Learning to Pray (Fifth Midweek Lenten Devotion)

[This was shared during the final Wednesday Midweek devotional worship for Lent at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier this evening.]
James 1:12-16
Luke 4:1-2a
Tonight, we’re focusing on the sixth and seventh petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: “And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil.”

Someone has said that the easiest thing to empirically prove about the witness of Scripture and Christian belief is the reality of sin and evil. The Bible asks us to accept as matters of faith, among other things, the existence of God, Jesus' birth to a virgin, the divinity of Jesus, Jesus’ resurrection, the true presence of Christ's body and blood "in, with, and under" the bread and wine of Holy Communion, and eternity as a reality that will be experienced by all who repent and believe in Jesus as Savior and Lord.

But it requires no leap of faith for us to believe that each of us is a born sinner or that, except for the God-man Jesus, sin is indemic to the human experience. Each of us can testify to the reality of sin and evil from what we see in the headlines, in our homes, and in our own hearts.

Ann’s and my home pastor used to tell us, “If you doubt the existence of original sin, put two 2-years olds in a locked room with a single toy.”

Our natural impulse is to be completely wrapped up in ourselves, to love ourselves but not God, and certainly not neighbor.

Our inborn desire to be in control of the universe, to “be like God” as the serpent put it to Eve in the garden of Eden, is something we all share, no matter how hard we may try to conceal it from others...or ourselves.

But after the Christian has prayed that

• God’s Name will be hallowed,
• God’s kingdom will come,
• God’s will is done,
• God will provide our daily bread and
• God will forgive us our sins as we forgive others,

Jesus encourages us to pray for what may be the biggest miracles of all!

Jesus teaches us to ask our Father to “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” or as a modern translation of the prayer puts it, “Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.”

Think about that: Jesus is teaching us to militate against our inborn impulse to do be our own gods and ask God for the power to not do every selfish, willful, destructive, hurtful thing which, inside of us, we want to do! That the Holy Spirit would actually move us to even pray for such things is a miracle, let alone give us the power to mean the requests and actually contemplate living them!

Of the sixth petition, "Lead us not into temptation," in The Small Catechism, Martin Luther makes the same point as Jesus’ brother James makes in the words I read from the New Testament a few moments ago. Luther writes, “God tempts no one to sin, but we ask in this prayer that God would watch over us and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful self may not deceive us and draw us into false belief, despair, and other great and shameful sins. And we pray that even though we are so tempted we may still win the final victory.” Here, Luther underscores the fact that, in this petition, we ask God for a miracle.

But that’s OK; God is in the miracle business!

On the First Sunday in Lent each year, we remember that Jesus, though sinless, shared the very human experience of being tempted to sin. As an often-quoted passage of Hebrews reminds us, in Jesus, our high priest, “…we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”

Jesus’ successful resistance of temptation in the wilderness--along with His life-long avoidance of sin--was a miracle, in its way.

Jesus didn’t take the easy way out.

He didn’t take the selfish way out.

He endured in His faithful obedience to the will of God and because Jesus endured, He can help us to endure faithfully in the face of temptation and evil.

But we can do more than endure. The God Who has shared our life experiences has also conquered our temptations, our sins, and death itself through Christ’s cross and empty tomb!

Whenever we ask God to “deliver us from evil,” we express our conviction that no matter what temptations bedevil us and whatever sins we need to confess in Jesus’ Name, those who entrust themselves to Jesus can be raised above all evils.

During our lives on this earth, God will minister to those who truly seek to walk with Him, just as God sent His angels to serve Jesus in His wilderness of temptation.

To pray, “Deliver us from evil” is to pray for more than the power to resist evil in this life. In Matthew 24, Jesus talks about what this world will be like as its life draws to a close. There will be an “increase of lawlessness,” Jesus says, and “the love of many will grow cold.” “But,” He goes on, “the one who endures to the end will be saved.”

It was no doubt with passages like this in mind that Luther wrote of the seventh petition of the Lord’s Prayer—“Deliver us from evil”: “We ask in this inclusive prayer that our heavenly Father would save us from every evil to body and soul, and at the last hour would mercifully take us from the troubles of this world to Himself in heaven.”

In teaching us the sixth and seventh petitions, as is true of all the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus invites us to trustingly live in the glory of two transcending Christian realities: Surrender and Triumph!

