This morning we come to the second message in
our brief series of messages about prayer. After today, I will offer two more messages on prayer, but
there will be a total of five messages in the series. The final message is not specifically about prayer, but it
does speak to one of the most pressing questions we have about prayer, and that
is the question of how God answers prayer, and specifically a prayer for
healing. The title of that message
is The Power of Healing, and I
presented it early in my time here but decided it was one that I should attach
to the end of this series.
Last week we talked about the Parable of the
Persistent Widow, and today we turn to a passage from the Sermon On the
Mount. I believe the Gospels are
the heart of the Scriptures, and the Sermon On the Mount is the heart of the
heart, so to speak.
The text is Matthew 6:5-15, and you can follow
along in this morning’s program as I read –
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 which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy
kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give
us this day our daily bread.
12 And
forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
13 And
lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the
kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”
14 For if you forgive other people 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.
It seems to me that this passage tells us there are several
underlying questions we must ask ourselves about prayer, and I want to talk
about three of those questions this morning.
1. Who is our audience?
In verse 5 Jesus says, 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.
There
is something that really bothers me in some prayers, and it is generally
ministers who do this, I’m sorry to report – it’s a sermon masquerading as a
prayer. It’s not a prayer as much
as it is a point being made to a congregation or the leadership of a
congregation. Here is an example,
for instance, of what I mean – Lord,
we thank you for the gift of discernment you have provided. We are going to vote today on our
church budget, and everyone has used their gift of discernment to understand
how important it is that we vote today in the affirmative, except for those two
elders who never go along with anything we try to do. You know who they are Lord, and we do too, and we trust that
you will soften their hard hearts – and their hard heads as well. Help them to see that this budget is
exactly what we need to adopt. So
please open their minds, open their hearts, and open their wallets as well.
Obviously, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. I have heard prayers that weren’t far
from that fictional example. When
Jesus is speaking about praying without a concern for being seen he is speaking
about the audience of our prayers, and God is always the audience of our
prayer.
As in last week’s Scripture text, where Jesus
told the parable of the unrighteous judge – and drew a contrast between the
judge and God – in this week’s passage Jesus is again making a contrast, but
this time the contrast is with some of the religious leaders and the manner in
which they practiced prayer, which was to seek a public audience to impress
others and to make themselves appear to be super-pious and super-spiritual.
Jesus could be very
hard on those who were religious leaders, which, quite honestly, has always
made me a little nervous. Leaders
are held to a high standard, and none of us, quite honestly, truly measure up
to that standard. But some,
obviously, don’t really try to live up to the standard. In the 23rd chapter of
Matthew’s gospel Jesus expresses very harsh words for the hypocrisy of some of those leaders. Here is a sample of what he had to say – 25 “Woe to you, teachers of
the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and
dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind
Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also
will be clean. 27 “Woe
to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like
whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are
full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the
same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside
you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
Ouch! Those are tough words, but they were
well deserved, as there was so much hypocrisy in the lives of those leaders. Too much of what they did was motivated
by a desire to be seen. Worship,
and personal piety and faith, had become little more than a means of attracting
attention, as if to say, look at me! And look at how spiritual I am! Imagine if there had been social media in the day of Jesus. These are individuals who might have
tweeted pictures of themselves praying on the street corner, or in the Temple.
According to Jesus, there is nothing about
faith that should be done in order to attract the attention of other
people. In his words on prayer,
Jesus goes so far as to say that we ought to take measure to guarantee we won’t
be seen, as in verse 6, where he says 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.
We don’t pray to impress others. We don’t pray as a way of making a point to anyone. We don’t pray in an effort to look
super-pious or super-spiritual. We
pray in order to bring what is on our hearts and our minds to God. We pray for others. We pray for our families. We pray for our friends. We pray for our enemies. We pray for our coworkers. We pray for people like us. We pray for people not like us. We pray for our church. We pray for other churches. We pray for our leaders, political,
religious, and other. We pray for
our community. We pray for our
nation. We pray for other
nations. We pray for our
world. We pray for everything we
can think of to pray for.
Now, when we read what Jesus has to say about praying in secret, we
have to say a word about public prayer.
Obviously there is a place for public prayer, such as worship. Jesus is not saying there is not a
place for public prayer. It is one
thing when an individual seeks to use public prayer as a means to impress
others and when a group of people gather together to offer their prayers. There is a power unleashed when people
come together as a group, as a body to pray together, whether it is a handful,
such as our Wednesday evening prayer group, or a larger group such as here this
morning, or an even larger group that numbers in the many hundreds or
thousands. Prayer in that manner
is a powerful statement that we are part of a community of faith – a community
that often functions as an alternative community to the world surrounding
us.
I am often asked to pray in public, which can be an interesting
experience, depending upon the circumstances. For several years I was asked to offer a prayer at one of
the nights of the horse show here in Shelbyville. I would make my way to the middle of the arena and when
given a cue would pray. I always
wondered why I was there, because no one seemed to listen. I could hear the noise of the
conversations in the grandstands, and every time I prayed there I was tempted
to say this – thank you Lord, for this
offering we are about to receive for First Christian Church, and may everyone
give generously. Just to see
if anyone was really listening.
