Oct. 2, 2016 Afternoon Service Beatitudes Part 12 by Pastor Josh Sheldon

The Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Teaching on Prayer

As the Lord saw the multitude, saw the disciples gathered around him, and he went to a mountain, and there gave them this word. Our text this morning will begin what will probably be a short two-part series on the verses that I will read in a moment from Matthew 6, verses 5 -13, the Lord's teaching on prayer.

As we work our way in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, which has to do with these three pillars of religious duty as they were then in Jesus' day seen. And so these were to pray, they were to fast, and they were to give alms, to be charitable, to pray and to fast.

And the Lord is once again demonstrating, explaining to us, to them who are around him then, to us who are around him today, what this righteousness that he is pushing us towards actually looks like. Now we know it's a change of heart, it's not all just do, it's not all just follow the procedure, say the words, it is a matter of a changed heart, a transformed heart.

We're speaking of the heart of flesh that the Holy Spirit gives when he gives us faith to believe. He has changed your heart from stone to flesh. So I wish to say that up front because as you go through this part of the Sermon on the Mount, it sounds like there's a lot of doing involved.

Now speaking to someone about this, and they brought up and said, yes, but you can't do these things except by the power of the Holy Spirit, and I said, that's true. That's absolutely correct. We stand on that.

Lord willing, I would die before I would deny that tenet of the faith. And yet, you may notice that in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, that is absent. What Jesus is giving us here is our responsibility.

This is what we are to do. These are the actions he wants to see. They require the transformed heart. We know that. But let us not say something like, well, when the Holy Spirit leads me in this way, no, no, no, no, because the Holy Spirit has led you in this way because he's given it to us in his word.

So by the transformed heart that Jesus by his Spirit has given you, given me, therefore do these things. Do you see the balance I'm looking for? I don't want to deny our responsibility. I don't want us to sit back passively and say, when I feel like the Holy Spirit has come upon me, then I'll be able to do these things properly.

That is not Jesus' point. Jesus is, in this portion of the Sermon, in a very practical, a very gritty, a very uncompromising way, giving us our responsibility in how we are to behave. I fear, not in this place particularly, not in this place at all, but in the church at large, there is this passivity, there is this excuse, if you will, that I just don't feel led to do these things.

So I'll wait until I feel that way and it's based on my feelings and my subjective context of the moment. I think that's wrong. We know that the transformation must occur. We know that except by faith it's impossible to please God, so God is not impressed when we do anything.

And yet, Jesus says, to you who are transformed, to you who have the new heart, to you whose faith is in Jesus Christ, do it. Do it. We continue to look for that righteousness that exceeds people who do it for their own glory so that you will be impressed with me.

I speak, of course, to the scribes and the Pharisees. I will read in a moment Matthew 6, 5 to 13, and our text will take us through the first few verses, verses 5 through 8, and we will save the Lord's Prayer for another time, Lord willing, next week.

I always want to remind us what it is we're looking for. What is Jesus telling us to look for here? Chapter 5, verse 20, and then I'll go right to chapter 6, verse 5. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

I fear you are going to tire of me reminding you of this. I don't think I really care. I want to be sure that this is at the forefront of our thoughts all the time. Heaven is at stake. The issue at hand is heaven, and of course, we know the alternative.

So with that in mind, verse 5 of chapter 6, and when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others.

Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them. For your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.

Pray then like this. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Before the Lord's Prayer, verses 9 through 13, we call it the Lord's Prayer. It's really the disciples' prayer that the Lord gave the disciples.

It's the disciples' prayer from the Lord. Before we come to that, we have this instruction in verses 5 through 8. They are crucial. In fact, if these verses are not understood, if these verses 5 through 8 are not assimilated, if we don't do them in all the way I explained it doing a moment ago, if we don't do them, if they're not true of you, then we could even say, do not proceed to the disciples' prayer.

It's like the old Monopoly game. Go to jail. Do not pass. Go. Go right back. Get back to the beginning. Check where you are. Look at the scripture. Make sure you're at square one before you proceed to the prayer of verses 9 through 13.

If we have not understood and assimilated in our spirit verses 5 through 8, then verses 9 through 13 are exactly what Jesus tells us not to do. They're just words. It's just babbling, vanity, empty, shallow showmanship with no eternal value because the living God is not in view.

So verses 5 through 8 are the crucial door by which we step into verses 9 through 13. So the question before us is, what do we do when no one is watching? Preachers love to ask, and I do love this question.

When your mind wanders, where does it go? Some say, I recently heard one preacher say something like, when your auto is in neutral, what are you doing while you're idling? Something like that. What do we do when no one is watching?

