The Posture of Prayer (Matthew 6:5-8)

Well, let's go ahead and open our copies of God's Word to our study here in Matthew chapter 6 as we continue this study through the

Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 6. And today we're going to be looking at, starting in verse 5, and try and get through verse 8.

But we're going to start reading in verse 1, the passage that Pastor Jeremiah preached from last week so we get the flow of Jesus' thought process here.

Starting in verse 1 of chapter 6 in Matthew, it says, And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others.

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

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

And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.

Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. This is the reading of God's Holy Inspired Word.

And just as we do every week, let's stop now. Let's pray once again that God would illuminate our hearts and minds to His great truth.

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we come to You humbly and ask that You would work in our minds and in our hearts, the work that only

You can do, God, that only Your Word can do. Lord, guard me from error.

Lord, I pray that I would only speak truth from Your Word this morning. And God, I pray that You would guard the ears and the hearts of the hearers, that if they hear anything wrong from this fallible man, that they would be aware of it and acknowledge it,

Lord, that we would only see You, that we would only see Your truth in this as we study

Your words, in Christ's name, Amen. A writer and theologian,

J .I. Packer, many of you have probably heard of him, he once wrote, We must learn to measure ourselves not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts.

I love that quote because it points us to the fact that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we are somehow more spiritually mature, that somehow we are further along in our sanctification process than we actually are, can't we?

We can deceive ourselves, and we do it in different ways. Sometimes some of us love theology, and we know a lot of theology, we have a lot of head knowledge, and so we know more than the next person.

After all, we win the argument, don't we? We won the argument with that other brother or sister or that other person about who

God is and what God's Word says, and so since we won the argument, we must be superior and they're inferior,

I'm the mature one. And we deceive ourselves in that. Some of us diligently read our

Bibles and read commentaries, we read books on theology, and we think that that somehow makes us spiritually mature.

Now mind you, you've heard me say it here before, you cannot have spiritual maturity without those things, but those things aren't what cause spiritual maturity.

Some of us may have giftings that are more visible in the church. You've seen those people, right?

You may even have been one yourself, where your giftings in the body are more open and seen by others, and so there's almost this thought in your mind that God must have placed me in this position because I'm more spiritual than the others, and so I have a more visible position.

After all, I teach. After all, I serve in this way and everybody sees it, so God must think

I'm more spiritually mature. The problem is when we measure our spiritual health by these types of things, it's easy to deceive ourselves, isn't it?

It's easy to deceive those around us at times, and why is it easy? Why is it easy to deceive ourselves and others?

Well, it's simple. It's because inward intentions, what's actually in the heart, can easily be disguised by outward actions.

In other words, people can't always see what's in here. They can't always see it.

They can only see what we say and what we do, at least as long as we keep up the facade. As long as we keep it up, that's all that they see.

And then it's funny how it works. We begin to somehow believe our own hype.

What they perceive of me, what I've presented to the other people around me about my spiritual health,

I then in return start to see myself maybe the way they see me, not who

I truly am. However, when it comes to prayer,

I mean true, righteous prayer, what's in here gets exposed.

It gets exposed before the ultimate standard of perfection because it's just you and God, at least true prayer is.

And I believe that's why many Christians neglect the practice of prayer.

I believe that even I myself have neglected the practice of prayer at times because I want to stay in blissful ignorance.

It's so much easier to compare myself to how you see me as presenting myself than to see who

I truly am on my knees in the closet before just me and a holy, perfect God.

And what's in here gets exposed. You see, Jesus puts a tremendous emphasis on prayer, doesn't

He? We see how the Son of God in His earthly ministry, He made a habit to commune with the

Father. I think there's 38 accounts in the four

Gospels of Jesus praying, many of which going off on His own and praying.

He made a habit of it, and this stood out to the disciples. As a matter of fact, so much the disciples, I believe in Luke 11,

His disciples asked Him, teach us how to pray. They obviously saw that the

Messiah, He knew what prayer was in His prayer life. And so they're asking, how do we pray?

