Objection: In the Lord’s Prayer, We Are Supposed to ASK GOD to Deliver Us from Evil, not “Claim” Deliverance from It

Ready for a shocker?  The “Lord’s Prayer” is NOT a model prayer for the Church Age!

Jesus’ prayer was an example of praying a simple, unpretentious prayer rather than using vain repetitions as the heathen do.  Ironically, today’s heathen now make a “vain repetition” ritual out of this exact prayer, as well as another anti-biblical prayer that gets prayed much more often than the Lord’s Prayer in a common “dead works” ritual where beads are used to count the number of vain repetitions.

The Lord’s Prayer never includes asking anything from the Father in Jesus’ name.  Asking in Jesus’ name is a Church Age prayer that wasn’t available under the Old Covenant.  Everyone Jesus taught was still under the Law of Moses at the time.  They could not pray New Covenant prayers of the kind that Jesus said we would pray.

Paul has some wonderful prayers in his epistles that are worth praying for ourselves and others regularly, yet these are not included in any way in the Lord’s Prayer, nor could they be.  When Jesus taught on prayer, there was no inheritance purchased for everyone yet, so no one could pray to understand more fully the riches of the inheritance he had in Christ!

We are commanded to pray for all who are in authority (1 Timothy 2:1-2), but Jesus did not pray for Caesar or any other official in the Lord’s Prayer.

We should be praying in tongues as well as with our understanding as New Covenant believers (1 Corinthians 14:15), but there are no tongues in the Lord’s Prayer either!

People are to pray that their flight during the Tribulation not be in winter (Matthew 24:20).  That prayer won’t be found in the Lord’s Prayer either.

There was a fad back in the 1980’s that all prayer must be based on the Lord’s Prayer, but thankfully that fad blew over, as all of them do – at least for a generation or so until a new face will probably start promoting the same “new revelation” to a new generation as if no one had ever heard of it before.  Jesus said, “pray like this” (in this manner), not “literally pray exactly this.”

The point is that there is a lot more to New Testament prayer than what is contained in the Lord’s Prayer.  If you restrict your praying to the Lord’s Prayer, you won’t pray the way that you should.  Besides that, there were elements in the Lord’s Prayer that were valid when Jesus demonstrated this prayer to His disciples that would not even be valid after Jesus went to the cross and rose again!

One case is “forgive us our trespasses.”  That is unnecessary for the believer, who is already forgiven for all his trespasses.  (Several Scriptures that prove this that are listed elsewhere; click here for one such list of them.)  If you want to apologize to God for something you did, I don’t have any problem with that.  I do it myself at times, but I don’t do it to receive forgiveness, which is something I have already received as a believer for all my past, present and future sins.

Another case is “deliver us from evil” (or in some translations, “deliver us from the evil one”).  As a New Testament believer, you are already delivered from the evil one and his evil kingdom (Colossians 1:13).

Also, His kingdom HAS come and your daily bread is part of the provision that Christ made for you once and for all.  After the resurrection, there is no more sense that we are on the earth praying to a Father in heaven.  We are seated in heaven praying to our Father in heaven, or we could also say that we are on the earth praying to our Father who lives in us.

Therefore, it is actually UNBIBLICAL to pray the entire Lord’s Prayer today!  Why would you ask God for something that He says you already have under the New Covenant?  Although what I just said would start World War 3 in some circles, I’ve made a plain case for it.

Jesus didn’t “miss it” when He prayed this prayer because at the time, no one was delivered from evil (or the Evil One) because Jesus hadn’t spoiled principalities yet and stripped them of their power over us (Colossians 2:15).  His disciples had not yet been brought out of the kingdom of darkness into Jesus’ kingdom.  That happened to them only after they were born again, which none of them was before Jesus rose from the dead.  So this was a fine prayer for the disciples to pray.  It just doesn’t reflect your position or your responsibility today.  It is now up to YOU to resist the devil so that he will flee.  It is not up to you to ask God to deliver you from the devil when YOU are the one who is supposed to run him off.  So in light of what James and Peter said (James 4:7, 1 Peter 5:8), a believer today cannot expect to successfully ask God to deliver him from Satan.  As far as God is concerned, you’re already delivered, and you now need to enforce your deliverance.