Deliver Us from Evil
“We do well not to pray the Lord’s Prayer lightly. It takes guts to pray it at all. To speak those words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze.”
Frederick Buechner
Jesus teaches us to pray: ‘Deliver us from evil.” At least three things are being affirmed here:
- Jesus is clear and unequivocal about the existence and reality of evil.
- Jesus is clear about how evil entraps us and is in pursuit of those who follow Him
- Jesus wants us to know that if we desire to avoid temptation and evil, we should seek the help of God to do so.
“Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved….they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.”
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
“The vocabulary of salvation is extensive: save, deliver, ransom, redeem, help, restore, heal.”
Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ
“So when you pray to be saved, to be delivered from the test, you are acknowledging that you are not in control of your fate, that there really is something in the world worth resisting, that this world and its rewards are not enough, and that you answer to some greater power than that which the world bows before.”
William H. Willimon & Stanley Hauerwas, Lord, Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer & the Christian Life