And what does Jesus do? He teaches them. He teaches the disciples how to pray. And this tells me that every

Christian, all Christians in here, we need to be taught how to pray. It doesn't just come natural.

Speaking to God comes natural for a believer, but how to pray truly does not just come natural.

We need to be taught. And this is why Jesus addresses it here in this sermon on the mount as He speaks to His believers.

So seeing how vitally important prayer is to the Christian life, let's now learn from Jesus Himself.

And the first thing that Jesus does here is just as He's been doing throughout this sermon, He's been telling us, contrasting the difference between religious prayer, religious acts, religious accordance to the law versus the heart.

And He tells us what prayer is not. Look at verse 5 with me. He says, and when you pray.

Now mind you, there is an assumption here in Jesus' phrasing that you are going to pray.

You are certainly going to be praying. He says, and when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites.

Who is Jesus talking to here? Not who He's talking about. Who is Jesus talking to as He says, when you pray?

He's speaking to believers, isn't He? He's speaking to His followers. He's not speaking to the religious, the

Pharisees per se. Only His followers is who He's speaking of. We know that because of verse 1. Look back at verse 1 that Pastor Jeremiah covered last week.

When He sets off this whole train of thought, He says, Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them.

For then you will have no reward from, from, what's it say?

Your Father. Is God the Father of unbelievers? No. God is only

Father to believers. So He's speaking to believers here. That's who He's speaking to.

So, we see the next part. You must not be like the hypocrites. Pastor Jeremiah did an excellent job last week defining hypocrites for us back in verse 2.

Laying the groundwork as to this word, it refers to someone that is an actor on a stage, right?

This is what we're talking about. This is an actor. This is not somebody that believes from the heart. This is somebody that is putting a mask on, that is putting on a facade and pretending to be something that they're not.

That's what the meaning of the word here, both in verse 2 and here in verse 5. How this refers to this actor on a stage and what he's doing is he's putting on a make -believe show.

And how did the hypocrites do this? How were they putting on this facade and this show? Look there at the next part of the passage.

For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others.

Now you'll probably recognize this is almost identical language from back in verse 2 that we just read.

But instead of referring to giving to the poor and the needy, these hypocrites are now praying.

Now, I know this would actually be a little weird in our culture, wouldn't it? This would be a little bit odd to be standing on the street corner praying.

It would be like you're going out with your family, you're downtown Jonesboro tonight and you're deciding to go out to dinner and there all of a sudden you see me and Pastor Jeremiah standing on the street corner in front of Skinny J's, screaming out a prayer as loud as we can so everybody in the street can hear.

You're probably going to think, oh my goodness, they've lost their minds. The only reward we'd probably receive from that is everybody thinking we're lunatics, wouldn't they?

Amen. Yes, but back in this culture, this would have gained some mad respect.

This was the real deal to these people. Someone standing on the street corner and praying their prayers out loud.

And that's because no other culture in history has ever had as high a priority and standard for prayer than Judaism.

Judaism has had the highest standard of prayer. Even the Muslims, and we see them, how they go at a certain time and they get on their mats and they pray.

Even Muslims would have looked at these people in Judaism like this is a little excessive.

Because they loved prayer and put a high priority on it. And that seems like a good thing, doesn't it?

They didn't understand what actual prayer is. They were just using the form of it and the phrasing from it.

You see, all faithful Jewish people would repeat what's referred to as the Shema.

And the Shema, it's a combination of verses I think from Deuteronomy and Numbers.

And they would repeat the Shema when they woke up. They would repeat the Shema when they went to bed.

But it didn't stop there. It doesn't stop there. As a matter of fact, on top of that, they had what's called the

Shemana Esrei. I'm probably pronouncing that terribly. So bear with me here.

This is referring to what they called the 18. And this is 18 written prayers.

Memorized prayers for different occasions and different things. But every good

Jew would pray all 18 of these every morning.

On top of their morning prayer. Every afternoon. And every evening. So you can see throughout the day they have all of these prayers.

And they held a high value on prayer. Not only that, but they would have allotted times for those prayers.

So at a certain time in the afternoon, they were expected to stop and pray these 18 prayers.

