November 24, 2024, Matthew 6: 5-8

So Charles Spurgeon said this, no man can be in the kingdom of heaven who does not pray.

So we're coming out swinging this morning. J .C. Ryle said this, it is not enough to join in the prayers of the congregation on Sundays or to attend the prayer of a family on the weekdays.

There must be private prayer also. Without this, we may be outward members of Christ's church, but we are not living members of Christ.

George Swinnick, another Puritan pastor and author said, prayer should be constant. It is your duty to give yourself to prayer.

It is like fire on the altar. It must never go out day or night. It is like a saint's breathing.

A Christian's prayer may have an intermission, but never a cessation. And then of course, turning to scripture, we could go on and on with this, but I'll just give you two verses right now.

The first is Colossians 4 .2, which says, devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.

And one other verse, if you were looking for something to memorize, this is a good one, 1

Thessalonians 5 .17, simply says, pray without ceasing, pray without ceasing.

And throughout the Old and the New Testaments, we have just countless examples of individuals praying to Yahweh.

And this of course includes Jesus himself. So given this, and given the understanding of some of these early, well, they're not that early, in the 1700s, 1800s, pastors and churches, understanding of prayer and the existence of God, and the example that we have in scripture, there should be no question in our own lives that prayer is something that's essential.

Prayer is something that you can't live the Christian life without having. But at the same time, a lot of us struggle with it anyway.

I looked up a few statistics on prayer. I like to do this every once in a while when they're relevant, but according to the

Pew Research Center, this was in 2021, 45 % of US adults pray daily.

Which, I'm not sure if that sounds good or bad, but what I do know is that it was down from 58 % when they did the same survey in 2007, so it's starting to drop fairly rapidly.

And a Barna survey, Barna is a company that does a lot of church -related stuff, showed that 14 % of American adults don't know if or how

God responds to prayer, and presumably they are actually conducting these surveys in churches. Now, a

Crossway survey, Crossway is a Christian publisher, they publish a lot of books that you're probably familiar with, showed that only 2 % of people surveyed were satisfied with their prayer life.

And next to that in my search was a statistic of an unknown source that said the average

Christian spends about five minutes a day in prayer. And just to bring life to some of these statistics,

I wanna tell you a story about a man who, when he was asked to pray at a young adult small group at one point, he said, no,

I don't pray out loud. Yes, that man was me, that was probably nearly 20 years ago.

And so I can only assume that if God laughs at the sheer stupidity that we, as his children, sometimes show, that he's at the very least pretty amused by that particularly foolish statement that I made, especially given future plans that he had for me, future plans of which

I was woefully unaware at the time, obviously. And I can make fun of myself, but I've also run into a lot of other people who have said similar things, people who are either hesitant to pray, at any kind of gathering, or just flat out refuse to pray where other people are.

And there could be any number of reasons for this. I mean, a lot of people think that they don't know how to pray, or they don't know what to say, they're uncomfortable speaking in public, whatever the situation is.

But I think that a lot of times it comes down to a faulty understanding of exactly what prayer is.

And we'll get into some of these things about what prayer is. Because that is the primary focus of our passage today.

And that's what we're gonna talk about. How to pray properly.

So if you will, turn in your Bibles to Matthew chapter six. We're gonna be starting in verse five, and we'll be reading through verse eight, excuse me.

So again, that's Matthew chapter six, verses five through eight. Our Lord says this, and when you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men.

Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your

Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the

Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. Therefore, do not be like them, for your

Father knows what you need before you ask him. So this is our passage today.

This is, again, continuing in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructing his disciples on the issue of prayer.

Now, prayer just so happens to be, in this context, the next item in our current list of ways that we can practice righteousness before the

Lord. But more importantly, that we can practice our righteousness before the Lord without being hypocrites about it, without doing it the wrong way.

And what we can do as we look at this passage, we will take it verse by verse, but we can divide it into two major headings.

The first is the wrong way that the hypocrites and the Gentiles, the two groups that Jesus mentioned, the wrong way that they pray, and in contrast to that, the right way to approach your own prayer life.

So what we'll do is we'll look at these in pairs, because this is the way it's divided up. We'll look at verse five and six first, then verse seven and eight, and then we'll add a little bit of application as we close.

