Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Lead Us, Rescue Us | Matthew 6:13
Pastor Rajiv Khatri preaches Lead Us, Rescue Us from Matthew 6:13 at Belvedere Church in West Palm Beach on September 20, 2026.
Lead Us, Rescue Us
You meant it when you said you were done. Then the hard week came, the familiar desire returned, and willpower was not enough. Jesus gives His children words to pray in that moment: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”
In this message from September 20, 2026, Pastor Rajiv Khatri continues the Kingdom-Centered Prayer series at Belvedere Church, a Christ-centered West Palm Beach church. Matthew 6:13 teaches us to depend on a Father who knows our weakness and invites us to ask for protection and rescue.
Trials can become places where God strengthens our faith and temptation pulls us toward sin. We are responsible for our desires and choices, and we need more than confidence in ourselves. Peter meant to stand firm, yet denied Jesus. Before Peter failed, Jesus was already praying for him.
The evil one uses temptation and accusation to draw us away from God. But Jesus has rescued His people from the dominion of darkness. Through His death, He broke the enemy’s power. The battle is real, and Christ’s victory gives us confidence to keep praying. We ask for help together: lead us, deliver us.
Key Takeaways
Bring your weakness to your Father. Jesus teaches us to ask for deliverance every day.
God tests; He does not tempt anyone to sin. A hard season can strengthen faith even as temptation pulls in another direction.
Take responsibility for your desires. Recognize the patterns that make you vulnerable and ask God for help.
Temptation is not surrender. Refuse to entertain or obey sinful desire.
Recognize the accuser’s lies. The voice telling you to stay away from God after failure is not an invitation to repentance.
Remember Christ’s rescue. Jesus has brought His people out of darkness and into His kingdom.
Jesus intercedes for His people. Even when your prayers grow quiet, you are not forgotten.
Pray with your church family. You were never meant to fight alone. Ask someone to pray with you and pray for them.
Closing Application
Name the place where you are most tempted to rely on yourself. Bring it to your Father today. Ask someone in your church family to pray with you, and pray for them: “Father, don’t let it take them. And if it has, Father, rescue them.”
Full Sermon Manuscript: Lead Us, Rescue Us
Pastor Rajiv Khatri | September 20, 2026 | Matthew 6:13 | Kingdom-Centered Prayer. Adapted for reading from the sermon manuscript; speaking cues have been removed.
Anybody ever go on a strict diet, no more sugar, no more carbs, and then found yourself at 1:00 in the morning standing in front of the open refrigerator in your underwear eating cold leftover pasta out of a plastic tub with your bare hands?
You look like a raccoon that just broke into a dumpster.
At 8:00 AM you were an athlete. You were focused. By midnight, your willpower had completely evaporated.
Here's the truth: your willpower is garbage. My willpower is garbage. We love to pretend we are strong, mature, disciplined followers of Jesus. But if you put the wrong thing in front of you at the wrong hour when you're tired, lonely, or stressed out? You fold like a cheap lawn chair. Stop lying to yourself about how strong you are. Jesus didn't teach us to pray for willpower; He taught us to pray for deliverance. He said pray: "Lead us not into temptation." Don't even let me be in the kitchen at 1:00 AM.
Matthew chapter 6:13. The last thing Jesus teaches us to pray. "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one."
Church, here's the whole sermon in three sentences. The battle is real. The war is already won. So pray.
Lead Us Not Into Temptation
Now some of you are sitting there thinking, alright, but I don't have a sugar or a carbs problem. Let me widen the net. Some of you aren't drinking on weekdays anymore, and you’ve convinced yourself you've got a handle on it. Some of you are looking at porn on the phone after everybody's in bed, and you've deleted the app twice this month. Some of you are sleeping with somebody you already know you're not going to marry. Some of you have been kind to everybody at the office all week and cold and angry to everybody in your own house. And some of you aren't fighting any of that this morning. You're just tired. You've been faithful a long time and you are running on fumes. And maybe you've asked God more than once to just let you come home.
And church, I know some of you are trying. I am not making fun of you for trying. Wanting to be free from whatever sin has got you captive. Fighting to be free. It's the right thing to want. Some of you are fighting for your lives in ways many of us can’t even imagine.
The question isn’t whether you've been trying. The question is why isn't it working. Let's look at this verse a piece at a time.
"Lead us not into temptation." That word temptation. In the Greek it's one word, peirasmos, and that word has two sides to it. On one side, it means a test or trial. On the other, it means a pull toward sin. James uses this word in the book of James Chapter 1. It says count it all joy when you fall into trials. That's this word. Then a few verses later James says God tempts nobody. Not ever. And that's this same word. So the Bible uses one word two ways. Which means the word by itself doesn't tell you which one you’re dealing with.
