Our Father Reflection 8: “…and lead us not into temptation…”

Matthew 6 v 9: This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, may your name be held holy… and lead us not into temptation…

Luke 4: 1-14

After teaching us to pray to our “Abba” confidently, Jesus is teaching us the Our Father as the pattern for all our prayer. He is showing us seven things to ask: the first three have all been to do with God (“hallowed be your name”, “your Kingdom come”, and “your will be done”).

What should we pray for every day, for ourselves? We have already prayed for ourselves for “our daily bread” and for forgiveness from God for ourselves (“as we forgive others”). Maybe it’s easy to know that we need food (natural and spiritual) and forgiveness every day. But now Jesus also teaches us to ask every day for our Father’s help in the fight with temptation. “Our sins result from our consenting to temptation; we therefore ask our Father not to "lead" us into temptation… the Greek means both ‘do not allow us to enter into temptation’ and ‘do not let us yield to temptation’” (Catechism 2847)

Fighting temptation is hard. There are evil spirits who try to get us to do wrong and it can be hard to know when we are being tempted, so there is often a battle in our minds between what we know Father wants us to do, and our weak and sinful nature. A gift we need for this is discernment: “The Holy Spirit makes us discern between trials [difficulties], which are necessary for the growth of the inner man, and temptation, which leads to sin and death. We must also discern between being tempted and consenting to temptation. Finally, discernment unmasks the lie of temptation, whose object appears to be good, a "delight to the eyes" and desirable, when in reality its fruit is death.” (Catechism 2847)

Having discerned that we are being pulled towards something evil, our hearts need to decide to be faithful to following Jesus: “ ’Lead us not into temptation’ implies a decision of the heart: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’. . . . ‘No one can serve two masters’." (Catechism 2848)

In today’s passage Jesus is tempted and shows us by example that the Word of God is the weapon that that we use to fight temptation.

Let’s pray that like Jesus, we discern when we are tempted, that we decide to be faithful, that we fight the enemy with the Word of God, and that we continue every day to obey our Father “in the power of the Spirit…”!