Effect of conquered temptation on the Christian life.
Effect on character. The old belief that the strength of a slain enemy
passed into his slayer is true in regard to a Christian's overcome
temptations.
Effect on grasp of truth.
Effect on consciousness of relation to God.
Effect on Future.
So then we ought to desire not so much exemption from temptation, as
strength in it.
And He will always be at our side to grant us this.
We should seek not freedom from furnace, but His presence in it; not to
be guided away from the dark valley, but through it. His prayer is our
model; His life is our pattern, who was tempted 'though He were the
Son'; His strength is our hope. He is 'able to succour them that are
tempted.'
We identify ourselves in such a prayer with all who have sinned, and
knowing that we are men of like passions, and that we may fall like
them, we cry 'lead _us_ not.'
He who offers this prayer from such motives will best and most willingly
meet temptation when it comes. The soldier who goes into the field with
careful circumspection, knowing the enemy's strength and his own
weakness, is the most likely to conquer. It is the presumptuous men,
confident in their own strength, who are sure to get beaten.
'DELIVER US FROM EVIL'
'But deliver us from evil.'--MATT. vi. 13.
The two halves of this prayer are like a calm sky with stars shining
silently in its steadfast blue, and a troubled earth beneath, where
storms sweep, and changes come, and tears are ever being shed. The one
is so tranquil, the other so full of woe and want. What a dark picture
of human conditions lies beneath the petitions of this second half!
Hunger and sin and temptation, and wider still, that tragic word which
includes them all--evil. Forgiveness and defence and deliverance--what
sorrows these presuppose! Each step of these latter supplications seems
to carry us deeper into the shadow and the darkness, each to present a
darker aspect of what human life really is; and now that we have reached
the last, we have an all-comprehensive cry which holds within its
meaning every ill that flesh is heir to.
But seeing that we have to do with a prayer, we have also to do with a
prophecy. We know that if we ask anything according to His will, He
heareth us, and therefore the sadder the want which is expressed, the
fuller of hope is the prayer. This petition gives a dark picture of
human wants, but whatsoever thing we pray about or against, we thereby
profess to believe to be contrary to God's will, and to be certain of
removal by Him; and when our Lord commanded us to say 'Our Father, ...
deliver us from evil,' He gave us the lively hope that all which is
included in that terribly wide word should be swept away, and that He
would break every yoke and let His oppressed go free. The whole sum of
human sorrow is gathered into one petition, that we may all feel that
every item of it is capable of attenuation and extinction; and so our
prayer, in the very clause which seems to sound the lowest depth, really
rises to the loftiest height, and the words which sound likest a wail
over all the misery that is done under the sun, have in them the notes
of triumph. 'The sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest
thought.' The most jubilant and confident prayer is that which feels
most keenly the burden of evil, and 'falling with its weight of sins
'upon the great world's altar-stairs,' cries to God for deliverance.