We are coming to the end of our sermon series.
We've been working our way through Matthew chapter six.
We've been looking at the Lord's Prayer as a template
or as a pattern that Jesus taught us how to pray,
how to pray according to these principles
that we've been dissecting line by line
as we've gone through the Lord's Prayer.
And each week we began by reciting it together.
So if we can get that up on the board
and we'll go ahead and say this all together.
Here we go.
Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy.
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 do not bring us into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
This is God's word.
Will you join me in praying?
Father, we pray today that you, the God of the ages,
the God throughout the ages, the God of creation,
the God who spoke and all things came to be
also spoke through Christ and through the prophets
and now speaks to us today through your word.
I pray that your word would bear down on us today
and that you Lord would reshape our reality
around the truth that is truer than true,
the reality of realities, your kingdom come in Jesus' name.
Amen.
So there's a scene that plays out in my head
over and over ever so often.
It's a real life experience, but when my mind recalls it,
it recalls it in flashes and pictures
that are often met with kind of wincing
and sometimes even this panicked sense of fear.
And I'll get it sometimes in the middle of the night,
I'll get it sometimes in the middle of the day,
it'll just come and I'll have a flashback,
a remembrance of an event.
The event was basically me and my wife,
we were sitting at a coffee shop in Cool, California.
Anyone know where Cool, California is?
It's up in the mountains,
maybe about an hour or so away from here.
It's about 15 minutes from our house
and we were chatting in the cafe there,
drinking some coffee early in the morning.
It was a cold winter day and it had been snowing
and there was ice everywhere that morning,
ice on the trees and on the road and everywhere.
And I don't know if you know this
about being up in the mountains,
but we kind of have our own way of talking things
and one of the things that's peculiar
about the mountain people is they name their storms,
especially the big ones, right?
They get names.
And so we've had our big one a couple years ago
where we actually got more or less trapped at our house,
I was gonna say with my mother-in-law
because it was with my mother-in-law,
but it wasn't a bad thing.
I could have used that as a joke right there.
Cabin fever.
But we were trapped there.
That was Snowmageddon, Snowmageddon.
It was more snow than you could imagine
and it piled up everywhere, our road was blocked.
And so around town, everyone was talking about Snowmageddon.
Well, this particular storm,
was this a year or two ago maybe?
This was Snowpocalypse.
So it wasn't quite Snowmageddon,
it wasn't the end of the world, but it was pretty bad.
I mean, it was on its way there, right?
The Snowpocalypse.
Well, while we're chatting,
we overheard some of the locals there at the coffee shop
talking about 193, which is the highway we take
from our house to get to Kuhl.
193 had developed that morning some ice patches
around some blind corners
and that it was gonna be really dangerous out there
just to drive safe.
And so we overheard that and we thought, well, okay,
someone's gonna spin out or lose control probably.
That tends to be the way it is.
So we took note, we hopped in the car,
we decided we were gonna limit our speed
and drive careful as we headed home.
Not five minutes after getting in the car back on the road,
193, as we approached a major curve in the road,
we see a pickup truck that's traveling
the opposite direction from us, hit some black ice,
began to spin out, head for the embankment,
lose control, fly over the embankment,
down 10 feet, rolls twice, ends up on its side.
And we're like, oh my gosh, like what do we do?
Well, we're on a road, we look to the side,
there's nowhere to pull the truck off
to the side of the road.
It is all pinched in with a mountain or a cliff
on one side or mountain on one side
and a 10 foot drop off on the other.
And we can see behind us the road,
but we can't see around the curve in front of us.
So we decide we're gonna stay in our lane,
we're gonna turn on our hazards to learn.
Anyone coming up from behind to slow down
and then I hop out and my wife hops out
and we go down to check on this truck.
As I approach the truck, my wife stays up
at the top of the embankment there,
kind of looking at what's going on around
and looking down at what we're doing in the embankment.
I approach the windshield of the truck that's on its side
and I look inside and I see a man who has,
apparently wasn't wearing a seatbelt
because he has fallen from his chair
down into the floorboard of the passenger side.
He's down there kind of fetal position
and there's a dog on top of him.
But then I see that he's moving
and he's trying to struggle to kind of pull himself up
and out and we begin to talk through the windshield
and he's able to stand up and unlatch the door
on the other side and push it up
and I help him kind of pull it out.
And then he's really concerned about his dog,
so he first hoists his dog out,
he's gotta get him out, we get the dog out of the car
and finally we get him out of the car
after a lot of wrangling and trying to leverage weight
and pull him up and he gets out.
