Prayer Before The Father Pt 2

Prayer as Communion with the Father

Well, this morning, as we return to Matthew's Gospel, picking up where we left off last week with respect to this particular section of the Sermon on the Mount, with Christ dealing with our prayer life, we need to take a moment and just recall that last week as we worked through verse five and six, we saw that true prayer, prayer before the Father, is prayer that is directed to God for God's glory.

We saw Christ contrast those who pray publicly for the attention of men and those whose concern is truthfully with communion with the Father. We saw that the statements given to us by Christ in verses five and six are in no way commands against public prayer or a statement that only private prayer is acceptable, but that statement also forced us to look inward, to examine the motives within our hearts as we come in prayer, whether that prayer be public or whether it be private.

The Gospel Produces Obedience, Not a Path to Salvation

Our focal text for today has Christ dealing with another distortion that exists in prayer life, that is the meaningless, vain babbling that can be done for the purpose of attracting or trying to gain the attention of Almighty God.

Again, as we have seen repeatedly throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Christ presses us deeper beyond the outward action towards the motives of our hearts and ultimately seeing this thread that has run throughout here, dealing with the righteousness that is required of kingdom people.

However, we must take care because it is very easy as we study these truths to simply misunderstand and see these commands as though obedience to these commands are a means by which we are saved. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

Obedience in the life of a believer is absolutely important. However, obedience in the life of a believer is not the path to salvation. To borrow from the late Bodhi Bacchum, all the gospel requires is repentance and faith.

Well, what about obedience? That is not what the gospel requires, that is what the gospel produces. So as we examine these words, we must understand that these commands are not a means by which we come into the kingdom, rather, they are part of our life as kingdom people and these commands that we see here and the discussion that Christ gives us here exposes our insufficiency and shows us the righteousness that is produced or should be being produced in the life of someone who has been transformed by grace.

Jesus' Warning Against Empty Prayer

So as we consider these things, let us return once again to the word of God and as I said last week, each week during our time focused in on the prayer portion here, we will read the entirety of the section from Matthew six verse five down through verse 15.

The purpose of that is to remain grounded in Christ's whole teaching and recall the fact that there's more context here than just one simple little verse. So if you have not already done so, I would invite you now to turn with me in God's word and having found your place to stand in reverence for the reading of God's holy, inerrant, infallible, authoritative, sufficient and complete word.

Matthew's gospel, the sixth chapter beginning in the fifth verse and following, we read these words. And when you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites who 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 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.

Pray then in this way, our father who is 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 have forgiven our debtors.

And do not lead us into temptation but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen. For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly father will also forgive you.

But if you do not forgive others, then your father will not forgive your transgressions. Our prayer this morning is adopted from the Valley of Vision, a Christian's prayer. Most gracious heavenly father, as we come now to the study of your word, we pray that you guard us from the snares that arise both around us and within our own hearts.

We pray you give us right thoughts about you that we would not imagine that our prayers are heard because of the number of our words or the strength of our emotion or truly anything that is found within us ourselves.

Teach us instead to come as children who trust their father, knowing that you already know our needs even before we ask. Father, we pray that by the power of your spirit, you would expose every wrong conception of prayer and every attempt in our lives to depend upon our own efforts.

Father, we pray that our desire to please you in public and in private and form within us the character of Christ would increase. Remind us that we are your workmanship created for good works in Christ Jesus, for which you have prepared beforehand.

Remind us that our confidence in our prayer rests not in ourselves, but in you and you alone. Father, we pray that as we study your word, you give us ears to hear and hearts ready to submit to everything that we find in your word.

Father, we ask all of this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen. You may be seated. Well, you may have already noticed that chapter, or excuse me, chapter verse seven begins exactly the same way as verse five.

So instead of belaboring that point, we just wanna remind you that the word here, translated and, simply helps to keep us before us, that this is not a new subject. It's not a new topic that's disconnected from what we've already been working on.

It is a continuation of the teaching of Christ. Here, specifically in these verses, he continues in his teaching regarding prayer. You'll also notice that just as in verse five, there is not a specific command that we pray, but rather an assumption that we as kingdom people will pray.

