Deliver us from evil

"And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil."
And God leadeth us, not into temptation, but delivereth us from sin, disease, and death.

Where does evil come from?

Jesus gives the best explanation when he calls the devil (evil) "a liar and the father of it."

Evil is a lie.

Does a lie have power? Only if you mistakenly (or willfully) accept the lie as truth. Then evil can seem very very real indeed.

And what can save us from sin, disease, and death - especially when they feel so very very real?

Only one thing: the Christ: God's Truth, accepted and understood and demonstrated.

And that is like turning on a light in a dark scarey place. And that darkness is powerless against the light.

Here's a little of what "Science & Health" as this to say about this:

S&H 16:15
"In the phrase, 'Deliver us from evil,' the original properly reads, 'Deliver us from the evil one.' This reading strengthens our scientific apprehension of the petition, for Christian Science teaches us that 'the evil one,' or one evil, is but another name for the first lie and all liars.

S&H 186:17
"Evil is self-assertive. It says: 'I am a real entity, overmastering good.' This falsehood should strip evil of all pretensions. The only power of evil is to destroy itself."

S&H 207:8
"God is not the creator of an evil mind. Indeed, evil is not Mind. We must learn that evil is the awful deception and unreality of existence. Evil is not supreme; good is not helpless; nor are the so-called laws of matter primary, and the law of Spirit secondary. Without this lesson, we lose sight of the perfect Father, or the divine Principle of man."

S&H 285:7
"What, then, is the material personality which suffers, sins, and dies? It is not man, the image and likeness of God, but man's counterfeit, the inverted likeness, the unlikeness called sin, sickness, and death. The unreality of the claim that a mortal is the true image of God is illustrated by the opposite natures of Spirit and matter, Mind and body, for one is intelligence while the other is non-intelligence."

S&H 540:5
"In Isaiah we read: 'I make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these things;' but the prophet referred to divine law as stirring up the belief in evil to its utmost, when bringing it to the surface and reducing it to its common denominator, nothingness. The muddy river-bed must be stirred in order to purify the stream. In moral chemicalization, when the symptoms of evil, illusion, are aggravated, we may think in our ignorance that the Lord hath wrought an evil; but we ought to know that God's law uncovers so-called sin and its effects, only that Truth may annihilate all sense of evil and all power to sin."

S&H 507:24
"Infinite Mind creates and governs all, from the mental molecule to infinity. This divine Principle of all expresses Science and art throughout His creation, and the immortality of man and the universe. Creation is ever appearing, and must ever continue to appear from the nature of its inexhaustible source. Mortal sense inverts this appearing and calls ideas material. Thus misinterpreted, the divine idea seems to fall to the level of a human or material belief, called mortal man. But the seed is in itself, only as the divine Mind is All and reproduces all--as Mind is the multiplier, and Mind's infinite idea, man and the universe, is the product. The only intelligence or substance of a thought, a seed, or a flower is God, the creator of it. Mind is the Soul of all. Mind is Life, Truth, and Love which governs all."

"The great fact remains that evil is not mind. Evil has no power, no intelligence, for God is good, and therefore good is infinite, is All."

"For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever."
For God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all, and All.

God's will done in you as it is done in Heaven

"Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven." Enable us to know, as in heaven, so on earth, God is omnipotent, supreme.

Enable us to know, as in Heaven so in us, God sees His omnipotent supreme will being done.

Right here where you are, you have the ability to see the universe as it really is, as under God's complete control, as all-harmonious, under God's perfect care and revealing. His will is done in earth - in your present state of consciousness - just as it is done in heaven - His state of consciousness, which yours reflects.

To the extent that you awaken to this, you experience God feeding your need of Love, forgiving all dreams of debt or lack or loneliness, leading you and delivering you from any nightmare of sin, sickness or death, revealing in you His kingdom, already present, already complete, already all-harmonious.

So you see that this is not mind-over-matter, or even Mind-over-matter. It is an awakening to the fact that you are, in fact, completely spiritual! That you are actually already - here and now - God's perfect image and likeness, without a single material (i.e., limited / mortal) element.

This is how God knows you. This is how God sees you. This is how God creates you. And it is your divine right to know, see, and be His exact image and likeness. In fact, it is more than your divine right. It is your actual present state of being. And it is the actual present state of being for everyone and everything around you: your neighbor, your community, the world, the universe.

Mrs. Eddy put it this way: "Jesus beheld in Science [just like God does], the perfect man where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man, the Saviour saw God's own likeness [God actually being made manifest], and this correct view of man healed the sick [awoke the "sick" to their already-present perfection as God-being]."

And God's will leads us not into trials or temptation - dreams of sin, disease, death - but His omnipotent will always delivers us from every wilfull, uncomfortable, limited sense of ourselves. Because His kingdom is already come, and His kingdom is already "within you."

A simple answer

What if your prayer is simply to be able to accept all that God is pouring out to you today? to receive all His gifts? His ideas? His inspirations and intutions? and then be grateful for them by living them out loud in your life?

What if you entered into what God is doing for you? What if you accept that you get to see the flawless unfolding of God's day, today? that you get to be the flawless unfolding of God's day today? that you get to declare the flawless unfolding of God's day today?

Then your prayer would simply be: Thy will be done.

Spiritual sense and prayer

"Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality."

Intuition is the seed of desire, of prayer. Intuition speaks wordlessly to your receptive heart. It says "this is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, or when ye turn to the left." It nudges that seed-of-desire in you into an awakening feeling that something wonderful is actually possible. This gives you hope.

And Hope is not just some vague wishful thinking. The Hope that God gives you is much more solid than that. The Hope God gives you is expectancy. And expectancy is what opens that seed of prayer. Expectancy is what knows - when the night is darkest - that the dawn will come. Hope is what carries you from indulging fearful thinking into risking prayerful thinking. Hope is a glimmer of "knowing before seeing." And when Hope reaches up from the light of spiritual intuition, it is never blind. Hope right now sees the flower in your sprouting seedling prayer.

Faith, which is Hope-put-into-practice, nurtures and supports the growth of your seedling prayer. Practicing your Faith by being faithful to your expectancy over and over and over again - strengthens your Faith. Practice teaches you what works and doesn't work, what's true and what's not true, what's real and dependable and what's false and worthless. All that practice builds your Faith-muscle! And that helps your prayer grow straight and tall, blossoming into:

Understanding. And when you actually now understand your desire, your prayer, you are awake to it. You are aware of it's real meaning. Your eyes are opened, and your mind is alert, and your practice is more sure and confident than ever. You shed the driftwood dreck that might have been sticking to your prayer - tossing aside the cheap imitation answers, seeing through this misleading sidetracks, ditching the counterfeit solutions. And so your experience the beneficial results of your prayer. You demonstrate through your intuition, hope, faith and understanding, what is spiritually true. You experience something new. You feel something solid and good and wonderful. Your prayer just naturally ripens into:

Fruition. And why? Because trusting God with your desire always bears fruit. And what is the fruit of your prayer? It is always:

Reality. Yes. Reality.

You can reach this point in an instant, an hour, or a lifetime. But time doesn't matter because even right now desire is alive in your heart. And this desire, viewed rightly, is always God stirring in you, drawing you closer, awakening you to who you really are, awakening you to your likeness to Him, your at-one-ment with Him, declaring what's really true: you are God being.

Rejoice then in God as All-in-all, and you as His perfect and complete image and likeness: pure, healthy, whole, and holy. This is who you always have been and always will be. And most importantly, this is who you are now.

"For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever."
For God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all, and All.