Transcription of my sermon preached Sunday 9th March 2008, at St Matthews Anglican Church, East Geelong, Australia.

Funny Warnings

People put some funny warning labels on products - here are some of the funny ones I found the other day on a website:

  • On a driving mirror in the USA: Warning! Objects in the mirror are actually behind you.
  • On a Korean kitchen knife: Warning! Keep out of children.
  • On a carton of sleeping tablets: Warning! May cause drowsiness. May !?
  • On the package for a Batman costume: “Warning! Cape does not enable user to fly. Batman didn’t fly! Obviously you need the Superman cape for that!
  • On a bottle of dog shampoo: Caution! The contents of this bottle should not be fed to fish. Who do I sue!?

Funny labels! Temptation doesn’t really come labelled though - or if it does it comes labelled to us as something harmless or even good when, of course, it in fact bring genuine harm to us & others. When we’re tempted we’re almost never presented with the downside.

If temptation came labelled with its full effect & downside then it wouldn’t really be a temptation at all. Just like some of the adverts for some medical pills where all the warnings are in very small text or said as quickly as possible on a TV ad. “Breathe Easier” with new Claritin-D - helps you breath easily. (Side effects may include drowsiness, fatigue, abdominal pain, dihorrhea, nausea, headache, fever, chest pain and/or flu symptoms). But when enticed by a temptation to sin it is usually because we’re just focussed on what we have to gain.

So today we’re going to be talking about temptation - Now of course, I’m going to be working mostly from memory & theory today because as you know once you become a member of staff on a church you no longer face any temptations whatsoever. Seriously though, Jesus faced temptation, the Archbishop does, and while we continue on as denizens of this fallen universe we’ll all continue to encounter temptation.

I want to start by looking at some different translations of the bible. Translations other than the NIV use different words on this line of the Lord’s Prayer, and consequently, so do some other churches. I think for some people this raises questions - which one is right?!? My bible says this! My church says that, etc:

Do not bring us into hard testing (Good News Bible & a couple of others)

and

And do not bring us to the time of trial (New Revised Standard)

Some churches say ‘Save us from the time of trial’. Notice that they have used Testing and Trial rather than temptation. How do you go from temptation to testing & trial? Well that’s because the word in the Greek is {pi-ras-mos} Peirasmos and it means temptation, trial and testing all rolled up into one word - it means all of them and so when we’re praying it means you can use different emphisees as you need to. No one is saying that ‘Lead us not into temptation’ is wrong its just that this prayer has a lot more to offer than just praying merely about temptation.

Peirasmos has several senses:

  • It can be a trial or testing, or proving - and the book of James says this is good because then we grow or to prove or show to yourself or others your character, holiness & faith. God uses what Satan & this world throws at us to bring glory to himself & growth to you - tests of proving give you muscles!

I had a chat with Mike Breen about how this phrase works logically if we’re talking about testing and trials, especially since James talks about ‘Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds’ - why would we say ‘lead us not into trials or testing’ when James says ‘Consider it pure Joy when you do’ - and Mike suggested that where trials is the emphasis of our prayer we’re asking God to lead us on a path that avoids spiritual conflict but if the Father chooses conflict then we ask Him to ‘deliver us from evil’. I imagine this is rather like Jesus in Gethsemene asking for his trial, torture & crucifiction to be avoided, but if God choses that it must be so then so be it and similarly we say ’so be it but deliver us from evil’.

It is good to remember here about the second part of the phrase: ‘but deliver us from evil’ begins with the word ‘but’ not the word ‘and’, it is ‘lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’, not ‘and deliver us from evil’ - meaning that these are not two separate petitions, but two-parts of the same petition. Ian will be covering the 2nd part next week but I just wanted to underline this so we don’t lose the context - we need to remember ‘lead us not into temptation’ with the rest of the phrase ‘but, instead, rescue us or deliver us, to you, Father, from evil (or the evil one)’. Also ‘deliver’ here means to deliver to God, not just to avoid evil - there’s a specific target - like a postal letter has a delivery address where it is to go.

So peirasmos can mean a trial or testing, or proving.

And it can also be a temptation to sin. Either as

  • An external enticement to sin, such as an alcoholic walking past a pub, but also,
  • It can be an internal temptation, in our thought lives. Pride for example, or take the 10th commandment, do not covet, don’t be envious - that is a good example of ‘Don’t do this in your mind!’, a good example of an internal temptation - because only God & I know what I’m thinking!

    • What else?

  • Temptation can also mean to be tempted away from God or obedience to a task God has given you- rather like Satan tempting Jesus from His divine errand - his mission to save the world - in Matthew 4. That’s another sense of temptation.
  • Finally, and this particular sense isn’t reflected in any of the translations we see, but pierasmos can be about us humans testing God through our rebellion. One example would be the Israelites in the desert in their rebellion where God shows his justice by leaving them out there for 40 years. Lead us not into a place where we test God’s patience through our rebellion.

