The Lord's Prayer - Ep 17

2026.08.10 Lord's Prayer Monday

Welcome to the Lord's Prayer podcast by Bridgeway Christian Church. The Lord's Prayer has been recited by Christians around the globe for centuries, but more than a beloved tradition, this prayer invites us to live the way of Jesus, to be shaped by his priorities, to partner with his spirits in bringing the kingdom of God to bear on our world. Every Monday during our summer devotional series, we read the Lord's Prayer, and then members of our pastoral team will offer some devotional thoughts based on the text.

I'm Pastor Anthony, and today I'm joined by Pastor Heather and Pastor Brian, and after I read the prayer, we'll discuss the last line of Jesus' prayer, deliver us from evil. Let's pray. 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 debts, as we have also forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Well, pastors, how are you doing? Doing well. How are you? Doing great. So this is our final week of this devotional series.

So it's been a pleasure working alongside you guys and praying and studying and conversating. Yeah, same. So we're going to get right into this.

And so let's unpack this section a bit. What is Jesus instructing us to do here when he instructs us to ask the Father to deliver us from evil? I think as I did some research around this, one really interesting piece is that word that Jesus uses here, deliver. And the Greek word is quite specific on kind of what deliver means.

It's a type of rescue. It doesn't mean kind of to strengthen us, to resist evil, or even to guide us away from evil. It literally means to rescue us from danger by pulling kind of out or away.

It's like this imagery of someone grabbing you out of the path of something that's coming at you. It's a soldier pulling a wounded comrade off the battlefield or someone rescuing you from drowning. That that's the picture that Jesus is painting here when he asks us to pray, deliver us.

God is the one who charges in and pulls his people out of the grip of something that's happening to them. And Jesus wants us to do that daily so that we kind of remember that we can't rescue ourselves. It's really, it's quite powerful.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, absolutely. And we can hone in further even on the word evil.

You know, your English Bible might say deliver us from evil or yours might say deliver us from the evil one. And so sometimes the question might be, well, which one is correct? Well, it may very well be that both are correct and Jesus wants to have both in view. So the Greek word is paneros.

And the first time that Matthew uses paneros in his gospel is in the Beatitudes. So chapter five, verse 11, he says, Jesus says, And then he continues in verse 12, And so here paneros is malevolent speech, speech that persecutes. But as you trace Matthew's use of this term through the Sermon on the Mount, it's pretty clear that paneros denotes more than just wicked, violent speech.

So later in chapter five, Jesus cautions not to be double-minded. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything other than that comes by influence of the paneros, the evil one.

Now that's verse 37. And then in verse 39, Jesus instructs, So here paneros is an evil or wicked person. Then in verse 45, Jesus says, And by the way, the feminine form of agathos is agathē, which is where we get the name Agatha for anyone out there named Agatha.

Anyway, enough of nerding out on that. In Matthew 6, 23, 10 verses after the line about deliverance from evil in the Lord's prayer, Jesus speaks of the evil eye, right? But this is the paneros eye. He says, And then finally, in chapter seven, the last chapter of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses paneros two more times.

In verse 11, he compares compromised humanity with a perfect God, saying, And then in verses 17, 18, Jesus explains that every good tree bears good fruits, and every paneros tree bears paneros fruits. You will know a person by their fruits, that is by the way they live. So paneros can refer to malevolent action and circumstances, to people who do evil, and to the evil one, the Satan, the devil.

And now grammar and context can clarify which of these aspects of paneros is in view. But when the context is vague, the term's precise meaning might be obscure. And when Jesus uses paneros in his prayer, his wording, his framing is rather vague compared to the way he uses the term elsewhere in his sermon.

Now, I take that vagueness as intentional. He's already established the kinds of evil his followers will endure and even be party to. And his generalizing wording allows each flavor of paneros to come into view.

So, in other words, whatever and whoever would ensnare us in evil, even our own participation in evil, Jesus teaches us to turn to the Father for deliverance. Father, deliver us from evil that comes against us, and deliver us from the evil we commit. I think my first takeaway there is, wow, that word is in the Sermon on the Mount an awful lot.

