Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. Don't repeat them. Don't do it over and over. Isn't it astounding that the Church of Jesus Christ took these words that He's going to say, and for 2,000 years we repeated them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
Exactly what He said, don't do, we did. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana. Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's Word meets our world. About 90% of all Americans claim that they pray weekly. In fact, 70% of all Americans say that they pray daily. Would that mean then that we are a praying nation?
What does it mean? Who are we praying to? What are we praying for? You see, it appears that for most people prayer is a sort of self-talk about what you want to have happen. That's prayer. And the problem with that is that we live in a fallen world, cursed world, and so when it comes to things like health issues and employment and the weather and terminal situations and parking spaces, we often end up extremely disappointed. And we end up becoming disappointed in our prayer lives. And more specifically, and maybe you're part of that group, you feel like your prayers are not answered. And what your prayer really was is you simply told God what you wanted to have happen. And it didn't happen. And so then you became disappointed. There's nothing new to this, by the way.
It's always been a problem. In Luke chapter 11, disciples came to Jesus and they said to Jesus, teach us to pray. Amazing statement. They didn't say to Jesus, teach us to teach. They had spent over three years with him, 24-7. They didn't even say to Jesus, teach us how to resurrect the dead.
They didn't ask that. They said, you need to teach us how to pray. And he did. He taught them. Open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 6. Matthew chapter 6. The middle chapter of the great Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5, 6, and 7. Wall to wall, red letter, if you have that kind of Bible. Jesus is speaking the whole way through. What Jesus is going to talk about in 5, 6, and 7 is what does an authentic life look like? And that's when the master speaks. It's the most comprehensive view of how to live your life in the entire New Testament. But here in chapter 6 and verse 5, Jesus decides he wants to take on the subject of prayer.
There's good reason for it. They don't know how to pray. Prayer in their culture had become something extremely different from what God ever intended it to be.
It became an aspect of ritual and reciting things. Each rabbi within the context of the culture, all of his students prayed in a certain way. As a matter of fact, that's why Jesus' disciples came to him. They said John the Baptist taught his disciples how to pray. In other words, if you heard a guy praying in public, you said, wow, he must follow John the Baptist.
He used certain words or said it in a certain way. Could you teach us a way to pray like that? And Jesus would have none of that aspect of it, but he decides he would teach them anyway. What I want to do when I look at these, because these verses are so familiar to all of us, what I want to do is I want to ask you a series of questions. Each verse or two is going to reveal a question. And you have to answer for yourself in your own heart, is this describe the way I pray? Does this describe my prayer life the way it is?
The first question is simply this. Is my prayer life real? Is my prayer real? And I'll explain it here in just a moment. Jesus said when you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites. It's a favorite word of his.
We get that out of the theater, the idea of wearing a mask and being an actor behind it. We all know what a hypocrite is. A hypocrite is someone who says one thing but lives in a very different way. Jesus uses that term and says, 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.
And truly, I say to you, they have the reward in full. Now, at the time of Christ, there were a lot of things going on. And one of the things that had gone on, the culture adopted that there was three times a day when you should pray. No matter where you are, you should pray a lot like Islam is today.
At 9 o'clock in the morning, you should pray, and at noon, you should pray, and then in the evening hour, 3 o'clock, you should pray again. So the hypocrites, what they would do is they would make sure that they find themselves in a specific spot, especially on a street corner, at exactly that time. And then when that time came, they would stand and they would pray. And Jesus said that when they do that, in fact, it's interesting, when he says this, he said, they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners. That word stand is an unusual word. There's two words for standing in the New Testament. One is sort of what I'm doing now, I'm just standing. But there's another way of standing, of sort of like standing.
In other words, it's got that idea, almost a military idea, I'm standing. That's the word Jesus uses. They love to stand. You can see the pride behind this. They love to stand, he said, in the synagogues and on the street corners, and the reason for their prayer life is simple. They want to be seen by men. They want people to see them praying. And Jesus said they have their reward in full. In other words, when people think well of them, oh, listen to that, look at that man stand and pray. Jesus said that's all there is to their prayer life.
There's nothing else. Now, you and I would never do things like that, would we? You would never pray in a way to draw attention to yourself at all. You wouldn't leave a door open so that one of your children or someone would come down and see you devoted to prayer, or your office door, so that someone could look in your office and say, oh, look, he's a strong Christian, or she's a strong Christian business person. And look, they're praying and you can see them. Or you go to a restaurant and everybody's in there and you want to make sure everybody can hear you pray, so that everybody can see what you're doing. Jesus said you do that and your reward's in full. And he said, you see, that's not what prayer is. That's not what prayer is at all. In fact, notice what Jesus says in the next verse. Jesus says, but you, when you pray, you go into your inner room, you close your door and you pray to your Father who's in secret and your Father who sees, he said, what is done in secret, he will reward you.