Are we the same in public as we are in private? I don't mean exactly the same. If you drop by my house on a Friday evening, you'd find the door would be quickly opened, the TV, if it was on, would be turned off just so we could put our focus upon you.

Refreshments would be brought out. If you came after about 8 o 'clock in the evening, I'd likely be in my comfortable pajamas, the ones that are kind of threadbare. They are this far above my ankles because they shrank the first time I washed them without my wife's direct counsel and advice and help.

But I like them anyway. But you would see that side of me, which is a side you don't see here when I'm wearing a suit and a tie. That's not quite the way I mean it, though. That sounds a little bit silly.

I wouldn't go out to check the email or check the mail in them. Oh, I'm sorry. I was saying those pajamas look pretty silly. I would not go out to check the mail in them. I do sometimes, but I probably shouldn't.

But is the fact that I wear a jacket and a tie on Sundays, does that qualify me as a hypocrite because I'm a little bit different in private than I am here in public? No, that's not what Jesus has in mind.

What he has in mind is specifically our relationship with God as it manifests itself in our life of prayer. Our relationship with God as it manifests in our life of prayer. This is what the Lord has in mind.

There's two negative examples followed by one positive. So do not be like the hypocrites, which are the scribes and the Pharisees, whose timing, whose posture, whose place of prayer are for the sake of the observer, which is a different matter, by the way, from leading in prayer.

If a man is assigned the task of leading in prayer, well, of course, he has to do the prayer in a way that you can hear it and in a timing when you are here and speak words so that you will be brought into the prayer with him as he approaches God.

Jesus is more concerned here with our way of prayer, what's in our spirit when we go to God in prayer, who it is we're approaching, whether it be public, as now, or private prayer. Verse 7, the other negative example, don't be like the Gentiles whose many words and constant repetitions were meant to gain the deity's attention.

And, of course, that must put us in mind. We won't go there, but we all know this history. In 1 Kings 18, verses 27 -29, after the prophets of Baal had been running around the altar for all this time and they started cutting themselves, they're calling, Baal, hear us, Baal, hear us.

There's not a sound. There's not a sound. And Elijah finally says, well, maybe he's away. Maybe he's busy taking a nap. He's out for dinner, this sort of thing. And so they would call louder and louder and with more and more words, thinking that finally heaven would be so overwhelmed with the sound of it that just to stop them, the deity would turn his attention and grant them some sort of wish or response.

Jesus says, do not be like that. That's a faithless sort of prayer. And we've spoken on this fairly recently, so I'll be brief. The hypocrites were those whose whole purpose in prayer was to gain man's attention, not God's.

Man's attention, not God's. Back in the 70s when the Iranian revolutionaries overtook our embassy, and I said 70s, I think it was the 80s, wasn't it? Late 70s, thank you. It was in the late 70s when they took it over.

But there were reports that usually things around the embassy were actually kind of calm. There wasn't much happening until the cameras showed up. And then all of a sudden there'd be riots and demonstrations and there'd be great activity around there.

And all the radicals would come out and make their statements and show all the hatred that they wanted to show and get it on the camera, the news cameras, whenever they showed up. And yes, children, there was a day when it took a news camera to record things that everybody didn't have a camera or a movie recorder on their phones.

It actually was a time when it was a big device that had to be carried on a shoulder. But only then did the demonstrations break out. They were just waiting for an audience, and I think that's like the hypocrites that Jesus here castigates.

Then there are the phrase-heaping repetitious Gentiles, and Jesus meant the Greeks, a little historical background will help us here. The Jews of the day had been taught that fixed prayers were acceptable.

Jesus is not, I think, totally against this idea as the semi-fixed nature of the prayer he teaches in the following verses attests, but the Greeks all around them tended to pile up as many titles for the deity as they could.

Their hope was to secure his or her attention. They would remind the deity of all the favors they had done and the sacrifices that they had offered to them. And all this was so they could hold the God accountable to respond, sort of a contractual obligation.

It's like, okay, now I've done all this for you, and you've made no objection. You did receive all these great favors from me, therefore you owe me. And so they would heap up the phrases. And the main phrases that they would heap up would be name after name after name after name for the same deity, and giving them all these compliments and titles.

Now you think again to the priests of Baal at Carmel that I spoke of in 1 Kings 18, and that's an example of just how futile it is to do such a thing. I mean, first of all, they got no answer because they prayed to no God at all.

And second of all, if we are praying to the true and the living God, then it's not our prayers, it's nothing at all about our prayers that turns his ears, it's not the many titles with which we extol him that impress him, nor is our eloquence or our fine systematic theology condensed into bite-sized chunks that which moves him to hear us.

