When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test.

This reading today gives us Luke’s version of the Lord’s prayer. It is very different than the longer version from Matthew that we might be more familiar with. This version is much shorter, but in at least one way it tends to be more precise. Specifically I am referring to the last line of the prayer. Luke’s version reads “do not subject us to the final test” While in Matthew’s version it reads “and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The reason that I believe that it is better, is because temptation is the test.

At the end of our lives we are going to be judged by how we dealt with temptation. As a result of the fall, we all have a weakness to sin, called concupisence. This weakness sets up a conflict in each and every one of us between our sinful desire to indulge in the wants and needs that this world offers, against the understanding of what is right and wrong (called conscience), that God puts on our hearts. The “test” is the extent to which we exert our will to choose one over the other.

We all face this test every day…, whether to eat the last slice of pizza, or have one more drink or to indulge in sex in an illicit or disordered way. We all are victims of this temptation, but what matters is how we handle and overcome our temptations. At the end of time we will be asked to account for all our actions. And at the “final test” those actions will be weighed on the scales of God’s justice…, and the righteousness of all of our choices will be measured against the sum total of all of our un-reconciled sins. How much did you fall, how much did you seek reconciliation and forgiveness? God will judge you, when you die, on whether or not the state of your soul at the time of your death was upright and just or if it was sinful and selfish.

That is what Luke means when he writes “and do not subject us to the final test.” None of us could stand that judgement. None of us are worthy of God’s mercy, and none of our lives are perfect and without sin. None of us wants to stand before God and have to justify ourselves and our lives to Him. It is only by His mercy that we are allowed into heaven. If you are blessed to get a plenary indulgence like the apostolic pardon, or you die a martyr, you will be exempt from this final test, and go straight to heaven. But in the end, no matter how you achieve it, it is only by reconciliation and God’s mercy that we can be purified enough to enter heaven without being subjected to the final test.

So that is what we are praying for today in the Lords prayer. That God will guide us to make upright and just choices, to reconcile when we fall, and to hopefully die in loving friendship with Him in this world, so that we can go straight into eternity and be with Him forever in heaven.

So please lord we pray that you will help us to become the saints that you indended us to be, and that you do not subject us to the final test. Amen.