Lead Us Not Into Temptation (Matthew 4:1-11)
Lead Us Not Into Temptation
January 18, 2026
Matthew 4:1-11
By: Pastor Mike Conner
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The very Spirit that came down from heaven in the form of a dove and anointed Jesus at his baptism now leads him into the wilderness to be tested, challenged. There, Jesus fasts for forty days and forty nights. His body wastes away in its extraordinary hunger. When he is at his weakest, the enemy of God comes and speaks deceitfully to him. This is the diabolos, the devil. This is the peiradzon, the tempter. This is satana, Satan. Three names for this cruel, cunning spirit in Matthew’s passage; three temptations. At the waters of baptism, God the Father had said, “This is my Son.” In the wilderness, the devil says, “If you are the Son of God.” What God speaks as a blessing to be enjoyed, the tempter twists into a reason for self-determination. Before he can step into public ministry, Jesus must answer a fundamental question: Will he, the Son of God, the Beloved, use his privilege and power to seek his own will and preservation, or will he, to borrow words from John’s Gospel, “do only what he sees his Father doing” (John 5:19 NIV)?
This is one of those passages of scripture that is endlessly fascinating. As I sat with it this week, it seemed as if every word opened up lines of inquiry. After all, there are parallel tellings of this story in Luke and Mark to compare it to; there are layers upon layers of Old Testament reference; there are word choices, images, and themes that connect it to other key moments in Matthew. Most sermons eventually require a severe process of selection. The preacher can’t say everything of interest or tell about all the false starts or rabbit trails or fugitive flashes of insight that were a part of study and prayer. I’m standing before you with a lot more that I might say about the Temptation, and with a lot of my own questions left unanswered. But my prayer has been that God would nevertheless use this one sermon as a means of daily bread.
And, you know, that feels like the resonance worth exploring this morning: the connection between the devil’s suggestion, “command these stones to become bread” (Matt 4:3) and Jesus’ teaching: “Pray, then, in this way: …Give us today our daily bread” (Matt 6:9, 11). Between Jesus’ necessary encounter with the tempter and the prayer we are to pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” That is, the connection between the temptation and the Lord’s Prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer appears twice in the New Testament. In Matthew 6, it is a part of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount. In Luke 11, Jesus offers it to his disciples after they come and ask him to teach them to pray. Many of us learned it when we were very young in this way:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
Or like that, but maybe with some Thee’s and Thou’s.
If you’ve participated in our worship recently, you’ve perhaps noticed that we aren’t praying the same version or translation of this great prayer from week to week. This is a relatively new practice for us. Last winter, I preached a series on prayer and thought it would be beneficial for us to experience a fresh relationship with Jesus’ words. My hope was—and is—that variety would help us notice new things, ask fresh questions, and appreciate the substance and usefulness of the prayer. I don’t think Jesus gave us this prayer primarily to comfort us or even to unite us; certainly it is not meant to get stuck as a rote exercise or a source of nostalgia.
You know, it has never occurred to me to wonder before about where this prayer came from. I mean, of course Jesus composed it and taught it—but why, and where? I guess I’ve assumed that he always knew it, or that it leapt spontaneously from his mouth when he sat down to give the Sermon on the Mount. But today I’m hearing all the connections between it and these days Jesus spent in the wilderness:
Our Father, who art in heaven. Well, Jesus encountered God as his Father during his baptism by John, when the heavens were opened the voice declared “Beloved.” Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Here we have the language of kingdoms, which the Deceiver offered Jesus in exchange for his allegiance. Jesus rejected this offer by saying, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him.” Give us this day our daily bread. In the wilderness Satan suggests that Jesus access his power to care for himself, to turn stones in to bread. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one. A prayer of protection from what Jesus endured for us and in our place.
I want to suggest this morning that it is worthwhile to consider the wilderness as the place that this wonderful prayer was composed. That it was forged not in contemplative stillness but through the fire of extreme deprivation and testing. What if the Lord’s prayer is a tool of resistance, a wilderness resource, a way of enduring our own weakness and limitations, our long days and nights of pain; a shield for holding off despair and desperation; a sword for cutting through the lies that tell us it is time to trust in something or someone other than God. I imagine that Jesus prayed this in the first-person singular “My Father… Give me today… Forgive me… Deliver me…” And by the time he was ready to pass it on to others, he had transposed it out of the singular and into the plural: we, us, our. Not only to unify you and me in our praying of it but to join us to his own voice, his own incorruptible integrity, his own unfailing trust.