And so this teaches us that part of the life of a believer, part of the being a kingdom person, a member of the kingdom of God, part of our life will include prayer. What we do see, however, that is different, verse five and six, we dealt with this distortion concerning the attention of men.

Meaningless Repetition Is Empty, Mechanical Prayer

Now we turn to one that ultimately concerns our understanding of God himself. Now this distortion is not necessarily a tricky distortion, but it is one that is very important because this entire distortion depends upon our view of God.

And a wrong understanding of God at this point gives us a wrong understanding of how we approach him in prayer. We see here, he says that when you pray, you are not to be used, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do.

Now the phrase that we have here that is translated meaningless repetition is actually a very rare word. This is the only place that it occurs in all of scripture. This is the only place that we even have it recorded.

And so what that has done is lead to a lot of theories about its origins, where it came from, what it really means. However, if we follow our understanding of how scripture interprets scripture, the meaning of the word becomes clear.

If we look backwards in time, Tyndale rendered this as babble not much. The KJV uses the translation vain repetitions. The issue here, even though many people will make it repetition, the issue is not the repetition.

The issue is the vanity behind it. It is speech that is empty, mechanical, multiplied, done so under the assumption that the sheer abundance of our words or the importance of our words or the theological backing of our words will somehow make the prayer more effective.

John Stott wrote in his message of the Sermon on the Mount, speaking of this word, he says, "'The word describes any and every prayer, "'which is all words and no meaning, "'all lips and no mind or heart.'".

Pathologia is explained in the same verse as Pelogia, much speaking. That is a torrent of mechanical and mindless words. The issue here is the vanity behind the repetitions. This is why we have to be careful.

Christ is not telling us, don't repeat yourself. Christ is not saying don't bring petitions back before me. He's not saying don't pray for a long time. The length of our prayer or praying for something that we've already prayed for have nothing to do with this.

The problem is the fact that these repetitions or the words are meaningless, that they are divorced from understanding, from faith, from genuine dependence. Upon God. In fact, if we study scripture, which is literally what we should be doing when we try to understand scripture, it becomes very obvious to us that repetition is not an issue.

This prevents us from putting the emphasis in the wrong place. In fact, if we go to Christ's own encounter in the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew chapter 26, we see that three separate times, verses 39, verses 42, and verses 44, in the hours leading up to the arrest, betrayal, the betrayal, the arrest, and the crucifixion of Christ, as he comes in prayer, he repeatedly comes to the Father with the same petition.

Matthew 26 verse 39 says, and he went a little beyond them and fell on his face and prayed, saying, my Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not as I will, but as you will. Verse 42, he went away again a second time and prayed, saying, my Father, if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, your will be done.

And again, in verse 44, it says, and he left them again and went away and prayed a third time, saying the same thing once more. Three times. Three times Christ brings the same petition before the Father.

We know the truth, that Christ knew no sin. And so if he knew no sin, then there was no sin in him bringing this repetition before God. So therefore, repetition before God cannot be the issue. We see Christ's prayer, it expresses genuine anguish, genuine dependence, genuine submission to the Father's will.

And so we are not being taught that asking the Father for the same thing more than once is unbelief. There are burdens that you and I will bear, that we will carry repeatedly before God. And we may do so for days or months or years.

If you think back in scripture, Rachel repeatedly prayed to have a child. Persistence, persistence in our prayer can actually be one of the clearest expressions of submission and dependence upon God. But there are times where that repetition has nothing to do with dependence.

In fact, it's exactly what Christ is condemning here. The belief that if we say it enough, if we are the proverbial squeaky wheel, we will get the grease. What Christ condemns is that our words have power simply because we say them more than once.

A good example of this, a great picture of this is found in 1 Kings chapter 18. And if for some reason you don't know exactly right off the top of your head what 1 Kings chapter 18 is, count yourself among brothers and sisters who are likewise in their thinking.

1 Kings chapter 18 is the event where Elijah confronts the prophets of Baal. We're familiar with the story. The question that was before everyone that day is who is God? Who is truly God? And we know Elijah stood alone as a prophet of Yahweh and he stood against hundreds of prophets of Baal and the challenge you will remember was that each one would build an altar and pray for fire to come down and whosoever God answered would demonstrate that he alone was God.