And by God's grace, he is fine, he's walking around,
he's talking just fine, the dog is fine,
maybe it had a little limp in it,
but overall everything was good.
Well, we're really focused on how do we get this guy out,
how do we help here.
I don't know if you've ever been focused on one thing,
but oftentimes everything else becomes
a little bit of a blur around you.
And it was after getting the guy out
and getting him helped that we,
I feel like me and my wife both heard it at the same time,
but we hear the sound of a car revving up really fast
around the blind corner coming.
And we look at each other, she's at the top of the embankment,
I'm down in the embankment, and someone,
I don't know who it was, there may have been someone else
who had stopped at this point, yells, get out of the way.
And just as we see the car rounding the corner,
hits the black eyes and turns that car perpendicular
to the road and it's sliding,
sliding right toward my wife.
That's where the moments and the flashbacks start, right?
That's where I'm thinking, what is she going to do?
Because if she goes in the embankment,
that's maybe where the car's going.
But when we have gotten out of our truck,
initially to walk down to help the gentleman,
we also had to walk across the road
and the road was like an ice rink.
Have you ever walked on tennis shoes on an ice rink?
Like very carefully making your way across.
And I'm thinking, there's no way she's gonna make it
across the road on ice,
trying to get out of the way of this guy.
And basically, I don't know if you could slow
all of reality down to a moment,
but in that moment, it was like, love you, babe.
Like this is it, this is it.
We thought we were helping out
and this turned out to be a tragedy.
My wife makes a split second decision.
She knows, she's a little scrappy,
she's got some balance to her.
So she decides, she's not going to the embankment,
she's going across the road.
And all I see is her lean forward
and she's fully forward as she starts to run across,
doesn't slip at all, makes it all the way across the road.
The car comes right to where she was sideways.
And when he hits the embankment,
it actually straightens his car out,
he gets right back on the road and goes on.
But that moment right there is like seared in my memory
of what could have happened.
And really, the memory is of this unseen danger
as you're completely distracted with something else,
this unseen danger just around the corner
could have changed our life in a second.
I could have gone to coffee with my wife
and come home to my boys to let them know that mom was gone.
And that's seared in there and I think someone said,
yeah, that's trauma.
Yeah, that's trauma, I would imagine it is.
And it's there.
Sometimes you get so focused on a situation
that you don't see the unseen dangers that are all around,
but they are all around.
And sometimes we're most oblivious to the ones
that are in the unseen realm.
Where a spiritual battle rages right now
and there is an enemy who is hell bent on destroying us.
J.I. Packer, the scholar and pastor said,
if you could see the actual danger
you are in every day of your life,
you would pray without ceasing.
You would pray without ceasing.
And Jesus teaching us to pray is cueing us
into what is really going on in our lives
that some of us have become oblivious to.
At 1 Peter chapter five says,
be sober minded and be alert.
This is a command to us as believers,
be sober minded, be alert, why?
Because your adversary, the devil,
is prowling around like a roaring lion
and he's looking for someone to devour.
He's looking to devour you spiritually.
John chapter eight says that Satan is a murderer
from the beginning and he does not stand for the truth
because there's no truth in him.
When he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature
because he is a liar and the father of lies.
There are lies being told to you
throughout your life and your day
that you may just go, oh, that's just a person,
that's just a liar, but it is the enemy
who's trying to bait you and pull you in
because you're trying to get out of your life
and pull you in because he wants to destroy you.
You have an adversary and most of us live oblivious to it.
We think chance, we think fate,
we think all kinds of things,
but you have an adversary who is active,
who is strategic and he's looking to destroy you,
destroy your faith.
Second Corinthians chapter 11 says
that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.
Paul in the book of Ephesians says
that we need spiritual armor.
Why would you need spiritual armor?
Because you're in a battle.
You need spiritual armor because you're in a battle
against an adversary who can actually do damage to you.
And so you have to put on the spiritual armor.
You have to put on the armor of God
so that you're able to stand against what?
The schemes of the devil.
Not many of us probably woke up this morning
thinking that the devil had a scheme to destroy me today.
The enemy has a scheme to bait me, to lie to me,
and to destroy me today.
He wants to destroy my faith.
And yet the Bible over and over again tells us that's true.
In fact, the Bible says in 1 John chapter five
that the whole world is under the sway of the evil one.
The whole world is under the sway of the evil one.
There are powers at work, there are structures at work,
there are governments at work,
and there are individuals who have not bowed their knee
to Jesus who are at work.
They may be unwittingly being used,
but they're being used by the evil one,
swayed by the evil one to destroy God's work and his people.