A lot, yeah. But second, I think kind of your last point there helps us see how all-encompassing this word can be, whether it is, we need saving from the evil in our own hearts. We need saving from demonic attack.

We need saving from evil that comes against us. It's a word that can really do a lot of work and refer to a lot of things. And in some ways, the beauty of the Greek language, right? It can mean this or this or this or this.

But those definitions are very different. I feel like in this case, it can mean all these different things, but it almost is giving us this fuller picture of evil and what evil could be. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, and I think when you pair it with, and lead us not into temptation or trials, as we talked about last week, and deliver us from evil, that we really need... Jesus is instructing us to remember that we need God both to help us to endure trials and to kind of be sovereign over that when that comes at us, and evil when that comes at us. It's like we're getting it from all sides. And no matter how you slice it, we need God.

Absolutely. So what does this look like? Because it can feel a little abstract, kind of deliver us from evil. What does this look like in your own prayer lives? How have you seen or practiced praying against evil? Oh yeah, so I grew up charismatic.

So that explains it right there. So what I saw as normal was a sort of labeling anything and everything from what's inconvenient to the downright tragic as the devil. The devil is in all the details.

Car trouble before church. It's the devil. Power goes out at church.

It's not the storm outside. It's that the devil doesn't want us to worship, even though the church has worshipped without electricity for millennia without a problem. Someone's got a bad attitude.

Well, the devil must be working on him today. It was like the Adam Sandler movie, The Waterboy. Bobby Boucher's mother, played by the legendary Kathy Bates, saw everything she disliked as the devil.

So that's how things can go down in the charismatic world that I inhabited. And so that way of relating to evil, suspicious to the nth degree, or even like flippantly redirecting responsibility to some mysterious haunting force, can leave one easily distracted to real evil in this world and even to our own participation in evil. Right.

And so I think it's crucial that we're self-aware and have a healthy way of relating to evil in our lives. So I regularly find myself just taking stock of my need to repent, to resist complacency, to remind myself that I want to be a person who is known by their allegiance to King Jesus. So that's how I am in this world flows from that allegiance identity.

And so that's dealing with evil in my personal life. Yeah. I think whenever I think of the evil one, kind of Satan or the devil, I think the thing that comes to mind most easily is that he is the father of lies.

And so I think anytime, kind of practically one of the most tangible ways that I pray against evil is by paying attention to the lies that I'm believing and praying truth into that. You know, that scripture is clear. The devil is the father of lies.

It's his native tongue. And so when I'm asking myself, what are the lies I'm believing? You know, it's kind of like, where am I coming into agreement with those lives? And how do I pray truth into that instead? You know, if the lies that I'm unattractive or I'm not enough, then that truth is I'm intentionally and beautifully designed. And that's not positive thinking.

You know, that's spiritual warfare at a very practical level. And I think that's an easy way to kind of pray in my personal life against evil. Yeah, that's really good.

I think that I resonate with both of you in different ways. I think, you know, Pastor Anthony, sort of this almost caricatured version of charismatic spirituality, where everything is the devil all of the time is, of course, a little bit silly. And it does have that effect of reducing our responsibility in fighting against evil, in addressing evil in our hearts and all of that.

I've heard someone say that if we get kind of too into, well, everything is the devil and we just need to be cleansed from, you know, Satan and demons and all of that, that we can sort of treat that sort of spiritual activity as kind of like an oil change. Like I just come into church and get everything cast out of me. And now I just go live my life and next week we'll do it again.

And it sort of neglects the patient work of discipleship that is really necessary if we're going to be mature. However, I think about the old C.S. Lewis line that we make two mistakes when it comes to devils. One is the one that you just described.

Devil's everywhere. The other is the devil is nowhere, right? Or I think about Tim Keller writes in his book, Encounters with Jesus. He says, the Western world has largely rejected the dimension of evil that the Bible gives us.