Think about it like this. Two men with a knife. One of them is a surgeon. He is cutting you open to save your life. The other one is standing in a parking lot at midnight and he is cutting you to end you. Same blade. Same cut. Same blood on the floor. And you can't tell which one it is by how much it hurts. You have to know whose hand is on the knife.
Church, here's what I need you to hear. Life is full of tests and Jesus knows that, which is why He gives us this prayer. Every hard thing in your life can become a battleground with two people working it. God testing you in it. And the devil tempting you in it.
God wants something out of that test. He wants to strengthen your faith. He wants to grow your character. He wants you to trust Him. He’s building you up. Now the devil wants something out of that same test. He is trying to get you to the refrigerator at 1:00 in the morning. He's trying to get you to that bottle. He's trying to get you to pick up that phone in the middle of the night. He is trying to take a hard week and use it to get you to stop believing God is good to you. He’s trying to tear you down.
And let me back up what I’m saying so you know it’s true. Four chapters before this, Matthew 4:1, "Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil." Did you hear that? The Spirit led Him. The devil tempted Him.
Two hands on it. One was proving the Son of God. The other one was trying to destroy Him. That same battle plays out again and again in the Christian life. And here’s what this actually means for you, church, that means your enemy is what that hard season is trying to turn you into. The great question isn’t, ‘Will I get through this?’ It's, ‘Who will I be when I come out the other side?’ Because that hard week can turn you bitter. Or dishonest. Or hopeless. Or send you looking for relief somewhere God told you not to go.
Or that same week can make you patient. Honest. Gentle. Kind. Faithful. Loving towards others.
Look at the words Jesus gives us: ‘Lead us not into temptation.’
Here’s the picture of what you’re asking: Father, don’t let temptation get its hands on me.
Hands. Like it’s got fingers and is going to grab you.
This isn’t a prayer to skip the test. Jesus never promised you an easy life. It’s a prayer not to be carried away by it.
Now I told you there were two people working. God and the devil. I lied to you. There's three.
Because there's you. Church, every single one of us gets dragged off by our own desire. Our own. Not the devil's desire. Not the world's. Yours.
And I know what some of us do with this. We blame it on the devil. The devil got me. The devil's been after me this week. Church, the devil cannot make you open that app at midnight. The devil can't make you eat the ice cream. The devil can't pour the drink and make you drink it. The devil doesn't control you. He's not inside you.
What he does is exploit what’s already in you. He takes your desires, your weaknesses, your patterns, and turns the burners up.
But, church understand, the desire was yours.
That's why temptation is so hard. Somewhere in us, sin is offering us something we want.
And that’s why the fight is real. Think about Peter. Jesus tells Peter, “Before this night is over, you’re going to deny three times that you even know Me.” And Peter basically says, No chance. Not me. Everybody else might fall away, but I won’t. I’m ready to go to prison with You. I’m ready to die with You. And Peter meant it. He really believed there was no circumstance strong enough to make him deny Jesus. A few hours later, Jesus has been arrested. Peter is standing outside by a fire, and a servant girl looks at him and says, “You were with Jesus too, weren’t you?” And Peter says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Not a soldier with a sword. A servant girl with a question. And Peter folds.
Peter’s greatest weakness was the thing he thought was his greatest strength. He thought he was strong. He didn’t need to be stronger. He needed to know he wasn’t. That’s why Jesus teaches you to pray. The battle is real.
You've had one sentence in your head your whole life, “try harder, be better” But remember how Jesus taught you to start this prayer. Our Father. You’re His child. You’re not crying out to some God who is standing at a distance waiting to see whether you're strong enough. You're talking to your Father. A father who loves you the way He loves Jesus. A Father who already knows exactly how weak you are. And knows the tests are coming. Stop telling yourself, “try harder, do better”. Let me give you a better sentence: Father, don’t let it get its hands on me. Father, don't let it take me. Don’t let this test of life take me into sin.
That’s the first part of this verse, “Lead us not into temptation”.
Deliver Us From the Evil One
Now look at the second half of that verse. "But deliver us from the evil one."
Church, I’ve already told you the devil wants to use the test to pull you away from God. Now Jesus tells you to pray about him directly. So let me tell you who you're dealing with.
The Bible calls him a lot of things. Satan. The devil. The adversary. The slanderer. The accuser. The tempter. The thief. A murderer. The father of lies.