His desire is to kill, to steal, and to destroy,
and he is an ever-present danger.
He is the unseen danger.
He is the danger around the corner
that we are oblivious to.
John Piper says, until you know that life is war,
you cannot know what prayer is for.
Until you know that life is war,
you cannot know what prayer is for.
It's even got a nice little rhyme.
And so here we are, we're looking
at Matthew chapter six and verse 13,
and we find that Jesus is teaching us about prayer,
and he's teaching us about this ever-present danger.
He says, and do not bring us into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
I know sometimes I will preach,
and I will give a couple of points,
and that can throw you off at times,
because you're thinking, oh,
there's three points evenly divided.
If he spent five minutes on one,
we're gonna be here 15 minutes, right?
Psych, gotcha.
But today you'll be relieved,
because I have one point today
that we're gonna spend the next four and a half hours on.
One point.
And if it's anything like the first service,
we were out early, so.
If you're taking notes, spread down this one point.
Every temptation is also a test.
On his face, Matthew chapter six, verse 13,
can read as if we are praying to God
that we're imploring or we're petitioning God
to please not tempt us to do evil.
It can sound like we're asking God,
don't take us into temptation,
don't tempt us to do evil.
But that would fly in the face
of what James chapter one, verse 13 says,
that no one undergoing a trial
should say I am being tempted by God,
since God is not tempted by evil,
and he himself doesn't tempt anyone.
So God cannot and does not tempt us to do evil.
But we know from scripture that God does test his people.
He tests his people,
and testing is God's way of strengthening our faith,
it's God's way of building character in us,
and it's God's way of proving obedience.
It's a divine tool for growth,
for refinement and preparation.
Testing draws out what is in us already,
to expose the areas of our weakness,
to encourage us in areas that the Holy Spirit
has been at work and we've seen growth,
and it drives us to thank and trust in God completely.
Testing is very different because testing is for our good,
its aim is our good, its aim is to expose
what the Holy Spirit has already been doing in our hearts
as sincere, and when we begin to see the progress of faith,
the journey of faith at work in our hearts,
through the testing, I did not respond to this situation
the way I used to, anyone ever been there, right?
The way I responded to that situation 20 years ago,
I don't respond anymore, God has done something in me.
The testing, being put in the situation
where the old you would have responded that way
is the only way for you to know
you wouldn't respond that way now
because God's done something in you.
So you see how testing proves something out in us,
it proves God's work.
Another tool, another part of the testing that God uses
is it can expose areas of weakness.
Not where we fall into sin,
but areas where we haven't attended to,
areas where we need more maturing
or we're immature in our reactions or responses to God.
And by seeing them, don't you know that
the first part of any solution is knowing the problem?
And so testing can help us to know the problem
that we need to work with, the weakness that exists in us
so that we can begin to agree with God
in prayer and the Holy Spirit.
Do your work in me, I clearly need patience.
I clearly need grace
because I was put in a situation that came out
and I know you wanna do good in me.
In fact, I often tell folks,
when you're put in certain situations,
whatever comes out is exactly what the Holy Spirit
wants to work on right now.
You're put in difficult situations,
the yuck comes out and you go, there it is.
Now I know what God wants to work on right now.
It's that, whatever that is.
God tested his people.
God tested Abraham, the most famous one, Abraham and Isaac
by telling him to go up onto a mountain
and to offer Isaac, his firstborn and the son of promise,
as a sacrifice, the promised child,
to be ultimately the fulfillment of God's will,
he said to go up on the mountain and to offer him,
to show that your hand is not holding so tightly
and the purpose was not so that Abraham would follow through.
It was because God could see that Abraham had faith
and obedience and he needed Abraham to see that.
He needed Abraham to see that God had done a work in him
so that his trust was secure.
Temptation though, on the other hand,
temptation is always an incitement to sin.
Not a test, not to prove God's work,
not to show weakness, but is intended for us to sin
and fall and fail, that's what temptation is.
Its goal is to lead you as one of God's children
away from God's will and exploit your weakness
and exploit your weaknesses and your desires.
But for us to understand Matthew chapter 6, 13,
we have to understand one key
and it's a key to understanding even life
as we understand it in our experiences and it's this,
all of our experiences are tests from God
and all of them are temptations from Satan.
All of our experiences are tests from God
and all of them are temptations from Satan.
Every experience we face in life is a test from God
to strengthen our faith in our character.
While simultaneously, it can be used and exploited by Satan
as a temptation to lead us into sin.
As one pastor put it, our experiences can be divided
into two categories, pleasant or pain.
