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Prayer is a spiritual activity engaged in by most of world, through many religions and faiths. In Jesus' teaching on prayer, he makes a fundamental distinction between prayer as a religious ritual and the kind of prayer that transmits through the Kingdom of Heaven. We pray that the dissonance would cease between Heaven and earth. And Gospel communication in prayer is a completely different dynamic than religious prayer.

Sometimes we view temptation as a conflict between the red and white figures on either shoulder. Too often we fall for the little guy with the pitchfork in our cartoon. Jesus faced temptation in a much more brutal, three-dimensional manner against the stark palette of the Judean wilderness. This episode has often been understood as a template for how we too could fight temptation. Nevertheless, we see in this exchange in the wilderness, the story of triumph reenacted against Israel's story--and ultimately our own stories--of failure.