Turn with me, if you would, please, to Matthew 6, verses 5 through 8. Today we continue our journey through the Sermon on the Mount by looking at Jesus' teaching on the prayer life of the Christian. If you would stand with me as you turn there in honor of God's Word. Matthew 6, read verses 5 through 8. 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, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret. 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 Word of the Lord. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, once again, we are confronted with our tendency to give more thought to ourselves than to You.
Our sin nature permeates everything we do, even the most spiritual activities of our lives. And so, I pray that You would take Your Word now and work it deep into our hearts and minds and lives. Lord, teach us to pray for the sake of Your glory, in Jesus' name. Amen.
You may be seated. We've come to the portion of the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus is describing what practical righteousness looks like. And the underlying principle driving Christ's teaching is that true righteousness does not flaunt itself. The man who is truly righteous is fixated on the glory of God.
Last time we were together, we stated the principle like this. Godliness demands that we value the approval of God more than the gratification of self. After establishing this principle of true righteousness, Jesus then applies this principle to three areas of the Christian life. Giving, praying, and fasting. Today we're looking at the second of these applications, and that is the prayer life of the Christian. What does the prayer life of the truly righteous man look like? You know, there are few activities in the Christian life that are more significant than prayer.
In fact, our church's confession of faith identifies three means by which God ordinarily gives grace to His church. The first and the last of these ordinary means of grace is prayer. Prayer is nothing less than communing with God. A Christian who doesn't pray is like a child who never communicates his wants and needs, his joys and disappointments to his parents.
It's like a spouse who never enjoys an intimate moment with his marriage partner. Prayer is God's ordained means by which we cast our cares on God and receive grace from God. It's an immeasurably important aspect of the Christian walk. And yet here Jesus teaches us that even in an area as fundamental and spiritually rewarding as prayer, there are pitfalls to be aware of. Our sin nature is so pervasive that it even follows us into the very presence of God. Even when we're engaged in the holiest of activities, such as prayer.
Sin contaminates and defiles our motives and our thoughts and our words and even our actions. So Jesus, knowing the depravity of His disciples, knowing how easily we slip on the rocks of our own ego, instructs us that if our prayers are to be acceptable to God, then they must keep both people and God in right perspective. To say it plainly, Jesus is telling us that righteous prayer minimizes self and maximizes God. So let's take a few moments today and look at the specifics of Jesus' teaching on prayer. First He teaches us that the prayer of the righteous person is prayer that minimizes self. It's prayer that minimizes self. Christ begins the teaching on the subject of prayer by telling His disciples how not to pray.
Look at verse 5 again. When you pray, you must not. Before we can learn the righteous discipline of prayer, there's something we've got to rid ourselves of, and that something is selfishness. Selfish prayer is an oxymoron.
As long as we're preoccupied with ourselves, with the impression we're making, with how spiritual we're coming off, our prayers are just empty echoes. So righteous prayer is first prayer that minimizes self. Now Jesus shows us what this looks like by giving two examples in our text. There's a negative example in verse 5, and there's a positive example in verse 6.
Let's consider for a moment the negative example in verse 5. And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. We met these hypocrites last week.
They're the play actors, the pretenders who act like something they're not. Jesus says, 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 their reward. So here we've got folks who love to pray for show. They want everyone to say, oh, look how spiritual so-and-so is.
And so they make sure their prayer life is very public and very visible. Well, Jesus is not impressed. He exposes their hypocrisy and tells his disciples not to fall into the trap of noisy, pretentious prayer. You know, the fact that Jesus has to warn us of this danger tells us something about the nature of sin, doesn't it? It reinforces the fact, as we've already seen time and time again in the Sermon on the Mount, that sin is not just defined by our actions externally.
It is, at its essence, a disposition of the heart. And if we're inclined to limit our view of sin to just wrong actions, we will overlook all manner of unrighteousness in our own lives. Sin is not something we wrestle with only when we're alone on Saturday night in a bar or something we're tempted by when we're hanging out with the wrong crowd. Sin, as God sees it, is in fact so pervasive that it threatens to intrude upon even the most spiritual activities.