Pleasant or pain, right?
Good or bad.
We've had good experiences, we have bad experiences,
we have pleasant experiences, we have painful experiences.
And pleasant experiences might be financial security,
it might be having a beautiful wife or spouse,
it might be having a good reputation in this world,
it might be having a peaceful home or success at work
or a windfall payment of money.
Any of these can be pleasant experiences in life.
Painful experiences might be a tragedy or a loss,
it might be a stressful circumstance or betrayal
of a relationship, maybe loneliness or regret
or injustice or illness.
These are painful experiences we go through
and if they're pleasant experiences,
you can know that they are tests from God.
You might go, wait, wait, no, no, I thought,
I thought tests or trials, no, or temptations,
those are bad things.
No, even in the two categories, pleasant experiences,
painful experiences, both of them are tests from God.
If they're pleasant, they're a test from God.
Will you give God thanks in your circumstance?
Your good circumstance.
Will you acknowledge him as the giver of all good things?
Will you consider him better by continuing to rely
and trust and lean on him?
Will you consider him better than the gift that was given?
Sometimes we go, Lord, man, I could really use
some financial security right now,
will you provide for me?
And subsequent or sometime after that, we might go,
oh, there's this provision, right?
Thanks, God, and then we go and we lean into
and rely on the gift that was given
or the provision that was given
as if it was what gave us security and hope.
And we put our whole faith and trust in the thing
and we deny God.
God's testing us even when he gives us good things
to see will we still consider him better.
Is he still our treasure?
When you get good health reports,
do you put your faith and hope in your health
or is he still better?
Is he still your hope?
And you can see that when the experiences flip
and become pain experiences.
If they are pain, they're still tests from God.
Will you trust him?
Will you trust his goodness?
Will you trust his wisdom?
Will you trust his faithful love?
But you can also know that every pleasant experience
is also a temptation from Satan.
Will you idolize them?
Will you not thank God for them?
Will you make them supreme?
Will you find your greatest hope in them?
Will you see the pleasure, be it financial security
or sex or promotions at work or upward success
or whatever it is, will you see it
and make them your pursuit and your source of life?
The enemy would want nothing more
than that, that you would find your greatest hope
and treasure and joy in the things that are good
that become distorted in your heart.
If they are pains, they are temptations from Satan as well.
Don't trust God.
Curse God for allowing this to happen to you.
Question God, I'm a good person,
how could you allow this sickness or this deep pain
or this sickness or this difficulty to come on me?
I've done everything right.
I've gone to church perfectly.
I don't cuss, I don't do anything.
Why would you allow this?
The temptation from Satan to not trust God,
to doubt his goodness, to doubt his wisdom,
to doubt his faithful love.
And with the understanding that every experience,
all of our experiences are tests from God
as well as temptations from Satan,
that both God will use it to test us and to form us
and Satan is lurking in the background trying to use it
to get us to turn our hearts and our affections toward it
and away from God.
With that understanding,
then we come to Matthew chapter six, verse 13.
With this understanding of life's experiences
and we see that what we find in Matthew six, 13
is that it is a prayer to God
that in all his testing of us
that he will not let the enemy get the upper hand.
God will test us.
Yes, test our faith and show it genuine.
Yes, use testing as this wonderful tool of grace
to prove the quality of the work of Jesus
and the Holy Spirit at work within us.
Yes, yes, yes, but God, Father,
don't let Satan ensnare me.
Don't let Satan ensnare me.
There's a Proverbs, I'm doing it off the top of my head
but it says something like this.
God, give me the necessary bread.
Give me the bread for today.
Don't give me poverty or else I might steal
and then profane your name.
And don't give me riches lest I forget you.
Give me just what I need.
God will use these different things in our lives,
pleasures and pains to test the quality of our faith
so that we can continue to grow and learn.
But Satan is always lurking and prowling
to use them also for temptation,
to tell you to take hold of it
like he did in the garden with Adam and Eve.
This good thing that God had given,
the fruit of the garden and the one rule
to not eat of the certain tree and the certain fruit
and what does Satan do?
He's lurking there ready to destroy God's work to say,
did God really say that?
Doesn't it look good?
If you just take it, it probably tastes good.
What does God know?
Right?
We need the Father to actively keep the enemy at bay
so that the testing in our life
doesn't cause us to fall into temptation.
Don't lead us through testing
to where we fall or succumb to the evil one and his temptation
but instead deliver us from the evil one.
In every test, God deliver us from it becoming
a faith destroying temptation.
We are desperately in need of God's mercy
to deliver us from the evil one and from his temptations.