Wow. Now, you know what Christians did with this? Everything you could do wrong with these verses, Christians have done over 2,000 years. Christians say, you know what, that's the point. You need to have a prayer closet.
You do. You don't really pray unless you have a prayer closet. Every person, every Christian who loves the Lord, you have to have a private prayer closet and inner room where you go and pray. That's what Jesus is saying.
Well, that would be kind of ironic, wouldn't it? Because Jesus didn't have a prayer closet. Jesus never had a prayer closet. Jesus said foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
Jesus didn't have some inner room that he went to. What Jesus is saying is, if your prayer is going to be real, it has to be private. You see, it has to be between you and God, and he makes it clear. He said, you pray to your Father who is in secret and your Father who sees what is in secret.
He says, he will reward you. You see, once you're in secret, you can't pretend anymore. There's no point in pretending. If it's just you and God, pretending the way you speak and everything is kind of ridiculous, isn't it? You see, the secret to prayer is that prayer is a secret.
You see, that's the whole point. Jesus is saying, look, if your prayer is going to be real, it's just between you and God. It's not between any other audience, just you and God.
To them, that was stunning. That's not the way they were taught prayer. They were used to every day at nine and noon and three seeing people all over the place, stopping and praying the way they were taught by their rabbis, and Jesus says, that is not the way to pray to God. Is your prayer real? Secondly, in verse seven and eight, he says, and when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they'll be heard for their many words.
Second question, is your prayer life simple? Now, the Gentiles said, nah, we don't do it like that. It's tough being a Gentile. The Gentiles believed in a pantheon of gods. They had all kinds of different gods they believed in. And the gods had strengths and weaknesses, and if you were going to conjure up the gods, you sort of had to prime the pump.
You sort of had to get them going. And so the Gentiles would just go on and on and on and on, and they would repeat the same thing over and over and over and over. Hold your place here.
Let me illustrate. Go with me to 1 Kings, in the Old Testament, 1 Kings, chapter 18, and verse 17. 1 Kings 18, 17.
I'll give you a moment. It's a famous story. It's Elijah. He's a prophet. The nation of Israel has paganized their Gentile.
They worship Gentile, especially Baal. And so Elijah decides he's going to challenge all these prophets of Baal. We find in verse 17, it came about that when Ahab saw Elijah and Ahab said to him, Is this you, you troubler of Israel? Ahab was an evil king. Elijah's a righteous prophet. Ahab didn't like him. Elijah said, I have not troubled Israel, but you and your father's house have, because you have forsaken the commandments of the Lord and have followed after the Baals.
You're following these pagan Gentile deities. And so, as the story goes on, he offers a challenge. You get down to verse 25 and it says, So Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, Choose one ox for yourselves, prepare it. He said, first for, he says, first for you are many, and call on the name of your God, but put no fire under it. Get your offering ready. Get the ox, get it on there, but no fire.
Now call on your God to bring the fire. So here's what happened. And then they took the ox, which was given to them, and they prepared it, and they called on the name of Baal from morning until noon. And here's what they said. O Baal, answer us.
Now that's from morning until noon. O Baal, answer us. O Baal, answer us. O Baal, answer us. O Baal, answer us. O Baal.
That's just five seconds I did it. Just imagine this going on for hours. Hours. O Baal, answer us. O Baal, answer us.
It just went on and on until noon, and they weren't even done. He says, but there was no voice, no one answered, and they leaped about the outer, the outer which they had made. They said, maybe he's not seeing us, so let's jump up and down.
I'm not going to do that. They jump up and down. O Baal, answer us. O Baal, answer us. O Baal, answer us. So they're trying their best to conjure up Baal.
And then it says, and it came about at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and he said, call out with a loud voice, for he is a god. Either he's occupied or gone aside. Or maybe he's on a journey, or perhaps he's asleep.
Maybe you need to awaken him. That's trash talking. Prophetic trash talking. He's trash talking them. Like maybe he went somewhere.
You know, maybe he's asleep. Maybe not yelling loud enough. So they cried out with a loud voice. They listened to him.
It's kind of funny. They listened to him. They cut themselves according to their custom with swords and lances until blood gushed out on them. So now they're jumping up and down, screaming, O Baal, answer us, and they're cutting themselves, all believing that this would stimulate him in order to answer. And it came about when midday was past. They raved until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice. And no one voiced, no one answered, no one paid attention.
