Now if you would take a copy of the holy Scriptures in your hands once again and turn with me now to Matthew’s gospel, Matthew chapter 6. If you need to use a church Bible, you’ll find that on page 811. Now you may remember that our teaching theme for this year is “Devoted to God: Learning to Live for God’s Glory,” and central to what it means to be devoted to God is the cultivation of the vital discipline of faithful prayer. You might know the words of James Montgomery’s famous hymn where Montgomery has us sing, “Prayer is the Christian’s vital breath, the Christian’s native air.” His point is, there is no such thing as a Christian who does not pray, just like there is no such thing as a living human being who does not breathe. Prayer is the instinct of every soul made alive to God by faith in Jesus Christ. Almost the first act of saving faith, as soon as it receives and rests on Christ alone for salvation, almost the first thing it ever does is to cry to Him for mercy and grace and pardon and help. Prayer is to Christian life what breathing is to biological life. We need it. It’s basic. It’s necessary. It’s fundamental.
But there is this one great difference. Ordinarily, unless something is really wrong, ordinarily you don’t think about breathing, do you? You don’t work at breathing. You don’t study how to breathe. Nobody teaches you to breathe. But every Christian needs to work at prayer. If prayer is among those disciplines that most conduce to our spiritual good, well then our great enemies – the world and the flesh and the devil – will do everything they can to stop us from praying. They labor to make us lazy and distracted in prayer, to undermine our confidence and our belief in prayer, to make us think that prayer is foolish or fruitless or that we are not the kind of people that God would ever listen to should we ever make the effort to try and pray. Our rebel hearts, our remaining sin, and our countless distractions, they all make growing in the discipline of prayer – if we are honest with ourselves I think we’d all acknowledge – they all make the discipline of prayer hard work. It’s tough. It’s not easy. And so we need all the help we can get.
It’s often said, “If you want to humble a minister, ask him about his prayer life.” But I dare say the same would be true for each one of us if we are sincere in our answer to that question. Ask us about our prayer lives; for the most part, we hang our heads in shame. There is a lovely moment in Luke chapter 11 verse 1 where the disciples are, perhaps they are overhearing or stumbling upon or simply watching the Lord Jesus praying. And they are so struck by what they see and hear in their Master as He goes to God in prayer, that they blurt out almost, “Lord” – you almost imagine them interrupting His prayers – “Lord, teach us to pray!” As they watched Him, it’s almost as though they thought, “Looking at Him pray, we feel almost as though we’ve never really prayed ourselves. And so Lord Jesus, please won’t You teach us?” And so as we begin this new series for the summer, looking at the teaching of the Lord Jesus on this subject of prayer in the gospel according to Matthew, I want to invite you to make the disciples’ request of the Lord Jesus our prayer together. As we turn to the Scriptures, that the Lord Jesus would teach us to pray, that He would make us praying people and a praying church. Lord, by Your Word and Spirit in these summer weeks together, teach us, teach us to pray. We need all the help You can give us. Teach us to pray.
This morning, we make a start in Jesus’ school of prayer by considering three things in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 6, beginning at verse 5. Three things. First of all, we’ll notice the teaching of Jesus and the subject of prayer and the practice of prayer, verses 5 through 8. The practice of prayer. Then secondly, we’ll go back and look at the Lord’s Prayer, which we recited together a few moments ago, we’ll look at it as a whole and make some general observations about the pattern of prayer in the second place in verses 9 through 13. And then finally, we’ll zoom in on the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer itself, the preface if you like, “Our Father in heaven,” in verse 9, and think about our great privilege in prayer. So the practice of prayer, the pattern of prayer, and the privilege of prayer. Before we read the passage together, especially given our subject, let’s bow our heads and look to God to help us as we read and study His holy Word. Let us all pray.
O Lord our God, feeling our own weakness as Christians in this area of prayer, which is so vital and basic and yet so hard and difficult, feeling our weakness – our sin, our neglect of the duty and the gift of prayer – we lift our voices with the disciples’ request, “O Lord, teach us to pray” for Your own glory and praise. Amen.
Matthew chapter 6 at the fifth verse. This is the Word of God:
“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 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. Pray then like this:
‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’”
Amen, and we praise God that He has spoken in His holy and inerrant Word.
