Verse explainer

What does Matthew 6:13 really mean?

A prayer not that God would stop testing us, but that we wouldn't walk ourselves straight into danger we can't handle.

KJV

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

BSB

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

The plain meaning

This petition sits near the end of what we call the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9–13). The puzzle it raises is real: does God lead people into temptation? Scripture elsewhere says he tested Abraham (Genesis 22) and that Jesus himself was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted (Matthew 4:1). So the prayer isn't asking God to stop all trials — it's asking that we not be drawn in, of our own will, to situations where our weakness will destroy us. The companion petition sharpens it: "deliver us from evil" — or, as the BSB renders it, "from the evil one." The two petitions work together: keep us from walking into the trap, and rescue us when we are caught in it. The doxology — "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory" — is absent from the oldest manuscripts and was likely a liturgical addition to the prayer's use in early Christian worship, which is why it does not appear in the BSB text.

The common misreading

"Lead us not into temptation" implies God might otherwise deliberately lure us into sin. This reading troubles people, and understandably so — it sounds as though God could be the one setting a trap. But the petition doesn't accuse God of that. As Jamieson, Fausset & Brown observe, God does bring his people into circumstances that test them: he led Abraham to offer Isaac, and the Spirit led Jesus himself into the wilderness (Matthew 4:1). The prayer is not asking God to stop all trials. The word peirasmos covers a range from healthy testing to dangerous exposure. What the prayer resists is entry — being drawn in, especially by our own imprudence, to a situation our faith and character cannot survive. Peter is the cautionary example: he forced his way into the high priest's courtyard, and once inside the atmosphere of danger, he collapsed three times. The companion line — "deliver us from the evil one" — confirms the prayer is about resisting a hostile force, not accusing God of malice. We are praying: do not let our own boldness or blindness carry us where we will be destroyed.

What the commentators say

John Gill18th c. · PD

Gill reads the petition as a prayer not against temptation in every sense — since trials are sometimes needful and useful — but against being overcome and sunk by them. He catalogues temptations from God, from Satan, from the world, and from a person's own heart, and holds that the prayer asks God not to leave us to these forces, but to give us a way of escape and final victory over all of them.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown19th c. · PD

JFB inclines toward reading the petition as a prayer against being drawn, of our own accord, into temptation — not a prayer that God would never test us, which would contradict his own dealings with Abraham and Christ. They point to Peter's self-propelled entry into the high priest's courtyard as the vivid illustration: he pressed in uninvited, was sucked into the atmosphere of danger, and fell. The matching word from the Garden — "Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation" (Matthew 26:41) — confirms this reading.

The word behind it

πειρασμός peirasmos

"Temptation" or "trial." The word covers both a test designed to strengthen and a solicitation designed to destroy — context determines which. Here it is the dangerous kind: the situation in which a person's weakness is exposed and may overwhelm them. The prayer is not to avoid every proving of faith, but to avoid being led into the kind of exposure that ends in ruin — whether the agent is one's own impulse, the world, or the evil one.

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