For this talk I think that since we pray ‘lead us not into temptation’ every week I shall focus mainly upon the temptation sense of the word Pierasmos - the internal desires & external enticements. There are a couple more translations that use the word temptation with a different effect upon this line in the Lord’s Prayer:

And don’t let us yield to temptation (NLT)

and

Keep us from falling into sin when we are tempted. (New International Readers)

Personally speaking I really like these particular translations. They assume that temptation will come our way - especially internal temptation that we cannot flee from - and we are asking that when it comes that God would keep us from yielding to that temptation.

Again, how can they translate it this way? Well it is to do with the word ‘into’ as in ‘lead us not into temptation’, and what they’re saying, insightfully I think, is that praying: Lead me not into temptation is not the same as Lead us not unto temptation.They are suggesting that we are not to pray that we wouldn’t face temptation, we’re not praying that we wouldn’t encounter temptation but we’re praying that when we do encounter temptation that we would not enter into it. Let me expand the difference:

Jesus often talks of entering into the Kingdom. To enter ‘into the Kingdom’ means much more than to merely encounter or face the kingdom it means more than plainly standing within the kingdom also; To enter into the kingdom means to yield to its claims, to be subjected by it, to surrender & submit ourselves to it, and to take upon ourselves its laws. And so I think that to enter into temptation can mean much more than merely encountering temptation; but it can mean to yield to its demands & become subjugated by it & surrendering to it.

For example in Matthew 26.41 Jesus in Gethsemene bids his disciples to “watch and pray that you do not enter (fall) into temptation”. He knew that within a few minutes temptation would come to them - temptation of cowardice & disloyalty. Jesus wasn’t suggesting they should pray that they would not encounter temptation but he bid them pray that they would not enter into temptation, under its power and mastered by it. They would undoubtably fight a battle but Jesus did not want them led as captives into its citidel.

So I hope that is helpful - sometimes we’re asking God to avoid taking us on a troublesome path upon which we might fall, and at other times we’re asking God to help us not to surrender & come under the power of temptation! This line in the Lord’s Prayer, this fragment, has an awful lot to offer us depending on our situation whether we find ourselves in preparation for Trial, Testing, or Temptation, or whether we’re in the heat of the moment - we can pray this line with an appropriate emphasis.

I think another thing we need to take from this line of the Lord’s prayer is that Jesus is telling us that we need to pray about temptation. There are 5 or 6 parts to the Lord’s Prayer, each with a different emphasis: Glorifying & honouring God, praying for his Kingdom & Will to be done, praying for provision, praying about forgiveness, and then praying about temptation and being delivered or rescued from evil. Well I think I know which one gets prayed about the least in my life!

But Jesus tells us to ask for God’s help and we can pray this line of the Lord’s Prayer both in preparation for and in the moment of temptation. Its just that perhaps we’re not too convinced of why we should pray about it. For this morning I have prepared 3 reasons that why we should pray about temptation:

Well, firstly we should pray about temptation because often the temptation is tapping into something much deeper than mere pleasure, or greed, or flesh-life moments. Let me give you an analogy from my life:

My first car was a Volvo 340. After a couple of years it began to make some funny noises as I was driving. Now I’m not an engineer so I just ignored it. The car was still running, it just sounded a bit funny. I was talking to one of my co-workers and I mentioned it to him and he gave me a pretty insightful piece of advice. He said “listen to your car - your car is trying to tell you something!” I thought “Yeah, that’s a good idea, I should probably do something about that”. And promptly forgot about it except when I was in the car and I would feel a bit guilty that I wasn’t dealing with it.

One day not too long afterwards the car broke down! I turned a corner onto a road that goes up a steep hill and the front-right suspension collapsed and the front-right wheel disappeared altogether into the wheel arch because of the amount of rust in it - it was a real mess. It looked terrible. Now, I’d like to stress again that I’m really not an engineer… so despite the fact that the front-right handside of the car had collapsed I figured that it still had 4 wheels even if one of them wasn’t in the right place “strictly speaking” - but I’m “generation X - it’s all relative - it doesn’t have to be perfect - just go with the flow…” and I figured I could probably still do the remaining miles of my journey. It didn’t take long for me to realise that wheels embedded in wheel arches don’t budge - at all - perhaps they can move but there were angels preventing the car from moving at all !? “Noooo - don’t let him move the car”, etc. The point is I didn’t listen to what my car was trying to tell me and I paid a price in the form of a hefty repair bill! It had a genuine need that I didn’t deal with - I didn’t take it to someone who could sort it out - and so that part broke completely and the whole car stopped functioning!