Well let’s think in the first place about the practice of prayer. Look with me at verses 5 through 8 and the first thing I want you to see here is that prayer is normative. In a marriage, there is a reasonable expectation that husbands and wives actually talk to one another. Isn’t there something terribly wrong, terribly wrong if spouses never said even a word to one another? Every married couple talks. They talk to one another. And yet everyone who has been married for any length of time will tell you that communication, while inevitable in a marriage, to be meaningful and beneficial and healthy, still takes a great deal of work. A marriage counselor might reasonably speak to a husband or a wife framing their comments, “Now David, when you speak to Sheena, you might try this approach.” But notice the assumption in the statement. The counselor doesn’t say, “Now David, if you should ever attempt something so unusual and unexpected as actually talking to Sheena, let me make a few recommendations for how you might try and give it a shot.” In a marriage, communication is a question of “when” and not “if.”
Now look at how Jesus speaks to His disciples about prayer. Verse 5, “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites.” Verse 6, “And when you pray, go into your room and shut the door.” Verse 7, “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases.” You have entered, believer in Jesus Christ, into a relationship of intimacy and love with the living God. There is no question in Jesus’ mind that every true disciple will pray. That doesn’t mean that our communication with God does not require work, but it does mean that the cry of the heart to God is a basic evidence and mark of all saving faith. Real Christians pray. “When you pray” not “If you pray.”
It may well be as you look at your own heart now and then in the bright daylight of holy Scripture that you find you have to admit that actually you never pray. You never pray. You trust yourself. You panic and worry and fret as you make your way through life. You seek the wisdom of others, but you don’t pray. Sure, you might go through the motions in church from time to time, but your mind is generally elsewhere. Your heart is flat and disengaged. I don’t say this to condemn you, but to help you see yourself and feel your need of God’s mercy and help. But listen now, if you never pray, you are not yet converted. You are not a Christian. If there is no reflex in your soul that leads you to look for your help to the Lord your God, then you need to know that you are still a stranger to the saving power of redeeming grace. Jesus says prayer is normative, fundamental, ordinary, basic. “When you pray” not “If.” It’s what converted hearts, believing hearts, cannot help but do. They cry to Him for help and mercy. Assessed by that measure, ask yourself, “Is mine a truly converted heart?” If it’s not, start now by crying out to God to have mercy on you and draw near to you. He is ready to come to you in grace and deliver you and shower His kindness and love upon you in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so as Jesus describes the practice of prayer, He tells us first of all prayer is normative.
But then He also says, notice in the text, prayer, real prayer is humble. The prayer of a Christian is humble. Notice that in verses 5 and 6. “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 secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” The hypocrites, Jesus says, talking about the Jewish religious leaders, the hypocrites, they use prayer as a tool for self-display. They find a prominent, public spot in the synagogue in worship, on the street corner on market day where there is a crowd, no one can miss them, and they begin to pray in order that others will see them and think well of them. They pray for self-display that they may be seen by others, Jesus says. They are not praying to God for God. They are play acting, which you might know is what the Greek word from which we get the word “hypocrite” originally referred to. It was an actor wearing a mask. That was a hypocrite. And it’s a perfect picture of this person standing in the middle of a busy street, showing off, isn’t it? They’ve reduced God to a supporting actor playing a bit part in the public performance of their own display of gifts. Hypocrites.
I’ve been in prayer meetings with people like this. Haven’t you? Honestly, ministers are often the worst at it. We preach sermons in our prayers. We want to make an impact upon our hearers as we pray. We want to move people by our prayers. But we can easily forget to pray in our prayers. “Don’t show off. Don’t draw attention to yourself,” Jesus says. That’s not what prayer is for. Isn’t it an especially perverse distortion of true prayer when instead of the dependence of a beggar coming empty-handed to the only one who can really help us, instead of that, we make prayer a venue for making much of ourselves. We don’t realize that we are in fact filthy, bankrupt vagabonds sitting in the ditch with nothing, nothing at all to boast about. “No, no,” Jesus says, “Go into your room, close the door, pray to your Father who is in secret.”
Now pause there just for a moment. Just to be clear, Jesus is not here forbidding public prayer absolutely. Jesus Himself often prayed in public, after all. But He is forbidding the kind of counterfeit praying that’s really worshiping at the altar of self while pretending to call upon God. The prayer, Jesus says, that God is pleased to answer and reward has no care at all for how impressed other people might be by its rhetoric. He is the God, Jesus says, who sees in secret. That is to say, He is the God who is not fooled by us for a moment, who is not swayed by our fancy words. He sees our hearts. He sees our hearts. He is the God who sees in secret, who gets under the mask and sees you and sees me. If we are to begin to really pray, really pray at last, we must humble ourselves before the God who sees in secret, like the beggars we really are, in our sin and bankruptcy and need, to the one, the only one who has grace to help us. So prayer is normative. Prayer is humble.