So, obviously, verse five, chapter six, verse five is the first verse. And that one deals with the people that Jesus refers to as the hypocrites.

These are the people that love to pray in public. I talked a minute ago about people who refuse to pray in public.

These are the people that are exactly the opposite of that, right? These are the people that you don't even have to ask, and they'll already start praying a lot of times because they want people to hear them.

And this idea of hypocrites, it should remind you of what we looked at a couple of weeks ago when we looked at verses one through four, and we talked about people who like to practice their giving in public.

They like to practice their charity in public so that they can be seen and congratulated by other people.

So they were called hypocrites as well, if you recall. Now, that's what we see here when

Jesus is talking about prayer, hypocrites who pray primarily to be thought well of by other people.

Now, this is interesting because it's been said that no religious tradition has ever had a higher standard or priority for prayer than Judaism.

So if you think about who the Israelites or who the Jews were, they were

Yahweh's chosen people. He set them apart very specifically.

They were entrusted with his written word. They were entrusted first with the Holy Scripture. Some of their patriarchs and some of their prophets either spoke directly to God back and forth or received word directly from God in the case of the prophets.

And if we consider prayer to be a form of communication with God, and truly, prayer is our main form of communication with God, then the

Jews, while they wouldn't have a monopoly on communication with God, they certainly would have or should have possessed a very deep understanding of what it is to talk to God and what prayer was and what it was for.

But just like a lot of the other things that we've seen already in the Sermon on the Mount, by the time

Jesus showed up on the scene, the rabbinical tradition of the time had caused a lot of issues, and it had caused a lot of issues with the prayer lives of people and with the prayer practices of the

Jewish people. So one commentator, his name was William Barclay, highlighted the fact that over the years and through the

Pharisaical teachings, prayer had become ritualized and formalized.

And as a result, there were several faults that were showing up in the prayer lives of people. Now, the first one is exactly what we just said.

The first fault is that prayer had been ritualized. So that means there were specific words that needed to be said, there were specific forms of prayer that had to be done.

And as you know, when this happens, when there are specific words to say, specific words to memorize, or a specific format to follow, some people will fall into just a rote kind of repetitive memorization practice.

It loses its spirituality. This is sometimes something that happens in liturgical traditions as well.

When you get used to doing the same thing every single week, it can become lifeless.

Now, it doesn't have to become lifeless. That's in our own hearts. But it's very easy for that to happen.

Now, I'll give you an example. The Shema is one of the Jewish prayers. And actually, this is one they still practice today, and it's beautiful.

And it's scriptural. So these are some of the words. It says this, Listen, Israel, the

Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Blessed be the name of his glorious kingdom forever and all time.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. These words which

I command to you today shall be on your heart. So that's a great prayer. It's all

Old Testament scripture, just keep that in mind. But it's very scriptural.

Another example is the Shemona Esrei. Now, this is a

Jewish prayer that contains 18 different prayers. So prayers for different occasions. And then what happens is those prayers become ritualized.

Now, again, I have to stress, this doesn't mean that if there is a specific prayer you can memorize and say.

It doesn't mean that it has to be lifeless or soulless or unspiritual. It can very much be a pure offering to God, even if you've memorized it, even if you're saying special words.

And we'll talk about that in just a little bit. But it can also easily turn into a simple act of obedience, a simple act of mindless obedience, which is where the problem comes in.

Now, the second fault is related to this. It's prescribed prayers for every occasion.

You got a prayer for a church service, you got a prayer for a meal, you've got a prayer for the harvest season, whatever the prayers are for.

So instead of truly coming before God to give thanks for these things or to ask for these things or to pray for these things, there are specific prayers that have to be said, which can take the spiritual aspect from it.

The third fault was that they had prescribed times to pray, morning, afternoon, and evening.

You stop whatever you're doing and you pray. We see this with our

Muslim friends as well. When I was away in South Carolina, this is something that we saw.

During the course of our day, every once in a while, the Muslims would just all of a sudden be absent because they were doing their prayers at the specific times that they were supposed to do them.

And I'm just gonna, maybe I'll just give this caveat every time. Does it have to be unspiritual?

No, it does not. But anything ritualized because of the nature of our hearts can easily become just another thing that we do unthinking to get it out of the way so that we've checked a box.