Our prayer life, our worship, our fellowship with other Christians. None of these areas are immune to the intrusion of sin. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wisely points out that the true nature of sin is not seen in the drunk lying in the gutter, but in the fact that even the saint on his knees before God must still wage war against pride. Christ doesn't identify the hypocrite as someone who says he's a Christian and goes out and lives a worldly life. He identifies the hypocrite as someone who's very fervent in his religious exercise, someone who worships on Sunday morning and Sunday night, someone who faithfully attends Wednesday night prayer meetings, someone who is known as a person of prayer. Christ applies the title of hypocrisy to the highest business in which a human being can be engaged, prayer.
And he does this in order to show the insidiousness of sin. And so we're forced to acknowledge, as one pastor wrote, that even when we try to persuade ourselves that we are worshiping God, we're actually worshiping ourselves and doing nothing more. In Christ's Sermon on the Mount, the hypocrite is busy praying on street corners and in public places. Now, I doubt that many of us are tempted to go down to the town center in Harrisburg and start praying out loud on the front steps of the YMCA. Is that because we're not in danger of hypocritical prayer?
I think we are in danger. You see, the sinfulness of hypocrisy in prayer boils down to the fact that its focus is on self rather than the one to whom the prayer is offered. That being the case, we are very much in danger of hypocritical prayer, even if we never pray in the public square. There are other ways to be self-focused. What are some ways, then, in which we might be guilty of the very thing that Jesus is condemning?
Let me suggest a few indicators. The desire to be known as a man or a woman of prayer. The need to talk about how much we pray. Wanting credit when God answers our prayers. Having a nonexistent prayer life. Being more preoccupied with how we're coming across to people than to God in our public prayers. All of these are symptoms of showy, hypocritical prayer. I recently read a story of a man who refused to pray in public for fear of falling into the trap of praying for show. So he would make it his practice every Sunday after the worship service was over with to leave the meeting and climb a secluded cliff where he could get alone and pray. His practice of private prayer eventually became so well known that people started calling him the man of the lonely rock.
His eagerness not to draw attention to himself began to draw attention to himself. The point is, even though we go out of our way not to stand on street corners, we may still be in danger of hypocritically calling attention to ourselves and to our prayer life. Righteous prayer, however, is prayer that minimizes self, and we minimize self first by avoiding hypocritical, pretentious prayer.
Praying for show. But Jesus then gives us a positive example in verse 6. He says, But when you pray, go into your room, shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. So in this verse, Jesus is commending the practice of private prayer. The advantage of praying in private is the fact that it minimizes the temptation to pray for show. It's easier to concentrate on God as your audience rather than people when you're isolated from the presence of others. Now, I want you to notice two aspects of God that Jesus emphasizes in his encouragement here for us to pray in secret. First is the fact that God is our Father. There's a relationship that exists between God and us, and that relationship is the basis for our prayer.
Jesus could have said, Go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Creator who is in secret. Certainly, God is our Creator. And as Creator, He is all-powerful, He is omniscient, He alone has the ability and the wisdom to providentially act on behalf of His creatures. But Jesus doesn't appeal to this Creator-creature relationship. Instead, He appeals to a much more intimate aspect of our relationship with God. He appeals to that aspect of our relationship with Him that makes Christians distinct from all other people, and that is the Father-child relationship. God is our Father, and we are His children. When we go to God in prayer, we go to someone who wants to fellowship with us, someone who wants to communicate with us.
We go to someone who cares about us and wants us to cast our cares on Him. I've often called my dad on the phone when he's in the middle of something and he stops what he's doing to talk to me. That's because I'm his son. When AT&T calls, he doesn't walk away from the lawnmower to enjoy a little fellowship with the telemarketer who's calling from the other side of the earth.
