The God Who Delivers Us from Sin

For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world faith. 1 John 5:4ESV

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This morning we continue to study Westminster Larger Catechism Question 195, which

asks, “What do we pray for in the sixth petition?” The fourth part of the answer states: “In

the sixth petition (which is, And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,)… we

pray, that God would so overrule the world and all in it, subdue the flesh, and restrain

Satan, order all things, bestow and bless all means of grace, and quicken us to

watchfulness in the use of them, that we and all his people may by his providence be kept

from being tempted to sin… .” Last time we saw how even as born again Christians there is

nothing in us that would move God to lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil.

In fact for the last three articles we have focused on what needs to be in our minds and

hearts in order to rightly make this petition to God. Today we begin to look at what it is

that we are actually asking for when we say the words, “Lead us not into temptation, but

deliver us from evil.”

God is sovereign. God rules over all. God is good. God is for all those who trust in Jesus

Christ. Because of these truths we can pray to God that we would not be led into

temptation but delivered from evil. God is all-powerful, all-good, and He is on our side.

You might be tempted to ask at this point, why do we need to pray at all? Since God is for

us, who can be against us, right? So why do we need to pray this prayer? First of all we

need to pray because the all-powerful, all-good God who is for us commands us to pray!

That alone should be enough for us regardless of whether or not we ever understand why

He commands us to. But God does more than merely command without explanation, He

tells us precisely why we need to pray. The answer is simple: we need to pray because God

has decreed to accomplish His good plans for us through our prayers, words, and actions.

Therefore, if I am a Christian, and if I would like to see myself not be given over to

temptations or evils, then I must trust God by asking Him to deliver me from them.

As we saw last time, our three enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil are all too

powerful for us to withstand or overcome. However God is infinitely greater, stronger,

wiser, and more powerful than all of them put together. Therefore, if we are in Christ and if

we ask God out of real faith to deliver us from these things we can know and expect that

He will. Now God does not and will not remove us entirely from these things and neither

should we ask Him to. So long as we live in this sinful world we will have to continue to

battle the world, the flesh, and the devil. But we can be confident of more and more

victory over them if we faithfully pray this prayer to God. And we should know and believe

that in all of our struggles with them God is working for our good.

So how does God deliver us from them, seeing that He does not entirely remove them

from us? The Catechism says that God “overrules” the world and all that is in it. That

means that all of the efforts of sinful man against one believer will be turned around. We

see this often in Scripture, supremely in the crucifixion of Jesus by His enemies resulting in

His victory over them. Likewise, God “subdues” the flesh. That is, God will cause our sinful

desires to weaken. Also, God “restrains” the devil. Here God will not allow the devil to

come at us more than we can bear, just as we read how God limited Satan’s access to Job.

The more we pray for these things in real faith, the more we should see God overruling,

subduing, and restraining.

The other side of this prayer is that God not only comes against our enemies for us, but He

gives us more strength to fight them. Thus the Catechism says that part of our request in

this prayer is that God would “bestow and bless all means of grace, and quicken us to

watchfulness in the use of them.” As we saw earlier (Q 154), God gives us real weapons to

fight our spiritual enemies and we are to take up those weapons and become more skilled

in our use of them. May God move in all of our hearts to ever more pray for our deliverance from our enemies!