When by faith, we surrender to Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit makes it possible not only for us to confess our faith in Jesus’ Lordship, but also to be empowered to relate to God as “our Father,” our intimate and loving parent. We can speak honestly to God about our desires, our hopes, our troubles and temptations, our requests.

Last Sunday, I mentioned that I've been reading John Ortberg's new book, The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God's Best Version of You. Today--after I thought I had finished this sermon yesterday--I got to a chapter where Ortberg talks about this whole business of surrender to God. To the world, he points out, surrender is equated with defeat. But for the Christian, surrender is the first step to life.

In fact, when a movement among Christians called the Oxford Group birthed Alcoholics Anonymous, it presented twelve practical steps to freedom from addiction, all of which are rooted in the Bible and Christian belief. The first step to freedom for the addict is admitting that they have a problem too big for them to control or overcome.

That is the first step to freedom from sin and the freedom to truly live for all of us. Surrender is a hard pill to swallow for us, especially for we men, who are seem to liberally imbibe the myth that if we're not in control, we're less than human.

But as Ortberg points out, when we play God, when we think that we must have things under control, we walk down the road of disappointment and unhappiness. That's because, my fellow recovering control freaks, when we presume to be in control of our worlds, we take responsibility for something over which we have zero control: the outcomes of life.

When we surrender our lives to God, God gives us the freedom to live day by day, working, loving, and living faithfully and leaving the outcomes in the hands of God.

That's a relief and that's liberating!

The child who surrenders to the Father in faith also shares in Jesus’ triumph over temptation, sin, evil, and death.

The person who asks their Father to deliver them from evil is claiming their share in Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Surrender to Jesus Christ brings triumph as God sets us free to be our true selves, our best selves!

We usually end our prayers, of course, with the word, Amen. Amen is more than a religious way of saying, “Over and out.” Let Luther have the last word tonight:

Amen means Yes, it shall be so. We say Amen because we are certain that such petitions are pleasing to our Father in heaven and are heard by Him. For He Himself has commanded us to pray in this way and has promised to hear us.

When we say, "Amen" in our prayers, we take Jesus up on His offer of new life to those who surrender to Him and walk in the triumph of new life for all who repent and believe in Him!

Lord Jesus: Teach us to pray as You have taught us and live our lives in surrender and triumph in Your Name. Amen

When the Means of God and the Devil Dovetail

"Hey, Dad," my son asked me earlier today, "what do you make of these two passages?" A buddy of Phil's, also planning on going to seminary, had run across a couple of passages of Scripture, dealing with the same event, but which gave it two totally different spins.

The passages are 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1. Readers of the Bible know that 1 Chronicles in the Old Testament reiterates, often with different details, the book of 2 Samuel. But the differences between the two passages Phil's buddy noted are pretty huge.

Read them:

Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go, count the people of Israel and Judah.” (2 Samuel 24:1)

Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to count the people of Israel. (1 Chronicles 21:1)

So, who was behind David's decision to count the members of his army, the Lord or Satan? And what was so wrong with David taking a census anyway?

Modern scholars of Scripture might not be terribly troubled by this seeming conflict. They posit that the Old Testament histories went through a number of iterations and were finally filtered through four "editors," not actual individual editors, but theological schools of thought that had their own slants and compiled the Biblical material in ways reflective of them.

According to this theory, the four major editorial schools that produced our current Old Testament, known by generations of seminarians as J, E, D, and P are Yahwistic, Elohistic, Deuteronomistic, and Priestly. Some scholars even claim to be able to discern paragraph seams reflecting the varied traditions throughout.

So, it's possible that the two seemingly conflicted passages represent different schools of ancient Israelite theological emphases.

This shouldn't threaten anyone's understanding of Scripture as the Word of God, though. Whatever the varied emphases of Biblical writers, editors, and translators, we trust that a praying people of faith, guided by the Holy Spirit, have handed down to us God's Word as God intended it to be given. The compilers of the Bible weren't dumb. They could see, for example, that Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 2:4-24, present us with two very different versions of creation. But each contain important truths about God's purposes that we need to know.

But I have a feeling that explaining the passages from 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles is, both simpler and more complicated than J, E, D, or P. In a nutshell: There are times when the means of God and the means of the devil are the same, although their ends may diverge.*

To show you how it's possible for the devil or a human being with bad purposes to use the same methods at the same time as God, Who's after good purposes, consider two other passages of Scripture.