The difference is one of relationship. I am his son. When we go to the secret place to pray, we're not just in the presence of the One who created us. We are in the presence of the One who created us, but not just that. We're in the presence of the One who calls Himself our Father, and He wants to listen. Notice also that God not only is our Father, He's also the One, Jesus says, who sees in secret. He sees in secret.
And you know, this attribute of God might just be the most comforting and reassuring part of this entire text to me. The God I address privately in prayer is the God who sees in secret. Part of the difficulty of human relationships is that we don't have full knowledge of the other person, do we? We don't see the secret recesses of another person's soul.
We don't understand their fears and anxieties and insecurities, and they don't know ours. But when I come to God with all the baggage and the junk that's in my heart, I have the reassurance that He knows me inside and out. Not only does He understand me, He understands my circumstances perfectly. Every word and motive of anyone that affects my life is laid open before Him. Peter said of Christ in 1 Peter 2.23, when Christ suffered, He did not threaten, but continued entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly. If we're convinced that the Father knows every secret, then we, like Christ, can continually entrust ourselves to the One who judges righteously. When we come to God, we don't come in a panic.
We come to the One who sees the whole situation and understands it. Let's think for a moment about how often in Scripture some of the most significant events in people's lives occurred in that place of secret prayer. It was in the secret place imprisoned in Egypt that God exalted Joseph. It was in the secret place on the backside of the wilderness that God prepared and called Moses. It was in the secret place running from Saul that God turned David into a king.
It was in the secret place, the Garden of Gethsemane, that Christ laid down His will and embraced the cross. Our God is the God of the obscure and the unlikely and the secret place. You see how this attitude in prayer is really antithetical to the hypocrite who is consumed with making a good show in front of others. Instead of showing everyone how spiritual we are, we should be minimizing our preoccupation with self by focusing on God as the One who knows all our secrets and yet still loves us with fatherly love. Now before we move on, I should address something that could potentially become a misapplication of verse 6, and it has to do with the role of public prayer in the Christian life. We need to understand that Scripture never condemns public prayer. In fact, we have numerous examples in the Bible of public prayer that God honors. I think of Solomon's prayer at the dedication of the temple in 2 Chronicles 6, or the prayers of Peter and John in Acts 4, which God used to advance the church in a very public sort of way.
There is the prayer of the tax collector in Luke 18, 13, beating his breast in the temple and saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. And the prayer of Israel's leaders in front of the whole congregation, Scripture says in Nehemiah 9. Paul gives instruction concerning the practice of prayer in public worship in 1 Corinthians 14. So we need to realize that when Jesus instructs us to pray in private, He's not condemning praying in public. He's condemning praying in public for show. He's condemning ostentatious prayer.
The issue isn't the location of prayer, but the attitude of the heart in prayer. God wants us motivated by His presence, by His attention, not the praises of men. Well, Christ's teaching on prayer begins with this call to minimize self. Righteous prayer cannot be about self-exaltation.
We've got to diligently keep self in its proper perspective. But righteous prayer must also see God from a proper perspective. So Jesus teaches us, secondly, that righteous prayer is prayer that maximizes God. It's prayer that maximizes God.
We see this in verses 7 and 8. In these verses, Jesus asserts two truths about God that help us maximize our view of Him. In other words, these truths help us to see God for who He really is. And when our prayer life is steered by this understanding of God, we are engaged in effectual, righteous prayer. So what are these truths that enable us to maximize our view of God as we pray?
The first truth is this. God cannot be manipulated. God cannot be manipulated. Look at verse 7. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words. So Christ helps us gain an elevated view of God by contrasting the way we ought to think about God with the way that Gentiles think about God. Now, the word Gentiles here is used in a technical sense to refer to unbelievers, the heathen, those who still suppress the knowledge of God and embrace all sorts of false views of what God is like. And Jesus uses two Greek words to describe this Gentile attitude, this unbelieving attitude towards God.