A fourth fault, one that we see today as well sometimes, and one that many children have lamented at many a meal is the idea that long prayers are better prayers.

The more words you say, the better. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with long prayers properly done.

So we'll move on past that one. The fifth fault is meaningless repetition.

And I won't go into that because we're gonna talk about that more as we get into, I believe, verse seven. But the sixth fault is the one that has no positive aspect to it.

All the other ones don't necessarily give themselves to an unspiritual approach to prayer, but the sixth fault does.

And the sixth fault, number six, is wanting to be seen. Praying so that people will see you or hear you praying.

And this gets right to the heart of our point about hypocrisy in prayer. Because we see

Jesus mention in verse five that they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men.

Now, it's important that we clarify a few things here. So we see four words that alliterate beautifully.

We see stand, synagogues, street corners. I'll hyphenate that so it's one word just to make sure it falls into our categories properly.

And then the word seen. And as we've already said, only one of those words is automatically negative where prayer is concerned.

So we have to be careful. We have to be careful not to take a single word or a single concept and make it into an idol or make it into a legalistic rule about something that's inappropriate just because we have misinterpreted it.

So let's start with the word stand. Some people like to make a big deal out of the physical posture that people have when they pray.

They like to make a big deal about the physical posture that they have when they pray. However, if we look in Scripture, we see a variety of examples of different postures.

We see people praying prostate, prostrate. Wow, you always get that word mixed up.

And it's always terrible. There's no circumstance where that's a good error.

Prostrate, which of course means lying down on your face.

We see people pray kneeling. People pray seated. People pray standing.

Now I've known people that wanted to make a big deal about being on their knees when they pray. Or people that say it's disrespectful to pray seated.

We don't find that in Scripture. We don't find that in our biblical examples. We see people praying in every different way physically.

So as we consider it in relationship to this verse, there's nothing inherently wrong with people standing to pray.

Now our next word is synagogue. Synagogue is the center of religious life for the

Jews. It's church, just like church for us. So obviously, there's nothing wrong with praying in the synagogue.

Because naturally, all types of prayer would occur there. Now our next word was street corner.

Now this is a little less common. This is different from the synagogue. It's a little weird. It's weirder to pray on a street corner.

But there's nothing that would prevent anyone from praying on a street corner.

Again, it all comes back to how you're approaching it or how you're going about it. One thing about the idea of street corner is that it's probably likely that Jesus wasn't actually talking about people that stopped to pray on a street corner.

But he was doing the hyperbole through absurdity kind of thing like he did talking about people who blow a trumpet to announce their giving.

Nobody was actually blowing trumpets, but that's sort of the equivalent of making sure that everybody knows it.

Praying on a street corner where all the public would see you is an example of a hypocrite doing something just because they wanted people to know.

However, somebody just walking along the street, you can say a prayer to yourself.

You can be praying as you go. That's how you pray without ceasing. There's nothing wrong with praying on a street corner.

But the last word, as we've said, can take all those other things and turn prayer into something that is offensive to God.

Prayer is supposed to be an offering to God, a communication with God. But when you take the idea of praying to be seen, then you have turned your prayer into an affront to God and his holiness.

The desire to be seen can take any prayer in any circumstance and just make it completely worthless.

Because what this is, the desire to be seen, it shows that we have a fundamental error in our concept of who the audience of our prayer is.

Prayer, even when we do it here, even when I do it here, when somebody else does it here, when you do it in your

Sunday school class, when you do it at a dinner with everybody around, prayer's never for other people.

Prayer's always for God. Again, we'll talk about that a little bit more too. But the idea of being seen.

Standing is fine until it's done solely for the purpose of being seen. Praying in the synagogue is perfectly natural unless that's the only place that you ever pray because there are people there to see you do it.

Praying on the street corner's weird. And if the main purpose is so that people see you pray, that's obviously bad as well.

I don't know if I wanted to tell this story. When I tell stories about real people that are negative examples,

I don't ever want to identify those people because again, there's a lot of well -meaning things that happen, but they just happen in the wrong way.

And there's a variety of reasons for that. But there was someone who wanted to pray before a sporting event and they wanted to put out an invite to everyone and have them all gather visibly to pray before this event.

