected to the Vineyard and it changed me life. Another option, at the end of the service (which is coming up) we are going to have folks come up front who would love to pray for you about anything and everything that is going on. Because, and I think this is one of the last things the verses teach us, in God’s eyes, we are all

Worthy of Protection

Jesus clearly teaches his disciples to pray that they won’t be tempted, and to ask God to deliver us from Evil. In God’s eyes, we are all worthy of being protected. That is God’s desire if each of us. He values you, cares about you, loves you, has deemed you worthy. Sometimes, this is really easy to forget, in big ways and small ways. We can think our problems are way too big for God to deal with “My house is being forclosed on, I’m being evicted, I owe Jabba the Hutt over 29 Trillion credits......there is no way God is coming through on this one.” or “It’s not that bad, I’m just tempted to doom scroll every once in awhile, not that big of a deal” no matter if we are in a good spot or scary spot, no matter if our temptation are big or small, or if the impact of those temtpations are big or small, God wants to be with us. He has said “I have deemed you worthy of my love and protection” How do you respond to that? Do you lean in, do you humbly accept the help. Do you ask for the temptation to be removed, and trust that, with God’s help, you will come out the other side of whatever test or trial you are walking through, better for it. Closer to God because of it?

Conclusion: Remember Who you Serve

One last part of that verse that’s more like a footnote, I guess it was found in some early manuscripts, has the prayer ending with “For Yours is the Kingdom and the Power, and the Glory, now and forever”.

I love that. It reminds us who we serve. The God who holds everything in his hands. The Kingdom, the Power, the glory, now and forever. That is the God who has deemed you worhty. That is the God that is offering to protect you. That is the God who wants to walk with you through this life, and be with you for all eternity in the next one. So, as an action step, I want to invite everyone here, if you haven’t already, to make this prayer part of your everyday routine. First thing when you wake up is good, but maybe you could do it after that first cup of coffee, or driving into work. Take this prayer and make it your own. Draw close to your Father in heaven. Feel God’s love for you. Let his name be made holy in the way you live your life. Ask to see his kingdom come that day. Maybe as your spending time in class, at work, with your friends. Ask for heaven to touch other. Pray that God would meet your needs of the day, whatever they are. Ask for forgivenss where its needed, and help to forgive where you have been wronged. Pray for protection from temptation, and that you’d come out on the other side closer to God. And then remember who you serve, King of the Kingdom, with the power, and the Glory.

Let’s pray this prayer together now.

(Prayer Slide)

Matthew 6:9–13 ““This, then, is how you should pray: “ ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’”

For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory now and forever. Amen.

Ministry Time

We are going to move into a time of Ministry. This is just a chance for us to lean into prayer. We have folks that will be coming up front who would love to pray for you. But, If your able, could you stand with me. And I ask you to stand, because, I believe we are holistic creatures. Our body, mind, soul, are all tied together. So when we stand, it signifies a change. We are moving into this time of ministry, this time of recieving from God. So, I am going to pray over us as a group, and then the worship team will lead us in some more songs. At any point if you would like to get prayer feel free to come on up and have one of these folks pray for you

Communion

Matthew 26:26–28 “While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”