When the truly righteous at least would do that. And as you can imagine, just like in normal life, these people were living normal lives like us.

There were people that didn't have the privilege to be able to stop and pray all of these prayers all the time.

Because let's say you're building a house and you're out in the middle of it. You can't stop in the moment and just drop your tools and drop everything and pray all these prayers.

So what they did was they had a condensed version of those prayers. They were like, if you can't be really righteous like us and pray all the way through these prayers,

God will understand. We'll give you the condensed versions. And not everyone could do it, but the religious leaders on the other hand, they had all the time in the world.

And they took advantage of it. They took advantage of those times when they had to pray to let everybody have a glimpse into their amazing piety.

All of you, you either skip your prayers or you do the condensed version. Look at us.

We're going to pray all those prayers and we're going to pray them out loud. Look back at verse 5 again there near the end.

This gives us some insight as to what their intentions were. And Jesus points it out. He says that they pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others.

Now again, this is similar language of back in verse 2. Pastor Jeremiah talked about the street where they were giving to the needy.

But the word back in verse 2 is actually a different word in the Greek. The word in verse 2 refers to a narrow street.

As a matter of fact, it refers possibly to an alleyway. So you can imagine giving to the needy.

You're walking through the alleyway. They're sitting on the edges of the alleyway. You're giving to the needy. People see you. This word's different.

The word in the Greek that's used here in verse 5 for street corner, this word actually refers to a town square.

This refers to a busy street. Not only a town square, a busy street.

It actually gives the idea of a town square, busy street at essentially rush hour. The prime time.

So Jesus has given us a little bit of insight as to what the intention was with these religious hypocrites.

These hypocrites, they knew that they were going to have to pray at this specific time.

And what did they do? They made sure to be at the town square, the busy street, to make sure that the maximum potential of people heard them pray.

So Jesus is getting right to the heart of these people's intention here, isn't he? And what is he doing?

Jesus is warning his followers. Jesus is telling true believers.

Remember that Jesus is speaking to his followers here. He's not talking to the religious leaders. He's talking to his followers.

And he's telling us not to fall into this trap, isn't he? Why is he telling us?

Why would we follow the example of the hypocrites? If we're children of him, don't we know how to pray?

Don't we pray in the spirit? So why is Jesus warning believers not to fall into this trap?

It's because Jesus knows our propensity, isn't it?

Jesus knows who we are. Jesus knows what we long for and what we go after.

And what is it that we long for? What is the human heart desire on this earth?

Affirmation. We're looking for affirmation when we're young from our parents. We're looking for affirmation from our peers.

We're looking for affirmation from our boss. We're looking for affirmation from our church members, from our pastors.

Whatever it might be, we're always looking to be affirmed in who we are. And this goes back to what

I mentioned earlier. We can fool ourselves and we can fool others so that we feel affirmed. And we long to be affirmed.

We always long for this. And instead of being affirmed where we're truly affirmed through the oneness that we share in Christ.

Because if we're his children, we share in that oneness with him. We share in him in the love of Christ.

And that's where we should gain our affirmation, isn't it? But we so often don't do that.

We don't seek affirmation from the one that can give us true affirmation because of his great love for us.

We seek for lesser approval. We seek after lesser.

We seek after peers and other people. And you know why we do this?

We seek after this approval because this is approval that we can gain on our own merit. We can put on the facade, can't we?

I can read that commentary this week and I can come and I can talk to you, Spencer. And I can show you all the stuff

God's been teaching me in the word this week. And you're going to walk away going, Ooh, Nathan is very spiritual.

I can put on that facade. At least for a season, can't I? So I seek affirmation there.

But it's fake. As long as we fake it, we're seeking it by our own merits. And Jesus, here in this

Sermon on the Mount, He crushes that self -deception. Look at what

He says. He says, Truly, I say to you. Now remember, we've talked about this over and over again.

Jesus continues to use this phrase through this sermon. What is He saying when He says, I say to you?

He's saying, I'm the ultimate authority. Don't listen to the religious people that are going to tell you to pray the 18, the prayers.