And the organization that was sponsoring the event kind of pushed back and said, well, it's okay for you to do that, but we're not gonna send out messages about it.

We're not gonna make it a thing because what that's gonna do is it's going to, it's gonna sort of create a divide between the people who pray and the people who don't.

And we don't want our teammates to be clashing over something like this. They said, you can still pray.

We're just not gonna make a thing out of it. But the people who wanted to pray kind of got upset. And again, they were offended that they were being told they couldn't do this.

And I understand that because as often as Christians get shut down in our culture, it's only natural to think that's what's happening.

But then you have to ask yourself, as you reflect on the Sermon on the Mount and you look at what Jesus is about to say, does it matter if you have the opportunity to pray in front of people?

Because nobody's stopping you from praying. Do you get mad because you can't do it in a public forum?

Or do you just go ahead and pray? So they got kind of mad because they couldn't pray in front of everybody.

But this is praying to be seen. And yes, we wanna shine our light, but we wanna do it to bring glory to God.

It gets very complicated. So you have to be careful what your motivations are, which will be one of our main points.

In fact, I'll just tell you that's our main point now. So if you get too tired or hungry or uncomfortable and you need to get up, you can do that.

Your motivation is everything when you pray. But once again, specific prayers for the purpose of being seen.

And I wouldn't say this is the example in the sporting event scenario that we just talked about. But prayers specifically to be seen are not prayers that God honors.

And as Jesus says here at the end of this verse, truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.

If you wanna pray to be seen, just like if you wanna give for people to acknowledge you, that's all the reward you ever get.

God does not care beyond that if that's your motivation. So the heart of hypocrisy when praying is to believe that anyone other than God is the audience or to be thought pious for your prayers by other people, particularly if you pray so that other people tell you how good your prayers are.

If that's what you live for, you have received your reward in full. Now, verse six, what does

Jesus say to do instead of this? Jesus tells his disciples, instead of clamoring to be seen or praying for the approval of other people, to remember who your prayer is for.

Verse six, but you, when you pray, go into your inner room and when you have shut your door, pray to your

Father who is in secret and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. Now, first we have to acknowledge that this assumes that you're praying.

Just like earlier, he assumed that you're giving. These are all, because if we step backwards a few more steps, remember that I told you the

Sermon on the Mount is for Christians. The Sermon on the Mount is not a standard of behavior for the entire world.

The Sermon on the Mount is a standard for regenerate believers to live in the world. And if you're a regenerate believer, if the

Holy Spirit has changed your heart, these are desires that you have, desires to pray. And you have desires to pray because you're thankful to God.

So again, Jesus is assuming here that everybody's praying because if you're a

Christian and you're not praying, you're making a mistake. But there's something about this statement that we have to carefully consider.

He says, go into your inner room and when you shut the door, pray to your Father in secret.

And we have to at least address this question, even though it probably seems pretty silly.

But when he says this, when he says, when you pray, go into your inner room, does this mean that we should never pray in front of other people?

Does this mean that all of our prayers should be behind closed doors? Are we being unfaithful to the teachings of Jesus when we pray out loud in our church service?

When we pray out loud before a Sunday school class? And we have to ask this because people, people make a doctrine out of this, that Jesus said to go into a room and shut the door.

But there's at least a couple of reasons we have to believe that what's going on here is at least an element of metaphor, not strict, literal instruction on this issue.

And the first one is very practical. The people that Jesus was talking to, his disciples and the people around him who were hearing him, well, they lived in houses that were pretty different from the houses that we live in.

I mean, most of them probably only had one room. And at most, maybe they had two rooms, maybe they had a small closet.

So while going into a physical inner room may be possible, for some people, it wouldn't be practical or possible because you walk in the door and there's the whole house, there's the kitchen, there's the bedroom, bathroom's probably outside hopefully, but everything else is there.

So there's not a private situation that you can enter into to pray.

A lot of people will give us instruction today based on this, you know, to have a special place where you can pray, where you can go, because it sets your mind into an attitude of prayer and you won't be disturbed.

But we're not necessarily looking at a physical inner room in this situation.

But the second reason we have to believe that this is not strictly literal is that Jesus prayed in public during his ministry.