Thirdly, Jesus says true prayer is trusting. Look at verses 7 and 8. “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.” Unlike the Jewish leaders who were in Jesus’ sights in the first part of our passage, praying elaborate prayers in order to sound impressive in the ears of others, Jesus now turns His target on the Gentiles who saw prayer rather as something more like a magical incantation. In their view, the gods, not being almighty or omnipotent or omnipresent or all knowing, the gods needed human beings to keep them up to date on the latest news. Prayer informed them of things they would not otherwise know, and once more, their gods were not always paying particular attention, and so you have to try to get through to them. And so you had to become a bit like a nagging parent, attempting to get a lazy teenager to go clean his room. The pagan would have to say the same thing again and again and again and again in the hopes that eventually their delinquent god would finally listen and maybe step up and help. They think they will be heard for their many words.
Pause again. Another moment of clarification. This is not a knock on praying for a long time or certainly not a knock on persevering in prayer, keeping at it, pressing on, until eventually the answer comes. That’s actually commended, as we’ll see, by the Lord Jesus Himself. But this is a rebuke of thinking that the one, true and living God who is really there needs us to get or to hold His attention. And saying that leads us to a vital prayer principle. A vital prayer principle. Who you think God is, what He’s like, who you think God is shapes how you will pray in fundamental ways. So many of the disorders and dysfunctions in our prayer lives are traceable to this as their root cause. Who you think God is shapes how you approach Him and how you will pray. If in your mind God is a bumbling old fool, ineffective or disinterested or uncaring and distant and aloof, either you will not pray at all or you will view prayer as leverage, like you are really trying to get God on your side, find the magic words, say the right words that will pull from Him what you think that you need.
But that’s not what God is like at all, Jesus says. He is the God who knows what you need before you ask Him. Our prayers are not imparting information to God that He does not already possess. He knows the end from the beginning. Doesn’t He? Our prayers – what are they? They are a child’s cry that reflect a bond of love and trust and dependence. That’s what our prayers really are. Prayer like that comes to the God who is sovereign. He is King. He is able to save and heal and help and who knows. He already knows. Isn’t that such good news? He already knows. Before you struggle to find the words, His heart is burdened with a weight of compassion for your need. And when you come to Him and cry to Him to give what He is pleased to bestow, you honor Him. We are not manipulating God or displaying ourselves. True prayer, Jesus says, it’s normative, it’s humble, but it’s also profoundly trusting. I trust you like a little child, crying out to his parent for daily needs. The practice of prayer first of all.
Now, let’s look at Jesus’ positive teaching. These have been largely negative comments, corrections Jesus has provided. Now He gives us positive teaching. A model of prayer in verses 9 through 13. Here in the second place is the pattern of prayer, and all I want to do is offer you a few general observations about The Lord’s Prayer as a whole. For example, first of all consider the order of The Lord’s Prayer, the sequence in which it comes to us. The simplest way perhaps to see this is to notice the pronouns. Look at the text. Verses 9 and 10, they’re all in the second person, right, so they focus – look at the language – on “you” and “your.” “Hallowed be Your name. Your will be done. Your kingdom come.” But the second half of the prayer, verses 11 through 13, they’re all in the first person. “Give us our daily bread. Forgive us our debts. Lead us not into temptation. Deliver us.” There is an important lesson in that basic pattern, isn’t there. As we pray, where ought the focus to fall? Not first upon our needs, however legitimate they may be or however urgently we might feel them. Prayer is first about God’s agenda before it may be about our own. Jesus teaches us to pray in the conviction that God knows better than we do, that His plans are always better than our plans, and His purposes, we are to prefer them always before our own. When you sit down to pray, do you rush in with your own agenda, or do you make what God has told you in the holy Scriptures is His will for the world? Do you make that the burden of your prayers? So the pronouns, the order of the prayer here seen in the pronouns, that’s instructive.