First: The climactic passage in the account of Joseph and his brothers in the Old Testament book of Genesis. Joseph's brothers, you know, resented their father's love and attention for Joseph, as well as the early intimations that the boy would one day rule over them. So, they sold Joseph into slavery, convincing their father, Jacob, that Joseph was attacked and eaten by a wild animal. Over the course of years, Joseph becomes the prime minister of Egypt and his brothers fear that in his powerful position, he'll take revenge on them. But Joseph points out that their bad action resulted in his being in the position to save thousands of people, including all of fledgling Israel, from a famine then raging throughout the Middle East. So, he tells his brothers:

"Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today" (Genesis 50:20)

Second: The set of similar passages in the New Testament Gospels that bridge Jesus' baptism, when He's declared the Son of God--the very personification of the Deity--and His temptation in the wilderness. Luke recounts this abrupt movement from triumph to deadly challenge jarringly:
²

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. (Luke 4:1-2a)

In the case of Joseph's brothers, there can be no doubt that what they did was despicable, both to Joseph and to Jacob. They took money for their brother, getting rid of him. Then, they broke the heart of their old man, convincing him that his undeniably favorite son** was dead. And yet, Joseph later claimed to see that while their act was, really, evil, God's hand had been in it. Their malevolence put him, over two decades later, exactly where he needed to be to accomplish God's purposes.

The case of Jesus' temptation is particularly interesting. The word for tempt, in the original Greek of the New Testament, is peirasmo. It can mean both test and tempt. And it can mean both things simultaneously.

Notice that it was God the Holy Spirit who led Jesus in the wilderness "where for forty days he was tempted by the devil." Apparently, both God the Holy Spirit and the devil wanted Jesus in the wilderness, but for different reasons. One can surmise that the Spirit wanted to strengthen Jesus' commitment to and fortify Him for His mission of dying and rising for us, while the devil wanted to deter Jesus from that mission, enticing Him to take easier paths to power and rule.

So, what's all of this got to do with our passages from 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles?

That's where the census comes in. There's nothing inherently wrong with a census. There were even times in ancient Israel's history when God commanded the taking of censuses. A nose count can be a good planning tool. But that wasn't David's motive. As the editors of The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Revised Standard Version) noted years ago:

The reason [for God's anger with the census] must have been that taking [it] was deemed an infringement upon the prerogatives of their God, the sole arbiter of the destinies of the nation and its people.

In other words, David had fallen prey to the idea that the bigger your military, the more powerful you are, when in fact, ancient Israel's power was God and the nation's humble reliance on God. The editors of The Life Application Bible (New Revised Standard Version) explain:

David's sin was pride and ambition in counting the people so that he could glory in the size of his nation and army, its power and defenses. By doing this, he put his faith in the size of his army rather than God's ability to protect them regardless of their number.

So, was it the Lord or Satan who incited David to conduct the census?

Why couldn't it have been both of them?

Sometimes, God lets us "go our own ways," allowing us to stew in our own juices so that we can see the futility and stupidity of trying to live without God. Sometimes we need to be brought up short so that we will turn back to God for hope, peace, and life. God appears to have been doing this with David here.

And, of course, because Satan wants nothing more than to break God's heart and destroy God's rule by tearing us from the arms of God, he could have been simultaneously urging David to take his self-glorifying census.

Sometimes, it seems that the means of God and the devil really do dovetail. In every temptation there's a test. When temptation comes, we can pray, "Lead us not into temptation." Or, as a modern translation puts it, "Save us from the time of trial."

*I know. Nobody wants to take the notion of the devil seriously any longer. He's seen as a worn-out old superstition. And while the devil can't make you do anything and would clearly love for you to be unaware of the ways he tries to drive you away from the hope and peace of God, you can be sure that he's constantly trying break God's heart by turning yours cold to God or by leading you to despair. Earlier this week, I talked with a man fearful that he was too bad for God to love him. I explained that, while none of us is good enough for God to love, God loves us anyway. On top of that, I said, a totally bad person would never worry about whether he or she were good enough for God. People given over to badness simply figure that good and bad are outmoded concepts or that they're good enough. The closer we get to God, the more conscious we are of our need of God and of God's forgiveness. "The next time the devil tells you that you're not good enough," I said, "tell the devil that Jesus and His love are bigger than your lies and I belong to Jesus forever."

**I love it that the Bible shows us how God loves and uses dysfunctional people. Believers in the God disclosed to Israel and in Jesus Christ are not, as the old bumper sticker puts it, perfect but forgiven.