Now, if you've never read this and really dug into the language here, this is a very sad but very comical encounter. As we see the prophets of Baal going first, they prepared their sacrifice and then from morning until midday, they cried out to Baal over and over and over but there was no answer.

There was no reply. Nothing happens. It's at this point that Elijah became a man after my own heart and began to tease the prophets of Baal, to mock the prophets of Baal. In fact, his words exposed the theology that went behind their prayers.

Elijah suggests to them that maybe their God is occupied or he's gone on a trip or he's asleep. The literal translation for one of those encounters is maybe he's in the restroom so maybe you need to holler a little louder.

Maybe you need to cry out more. Maybe you need to have a greater intensity, a greater effort, more words and what we see is this is exactly what they do. They cry louder. They continually pray and pray.

Their religious activity became frantic. They cut themselves until blood flowed and they continued in this forensic manner and still there was no response. There was no answer. This is an extraordinary picture of the pagan understanding of prayer.

This is what Christ is talking about when he says do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do. Their attempts were to gain the attention and if their present effort was insufficient then maybe the answer was more.

Sometime in our prayer lives, maybe we feel like we haven't prayed enough for God to hear us. We didn't ask loud enough. We didn't ask it in the right way. We didn't go before him and do the right dance.

We knelt, we should have been laying face down or standing up or holding our hands out or putting our hands at our side or folding our hands in front of us. That there was something about our prayer that prevented God from hearing it and so the danger is that when we begin to treat prayer as though it is only effective when it is correctly performed with the right words, the right intensity, repeating it enough times, phrasing it in spiritual language that maybe God will be more inclined to hear us an answer.

What's happened is our confidence has subtly shifted. It is no longer resting on God. We may be speaking to God. We may be praying directly to God, but the truth is we're praying directly to God and relying on ourselves because our performance, our technique has to be right.

This is why this follows in line with what Christ has already taught us in verses five and six, that this speaking to God needs to be done in the right way that will be moved or God will be moved by our performance and before we just go, well, you know what?

I wouldn't pray like that to Baal or anyone else. No, but we can pray to God in the same way. We can use phrases that we repeat constantly as filler because we simply don't commune with God. We're putting on a show, a performance.

We string together theological language because it sounds better, because it sounds more appropriate. And we may be expressing great truths, but we may be expressing great truths with disengaged hearts.

We may can prattle off the Lord's prayer in a very theological way, using that model that Christ gives us on our hearts or somewhere else. And so we must recognize that neither the words themselves nor the eloquence of the source or the eloquence of our voice is the source of our confidence when we pray.

None of the things, none of the length, none of the intensity, none of these things obligate God to answer us and to answer us in the way that we believe he should. And this is important. It's important because prayer is fundamentally an expression of dependence.

Prayer is fundamentally an expression of our dependence upon God. When we pray, one of the things that we are doing is acknowledging that contrary to our normal belief, we're not sovereign. Contrary to our regular belief, we're not self-sufficient.

Contrary to what the world would have us to believe, we cannot provide everything that we need. We come before God because he is God and we are not. The danger of meaningless repetition is what it does is it subtly changes that relationship, reverses it.

And instead of depending upon God, we are depending upon our actions, our words, our persistence, our manners. We absolutely need to examine whether our minds or our hearts are engaged when we pray. Listen, we can become so familiar with certain phrases that they become part of our prayer life without us even realizing it.

And ultimately, they may not even mean anything anymore to us. We simply say them because we've adopted and adapted them into our prayers and they've now become part of them. Whether we are even consciously thinking about what we're saying or not.

But ultimately, this is not even about an imperfectly focused prayer. If perfectly focused prayer were the requirement, if perfectly focused prayer was the requirement that our prayer be heard, then we should all stop praying.

Because we will never be perfectly focused in our prayers. We will never pray in a perfect manner. Every prayer that we pray, we bring the remaining weakness that we have. We bring sin that remains in our life.

We do that just like we do it in every other part of our Christian life. So the problem, the issue is the confidence and where it rests. Does it rest in our words, our actions, our motives, or does it rest in God?

The Father Knows What His Children Need

Which is what Christ addresses in verse eight. Therefore, do not be like them. For your father knows what you need before you ask him. So we begin with the word therefore. Christ is bringing us to a conclusion.

