II. The divine opposition to evil.

This prayer implies that all evil is contrary to His will. The one kind
is so, absolutely and always. The other is a method to which He has had
recourse, but not that which, if things had gone right, He would have
adopted.

So this prayer breathes confidence that God will overcome both kinds.

How much there is to make us believe that evil is eternal.

How apt we are to fall into despair, to lose heart for ourselves and our
fellows; to say that it has always been so, and it always will be so.

For all social reformers here is encouragement.

For ourselves, when we seem to do so little in setting ourselves right,
here is confidence.

But it must be _God_ who conquers the world's evil.

Our most potent weapon in the struggle with our own and the world's evil
is the earnest offering of this petition.

Think of the failure of godless schemes; how often we have been on the
verge of political and other millenniums.

Only the God, who cures sin, can cure the world's ills.

We are not to substitute praying for working. God may answer our prayer
by setting us to work.

Remember that you pledge yourselves to work for your fellows by that
_Us_, and to try to reduce, were it by ever so little, the sum of human
misery.

IV. The manner of God's deliverance from evil. God delivers us by
Christ, that is the sum of all.

He delivers us from sin by His answers to the previous petitions.

He delivers us from suffering by teaching us how to bear it, and by
showing us the meaning of it. The evil in evil is taken away. There
shines a brightness round about the devouring fire (Ezek. i. 4). 'All
things work together for good.'

Finally, He delivers by taking us to Himself.

This prayer goes beyond present experience. It is the yearning for full
redemption. It is the last which is answered. But there lies in it a not
indistinct prophecy of that great and blessed time when we shall be like
Him, and delivered from all evil.

For ourselves and for the world it carries the assurance that neither
sorrow nor sin shall be permitted to deform for ever the face of this
fair creation; but that the day comes when God's name being everywhere
hallowed, and His will done on earth, and His kingdom set up, and all
our wants supplied, and all our sins forgiven, and all temptations taken
out of the way, evil of every kind shall be scourged out of God's
universe, and 'the ransomed of the Lord shall return