Church, that's not a hobby. That's a job description.
Now some of you, don’t think about the devil much at all. And you underestimate him. Honestly I do that.
Some of you are still picturing a cartoon. Red suit. Little horns. Pointy tail. Pitchfork. Sitting on a bottle of hot sauce.
Nobody's scared of that guy. And that works out real good for him.
But some of you have got the opposite problem. Some of you think he's behind everything. Every difficult thing is a spiritual, demonic attack towards you.
Every sickness. Every closed door. Every flat tire in the church parking lot. And you’ve made him more powerful than he is. Let’s play a little game. What's the opposite of up? Down. Opposite of tall? Short. Opposite of big? Small. Opposite of hot? Cold. Easy. Alright. What's the opposite of God?
There isn't one.
He wanted to be God. He’s not God.
And write this one down. God knows everything. The devil does not.
Scripture says of God, ‘You alone know the hearts of all.’ That belongs to God. Church, the devil can’t read your mind.
But now hear me. Here’s why you'd better take him seriously. He can't touch God. He tried that and lost. So he comes after God's people instead. Jesus said in John 10. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy.
He can't get to the Father. So he goes after the Father's kids.
So he can't make you do anything. He can't get inside your mind. What's he actually doing then?
Look, the devil has seen the patterns of humanity longer than you and I have been alive. He exploits patterns of weakness. He doesn’t need to be all-knowing to know human beings are vulnerable when we’re tired. Angry. Lonely. Anxious. Afraid.
Let's say your thing is pills. Bottle in the console of your truck. Sunday night you told yourself you were done. You meant it. You were dead serious. Now it's Friday. Long week. You're sitting in the driveway and you haven't gone in the house yet.
Church, he did not read your mind in that driveway. He didn’t have to. Temptation knows how to exploit a pattern. He didn’t put the desire in you. You had the desire.
And you think about that console. The temptation is real.
Now hear me carefully.
Being tempted is not the same thing as being taken into sin. Jesus Himself was tempted, yet without sin.
But you and I are not Jesus.
Temptation finds something in us. A desire. A craving. Something in our fallen hearts that says, I want that.
And church, that desire itself is part of the sin in us. So don't confuse temptation with surrender. But don't make peace with the sinful desire either.
Don't entertain it. Don't cherish it. Don't welcome it. Don't obey it.
The bottle is still closed.
But this is where Satan shows you the bait and hides the hook.
And the bait is real. “That pill works. It's gonna take the edge off.” He shows you that. “It’s gonna make you feel better.”
You know what he doesn't show you? He doesn't show you Saturday morning when it's worn off and you're worse than before. He doesn't show you next Friday when one pill won't cut it. He doesn't show you next year when now you need two, or three, or four just to get through the day.
He showed you one night. He never showed you the rest of your life.
And then after that, he is still not finished with you.
Now he starts talking to you. “You did it again. You are never going to beat this. You stood up in that church and sang this morning and then you came home and did this. And don't bother praying about it. God has heard this out of you a hundred times.”
Church, that's the accuser. That's the evil one. That's who Jesus just told you to pray about. To pray against. In temptation the devil makes the sin look small. And after you sin, he makes it look enormous, and he makes your Savior look small.
It was never about the pills. He wanted you to stop praying to God. And God is telling you don’t fall for the lies of the devil.
That thing you're feeling right now. That thing in your chest. Don't put the battery in the drawer.
You know what a smoke alarm does at four in the morning. It starts screaming, and your first thought is, make it stop. Pull the battery, throw it in the drawer. Go back to bed. But the alarm isn't the problem. The alarm is telling you there's smoke somewhere in the house.
That's what's happening in some of you right now. Your stomach is turning. Your heart rate is increasing. There's an ache inside you. That's a voice telling you something's wrong.
But you have got to know the difference between the voices. One of them says: you're disgusting. Stay out there. Don't you go near God after what you did. The other one says: this is burning you down. Get out of there. The one telling you to get out of there? That's God. One of them drives you away from God. The other one drives you to Him.
That voice telling you not to come back to God after what you did? That is not the Holy Spirit. That's the accuser.
And church, some of you aren't just dealing with temptation anymore. You're past that. You feel handcuffed. You feel like you're in a prison of your own sin. You feel like there's no way out. And the weight of it is crushing you.
If that’s you, then this prayer is for you. Father, rescue me.
Because church, the devil already lost. The war is already won.
The Rescue Jesus Has Won
Don’t pretend you’re fine. Right, like Ross from Friends. The love of his life, Rachel, they dated, they broke up. Then he finds out Rachel is dating his friend Joey. "Ross are you okay?" "I'm fine. Really I'm fine. I don't know why it's coming out all squeaky like this."
