Our Father, the tempter?

​The Lord’s Prayer, or the Our Father as we Catholics like to call it, has a confusing petition.  This is the only prayer Jesus commanded us to pray.  All Christians pay this prayer, whether catholic, protestant or non-denominational.  When we say the prayer, we ask God for three petitions in the second half of the prayer: give us, forgive us and lead us.   This short note concerns the third petition: “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”  I always found it strange that Jesus would command us to ask God to lead us not into temptation as if God would tempt us.  God does not tempt us.  Only the devils has that calling and responsibility. The Apostle James confirms that fact in his epistle. “Nobody, when he finds himself tempted, should say, I am being tempted by God. God may threaten us with evil, but he does not himself tempt anyone.  No, when a man is tempted, it is always because he is being drawn away by the lure of his own passions.”   James 1:13-14.  So if God does not tempt us, why do we ask him to lead us not into temptation as if God would lead us into temptation and sin?  I think that when this phrase was drafted into Latin, and then English, a comma was left out.  There should be a comma behind the words “lead us.”  Jesus commands us to pray to the Father to lead us, direct our lives away from temptation and free us from the snares of the evil one.  When you pray the Our Father, ask God to lead you down the narrow path.  You should understand that our natural passions and desires often overtake our thoughts and we seek unhealthy obsessions like sex outside of marriage, drugs, alcohol and money, often to extremes and to our destruction. James confirms this statement:  “passion conceives and gives birth to sin; and when sin has reached its full growth, it breeds death.”  James 1:15.  Ask God to lead us away from the temptations of the evil one.