Don't listen to them when they're telling you to pray this memorized passage from Deuteronomy and Numbers.

Don't listen to them. I tell you because I am the ultimate authority. And He says,

Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. Paid in full.

No further expected payment. You've received it.

It's done. This does refer to the same reward that Pastor Jeremiah spoke of last week.

So I'm not going to dig into that much. We're going to move on in the passage. But I think there's another principle that we can see here.

I believe we can see the principle of the reward of answered prayer. Does God hear the prayers of the unrighteous?

I mean, He hears them. But He has no responsibility to acknowledge them, does

He? But God does hear the prayers of His people, of the righteous.

The reward is answered prayer. You can jot this verse down, 1 John 5, 14.

And this is the confidence that we have toward Him that if we ask anything, and here's the kicker, according to His will,

He hears us. So why does He hear the prayers of the righteous? Because the prayers of the righteous are being informed by the spirit, the indwelling spirit within them, teaching us how to pray, working in our hearts and changing us.

But when we're praying to be seen, we are praying for ourselves.

We're praying for our own will, aren't we? When we seek to be seen, we're not praying for the will of the

Father. Just as that passage in 1 John I just read mentions, the will of the

Father is key. And we've already received our reward. This isn't just the hypocrites here.

Jesus is talking to us, guys. We can't just push this off and say, oh, I know a guy like that.

I know somebody like that. No, He's talking to us. He's warning us. Don't be like them.

Don't be like the hypocrite. Don't follow that example. Let me teach you how to pray here.

And that leads us to the second thing that Jesus does here. He tells us the true posture of prayer.

The true posture of prayer. See, the hypocrites believe that the posture is in the body.

This is a physical posture towards God. Where I stand is important.

What I say is important. How I say it is important. This is the posture of the physical realm.

But Jesus says, no, no, no, no. It's the posture of the heart. This is a heart issue.

Just as He was saying with the examples of the law that we've been talking about over the past few weeks. Look at verse 6.

But, when you pray. I love this language that Jesus is using here.

Jesus isn't giving us a specific time to pray, is He? This isn't open -ended.

When you look at the original language, there's this implied idea that Jesus is saying that any time, every time, all the time, when you pray, you can stop and commune with the

Father at any moment. You don't have to have a rigid time. You don't have to only pray at 3 o 'clock in the afternoon like everyone else.

You don't have to only pray at this time. You pray any time. But when you pray, and again, it's unexpected that you will pray, by the way,

Go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.

Misunderstood passage here. So, I'm going to ask a question here. Really think about this one. Is Jesus saying with this passage that we can only pray in our room alone?

Because it sure seems like it, doesn't it? Let's read the passage again. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your

Father who is in secret. Well, that obviously can't be what

Jesus is saying, can it? Why? Why is it obviously not what

Jesus is saying? Because Jesus is not going to contradict His word. Here's two passages you can jot down or look at.

1 Timothy 2 .8 Paul is either wrong here when he's informing Timothy or Jesus doesn't mean what we think

He means back in the Sermon on the Mount. Paul says, The corporate prayer, corporate worship, right?

Acts 1 .14, we see believers here. Devoting themselves to prayer together with the women and Mary, the mother of Jesus and His brothers.

Together. So, if we take that verse from Jesus out of context and we say,

Okay, well this means that we can only pray in our room alone and anything outward is going to be hypocritical and we can't do that.

So, what is Jesus actually saying here? Well, some that we would respect.

As a matter of fact, I used to think this way. Some believe that He's using extreme examples.

That He's using this extreme example to contrast from the hypocrite. So, what does the hypocrite do?

The hypocrite goes out into the busiest street corner and he prays out loud a written prayer and now what

Jesus is doing is saying, Hey, if you're a true believer, I'm going to give you the most extreme example of that as possible.

Go to your room and pray in there and that's the only time you can pray. I'm not sure that this is what

Jesus is doing here in this section. Now, I will say Jesus has used this approach before, mind you.

So, I have to give it merit. It is possible. That's why I share it with you. But, I believe the key is in the word that He uses.

