Forgiveness is a powerful medicine 1

In Matthew 6 Jesus introduces a radical way of praying. I call it radical, although we have trivialized the Lord's Prayer to a recite-by-heart mantra that we hope to get instant results from if we repeat it as many times as possible. This even ends up negating the very premise He precedes for teaching us how to pray, which is in verse 7 (And when you pray, do not keep bebbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many word N.I.V.). The people at that time had begun to emulate pagan practices, most likely in my opinion, because their prayers were often unanswered.

I thus say it was radical because the prayer pattern, as I would like to call it, is boiling prayer down to its powerful essentials, and I will give my take on it's breakdown in a later post, if the Holy Spirit permits. The main issue here is that these spoken words become powerful tools in our daily lives in the sense that they activate God who, as Yeshua puts it, already knows what we need before we ask of it.

 It then strikes me that if we are born again, have confessed and renounced our sins and are living under His grace, as being odd that we should daily ask God to forgive us our trespasses (debts NIV)! Furthermore we ask Him not to lead us into temptation but to deliver us from the evil one (or evil in some manuscripts).

I have found some very strong arguments in favour of there being no need for the deliverance ministry but this verse seems to being screaming at us that we may be sanctified by the blood but we have to daily pray for deliverance. OK. Some will say deliverance here means deliverance from future or present traps set up by the enemy, but the Greek used there is 'rhyomai' which is used in the form 'rescue'.

So we could replace this with the statement: And lead us not into temptation but rescue us from evil (or the evil one).

 And remember, this is a prayer pattern to be used when praying to God! So my question then is, if we have already been rescued from the enemy, why should we pray daily to God to be rescued from him?

By John Kagaruki