The first is translated in the ESV as heap up empty phrases. Let me read a lengthy dictionary definition to broaden our understanding of this term. It means to speak too much, to use many words and speak for a long time, to use vain repetitions, to utter senseless sounds, to speak incoherently, to babble, to stammer, to stutter.
I'm doing it right now. I'm using too many words to define something you already know. We do that in prayer so often. The other term Jesus uses is a compound Greek word that means poly words, many words. These people who lack a right view of God talk too much when they pray because they think that the more they babble on, the more God will listen.
It's an incorrect view of God, and it leads to faulty prayer. Perhaps the best biblical example of this sort of thing is the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. You remember the story, don't you, in 1 Kings 18 of how Elijah challenged these false prophets to a duel between deities. Scripture describes how the prophets of Baal cried out from morning until noon, dancing around, even cutting themselves, trying to get Baal's attention. But the Bible says there was no voice, no one answered, no one paid attention. But then after all the drama of the Baal's prophets, Elijah's prayer is striking in its brevity. Elijah simply said, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel and that you have turned their hearts back to you again.
And immediately God sends fire from heaven and it lapped up the sacrifice and the altar and even the dirt under the altar. How often we adopt the attitude of Baal's prophets and try to obligate God to hear us and answer us. We think we can back God into a corner and demand that He give us His attention. If I just pray long enough and hard enough, if I shed enough tears, if I promise to sacrifice this thing or that thing, He'll have to hear me. But folks, the God who created you and me, the sovereign King of kings and Lord of lords is not obligated to do anything for us. Yet we try to bring God down to our level and exalt ourselves up to His by thinking that somehow our performance can gain us some recognition, some clout before the throne of God.
For they think that they will be heard for their many words. The truth is that prayer wheels and rosary beads won't increase our chances of being heard by God. The effectiveness of prayer doesn't lie in talkativeness, but in an elevated view of God's free sovereignty. Scripture is replete with prayers that are as powerful as they are brief. Perhaps one of the most glorious would have to be the prayer of the dying thief on the cross, a man who most likely had never prayed a sincere prayer his whole life, but with his last breath, he simply says, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
And those nine words become the prelude to an eternal paradise with Christ. The habit of vain repetition in prayer as a means of getting God's attention is in essence a denial of His sovereignty. To pray in this way is to view God and His intervention on my behalf as somehow contingent on what I do or don't do. It is to diminish His free grace in my life and exalt myself. It diminishes God's role and it increases mine, which is the exact opposite of what the prayer of the righteous ought to be. Praying like Gentiles is an assault on the character of God.
Praying like the righteous magnifies God to His rightful place by first acknowledging that God cannot be manipulated by His creatures. But there's a second truth about God that Jesus wants us to see and it's this. God already knows. God already knows. Look with me at verse 8.
Do not be like them, that is the Gentiles. Don't be like the Gentiles, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. The reality is that we don't need to multiply our words in explaining our situation or our request to God because God already knows every detail of our life. He knows what we're going to ask before we even ask it. Now before we unpack this verse, let me just say that if wordiness in prayer is a denial of God's sovereignty, as we saw in verse 7, then a failure to recognize this second truth in verse 8, that God already knows what we need, is a denial of God's goodness. The reason we don't come to God in a panic is not only because we recognize He is sovereign, but also because we recognize He is good. He is a Father who desires to give good things to His children. Jesus says don't be like the Gentiles who cut themselves and flail around multiplying their words in order to get their deity's attention. Why? Because your deity is different.
You already have his attention before you even open your mouth. You know what this means? This means that our motive in praying has nothing to do with getting God's attention or informing Him of our needs.
That's not the point. Now I do wonder if this reality, that praying is not about informing God of something He doesn't already know, maybe causes us to ask in the back of our minds, if God already knows, then why bother praying? And I think this is an important question. The quick answer is that God has ordained prayer as a secondary cause, a secondary means of carrying out His will. We pray because God has decided that He's going to work through the prayers of the saints. And so as good theologians, we on the one hand acknowledge that God is sovereign and omniscient, while at the same time recognize that we obtain blessings from God by asking for them. This is sort of a pray because it's your duty kind of an answer, and it's true and accurate as far as it goes.
