Living Guilt-free

Living Guilt-Free

Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Matthew 6:13, NKJV

MEDIEVAL MONKS WHO REALLY WANTED to test their spiritual strength would surround themselves with a feast and refuse to eat, or sleep in the presence of an undressed woman and resist the urge to touch her. Not many went to such extremes, but some felt the need to confirm that they could resist obvious temptations. They preferred to have opportunities to sin and deny them rather than to avoid temptation and think they had accomplished something.

We might find such mental gymnastics amusing, but many Christians spend an awful lot of energy trying to resist temptations rather than avoiding them in the first place. And when we fall prey to them, we blame our human weakness rather than our willingness to put ourselves in tempting positions to begin with. We forget that Jesus told us to pray not only to resist temptation but to be delivered from both temptation and the evil one altogether. We are instructed to pray for avoidance.

What does that have to do with prayer? For one thing, we can pray to be delivered from evil in complete faith that God is willing to answer and help us avoid tempting situations. And if we do face them at times, we can trust him for strength and wisdom before, during, and after. He gives us a way out, around, or through.

But this prayer is vital for faith in other areas as well. Our faith is undermined far more often by the guilt and shame that follows sin than by the sin itself. Though God never tells us we are unworthy to pray in the aftermath of failure (or any time), we assume that we are. We hold back. We pray without any conviction that God might answer because we’ve beaten ourselves so thoroughly with a guilty conscience. This request and the one before it—being led away from temptation and forgiven when we’ve fallen for it—are powerful supports for a life of faith-filled prayers. Pray them often and always trust the protecting, cleansing work of God.

The purpose of being guilty is to bring us to Jesus. . . . If we continue to make ourselves guilty—to blame ourselves—then that is sin in itself.