One of the most well -known examples of that is in Matthew 14, 19.

What we see there is Jesus praying before 5 ,000 people, before he fed them with loaves of bread and fishes.

He also prayed in front of his disciples. You can look this up in Luke 11, 1.

And even beyond this, we have at least a handful of prayers in Jesus.

One of the most well -known is in John 17, which is called the high priestly prayer. Some people say that's actually the

Lord's prayer as opposed to what we're gonna look at in the next week or two. But just the fact that it's recorded in the

Gospels means that it was witnessed by at least some people. So for us to take

Jesus's words, go into your inner room, shut the door, and pray to your Father in secret, means that, again, there's an element of metaphor at play here, because Jesus himself didn't follow these words.

So that means that there's gotta be something a little bit different that Jesus had in mind when he said this.

So William Hendrickson had this to say. The main emphasis is not even on the place of prayer, but on the attitude of mind and heart.

Not the secrecy is the real underlying thought, but the sincerity. So this is not a command to go to some specific place or to go inside a closet where you're completely isolated every time you pray.

It's not to say that it's a bad idea to do it sometimes, but it's not a command to do that.

And even less is it an admonition against public prayer. But what it is instead is an instruction to approach prayer with the proper motivation, to approach prayer with your heart and your mind in the right place.

It's to understand that you only have one audience to your prayers, and that audience is

God. And we'll get into this more in just a little bit. But we also see at the end of verse six that God will reward those prayers offered in secret, and he'll reward those prayers that are offered with the right heart and the right motivation.

So again, kind of the way that you have to approach this idea is to, no matter where it is that you're praying, is to shut out everything else that's around you and recognize where your prayer is directed.

That's what it means to go into your secret inner room, because that can be very much an internal thing that you do, even when other people are around.

Now, as we get into verse seven and verse eight, we have our next set of instructions, our example of improper approaches to prayer and a corrective given by Jesus for that.

So what we're looking at now in verse seven, which says, and when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the

Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. So we're looking at another faulty way of praying.

Now, Jesus attributes this one not to the hypocrites, but he attributes this to the Gentiles when he says not to use meaningless repetition to be heard for many words.

And we have to consider the context here as well, because historically, what was most likely to come to mind to the people listening to Jesus would be the prayers of the pagans in the culture that they were living in.

So these pagans had many different gods. We haven't gotten there yet, but we'll get there actually pretty soon,

I think. I think it's in Acts 17. Let me look at this real quick, where Paul is addressing some folks there.

Yeah, he says, for while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, this is Acts 17, 23,

I also found an altar with this inscription, to an unknown god. So the point is the pagans had gods for everything, many, many different gods.

They even had an unknown god just in case they forgot to address a god that was gonna be insulted that he wasn't addressed, or she wasn't addressed.

And part of this was that they had to offer up lots and lots of prayers. And this is because they believed they had to offer up a lot of prayers because there's all these gods.

So first they have to make sure that the right god hears them. But then they have to make sure that they're offering up enough prayers that once the right god hears them, they get them at least stirred up enough so that they can be in a position to respond, whether it's irritated enough to get them to shut up so that they'll respond, or just so that they get up from whatever it is they're doing and answer those prayers.

So basically, the Gentiles, the pagans, as we're looking at it now, had to wear down their gods with repetition.

Again, their strategy was to pray so much that the gods would answer them just so they would stop praying.

One example related to this that we see if we turn back to the Old Testament is the example of the prophets of Baal when they had their showdown with Elijah in 1

Kings 18. Now the prophets, it says, they prayed from morning until noon.

Okay, so that's a few hours, right? But it doesn't stop there because their god didn't answer.

So then they prayed from noon to the time of the evening sacrifice. So these pagans are essentially spending their entire day in prayer to Baal, in this case, as the god they were trying to get to act.

They were trying to get Baal to bring fire down from wherever it was that he existed and burn up their sacrifice, and he did not.

And just so you remember, Elijah did the same thing, wet the altar, wet the sacrifice, and God still lit the thing on fire and burned it up.

So anyway, this is how the pagans prayed, and this is what Jesus is talking about in this situation.

Now in modern context, we see examples that are similar to this. We see things like Buddhist prayer wheels, wheels with prayers on them.