What is at stake for Jesus in these three temptations—to provide for himself unnaturally, to entertain oblivion, to seek power and glory for himself? In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, a Catholic Bible scholar named George T Montague says this: “Unspoken, of course, is the assumption that Jesus should use whatever divine power he might have in his own interest, and should he do so in the matter of food, he would in effect withdraw himself from solidarity with his people of old and the people of his day who do not have it in their power to do such things…”[1]
His solidarity with us is what’s at stake. His commitment to be with us in our weakness, with us in our seasons of spiritual or physical hunger. To open for us, in the midst of them, a space where we can trust in God’s love, provision, and protection; a place where we won’t force our own way or sully our integrity out of desperation. And that place is his heart, expressed, I would argue, in this prayer.
If Jesus would have turned stones into bread—and he could have; he and Satan both know this—he would have stepped out of his communion with God the Father, making a move toward self-preservation before receiving a word from God. He would have abandoned his solidarity with our hunger; we can’t magically turn stones into bread, so he keeps himself from that human impossibility, though it means remaining in his hunger.
Jesus goes without food for 40 days and forty nights and then faces down the very heart of evil. Those were his temptations; they are not ours. The Spirit led him into that task; we are taught to pray for exactly the opposite, to not be led into temptation.
And yet, in our own way, don’t we often feel like this is this situation we are in?
Don’t we sometimes feel like we’ve been out here, in our own personal wildernesses, for almost too long? It may not be forty days and forty nights of total fasting, but maybe it’s been a long night of grief, a long year of being in and out of the hospital. Forty days of not being able to pay down your credit card. Endless days of chronic pain. A season of unemployment. Logging on for another day of watching what madness the Idaho Legislature will do next. Logging on to be pierced by the stories of pain: in Minneapolis, in Portland, in Gaza, in Sudan, in the polar regions. Our wilderness might be a dark night of soul, when God’s voice has gone silent. It might be a displacement from community, where we’ve been rejected, or where our own growth in faith and love drives us away from systems of harm.
And as if these wildernesses were not enough, in the midst of them we know who Jesus has called us to become: persons of no-strings-attached love, of costly generosity, of patient trust and continual forgiveness; humble people who seek no glory for ourselves; simple people who don’t participate in exploitation; people of hospitality who are more ready to give than to receive. If we consider all this and how often we “miss the mark,” how easy it is for us to abandon our trust in God because we feel that we’ve been out in the wilderness too long, we ought to rush to take up Jesus’ prayer again and cry out “ Our Father,” know that he is with us in that “Our,” and that he will help us remain steadfast through every testing, because he has already won the victory.
If we are going to persist in feeding people who are hungry, we have to be people whose own hunger for justice does not grow impatient and try to wrestle bread out of stones, but is instead sustained by that prayer, “Give us today our daily bread.”
If we are going to persist in advocating for affordable, quality childcare in a State where 25,000 parents left the workforce last year due to a loss or change in childcare, we have to be people who make our home in the prayer, “May your kingdom come, may your will be done.”
If we are going to persist in building the beloved community that Martin Luther King Jr. believed in; in eliminating the widespread poverty in America that broke his heart; in learning to see beyond what divides us to the promise of our solidarity with others, we have to be people who say, “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”
With this prayer forged in the wilderness, we deal not with a comforting token or a rote religious exercise but with a channel of communion, a place where we, in our hunger, are met and sustained by the Christ who hungers but is not overcome by impatience, fear, or resentment. With this prayer forged in the wilderness, we will not force our own way. We will not sell our birthright as children of God. We will not sully our hands with the Master’s tools as we seek to deconstruct the Master’s house. We will not live in fear, or entertain oblivion, or numb our compassion by living as avatars in the simulacrum.
Instead, we will abide there, in the condition that so much of humanity lives so much of the time, hungry for bread and for justice in the wilderness, and make of our lives, right there, an offering, an opening, through which God’s power for love can flow.
If the Kingdom of God were to depend on our largesse or our wisdom, our creativity or our readiness to endure discomfort, we would be lost. But thanks be to God that the coming of the Love’s reign does not depend on our natural strengths but on our spiritual humility, our trust in Jesus’ victory over every demonic suggestion.
“For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15 NKJV), scripture proclaims.
So let us, through the solidarity and the prayer of Jesus, abide in him, and answer his call to never cease hungering and thirsting for righteousness. “Weeping may endure for a night,” maybe forty long nights, “but joy,” we know, “cometh in the morning” (Ps 30:5 KJV). And “all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:3 NIV).
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] George T. Montague, S.M., Companion God: A Cross-Cultural Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 42.