Luke 11:4 And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation… The Italian poet, in painting the world of woe, ranges its several dreary mansions along a narrowing and descending volute. The lower it sunk the narrower it grew in his vision. Escape from the influence of hell is, in the structure of the Lord's prayer, represented by an image the converse of the poet's. The higher the way of escape mounts, the broader it becomes. As by the winding pathway and the successive stages of this form of supplication we are borne upward out of the bowels of the pit into which the Fall had plunged us, so we find the path widening perpetually as it goes on ascending; as we proceed from one grade and platform of prayer to another the subject of request extends itself out more and more widely. As we climb the heavenly heights, new and broader prospects open around us. We begin by deploring sins within ourselves, and grope about the narrow and dark den of our own hearts; we then expand our petitions by reference to the temptations in the circle around and without us; and finally, in the words now before us, we look beyond the limits of sin in us and temptations around us, to the sorrow and pain which may remain, even where sin is renounced and where "temptation is resisted. Beyond this state of probation we look to evil as it shall be recompensed and perpetuated in the world of retribution, and to yet another world, where all effects and traces of evil are effaced from the heart and lot of the blessed. Taken in this sense, then, the sentence includes a prayer for the repeal of the primal curse on man and earth. I. The cry of our text, STAMMERED, as by the unregenerate and heathen world, it universally is. The burden of the text is heard in the voice of the new-born babe, sending back the first draught of air which its tiny lungs have made, in wailing, as it lies back on its nurse's arm; and it is found in the death-rattle of the gray-headed grandsire, breathing his last after well-nigh a century's experience of life, and its toils and its woes. Each contest that sets man against his fellows — from wars like those of Tamerlane or Napoleon, that littered a continent with their millions of dead, down to the street-fray or the village lawsuit; each statute, tribunal, and prison, and penalty; each party-gathering and each party-badge; each form, and voice, and look of human anguish; the pauper's thin and trembling hand; the maniac's shriek, and the captive's asking eye; the sick man's hollow cheek; all the diseases that crowd the beds of the hospital, and perplex the physician's skill, and crowd the volumes of a medical library; all the remedies and diversions that seek to while away care or suppress thought; the drunkard's bowl, and the song of the reveller, and the gambler's dice-box — all the wild utterances of human revenge and hate; murder scowling on the brother whose presence it cannot abide, and jealousy and envy nibbling at character, and hinting dislike; all the ills of childhood, maturity, and age; each bead of sweat rolling from the brow of honest toil; each tear that falls from the eye, and each sigh that quits the burdened heart; every pang felt, and every complaint uttered? but waft upward to God or send around to our fellow-man the one sad, monotonous cry, "Deliver us from evil." II. That cry ARTICULATED, as by the penitent and Christian, now taught to know the plague of his own heart; it is — 1. Taught of God's Word, he traces back all evil, social and physical, to moral evil, and finds the guilt of its introduction into our world resting on his race, and of its continuance resting on himself. 2. But who shall satisfy for past offences, and who uproot the strong tendencies for ill within him? Is there help in his fellows? They may aid and instruct and cheer him onward. The Christian Church, like travellers in arctic climes, watching to detect the first evidence of frost seizing the face of a fellow-traveller, its unconscious victim, and applying promptly the remedy, may aid him in watching against the frost of spiritual death, that unsuspected would else steal upon him. But they cannot make the atonement, or work the regeneration which he needs. May he look higher than earth and man? He must; for man and earth cannot solve his doubts or quell his fears. He is dying — who shall unsting death? He is to live and bide the doomsday? Oh, who shall give him acquittal there? God could, but will He? To Him he resorts. III. That cry answered, as it is, by God come down to our deliverance. (W. R. Williams, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. |
    |