But I came across a fuller answer and one that, to be honest, is much more motivating and inspiring to me. John Calvin said in his commentary on this passage, 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. 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. You see, when we come to God in prayer, we come as children to a Father, a Father who's already predisposed to help His children. God already knows our needs, and He wants to help, but He wants us to ask.
Why? Because the very act of asking, the process of pouring our hearts out to God in dependence and sometimes in desperation changes us. Prayer doesn't change God, it changes us.
Calvin goes on to say, Whoever is convinced that God not only cares for us, but knows all our wants and anticipates our wishes and anxieties before we've even stated them, will leave out vain repetitions and will reckon it absurd and ridiculous to approach God with rhetorical embellishments in the expectation that He will be moved by an abundance of words. Anyone who has had young children understands this, I think. You ever listen to a small child, a baby asking his parents for something, and the child just absolutely butchers the English language so badly that you have no idea what he just asked for, but somehow the parent knows exactly what the child is asking for. I'm always amazed at how even a small infant who can't even pronounce a single word yet is able to convey specific requests to his parents.
Pick me up, change my diaper, feed me. Folks, if parents can understand the broken requests of their children, rest assured that the God who created you knows what you need before you even ask. And so Jesus tells us to maximize our view of God by realizing that He cannot be manipulated because He's sovereign and by realizing that He is already aware of your needs and predisposed to meet those needs because He is good. When we pray, we don't fixate on man's opinion of us but on God's. We don't focus on ourselves in relation to other people but on our relationship to God.
We don't come to Him in a panic as if He's really too busy or uninterested. We come with the full assurance that He is our Father who sees in secret and knows us through and through. Righteous prayer minimizes self and maximizes God. This text primarily deals with our attitude in prayer. It doesn't so much address the content of our prayer or the practical aspects of how we go about praying to God. We'll look at that more next time when we consider the Lord's model prayer for us that He gives to us in the next few verses. But I feel the need to at least mention something that is implied in the verses we've looked at today, something that perhaps needs to be addressed before we can even evaluate our heart attitude and motives in prayer. Do you know what the biggest cause of unanswered prayer is? I believe the primary reason prayers are not answered is because we don't pray. James makes this point in chapter 4, verse 2.
You do not have because you do not ask. And perhaps all that we've talked about today doesn't even seem applicable to you because if the truth were known, you have neglected the grace of prayer. You're guilty of prayerlessness. When Jesus teaches His disciples about prayer in Matthew 6, He assumes that they're praying. He says in verse 5, when you pray. He says it again in verse 7, when you pray. I wonder if any of us here today could honestly affirm that we are taking full advantage of the grace of prayer, that our private prayer life is reaping all the benefits God has to offer. I would suggest that perhaps the chief sign that a person is praying in order to be seen by men, praying just for show, and a private prayer life is nonexistent. Now, I don't want to put a yoke on anybody and say you've got to pray so many times a day or so many minutes a day.
That would not be helpful. But I would like to leave you with this thought. If you have no desire to spend concentrated, uninterrupted time with your Heavenly Father in prayer, something's the matter.
If a child can get along just fine without ever intimately communicating with his father, there's something wrong in that relationship. So what do we do? Well, folks, if prayerlessness is a problem in your life, repent. Repent of the sin. Ask God to change you, but then rearrange your schedule.
Quit a hobby. Turn off the TV. Do whatever it takes to get to that place of secret prayer and close the door and pray. Then Jesus says, Your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, teach us to pray. Teach us to pray with minds that are set on heaven. Forgive us for neglecting this awesome means of grace that you've given either through disuse or through praying pretentiously. Holy Spirit, search us and know our hearts. Try us and know our thoughts. See if there be any wicked way in us and lead us in the way everlasting. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
