November 24, 2024, Matthew 6: 5-8

Prayer as Essential Christian Life

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 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 chapter, or 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.

The Wrong Way to Pray: Hypocrisy and Ritualism

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 pray.

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 in place.

So 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 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 stop 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. So 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 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, a 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.

Prayer Without Meaningless Repetition

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 until noon. And 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 is 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.