The word that He uses here in the Greek, Tumion, if I can say that right,

Tumion in the Greek. This word that Jesus uses is often translated, inner room.

That's why we get our translation, the room. But, with a little bit of digging, we see that it is also referred to as a secret room.

Bear with me. So, back in this time, they didn't have big metal safes.

And, they didn't have heavy duty dead bolts on their front door like we do today.

So, what would they do with their prized possessions, with their valuable things? What would they do with these valuables?

Would they just keep them on them the whole time, make sure somebody's home so nobody steals them? Now, they had what was a hidden closet somewhere in their home.

This Tumion is what they called it. And, it's a hidden closet that only the family knows about.

It's a secret place. A secret place in your home. And, when

He says, but when you pray, go into your Tumion, your secret place.

And, shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. Now, I think we see a couple of things here.

Bear with me. I think we see a couple of things. The first one is, the bulk of our prayer as Christians, true prayer, should be in solitude.

The bulk of our prayer should be in solitude. Why would I say that? Because that's what we see as an example by Jesus, right?

Notice what Jesus did. He would pray with His disciples. He would pray with the people. But, the vast majority of Jesus' prayer life was what?

It was Him going and finding a quiet place. Going off and finding a spot where He could commune with the

Father. Without this communion, without going to your secret place, there's an obvious deficit in a person's spiritual walk.

For example, have you ever listened to, let's say, an older saint? An older person that prays.

They've been in the faith for a long time. And they didn't use any fancy words.

Their prayer wasn't long. It wasn't this drawn out thing.

But, man, you could just tell. That person spends some time with the Creator.

That person spends time with the Father. It's because their prayer seemed as natural as breathing.

You know what I'm talking about? You ever been with someone like that? An older saint that prays like that? That it's as natural as breathing.

But also, their entire life is marked with godliness. So, you see that secret prayer life.

You see that they commune with the Father, as Jesus has prescribed for us. 17th century

Puritan John Owens says, He who prays as he ought will endeavor to live as he prays.

He who prays as he ought will endeavor to live as he prays. That's why that person lives a godly life.

Their prayer, their communion with God. And it's because, as I said earlier, true prayer exposes what's truly in our hearts.

It exposes us. The other times we can put on a facade, and we can fool each other, and try and get affirmation from that, but deep down inside we know that's not true.

But man, when we go to our secret place, when we get on our faces before our

Heavenly Father, and we pray, this all gets some light shed on it, doesn't it?

And we can't avoid that. And we need this exposure day after day, don't we? I need it.

And so often I neglect it. Here I am repenting to you. I neglect it way too often.

And I'm asking God to help me. We need to be alone with the

Father. Because we need that. Why do we need it? We need it so that we're confronted by our hypocrisy.

We need it so that we're confronted by our pride. We need it so that we're confronted by our self -righteousness.

Holding us in a humble state of submission when we're on our knees before our

Father. And this is why we must seek the Lord in solitude and prayer as often as possible.

But the second thing I think we see in this is even our public prayers ought to be in solitude.

You see some confused faces. I did that on purpose. What do

I mean by this? Our public prayers must also come from a secret place.

I think that's what Jesus is saying here. Our secret prayer must come from that secret place.

That place that only we know. That place that only our loved ones might even know.

That place where all of our valuables are placed. Everything that we hold dear is where?

It's here. This is the secret place. And when we pray together corporately, which we've done this morning, praise

God. And we'll continue to do. We'll pray a couple more times before we end today. As we do that, that should also be a prayer of solitude.

This is communion with the Father, right? It's not necessarily communion with each other. This is communion with the

Father. Have you ever been praying in a group and there's someone else in the group that you really want to preach to?

You know where I'm going with that, right? There's somebody you really want. They need to hear something.

And I'm going to use this time as I'm praying to make sure that I preach at them, but I'm just talking to God, right?

And so I can indirectly kind of get on to them. You ever done it? I see everybody smiling, so yes, we've all done it, of course.

That's not prayer. It may be preaching, but it's not prayer.

This is not prayer. This is not what God desires from us as His followers.