And as a result, we are always underestimating and sometimes misdiagnosing the power of evil in our lives. And I definitely, even in my prayers, lean a little bit more towards the direction of just, you know, praying what seems right to me or praying God's will. My first line of defense is not just necessarily always like praying against demonic activity or anything like that.

But I will say this, and I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just saying that is. That I think about specific situations I'm praying for regularly right now where I just kind of go like, there is something beyond the human happening here.

It just feels like there is a demonic stronghold going on. And I can pray all I want about the particulars of some of these situations, but it is important for me to remember to pray against the enemy's activity in my friend's life or in whatever's going on. And that if I'm not addressing that, I'm praying against symptoms, which is fine, but I'm not actually praying against kind of the source of the problem.

And I think there is some spiritual power that is lost when we're not in Jesus name praying against evil that comes from the evil one. So once again, Jesus is instructing us here in the plural. It's not singular.

He says, deliver us from evil. What does it mean to pray that as a congregation or a community and not just personally? Yeah, I think I am so individualistic. This prayer is really revealing that to me.

And that communal instruction for praying like that is so easy to miss. Deliver us means kind of like you were saying, as you're praying for your friends, it's not just bringing my own needs to God. It's me showing up for other people and praying against evil for them.

I'm praying for that person in my church who's in the middle of something really dark and probably doesn't even have the words for it yet. You know, that's my responsibility to pray for them as much as it is their own. And kind of this communal aspect, honestly, I think our annual 40-day fast, you know, that is preparation for worship prayer and healing night, which actually begins in early September, is probably the most excellent example of what this prayer looks like in practice.

Because even if I'm not personally in need of healing, I'm entering into the 40-day fast, seeking the Lord and standing in prayer, not just for myself, but for our whole body, for our community, for our city. You know, I'm not asking breakthrough for me. I'm asking it for everyone.

And I think that, you know, we can be tempted to kind of opt out because we think, this is a healing service for those who are sick. And really, this is something we're really practicing as a congregation, this line from the prayer, and really asking all of us to kind of come together and pray and seek the Lord to deliver all of us from all, you know, kind of the evil one and suffering and kind of evil in general. Yeah, that's right.

You know, we can't miss large-scale evil. You know, our individualistic framework that we live in day in and day out can have us sort of in our own heads, you know, a lot of times where we're focused really on the problems going on in our lives, right? And it's really easy to sort of, oh, that's what's going on with you. You need prayer? Yeah, I'll pray for you, right? And so it's really easy to dismiss what's going on in other people's lives.

But I think also just the big world, the big picture, what's going on, evil that affects the world and that kind of evil that sometimes for me, if I'm being honest, it feels like it's much bigger than what I can stomach. And there's a lot of this kind of evil that we can behold just by the scroll of a screen. And so, you know, I sometimes, I honestly, if I feel like I'm helpless, even in my prayers, that my prayers can make any headway in resisting large form evil.

And that's just me being honest. And, you know, and I recognize the temptation to retreat to what my mind says is more manageable when it comes to prayer against evil. But, you know, I simply can't settle for that.

I have to resist that. I need to remember Jesus's words, deliver us from evil, right? My prayers join a choir of intercessors that God would bring his kingdom of justice and righteousness to bear on our world. And so when I remembered that, it simply isn't I who prays, but we.

Well, that's an incredibly encouraging thought. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah.

So, yeah, we keep praying and we keep trusting the Lord and keep praying us, right? As we walk through the Lord's Prayer this entire summer, let's not lose the plurality of that prayer. Let's not lose sight that we're part of the family of God, the kingdom of God. And that's, you know, we belong.

Yeah, we belong. We abide in Christ as part of his body. Yeah, it really takes me back to how we started.

Our father. Yeah, our father. Amen.

Well, everyone, thank you so much. And I just want to say thank you again, Pastor Brian, Pastor Heather, for being a part of this. This has been awesome.

Yeah. So everyone, thank you for being with us, for praying along with us. We have one more Lectio on Thursday.

Be sure to join us and check out the show notes. Take care.