Spin the wheel. Every time it goes around, the prayer goes up. So the more times the wheel goes around, the more times the prayer's being offered to their god.

Or in Roman Catholicism, where I'm given to understand that lighting candles, prayer candles, is essentially causing the prayer to ascend to heaven as long as the candle is lit.

Or praying the rosary, making sure that you pray around a certain number of Hail Marys and a certain number of whatever is prayed with the rosary.

Now this shows up in charismatic Protestant traditions as well, and this is more similar to New Age practice than anything else, but it involves repeating words and phrases over and over again, like a mantra to sort of clear your mind, which is not a good thing to do.

But I won't just pick on other faiths because even as Christians, we're guilty of meaningless repetition sometimes.

I mean, who among us has not repeated exactly the same thing at a prayer before bedtime?

Or a prayer before a meal? Kind of mindlessly repeating the same words out of muscle memory as much as out of devotion to God or out of genuine prayer?

So we all do this. I mean, and just to be transparent, like this is fun in a horrible way for me to go through these verses the way we're going, because as I read and as I write,

I just remember all the stupid things that I've done. I remember all the errors that I'm now highlighting and I say, oh gosh,

I did that. Man, I've done that a lot. So anyway, this happens.

And we should also note that it's not to say that it's wrong to pray multiple times for the same thing.

That's not the point of this either. Again, I know you might get tired of me saying this, but we gotta be careful about taking an isolated phrase and turning it into a full -on doctrine that we use in our worship.

Because we see in Scripture people praying continuously for different things.

Luke 18, chapter 18, verses two through seven, this is the parable of the unjust judge.

Jesus says in verse seven, if you're not familiar with this one, go back and read Luke 18, two through seven.

It says, now will God not bring about justice for his elect who cry to him day and night?

And will he delay long over them? This woman prayed enough to the judge that he answered her prayer.

And we see this also in 2 Corinthians 12, seven through eight. What we see here is

Paul. He prays to God three times to remove the thorn from his flesh.

And guess what? His prayer was answered. And the answer was no. So just know that that is sometimes the answer.

God's power is made perfect in our weakness. So sometimes we try to pray for things to be taken from us, and they are not taken from us.

And that is on purpose, just like Paul's example here. But what we have in view in verse seven is that mindless, rote repetition.

If you're saying words over and over and over, just repeating them, kind of babbling, that's the wrong way to go.

But particularly, we're thinking about these pagan prayers that we talked about just a minute ago. And the reason, the reason that this is not necessary is because of what

Jesus lays out in the next verse. Verse eight, God knows. Therefore, do not be like them.

Do not be like the Gentiles. For your father knows what you need before you ask him.

And this highlights one of the huge differences between God, Yahweh, and the fake gods of any other kind of pagan idolatry.

And that's that our God, Yahweh, is sovereign. He knows everything. And as Jesus says in verse eight, he knows what you need before you ask.

Now, some people take this verse as an opportunity to say, well, if he knows, then why should we bother to pray?

He can just answer our prayers anyway. He already knows. And first off, that is just emblematic of the attitude of the lazy, entitled, nominal

Christianity that we see spread throughout American evangelicalism today.

Because this shows a wrong attitude of who God is or a wrong view of who

God is. This treats prayer as a wishlist kind of thing.

This treats God as that genie who grants our wishes or who exists for our benefit, who exists to answer our prayers in the way that we think they should be answered.

And it's not like people come across this idea accidentally.

People are taught this. People are taught this in prosperity gospel type of situations where you pray for money, you pray for things, you pray for that kind of stuff.

And if you pray in faith, God will answer it. And that's not what prayer is about. God doesn't exist for our benefit.

We exist for God's glory. This approach to prayer betrays also an attitude that God is fortunate enough that we should take our time to talk to him.

And it ignores or it disregards God's holiness. And it disregards the fact that it's our privilege that he should want us to communicate with him in prayer, that it's a gift that is given to us.

So the late R .C. Sproul put it this way when asked this very question.

If he knows all our prayers, why should we pray? He says, we pray because it changes us. We pray also because God uses our prayer as a means to bring about the ends that he has decreed from all eternity.

God commands us to pray and to do so earnestly, but we do not pray to instruct him or give him our counsel.