And God says this is how we should pray.
We should recognize that we are always in danger.
Every experience, be it pleasure or pain,
is where the enemy is prowling
but it's also a place, an opportunity for us to trust
in our deliverer, the one who delivers us from the evil one.
I don't know if you know this about Jesus
but in his death and resurrection,
he conquered the evil one.
He gained victory over the evil one
and while the effects or the power of the evil one
is not fully drained and dispersed with
as it will be at the end of time,
if we are in relationship with God,
if we are praying the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray
every single day to drive ourselves and our hope into God
even when we're experiencing good times or pain,
to remember that we could always lose God in the midst of it.
If we succumb to temptation but instead continue
to drive us into the Father's heart.
That's what this final phrase or final petition
in the Lord's Prayer is leading us to.
And invite the worship team to come up.
See that wasn't too bad.
One point, a couple minutes.
Worship team's gonna lead us in a song in a moment
and we'll take communion but as we began to come up,
as we began to close our time together,
I just wanna ask you a couple questions.
I don't know what you came in with.
Some of you are probably experiencing temptations
and trials right now.
See because while every experience in life
is a temptation and a trial,
there are some that are very acute
or that bring us to awareness.
And this message I think that the word is trying
to teach us is be aware always.
The enemy is always probably, he's always around the corner.
He's the unseen danger at every turn.
And you very well could say, oh but my life is good.
Be alert.
Oh I have everything that I want and I need.
Be alert.
Don't let your guard down.
Oh I'm in pain, I'm going through a very difficult time.
Be alert.
I can promise you that the enemy is active on both sides,
pleasure and pain.
I've seen many people derail their faith,
abandon their faith, destroy their faith,
shipwreck, whatever you wanna call it,
in times of pleasure as much as in times of pain.
Times of abundance where they forgot God.
And the Lord's Prayer drives us back to say,
God I'm gonna live my life as if every experience,
every moment, pleasure or pain,
that I need you to deliver me from the evil one.
I need you to deliver me.
We sang it earlier, Lord I need you.
Yes I need you every hour, minute, second, breath.
I need you.
He's our one defense, our only righteousness,
only connection to God, we need him.
And so do you trust God enough to ask him
to guide you through both the testing and the temptation
today?
And I'll ask you this, what else or who else
but God can deliver you from the schemes of an enemy
that you can't see?
At least when me and my wife are on the side of the road,
we can hear the car coming and we can see it.
What about the blind side that the enemy can bring
right in the middle of absolute elation and joy
the temptation that he'll lay before you
that you might fall into his trap?
You need God to deliver you, who else can deliver you?
The final thing I'll ask is do you treasure God?
Is he better, is he better than all other things?
Than all good things and all bad things?
Is he better than everything that you have in this world?
Than everything that you have in this world?
You know when that's most tested, right?
When you're losing it.
That's when you know, that's when it's tested.
That's when the quality of the faith is tested most,
is when you're losing it all.
And some of you have gone through some difficult times,
some of you have gone through health crisis and issue.
And maybe at the beginning you started to doubt
a little bit.
I don't know how strong this faith is.
But I promise you that if you prayed, God deliver me.
If you prayed, God deliver me even through this
and be it life or death, you are better.
That's the truth that bears down.
If you do life or death, you are better.
Then what can the enemy take from you?
And what can this life take from you?
Would you have the one thing that lasts,
the one thing that's eternal, the one thing that's solid?
This life can't take anything from you if he is better.
But if that money or that job or that status
or whatever else, that's better,
then when it's taken, everything is gone.
My life is destroyed, I've got nothing.
Choose what's better.
Choose what lasts.
Pray the prayer daily, recognizing the unseen danger.
God, do not deliver me over to temptation,
but deliver me from the evil one.
I believe God honors that prayer.
And we know that in Christ Jesus,
he has triumphed over death and the evil one
in the shedding of his blood
for the redemption of those who believe.
Finally, I'll say before we receive our communion elements
is this, if you're here and you've never before,
put your hope and faith in Christ.
If you haven't, bow the knee or bend the knee
and bow the head and see him as Lord,
declare him as Lord of your life.
Put your hope and faith in the thing that will last.
Make him better than all other things.
Then I wanna invite you to make that choice,
make that decision, make that leap today,
to follow Christ, to let go of all lesser things
and hold on to what is better and what will last.
He will never fail you.
He will never let you down.
Even if life, sickness, the enemy, take all things from you,
you will have what lasts and you will have it for eternity.
Put your faith and hope in Christ.
In Christ, will you pray with me?