He's giving us the reason why we are not to pray in the manner that he has dictated. The prophets of Baal cried out louder because they believed that God needed to be awakened. Christ is saying to us, you don't need to approach God that way.

You don't need to cry out to get his attention. You don't need to wake him up, which means that to whom we are praying and a proper understanding of to whom we're praying becomes critical. And so Christ identifies to whom we pray, your father.

His model prayer that we will begin talking about next week explicitly starts with the word, our father. We are coming before a father. This language is not new. It's already been central. Christ has already told us to pray to your father who is in secret.

But this is a father who already sees, who already knows, who already cares. This is not to give Christ or to give God information leave the father information that he does not already have. It's not a download session.

Listen, there's no circumstance in your life that catches him unaware, no burden that we must explain because he has overlooked it. And there is no need that suddenly becomes known to him just because we now put it into words.

You heard the words of Psalm 139. If you happen to doze off, you get to hear them again. Psalm 139 says to us, oh Yahweh, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up, you understand my thought from afar.

You scrutinize my path and my lying down and are intimately acquainted with all my ways even before there is a word on my tongue. Behold, oh Yahweh, you know it all. You have enclosed me behind and before and you have put your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is too high. I cannot attain it. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you're there. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there.

If I lift up the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right hand will lay hold of me. Father already knows. Now this generally brings up the next question that people follow up with, well, if he already knows, why bother to pray?

I have to pray to make him know about it because otherwise, what's the purpose? What's the use? What reason do I have for praying? And Calvin actually gives a great answer to this question. He writes this, the very design of prayer furnishes an easy answer.

Believers do not pray with the view of informing God about things unknown to him or of exciting him to do his duty or of urging him as though he were reluctant to do it. On the contrary, they pray in order that they may arouse themselves to seek him, that they may exercise their faith in meditating on his promises, that they may relieve themselves from their anxieties by pouring them into his bosom in a word, that they may declare that from him alone, they hope and expect both for themselves and for others, all good things.

God himself on the other hand has purposed freely and without being asked to bestow blessings upon us, but he promises that he will grant them to our prayers. We must therefore maintain both of these truths that he freely anticipates our wishes and yet that we obtain by prayer what we ask.

So not a means to inform God, it is a means by which God teaches us dependence upon him. Once again, it is in prayer that we acknowledge our need. We come to him acknowledging our dependence, confessing our inability, submitting ourselves to his will, giving thanks for his provision and trusting to him everything because we recognize that they are beyond our control and beyond our ability.

In fact, if you truly understand it, the fact that the father already knows doesn't make prayer unnecessary, it makes vain and meaningless words for the sake of manipulation unnecessary. He already knows, he already sees.

There is a vast difference between those two things. You and I are commanded to ask, but not because God is ignorant. We persist, but not because God is reluctant and must be worn down and we bring him the same burden again and again because you and I remain dependent upon him.

That's why the repeated prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is so important. He brought the same burden. He brought the same burden three times. But each time his prayer ultimately rested in submission, not as I will, but as you will.

Repetition flowing from dependence is completely different from repetition intended to manipulate. One entrusts the matters to the father, the other attempts to control the outcome. We should find tremendous comfort in the words of Christ before we ever enter the room, before we ever bow our heads, before we ever put the burdens into words.

Our father knows. He knows our need. He knows the need that we don't even know we have. His knowledge is perfect simply because he is our father. That perfect knowledge is joined with perfect wisdom, perfect goodness, perfect providential care.

So we don't come before him hoping that the right words finally gain his attention. We come because he already sees, he already knows, and he has told his children to come. But even here, even as we recognize this great truth, we must also be reminded of the thread that has continued throughout this teaching.

Our Access to the Father Rests on Christ's Righteousness

You'll recall back in Matthew's gospel, chapter five, verse 20, Christ told us that the righteousness of his kingdom people must surpass even that of the scribes and Pharisees. And in verse 48 of chapter five, he placed the perfect standard before us, the standard of the father.

Matthew chapter six, verse one, warned us of doing our righteousness before men for the practice of being noticed. All of these things drive us to examine our hearts. They drive us to see the behavior that arises, not physically, not outwardly, but what's happening inwardly.