God does not need our advice. God doesn't need our wishlist.

God already knows what is going to be given to us. But let's go ahead and wrap this up into a few lessons we can take, a few lessons that we can apply into our own lives.

And let me first say this. I've heard prayer sermons that include prayer tips, formats to pray.

Maybe you've heard of acts, you know, adoration, confession, thankfulness, and supplication or something like that.

I'm not gonna do that today. That's not what this will be about. We actually will get into a little bit of that because the next thing coming up is the

Lord's prayer where he instructs the disciples how to pray. But we need to have principles that we can understand because again, if we just give techniques or we just talk about methods, well, that can turn into a ritual.

And then we can ritualize prayer in the same way that the Israelites in that first century did in first century and before.

So the first one of these principles is that prayer is commanded, expected, and desired by God.

And as I use those words, you have to understand something.

Despite the connotations of the words, connotations that go along with commanded and expected, we should still view prayer as a privilege, as an opportunity, not as an obligation and a duty.

Again, as a regenerate believer, we recognize that prayer is an opportunity to speak to God.

And we want to be obedient, but not only do we wanna be obedient, but we wanna do this because we have the opportunity.

We're so thankful for the salvation that we can't wait to express it. That the

God who created you and everything around you, he has graciously offered you the opportunity to speak with him anytime you want.

In our society, we're happy if important people give us a few minutes of their time.

Maybe it's our boss. In the military, we are very cognizant of all the things that higher ranking individuals have to do.

So if I wanna talk to a battalion commander or even a division commander or someone like that,

I don't wanna waste their time, you know, because I know they're busy, I know they have these things to do.

But God says you can come to him in prayer anytime you want, as long as you want, as much as you want, and he wants you to do that.

And how much more important is that than anything else or anyone else whose time you could consider taking right now?

God is the creator, God is the judge, but he's also the father. He's also your father.

So prayer demonstrates for us, even if it's commanded and expected, it is desired, and it demonstrates for us that the love

God has for us exceeds the love that we show to him. So think about that when you're considering the idea of prayer.

So that's the first one. Prayer is commanded, expected, and desired by God. Number two is prayer is always to be directed to God and not to man, not to other people.

And a lot of people fall into one of two camps. They either don't wanna pray in front of people like we talked about already because they don't know what to say or they're afraid they might be awkward or people will judge their prayers, or we got people who love the opportunity to pray and just wanna jump up there so that people can see how good they are at prayer.

Although, I guess to be fair, we could say a lot of people fall somewhere in between there, but either way, the point, as we've seen already, is that any approach to prayer that focuses more on what the people who hear the prayer are thinking than on what

God is hearing is a wrong approach to prayer. And we have to keep in mind that when we pray, whether it's in the privacy of a true inner room, an actual inner room in our house, or in front of a crowd of people, the audience is still

God. It's still God we're talking to. We're still approaching the throne of God.

So again, like we said earlier, you have to shut out the things that are going on outside of you.

So practically, this should influence the way that we pray in pretty much every situation, and even prayers in our church services, like we did earlier and like we're gonna do in just a couple of minutes.

An attempt has to be made to shut out everything that's not God, to focus fully on God with those prayers.

And what this means is that there are certain types of prayers that are not appropriate.

Here's another mistake that I've made before that maybe some of you will identify with, is what

I'm talking about is the kind of prayer that in reality is really just pretending to be a prayer, but for a pastor, it's really just part of the sermon in disguise.

It's the sermon in a prayer outfit, because the prayer is not to God, it's actually a prayer to a certain person or people.

Like, dear Lord, I pray that you will open the eyes of the congregation to understand the role of the pastor.

So let's stop asking me to do this thing I don't wanna do. But it's not limited to people who stand in a pulpit.

Parents might pray this way in front of children. Spouses might pray this way in front of each other.

And of course, pastors do it with their congregation. And this is a wrong approach. Again, if your prayer is a message to somebody, that's not it.

So this gets down to our third point. Your motivation matters more than anything else.

Your heart, your motivation is more important than your words in a lot of cases.

It doesn't matter if you sit or stand. It doesn't matter if you pray in the church or on the street corner or inside your secret prayer closet, because every single prayer comes back to the state of your heart.