That's three in the afternoon. They spent seven or eight hours screaming, yelling, O Baal, answer us, cutting themselves up, jumping up and down, vain repetition, just going on and on with it. Well, you know how the story went. Then Elijah prayed, verse 38. The fire of the Lord fell, consumed the burnt offering, and the wood and the stones and the dust that licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and they said, The Lord, He is God.
The Lord, He is God. Very different kind of prayer. Now let's go back to Matthew. Jesus says, and when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition. Meaningless repetition. That word is batah legao, meaningless repetition. Batah means empty.
Legao means words or phrases. Don't use empty words. Don't repeat them.
Don't do it over and over. Isn't it astounding that the Church of Jesus Christ took these words that He is going to say and for 2,000 years we repeated them over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Exactly what He said, don't do, we did. Some of you have become traditions.
You need to give 10 our fathers, 15 our fathers, 20 our fathers, 25 our fathers. It's astounding. It's astounding. It's alarming that you could read this passage and then come up with that. That He wants you to repeat it over and over and over and over again. It's exactly what He doesn't want you to do. He said, let your prayer be simple.
There's a good reason for it by the way. I'm sure you've thought it, prayer never informs God. You understand that, don't you? When you pray, you are never giving God information. It's just like, I didn't know that.
Thank you. You've given me this, that's not prayer. Repeating something and over and over. You see, it's a difference between not giving information. Prayer is, prayer reveals my faith in God. That's what prayer does. Prayer reveals my faith in God. God speaks to me through His word, I speak to Him through prayer and my prayer reveals my faith in God. That's what prayer is. It's never to inform God. You see, that's not the way prayer operates.
It's a very different thing. He said, you can keep this extremely simple. Now, understand, Jesus did talk about the idea of being persistent in prayer. He gave great parables about it. He talked about it. You need to be persistent but not repetitive. In other words, He loves it when you come to Him over and over again.
Why? Because He loves the conversation you have with Him. He loves that. You see, that's an important thing to God. This is all part of the relationship between you and God.
He said, but you can keep that very, very simple for you and for me. So, is my prayer real? Is my prayer simple? And then, well, let me read verse 8 before I go to the third one. He says, so do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask.
You see, it's never a matter of asking. For so many of us, I think that's our prayer life. There's a way I want my world to be.
Here's my list, Lord, and I want my world to be this way. And then when it's not that way, you go, and He doesn't answer my prayers. There's a reason. He's God, you're not.
You see, there's a difference there. That's the whole idea. This isn't a matter of, and by the way, there are whole aspects of our Christian faith, especially a foot now, that reverses the whole thing. And basically says that God's role is to give you what you want.
That's His role. And your faith has so much power, it makes God give you what you want. Many, many years ago, Paul Youngi Cho was a pastor in South Korea of a very large church.
I remember reading a quote of his, and his quote was simply this. Jesus Christ is the slave of my lips. In other words, I tell God what I want, and because of the power I have over Him, He then gives me what I want.
Jesus would very much disagree with that. Is my prayer real, and is my prayer simple? And then, third question, is my prayer worshipful? Is my prayer worshipful? He said, pray then in this way. So, Jesus is now going to give them the disciples' prayer.
Pray in this way. First of all, pray is interesting. It's an imperative mood.
It means it's commanded. People often say, well, if God knows everything, then what do I have to pray for? There are a lot of good reasons you should pray, but here's one of them. He commanded you to.
See, that kind of ends the whole thing. I'm commanded to pray. He said, you pray. Okay, I'll pray. He said, pray, and when it says in the numeric and standard, it says, he says, pray then in this way.
In this way is a little bit, I don't know if it's the best acro way, it's utos in Greek. And it means pray like this. Pray in this manner. The last thing Jesus intended with this short prayer is that you would pray the prayer. He doesn't want you to pray the prayer. He wants you to pray like this. You see, that's not the way they prayed. They prayed in a very different kind of way.
Jesus said, look, I want it to be very short and very sweet. He said, you just pray in this manner or pray in this way. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called OnePlace.com. That's OnePlace.com and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.
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Support for our ministry can be sent to Fellowship in the Word 4600 Clearview Parkway, Metairie, Louisiana 7006. If you would be interested in hearing today's message in its original format, that is as a sermon that Pastor Bill delivered during a Sunday morning service at Fellowship Bible Church, then you should visit our website, fbcnola.org. At our website you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for you can listen online or if you prefer you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember you can do all this absolutely free of charge. Once again our website is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word.
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