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Welcome back! I hope you’ve had a chance to dig a little deeper into this passage this week. Here’s what the Spirit has revealed to me from my studies:

Last Week’s Work

CROSS-REFERENCES

I was surprised at the number of cross-references available for the phrase, “lead us not into temptation!” As I reviewed them, I noticed:

• God allows us to be tested throughout the Bible.  
  From the beginning, when the serpent conned Eve into eating forbidden fruit (Genesis 3).
  God tested Abraham, asking him to offer Isaac, his only son, as a sacrifice in Moriah (Genesis 22:1-2). Abraham and Sarah waited decades for Isaac, the child of the promise (Genesis 17:19), so the temptation to fail that test had to have been indescribable! Yet Abraham’s statement to Isaac reveals temptation-resistant faith: God will provide for himself the lamb… (Genesis 22:8).
  And God also tested the Israelites similarly in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 8:2, 8:16).
  God used a trial (a thorn… in the flesh) to keep Paul humble (2 Corinthians 12:7-9).
• Prayer is a God-approved strategy against temptation.
  In addition to Jesus’s recommendation here in His model prayer (Matthew 6:13), we also see three times when He coached Peter, James, and John to pray that [they would] not enter into temptation. Three times they snoozed instead (Matthew 26:36-46, Mark 14:32-42). I wondered if that lack of prayer later contributed to Peter’s succumbing three times to the temptation to deny Jesus (Matthew 26:69-75).
• God won’t allow Christians to be tempted beyond their ability, there will be a way out. (1 Corinthians 10:13).
• God knows how to rescue the godly from trials (2 Peter 2:9). He can relieve any trial, but as indicated above, He may choose to use it to grow us, instead.

OTHER TRANSLATIONS

When I used biblehub.com to access multiple translations of Matthew 6:13, the New Living Translation (not one of my regular checks) caught my eye:

And don’t let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.

This is different! While the other Bibles ask to not be led or brought to temptation, trial, or test, NLT seems to accept it’s going to happen (as my cross-references surely indicated!) and asks instead to be strengthened against its pull away from God.

COMMENTARY

I compared my thoughts about the work I’ve done in this study with eight commentaries on v13 and didn’t find any areas of disagreement. That said, I really liked J.W. McCarvey’s perspective on three parts of the overall prayer (vv9-13) I discovered in The Old & New Testament Restoration Commentary:

• Invocation (where previous prayers often addressed God as Lord), Jesus, Son of God, introduced the concept of addressing him as Our Father);
• Three petitions about our relationship with God (honoring His name, bringing His kingdom on earth, and doing His will); and
• Three Petitions about our needs (provision of daily bread, forgiveness of sins, and avoidance of temptation).

Dig-In Challenges

This coming week, let’s wrap up our study of Matthew 6:5-15 and align with what we’ve discovered in this passage:

1. PRAY: Read the prayer created in Step 1.
2. ALIGN: Review our study notes and other work, focusing specifically on what we’ve learned in this study.
3. ALIGN: Then, considering those “lessons learned,” think about how the Spirit has convicted us through this study. In other words, where has He shown us misalignment between what we’ve discovered and how we practice our faith?
4. ALIGN: Next, let’s look to God’s Word for guidance to correct that misalignment. This is often—but not always—a verse from the study text or from one of the cross-references.
5. ALIGN: And finally, reflect on how we can change our thoughts or actions to align more closely with what we’ve discovered here. To really make this work, I’m committing to changing something and do my best to act on that commitment every day for at least three weeks.

That may seem like a lot to consider in one week. If you’re working with the Spirit, remember it’s okay to work at your own pace. Don’t worry about where you are—just do what you can when you can. I know the Lord will bless any time you spend in His Word!

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