But when you pray from that secret place, from the heart, true prayer,

He says, look at the next part of verse 6, And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Our Father who sees in secret. Now next week we're going to talk a little bit about Father.

The fact that our Father, our Creator, our God, He sees in here.

That's why we get exposed when we go before Him alone, isn't it? Because we know He sees in here.

He sees what we have in there. He sees what's stored in that storehouse in our hidden place.

He sees it, and we know He sees it. But there's a beauty in it, isn't there? Because if we're not aligning, and our treasure is not

Christ, our treasure is not in heavenly things, in earthly things, in His kingdom. If it's just earthly things, then it's of no value, and it would be burned up within His presence and communion with Him and through His Word, right?

But there's also another beauty in the fact that God sees the heart, that sees the secret place.

It's because those things that you can't even tell your spouse, He knows.

He knows. No one else has seen it. It's hidden.

Those hurts, those angers, that bitterness, that frustration, whatever it might be that you're not letting anyone else see or anyone else access to,

God has full access to. And if you're in Christ, He still loves you.

He meets us in the secret place. And He rewards you. He rewards you for the things that are in that secret place that are honoring to Him.

And He burns away the other. Because there is no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus, right?

That's the beauty of true communion with God, is He sees in the secret place.

He sees in the heart, and He rewards us. The hypocrites have their reward, the fleeting praises of man.

That's all they have. But we, we have a great reward.

And that great reward should drive us to pray to Him, because that reward covers a number of things.

One of these is what I've been talking about, sanctification. Being stripped of sinful desires through prayer and through His Word.

But it also allows us opportunity to not have to put on the front.

We don't have to put on a facade. We don't have to go to the street corner and say fancy words as loud as we can, as long as we can.

Now He hears us. It's simple. It's humble.

It's beautiful. And God uses this in it. And now Jesus has addressed the posture of the heart, and He speaks to the content of the heart.

And we're going to skim through this verse 7 and 8 very quickly, because I'm going to be covering these verses next week in greater detail.

But I want you to see it. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do.

For they think that they will be heard for their many words. You see, the Jews had this habit that they had picked up from the

Gentiles. The Gentiles believed that the value of prayer was largely in its length and in its wordiness.

When they would pray to their gods, these Gentiles would pray these long, drawn -out prayers that are extremely wordy, and it influenced these

Jewish people here. And that seems very lofty, doesn't it, when someone prays like that?

We think, well, God must really hear His prayer. But Jesus is saying the length of prayer, the fancy words, the repetition, they don't impress

God. And then He says in verse 8, look at it. Do not be like them. Like who?

The hypocrites. For your Father knows what you need before you ask

Him. Now this gets right to the heart of true prayer. True, righteous prayer is not for the purpose of informing or persuading

God. It's not what God designed prayer for. God already knows what you need and what's in our hearts.

And when we are in a constant state of prayer, all of our pretense, all of our hypocrisy is burned away, and we have a heart that desires to be in line with the will of God.

Just as that passage in 1 John I mentioned. Understanding that this isn't about us.

You hear me? Prayer is not about us. Prayer is a means of carrying out God's purposes in our lives.

He is molding us to His will, not the other way around. We are not molding

God to our will. He is molding us. God's not our genie to grant our wish if we would just say it the right way.

He's conforming us into the image of His Son. That's prayer.

True prayer is sanctifying. And it comes from the heart. Whether you're praying in your closet alone, or whether you're praying in a small group, or whether you're praying in a big group, or whether you're praying in front of the church, that prayer is not for everyone else.

That prayer comes from the heart and it's to God. And when someone else is praying on this stage, in this room, you as believers should be praying from the heart and affirming those prayers because it's to God, not each other.

As I said, we're going to be looking at these same verses next week and diving in a little bit.

And we will be talking about prayer over the next few weeks. So I would encourage you, let's build into ourselves a habit starting this week of getting alone and being with the

Lord and asking God to expose what's truly in our hearts. Asking God to tear down the idols of our hearts and rip out the treasures that are earthly from our hearts to clear out that storeroom, to clear out that secret place that it may only be for the

Lord. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, thank you.