"I'm fine."
Churches have gotten really good at that haven’t we. Every Sunday morning, “how you doing?”, “I’m fine. I’m good.” When you’re not.
Let me say something to you as your pastor. We are not going to be that church. If you’re not fine. Tell someone. Tell someone in your Bible study group. Tell someone you’re close to here at church. Come and tell me. Let me know, “Pastor, this thing has got a hold on me.” You’re not going to get a lecture from me. Or from any of the other leaders in the church. We’re going to sit with you. We’re going to pray with you. We’re going to walk you out of it, together.
Which brings me to "Deliver us." Church, that is not a nice church word. It's a rescue word. It means snatch out. Drag clear. It is what you yell when you are in the water drowning and you can’t get out on your own. And Jesus put that word in a prayer He told you to pray every day. Not on your worst day. Every day.
Psalm 107 is a song about people God rescued. "Some sat in darkness, prisoners suffering in iron chains, because they rebelled against God's commands and despised the plans of the Most High... Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them. He brought them out of darkness and broke away their chains."
Did you catch why they were in there, church? They rebelled against God. They despised what He said. They put themselves in that prison cell.
But they turned back to God. They cried out to Him. And the LORD saved them. He rescued them. He brought them out of darkness and broke away the chains.
That word Jesus gives, deliver. Rescue. Paul picks up that same word in Colossians 1. Same word. One difference. He puts it in the past tense. "For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins."
Has rescued. Past tense, church. You're in that driveway praying, rescue me, and Paul says something decisive has already happened. You don't belong to the kingdom of darkness anymore. He came and got you. He transferred you into the kingdom of His Son.
Hebrews 2. He took on flesh and blood. Same flesh you've got. So that by His death He could break the power of the devil and set free people who spent their whole lives scared. Their whole lives, church. Some of you have been scared for years.
But church, taking on flesh and blood was not the end of it. That was just how He got here. How far did Jesus go?
Go with me to a garden on a Thursday night. Jesus wakes His friends up. He tells them, watch and pray so you don't walk into temptation. And then He says it. "The Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners." Into the hands.
I told you the prayer, Father, don't let it get its hands on me. Jesus went the other way.
He heard them coming. He didn't run. He walked toward the torches. He walked toward the swords. He held out His wrists and let them tie Him up.
They put their hands on Him. Their Creator. They beat Him with their hands. They drove nails through His hands.
He let them get their hands on Him So the hands of the evil one could never have you.
The battle is still real. You're going to feel it Friday night. But the war is already won.
Sin doesn't get the final word. Satan doesn't get the final word. Hell doesn't get the final word. Jesus does.
And some of you quit praying about your thing a long time ago. Remember Peter. The man who thought he was strong and found out he wasn't. Before Peter ever failed, Jesus had already said to him:
Luke 22:31–32: “Satan has asked to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.” Before Peter ever failed, Jesus was praying for him.
Church, even if your prayers went quiet, His didn't. Jesus is praying for you right now. He never stopped.
And some of you in here aren't fighting anything this morning. You're just tired. He's praying for you too.
Now here's something that's been sitting in this prayer the whole time and I don't want you to walk out without it. There's no I in it. Lead us. Deliver us. Jesus never taught you to pray this by yourself.
Whatever has got you this morning, the person sitting three seats down from you is fighting something too. You just can't see it. You were never meant to do this alone.
So we're going to do something before we leave. I want you to turn to somebody. Your husband. Your wife. The person next to you. If you came by yourself this morning, find somebody. Don't sit there alone. Not this morning.
You don't have to tell them what it is. You don't have to explain anything. Just pray for each other.
Here it is. Two sentences. Father, don't let it take them. And if it has, Father, rescue them.
Church. You have been fighting this alone for a long time. You're not alone anymore.
The battle is real. The war is already won.
God, Yours is the kingdom. Not the one that's had ahold of me. Yours is the power. Yours is the glory. Forever. Amen.
West Palm Beach Church
Belvedere Church is a Christ-centered West Palm Beach church where you can hear God’s Word and grow with a church family. In this message from Matthew 6:13, Pastor Rajiv Khatri teaches us to bring our weakness to the Father, trust the rescue Jesus has won, and pray for one another. Bring your questions, your struggles, and your need for grace.
Join us Sundays at 11:00 AM at 301 Cherry Road, West Palm Beach, FL 33409. Plan your visit to Belvedere Church or explore more sermons.