And we can link this back to the sixth beatitude, Matthew 5, eight, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see

God. And they'll have their prayers answered by God. John MacArthur puts it this way, to pray rightly is to pray with a devout heart and with pure motives.

It is to pray with single attention to God rather than to men. And it is to pray with sincere confidence that our heavenly

Father both hears and answers every request made to him in sincere faith.

This is why prayers for stuff often appear not to be answered, but because the answer is that maybe in some cases to give you the stuff would do more damage to your soul than it would do good.

It would tear down your trust in God more than anything else, because now you would be wealthy or you would have whatever it is that you want.

But I wanna add one more thought here, and I don't know if this is like a sub -point to point three or if it's point four or what, but you have to be careful.

You have to watch yourself, because sin has the ability to corrupt anything that we do, including prayer.

Because what sin can do is stir up pride in your heart, even if you are making a point not to pray in front of people.

You could be making a point to pray in private, but in a way that people could see you.

I have an office up the stairs right there. You can look straight in the door and see my desk. What if I positioned myself right there every

Sunday at a certain time in a position of prayer so that you could not only see my bald spot, but you could see that I was clearly praying over the service?

If I'm praying in a room by myself, but I'm praying in such a way that people could see me, that might cause a question as to the true motivation of my heart.

Because even as regenerate believers, even as saved Christians, sin dwells in your heart.

And being by yourself doesn't allow you to escape yourself. Satan would love nothing more than to corrupt your prayer life, despite your best efforts.

Martin Lloyd -Jones said it this way. He paints a vivid picture. He says, we tend to think of sin as we see it in its rags and in the gutters of life.

We tend to look at a drunkard, poor fellow, and we say, there is sin, that is sin.

But to have a real picture and a true understanding of it, you must look at some great saint, some unusually devout and devoted man.

Look at him there upon his knees in the very presence of God. Even there, self is intruding itself.

And the temptation is for him to think about himself, to think pleasantly and pleasurably about himself rather than God.

That, not the other, is the true picture of sin. The other is sin, of course, but there you do not see it in its acne.

You do not see it in its essence. Or to put it in another form, if you really want to understand something about the nature of Satan and his activities, the thing to do is not to go to the dregs or the gutters of life.

If you really wanna know something about Satan, go away to that wilderness where our

Lord spent 40 days and 40 nights. That is the true picture of Satan, where you see him tempting the very son of God.

So this, what he means here is that you could go off completely by yourself where you'll never see another person.

And you could devote yourself to prayer and the devil can show up there and the devil can try to corrupt your prayer because he'll tell you, man, there are not a lot of people as holy as you.

How great it is that you took the time to go off and do this. You made sure that nobody watched you pray because you are going about it the right way and you get these thoughts in your head and instead of thinking about God, you're thinking about how awesome you are at praying and how good it is that you're not doing it in front of other people.

And then there, even that last thing has been corrupted by sin. But I don't say that to cause fear or to stop you from praying, but just to prompt you to watchfulness, to prompt you to care for what's going on in your heart and mind.

Because prayer is a gift from God. Again, not only has he given us his son to justify us before him, but he's given us the opportunity to talk to him.

And he does answer prayer always. He answers it in the way that is in your best interest and he answers it in the way that he knows is best.

But you have to understand that God desires your prayer. God wants you to talk to him.

Proverbs 15, eight tells us this. The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to Yahweh, but the prayer of the upright is his delight.

So don't neglect your prayer life. Let's go to the Lord in prayer.

Father, the truths laid out in your word continue to humble us and to continue to show us and to show me the many ways in which

I've fallen short in my prayer life, the many ways I've fallen short in my approach to you.

Yet at the same time, we see that you still love us. You're still there. You still listen and you still answer.

And how can we do anything other than rejoice to know that you're there, you're in control, and you're looking out for us and you're looking out for our good?

You also sent your Holy Spirit to help guide us in prayer, to help us know the things to say, the things to pray for, the approach to take.

God, and we just thank you that you've provided a means for us to communicate with you. You're over and above all things.

Everything has come from you, through you, including us, yet you still hear what we have to say,

Lord. Move us to a more powerful, more productive prayer life.

We continue to ask you for your help and thank you for your blessing.