What Jesus
Taught About Prayer
Larry Thorson
Matthew
6:5-15
5
"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray
standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.
Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray,
go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then
your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you
pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard
because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what
you need before you ask him.
9 "This,
then, is how you should pray:
" 'Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your
kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us
today our daily bread.
12 And
forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead
us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.'
14 For if you
forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also
forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will
not forgive your sins.
Today’s New International Version Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International
Bible Society
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord
my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord
my soul to take.
That was the first prayer I learned to pray. My mother taught it to me when I was young
and every night before I went to sleep I would pray that prayer. She probably learned it from her mother who
learned it from her mother because it’s actually from the 18th century. Eventually I added prayers of blessing for
everyone I knew. “Bless Mom and Dad, my
sister Rosalie, our dog Skippy… For
awhile I thought that if I didn’t pray naming each person I liked something bad
would happen to them.
Somewhere,
sometime in your life you started praying. I doubt that any of you went out and bought a
book like “Ten Easy Steps to Praying” to learn how to do it. You just did
it. In fact you just do it now. Even people who don’t consider themselves
very religious will pray sometime or another.
One
summer when I was 16 and a new follower of Christ I went to a high school
conference at Arrowhead Springs above
Praying
isn’t very difficult. You just talk to
God. We pray in church. Some people only like public prayers that are
prepared ahead of time and written out on paper. The Reverend Jim Karcher writes a beautiful
and timely prayer every Sunday for our
Others
only like spontaneous prayers that aren’t written out. I like written prayers but I never write mine
out. When I pray in public I never know
what’s going to come out of my mouth. I
used to pray the pastoral prayer every Sunday for two services following the
sermon and offering in my previous church.
While I would sit in the pew getting ready to go forward to pray I
always prayed this little prayer “God help, give me something to pray, please”. When I opened my mouth something would come
out. Both methods of praying are God
inspired and neither one is more important than the other.
Again,
let me repeat, praying isn’t very difficult.
You can do it out loud or you can do it silently. It doesn’t matter. How you do it is less important than why you
do it. Jesus said in v.5 "And when you pray, do not be like the
hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street
corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward
in full. But when you pray, go into your
room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father,
who sees what is done in secret, will reward you”.
In Jesus’ day it was
common for a lay person to be asked to pray out loud in the worship service at
the Jewish Synagogue. So instead of
Pastor Jim or Pastor Scott praying the pastoral prayer you might be asked to
pray. This would be your big opportunity
to say what you’ve been storing up all year.
Prayers were like sermons. “Oh
God forgive those in the congregation who voted for purple carpet in the
sanctuary last week, for they knew not what they were doing”. Or something like that. Who are they praying to, God or the
people? What’s their motivation?
Praying
isn’t very difficult. How you do it is
less important than why you do it. If
why you do it is to talk to God and not to people then don’t worry about the
words.
In
verse seven Jesus addressed another problem in prayer “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling
like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8
Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
“Babbling like pagans”. Pagans were anyone not practicing the worship of the Jewish Yahweh
God, the God that we worship. It was believed that the pagan gods could be
appeased by steady repetition often called chants. The more you chanted the more you got what
you wanted. Sometimes I find myself
praying the same thing over and over as if God can’t remember that I asked him
for that earlier. Or that God doesn’t
already know my needs.
Instead of focusing on the need “Oh God, you know we’re behind on our
finances” for example, Jesus says God already knows that. All that focusing on the need does is raise
our anxiety. Every night before going to
sleep Martha and I pray together. We
always conclude with something concerning our children. What we found in mentioning the particular
concerns we had for our children was that those concerns raised our anxiety
sometimes even making sleep difficult. Remember
God knows what you need before you even pray.
What Jesus wants us to do when we pray is to
focus on God and the possibilities of life with God not the people standing
around us (are our prayers articulate enough?) or the concerns (have I said
enough to convince God to give me what I want?). That’s what Jesus was trying
to get across when he was teaching the people how to pray.
Praying isn’t very
difficult. How you do it is less
important than why you do it. The why
you do it is because you love God and that apart from him your life is not
complete. The why you pray is not to
give him a honey do list, he already knows what needs fixing. The why you pray is not an exercise in name
dropping to raise your social value. “He
and God must be tight, just look how he prays”.
Why God wants you to pray is because he wants your worship so bad and
knows that it will fulfill your life.
While how you pray is less
important than why you pray Jesus gave
us some advice as to how to pray. In verse
9 he said "This, then, is how you should pray…” He didn’t say “This, then is what you should
pray” but how you should pray. It was simply
a guide to prayer not the actual prayer Jesus intended for us to pray.
Next week we’re going to look at the Lord’s
Prayer as a guide. We’re going to answer
why some churches say “forgive us our debts” while others say “forgive us our
trespasses”.
Yet we like the words of this prayer guide. It has become the most popular prayer
ever. How many football teams have
prayed it prior to a big game? I did
lots of weddings in my last church for young, unchurched couples. The one thing nearly every unchurched couple
knew and wanted in their ceremony was the Lord’s Prayer. It’s even been put to
music many times and in many ways. It is
a rare, rare worship service here when we don’t pray it and I’m glad. But it wasn’t intended as a prayer, only as a
guide to prayer. For that it’s a good
reminder each week of how we should pray.