Why does God hear our prayers? He hears our prayers because it is his nature to hear our prayers. Why is it God's nature to hear our prayers? Because God loves those who loves his son. Jesus Christ says in John 17 that the love that the father has for the son is the same love he has for those who love his son.

Why does God hear our prayers? Is it because I can give every Jehovah-adjective in the whole scripture? No. Is it because I can put together a sentence with more hyphens and semicolons than anybody else and have it still make grammatical sense?

No. God bless you if you're able to do that, if that's coming from your heart. God bless you for it. Seriously. Why does God hear us? Because we come to him in the name of his son. Because it is his nature to hear prayer and to answer prayer.

Prayer in Secret, Prayer in Public, and the Father Who Sees

I said a couple of weeks ago I don't want anybody here to become self-conscious about prayer, which was one of my trepidations about even entering into this portion of the Sermon on the Mount and how it presented to you.

I don't want anybody to be self-conscious about how they pray. We all pray differently. Some of us use common language and we speak to God with an intimacy and a familiarity that others of us don't. We import words and we import phrases that we use in our routine conversations.

Others of us are more formal. I know men who, when they pray publicly, pray in this King James sort of English. I can name names because he's a dear friend of mine and ours and he's preached this pulpit.

Owen Alford from Christ's Bible Church, one of Joe Jackowitz's co-pastors. When he prays, he prays to God about thy holy word. Lord, come to thy people. Give thine goodness to us this day. He just preaches.

It's not a put-on. It's the way he prays. It's who he is when he's approaching God. Some of us are more common in our language and then the way we phrase it to him. I don't want anybody to change unless you're praying to impress me.

Then I beg you to change, but I don't want anybody's style to change when that style is how they approach God. We need all the variety. We need the people who sound a little less formal with God, even though we know that they know who they're approaching.

We need those of us who use the more formal kind of language. You see, you can pray aloud and for my benefit without violating Jesus' dictum. The point is who you're praying to. The point is who we're praying to.

You can repeat yourself if your spirit cannot let you stop. Just don't think that God's favor is gained by it. You can call him Father and Lord God and Heavenly Father and God my Savior all in the same prayer over and over again.

You can call him Raweh, Ra 'ah. You can call him the Lord will provide. You can call him Jehovah, Nisei, which is the Lord our banner. God's names are true to his nature. They're true to his person and they are meaningful.

We don't get a preferential place in line when we remember more names than the next guy, but that doesn't mean Jesus is telling us not to use God's names. Many of them, whichever is appropriate to the prayer at hand, it's just that they don't remind God of anything he doesn't already know.

But if this is the way you approach God, again, I plead with you, don't change for me any more than you're praying for my benefit. The whole point here is who are we approaching? For whose benefit? Well, I keep saying that it's not for God's benefit that we pray.

It's for my benefit that I hear your prayers. It's your benefit to hear mine. Do we know who it is we're standing before? The Lord God Almighty. Jesus gives us two occasions of prayer here, private and corporate.

You see, if we pray only at church, that would imply that God is more especially here than there, wherever your private there might be. But that cannot be the case. We can't constrain God that way. His eyes roam to and fro throughout the whole earth.

He seeks those who will worship him in spirit and in truth. God does not dwell, Acts 7, 48 -50 tells us, he does not dwell in a house made with hands. You see, the question is not really whether you think God is here more than there, but whether you think he even is.

We often say rightly that if you reserve Sunday as your sole day of worship, then there's no way you are prepared for worship on Sunday. On Sunday, our voices are joined with our brothers and sisters.

On Sunday, we hear the word of God, which we've been devoted to all week, formally declared and applied to us. But this cannot be the only time, the only place. And what is Jesus saying? But you, when you go to your closet, I knew a pastor once who actually had a special room in his house he called his prayer closet.

I have nothing against that, I just don't think it's required by the text. What is Jesus saying? But you, when you go and have your time with God that's just you and God, when you are on your knees and it's you the individual with God, just the two of you, then go to your house, close the door.

Do you have to actually close the door? No, that's not his point. His point is who is your audience? Your audience is God, God alone. As much as it is God alone when you're in private time with God, so it is here.

Even in public prayer, when I pray to open the service, while I'm praying for you in a sense, but it's the God that we're approaching that is important and we must be devoted to him throughout the week.

Jesus assumes that our life Monday through Saturday before we come in here on Sunday is a life of prayer. Where do we end up if it is only here and on this day that we pray? Well, I'm afraid that would make us all hypocrites.

We've implied that God is only here today and our prayers are then for the entertainment of others. The second thing it implies, is it not a vain babbling and heaping up of phrases if they proceed only here when we're all together?

Would that not imply that we have no prayer life except when others are listening? I think that would be unacceptable. Verse 8 sums it up for us. He says, do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him.