And when that drives us inwardly, we are confronted with our need. We are shown that it is not simply enough to avoid praying like the prophets of Baal. It's not enough to remove certain phrases from our prayers.

It's not good enough to shorten them or lengthen them or try to find the right stance or develop better technique or have the right vocabulary. The problem is is that our hearts are not perfectly dependent.

Our motives are not perfectly pure. Even when we understand the teaching of Christ, even as believers, we don't come before the father with a righteousness that originates in ourselves and will meet the perfection that he requires.

This is why confidence in prayer cannot rest in the quality or action or manner or words of our prayer. Our confidence rests only in the father to whom we pray, but our access to the father is through Christ, the very one who is teaching us here. How to pray.

The very one who is giving us the directions is the one who perfectly possesses the righteousness that is required to bring our petitions before God. When you study Christ's prayers, there's not a prayer that comes from a place of unbelief.

There's not a prayer that seeks to manipulate the father. There's not a moment where he is trusting in the quantity or the quality of his words. When we truly understand Christ, we understand that his dependence was perfect.

His submission was perfect. His obedience was perfect. His righteousness is perfect. And it is only because you and I are united to him that sinners like us can come before the holy God and deign to call him father.

This means again that we don't come because we finally learned how to pray perfectly. I can only imagine that the number of people, myself included, who have avoided prayer throughout the years simply because they didn't think they knew how to pray.

They didn't feel like they were doing it correctly. They weren't saying the right things. They were giving too many lists. The truth of the matter is, is we don't come because our concentration never wonders.

We don't come because our motives are never mixed. We don't come because our words are always exactly right. We don't come because they're not what they ought to be. Because if we come because of any of those reasons, we will never come before the father.

We must come only in the name of Christ, resting in his righteousness rather than our own. Our prayers remain imperfect. They will continue to remain imperfect because we continue to remain imperfect.

But thanks be to God that our access to the father does not rest on our perfection, that our access rests upon Christ's perfection. That understanding should give us humility and confidence in our prayer.

Humility because we recognize that there is nothing that we can do that places God in our debt. You can literally, let me maybe help break this down just so we understand it very clearly. You can literally pray the prayer that Christ is going to give us in the next few verses and it still falls short.

And we can make the argument that's a perfect prayer because Christ gives it to us. And we'll talk more about whether it's a model or actually a prayer later. But the truth of the matter is this, is that even praying that prayer, if we exactly use that model, we still come.

We still come ineffectively. We still come in this position of unworth outside of Christ. And it gives us confidence because we know that we are approaching through Christ and we are approaching the father.

Not some reluctant deity who had to take a bathroom break and doesn't want to listen to us. One who already knows, who already cares. We are coming as adopted children to a father who knows all we need before we ever ask.

So what is the answer to meaningless repetition? It's not less words. The answer is a right understanding of the father. A right understanding of our access to the father. An understanding that we ask because he commands us to ask.

We persist because we depend upon him. We trust because he already knows. And we come not in the confidence of our own righteousness or in the perfection of our prayers, but through the perfect righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Which means that the foundation of Christian prayer is not the perfection of the one praying, but the perfection of Christ through whom we come to the father. Let us pray. Gracious heavenly father, we give thanks that as we come before you in prayer, we do not come attempting to gain your attention or attract your attention or persuade you by the multitude or the manner of our words.

You already know us completely. You already know all of our needs before we even ask, even needs that we are not even aware of yet. Father, forgive us for the ways in which we depend upon ourselves. Our words, our emotions, our efforts, rather than trusting in you.

When we pray that through the power of your spirit, we would be taught to pray in understanding, in faith, fully submitting to your will and depending wholly on your wisdom, your goodness and your providential care.

Father, we are thankful that your perfect standard exposes the impurity of our motives and the weakness of our prayers. But as those motives and weaknesses are exposed, remind us that we do not come before you in a righteousness of our own.

We come through the perfect righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ and the truth that his work has brought us near. Father, we ask that through the Holy Spirit, you would teach us to pray as your children, confident in the perfection of Christ through whom we come.

For we ask all of these things in the blessed name of our Lord and Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, amen.