You & I can be a bit like that car. We have deep needs within us that by God’s design only he can meet. Needs like intimacy with Jesus that when not met means we can be tempted by offers of intimacy from elsewhere. Needs like security, hope & future which if not met mean we can be tempted into greed and buy into materialism, the world’s version of security, among other things. Needs like feeling valued and worthwhile which, when not met, can tempt us into sins of pride or low-self-esteem - when God wants to give you his sense of your value & worthwhileness. Needs like Joy & godly pleasure not being met can mean that we’re open to an external enticement to the world’s versions of those things, of escapism or substance abuse, etc. You see what I’m getting at - you can trace temptation & sin back over several stages until you find the root cause, the underlying need that God wants to meet anyway - its just that the world has sinful rubbish versions that damage & hurt and doesn’t really meet the need, or if it does it just does so temporarily, for a moment. We have to seek God to meet those needs - and sometimes that requires an awful lot of grace, patience & perseverance.

So when temptation and sin come along, especially if we find ourselves in cyclic temptation & sin, we have to use them as triggers to take ourselves back to God both in the moment, and in reflection & discussion and ask God to show us what the root cause is of the temptation. What is the underlying need, ask God to show you what you lack and then ask him to deal with it in whatever way he sees best. If we don’t deal with these needs & inner weaknesses we just end up going around in circles and eventually that part of our lives breaks and then we break down.

Take, for instance, the lack of God’s Joy in our lives. It is a fairly common need that we have that can be the root cause of a temptation to obtain a physical high or escapism - this is an interesting one because we can often feel like our desire for pleasure & enjoyment is just plain wrong when nothing could be further from the truth. Or in rejecting the temptation to bring pleasure through sin we can wrongly assume that we are not to seek pleasure at all.

CS Lewis had something immensely helpful to say about desire & joy: …it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

We are far too easily placated with this world’s idea of Joy & pleasure when God has made an offer of infinite Joy - the world offers its version now, easily accessible but at a high cost, but God’s Joy & pleasure is worth seeking, worth obtaining, and worth waiting for, and it is free!

The 2nd reason we should pray about temptation is because as I said before it is a really bad deal, it is deadly, it comes to us labelled as something harmless, and you & I are not very good at dealing with temptation.

It would be great if temptation did come labelled truthfully: “Warning! This sin will bring disharmony to your relationship with God”. “Warning! This sin will compromise your witness!”. “Warning! This sin will cost you your marriage.” “Warning! This sin will bind you into an addictive cycle.” But of course temptations don’t come with warnings because then they wouldn’t be temptations they would just be really bad offers. And that’s what they are - bad deals, bad offers! Jo and I saw one the other day on the back of a reciept: “2 nights in Echuca - $250 per person”. That’s not an offer that’s daylight robbery! I’m not saying Echuca is not nice, but….

When we yield to temptation we’re ripped-off, we get mugged. As CS Lewis says, we have no real idea what is offerred us so we can easily think the world’s broken and damaged version of Joy is all there is to be had, it is the same for the world’s version of security, intimacy, worth, and so forth.

It was Franklin Jones who said What makes resisting temptation difficult, for many people, is that they don’t want to discourage it completely. Sometimes we’re just not entirely convinced about how bad it is and we need help from the Lord & each other. Lets ask God to remind us that sin is always a rip-off!

And that brings me to the 3rd reason that we should pray about temptation, and that is that God wants to help! Jesus would never and will never ask us to pray a prayer that the Father didn’t want to fulfil, and this is no exception. God wants to help us, to strengthen us, he wants us to pass the test and grow muscles, be mature and complete not lacking in anything as James says.

If we will stick close to God & live in community with the body then he will ensure that we have a choice to not yield to temptation, and he will deliver us from evil. If we stick close to God we will be close to the one who has defeated sin, evil and temptation.

In an interview Henri Nouwen said: I cannot continuously say no to this or no to that, unless there is something ten times more attractive to choose. Saying no to my lust, my greed, my needs, and the world’s powers takes an enormous amount of energy. The only hope is to find something so obviously real and attractive that I can devote all my energies to saying yes…. One such thing I can say yes to is when I come in touch with the fact that I am loved. Once I have found that in my total brokenness I am still loved, I become free from the compulsion of doing [such] things.

God and all he has to offer us is infinitely more attractive than any sin - it is just often we can’t see it. So lets continue to persevere with being vulnerable in our mpods - I know it can be hard, it takes an awful lot of character & maturity to be able to reveal your own weaknesses - and continue to open up our lives to one another, to ask each other for help & God for his joy, intimacy, power & healing in order that we can resist sin, the very thing that separated us from God in the first place.

Lets pray…

  • Help us to pray about temptation, show us underlying needs and weaknesses that are bringing about temptation in our lives.
  • Help those of us who are in Trials & Hard testing to consider them joy, and that they would bring about perseverance, maturity.
  • Help us to be open with one another & together to ask & seek you for your help & intervention in our lives.

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