And later on, Jesus is going to say in the same sermon, if you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father who is in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?

Faith, the Holy Spirit, and Prayer That God Hears

Why is God pleased to hear our prayers? In all my clumsiness, in all my self-consciousness, with all my amnesia about who asked me to pray about what, why is he pleased to hear the prayers? Again, it's a matter of faith.

Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. Is this not just what Jesus said? Your father who sees in secret will reward you.

Many Bibles add the word openly. He will reward you openly. Because long before he gets to that verse, the author of the book of Hebrews makes it clear that this faith he has in mind is no general faith in the existence of some higher power, nor does he mean just wishing for something to happen.

Nor does he, he means faith in the true and living God who cannot, we cannot see, but we must believe he is. He means a God who, though we don't see him, we believe that every good and perfect gift is directly from his hand.

He means the God and Father of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. One reason my halting prayers are acceptable to God is that were I the most eloquent speaker in the history of the church, compared to the God I pray to, they may as well be a child's goo-goo-ga-ga sort of thing.

He takes us at our meaning. He takes us according to our abilities, not some stratospheric standard of verbal excellence. Praise God for that. But he takes us from what's in our spirit and what we're trying to do.

Does it not say in Romans 8 that the Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalf and takes our mumblings and our mutterings and we don't know how we ought to pray and we don't know how to put to God the depth of our emotion or our feeling about something, how much angst we have over whatever the situation is.

We don't even know what to say. And God, by his Holy Spirit, as it were, translates it, brings it to the throne of grace for us. He intercedes on our behalf. He takes us at our meaning. He takes it as what's really in our spirit.

But the other reason he hears them, as I've said, is they're offered in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. This is why he hears us. We're accepted because we are in the Beloved if we're the community of faith.

Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, who gave himself for me. Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, who took away my sin when he hung on the cross for me. Jesus Christ, the Holy One of God whose body was battered, and of course we're speaking of what's coming in a few moments, the Lord's table, his body was battered and we have the broken bread before us to remind us of the torture he endured.

Jesus Christ, whose blood was poured out to death, which is the wine and the juice, it's for his regard, it's for his sake that he hears those who his Son has redeemed. Jesus said that our Father knows what we have need of before we ask him.

I mean, this is really, in many ways, nowhere more true than this table that is before us, the Lord's Supper. I mean, what did you and I need? What did we have need of yet we didn't ask? Before we even asked, we refused to ask, what did we need?

Salvation. We needed Jesus. We needed faith to believe. We needed faith to repent. Yet before we even asked, God provided that. Doesn't Jesus say your Father in heaven knows what you need before you ask him?

In Genesis 22, when Abraham so needed a substitute for his son Isaac, scripture says he looked and he saw the lamb. He didn't ask. He looked and he saw it. God provided what he had need of. He didn't ask.

Have you repented of your sins? When Jesus said, this is my body which is broken for you, I ask you, was Jesus' body broken for you? Do you, by faith, believe this? When he said, for this cup of wine, this cup is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for many for the remissions of sins, I ask you, were your sins remitted?

Did Jesus Christ, when he said it is finished, was it finished for you? Can you say with Paul, the Lord who died gave himself for me? I ask further. We're going to come to the table in a moment, so I ask these questions.

You answer them in your own conscience. Have you obeyed the Lord's command to be baptized in the name of the Father and in the Son and the Holy Spirit? Are you joined to a church that preaches his name and obeys his commands?

Is your life given over to his glory at every step? Are these true of you? Then you may partake with us. If you believe these things, but today you find yourself in some sort of turmoil or doubt, I say, please still come to the table.

It is for the Christian's strengthening that the Lord commands this regular observance. Do not worry about your worthiness. None of us are worthy of Christ or what he's done for us. And this table, just like prayer which I was speaking of a moment ago, this table has all to do with Christ's worthiness and not ours.

Why can we come to the Father in prayer? Because Christ is worthy. Why does God the Father hear us? Just because his Son is worthy to be heard and therefore those in him are heard by God the Father. Why are you worthy to come to this table?

Only because Jesus invites. Who is worthy? Only Christ. Too often I hear people say they can't come because I sinned this way, I haven't repented of this or that. My spirit's in turmoil over some other issue.

That's not what's at stake here. That's not what the issue is. Who has set this table before us? I don't mean the ladies who put the elements together as much as we appreciate that. It's Jesus Christ.

It's the Lord's Supper. We come here because he invites and we come here because he and he alone is worthy. And if anything would remind us of his inestimable worth, it's the broken bread and the cup of wine to remind us of his body given for us and the life, the blood that was poured out on our behalf.

We come here on the same basis as we come to God in prayer. In the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. So we'll close with a hymn and then we will partake in a few moments.