When I was younger I struggled for a long time to put together
public prayer and the words of Jesus in this morning’s Scripture passage. When I was in high school, at church
camp one summer, we were told that we should go back to school in the fall and
pray over our lunch so that everyone would see us praying, and that was a way
of witnessing to others. I think
that was a well-intentioned idea, but it seemed to conflict with what Jesus
said. It took my young mind a
while to work out what to think about it, but the conclusion to which I came
was this, which now seems very simple – I always prayed over my lunch, always, even
though it generally wasn’t with my eyes closed and my head bowed. And the reason why is because that’s
just how I happened to pray, and I decided that if I changed the manner in
which I prayed only to be seen by others, my motivation was wrong. If you normally pray with your head
bowed and your eyes closed, by all means that is how you should prayer wherever
you are because that is simply you being you. But the point of prayer is not to call attention to yourself
or to be seen.
2. What do we
expect from God?
Richard Rohr has this to say about prayer – the word “prayer” has often been trivialized by making it merely into a
way of asking for what you want or making announcements to God, as if God did
not know (see Matthew 6:7-8)…It is not a technique for getting things…
(From the February 7, 2017
email from the Center for Action and Contemplation)
I once heard a prayer that echoed those thoughts in a very
interesting way. It has remained
in my mind for many years and is a prayer I heard offered by a young man who
was in, I believe, the 4th or 5th grade at the time. We were closing out an evening of kids
worship and asked for a volunteer to pray. This young man raised his hand and came to the platform to
pray. He was filled with sincerity
and wisdom as he prayed. One of
the things he said in his prayer was this – God,
help us not to see you as nothing more than a vending machine, putting
something in so that we can get what we want in return. That’s some really great theology from
a young man.
What do we expect from God when we pray? This is a tough question, because if we are honest, we will
admit that we expect God to answer our prayers in the way we want him to answer,
when we want him to answer.
Obviously, God does not always do that. In verses 7 and 8 Jesus says, and
when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be
heard because of their many words. Do
not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Isn’t
that interesting, what Jesus is saying?
Jesus is reminding us, once again, as we saw in the parable we studied
last week, that we can expect that God is working on our behalf. There is nothing wrong with enlisting
many, many people to pray for a particular concern, but it is not necessary to
do so in order to move God to action.
God does not need to be convinced to work on our behalf. God does not have a quota of people
that need to be engaged in prayer on behalf of a cause or a person before he
will act. He doesn’t say, if Dave had just enlisted one more person;
he was so close. He got 99 other
people to pray but I can’t act until there are 100 people.
Jesus says God already knows what we need before asking. Pray with the faith and the
confidence that God not only hears your prayer, but he is aware of your need,
your request, your fear, your thanksgiving – whatever it is that is on your
heart and mind – and has already acted upon it or begun to act upon it.
But
it is good to enlist many people to pray for a person or cause, because it
moves us to be involved in the work of God. We don’t have to convince God to be at work, because he is
already at work. Prayer ought to
move us and mobilize us to be a part of the work that God is already doing.
3. What does God expect
from us?
I think prayer is about many things, and one of them is authenticity;
authenticity about who we really, truly are. We talk about how we ought to live authentically, but we are
to be authentic to God as well. C.
S. Lewis wrote that we must lay before
Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us (Prayer: Does It Make Any
Difference, Philip Yancey, p. 42).
How often do we say to others, I’m
doing fine. I’m doing so well that
if I were any better I couldn’t stand it. And yet the reality is sometimes very different from the
front that we put out for others to see.
We don’t want people to know we struggle, we don’t want people to know
we have problems, we don’t want others to see weakness in us, and we don’t want
anyone to know the real person behind our very carefully constructed façade.
Speaking as a minister, one of the real challenges to me is the
level of expectation that is sometimes placed upon me. I find that to be difficult, because I
can’t live up to it. I am a person
with a lot of faults and
shortcomings, and please don’t ask my family about any of them, because they
may affirm that yes, he has a lot of
faults and shortcomings; let us tell you about some of them.
At the heart of what Jesus is saying in this
passage is that we ought to be authentic
in all of our expressions of faith and spirituality. We live in a world that craves authenticity, because it is
so lacking in the world at large.
And we ought to be authentic with God when we pray. God knows who we are. God knows our faults and our
shortcomings. God knows our
failures. And yet he holds none of
that against us. That is the great
news about God! We do no favors to anyone when we project an
aura of perfection. Sometimes
things go wrong in our worship services.
When they do, we don’t try to hide the fact that sometimes technology
doesn’t work, sometimes people forget something, and sometimes we make a
mistake or a miscue. So what? That is real life, and if we cannot
reflect real life in worship then we are missing something very important, and
that is being authentic, because that is what God expects of us.
There is so much power in prayer; power because
we serve a powerful God! Thanks
goodness we do not have to convince to him do what is good for us, because he
is already doing so! Thank
goodness we can be assured he is always working on our behalf! May we pray not only often, but always!
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