So too are the verbs in this prayer. It might be a surprise to learn that the verbs are in the imperative mood. What’s another name for an imperative? It’s a command. That’s an imperative. A command. Now, Jesus is not saying, suggesting for a moment that sinners may command God to do anything. And grammatically in Greek, requests are in the imperative mood. This is how you make a request. That’s fitting, however, I think, because sometimes our pleas to God can become so urgent, so passionately presented, so heartfelt that they start to sound like a command. Don’t they? “O God, save! Son of David, have mercy! O Lord of Hosts, give ear to my cries!” Those are imperatives, but they’re not really commands. There’s no failure to approach God with reverence and awe, but they express urgency, vehemence. The deep longing of the heart and the burden of our lives. Pressing God to hear and answer. The point, I think, is that Jesus does not want us to thoughtlessly recite the same old words and just go through the motions. You have a prayer list and your prayer is, as you sort of wipe the sleep from your eyes and drink the coffee in the morning, “O Lord, bless so-and-so,” and “O Lord, be with so-and-so,” and “O Lord, bless such-and-such.” You’re not really thinking. You’re not really praying in your prayers. You’re ticking the boxes. Jesus is calling us to more, to the engagement of your heart and your mind. What is it that you want God to do? Cry to Him with more than your lips, but with your whole soul.
But also notice that these verbs are in the passive voice. That somewhat softens the imperative. “Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done.” So we’re not standing before the throne of God telling Him to get on with it, as if we were an impatient gym teacher, you know, directing a child to climb that rope and not listening to their lame excuses for inactivity. “Come on, God, get on with it!” Not at all. It’s in the passive voice. “You are King, not me. You must act. I have no power. O Lord, Your will be done, for I am helpless unless You do.” So we come to Him with the urgency of the imperative mood and the humility of the passive voice. The order of the verbs.
Also, the scope – just how expansive and far reaching is this model prayer that Jesus gives us. It covers all time, all time. It looks to the future. “Your kingdom come.” Tomorrow, “Lead me not into temptation. I want Your will to be done tomorrow. I want to be preserved from the assaults of the enemy of my soul and from the temptation which yesterday and today have tripped me up so often. O Lord, tomorrow do all Your holy will.” The future is here. The present is here. “Our Father in heaven, You reign right now. Give me this day, daily bread.” The past is here. “Forgive me my debts. I have fallen and stumbled. I am guilty in Your sight. But because of the cross of Your dear Son, I know that with God there is plenteous redemption. So Father, for Jesus’ sake, please forgive me. Forgive me my debts.” The past is here and the present and the future. All time. All need is here. Spiritual needs – that God’s name be hallowed, honored, exalted, His kingdom come, His will done, that our sin might be forgiven, that temptation might be avoided, that the evil one overcome. Relational needs are addressed – “I am forgiving others even as I cry to You to forgive me.” Spiritual needs. Needs in my interpersonal life. And physical needs, daily bread. “I’m not going to presume upon You for clothes on my back and a roof over my head and food in my belly. Everything I have and everything I ever need comes from Your gracious hand. So today, O God, give me my daily bread.”
There is no limit, no time limit on the mercy of God. There is no statute of limitations on His grace. You can come to Him, no matter how long and dark and wicked your backstory may be, and find that He is right now ready with abundant grace to forgive and cleanse and make you new. You can come to Him with the moment, sudden, urgent, pressing need and discover that He already knows what you need before you ask it. You can come to Him with all the unknowns of tomorrow and find rest in His sovereign plan and keeping. You can come to Him for daily bread. You can come to Him with broken relationships. You can come to Him with besetting sin that seems to ensnare you and from the grip of which you have struggled and never yet been able to break free. He knows what you need. He has grace to match. So come to Him. Come to Him. The practice of prayer. The pattern of prayer.
Now finally, let’s zoom in on the opening line of The Lord’s Prayer and consider the great privilege, the great privilege of prayer. Verse 9 is addressed to, “Our Father who is in heaven.” The simplicity of that is striking, isn’t it? There is no grand eloquence. He is not showing off. There is no attempt to wax lyrical, no ostentation. This is the simple, direct address of a child. Secure in the love of his Father. Coming unselfconsciously into His presence to speak to Him.
I think I’ve told you about this before, but I was at a gathering in the home of a minister friend on the Isle of Harris in Scotland last October. And we were at a fellowship meeting in his home in the manse. People were sharing their testimonies, we were singing psalms together, praying together. The house was packed. The living room – it was jammed, people lining the walls, sitting on the floor, sitting on every chair. The sofa was crammed with too many people. It was a wonderful night, but one of the young couples had a toddler with them, and the little girl was out playing mostly in the corridor in the hallway outside, but at one point, I think in the middle of someone’s testimony, the door suddenly banged open and this little girl pushed her way, you know, through the people sitting on the floor and elbowed her way up into her mother’s lap. That’s where she belonged. She never thought to hesitate for a moment. She didn’t ask for permission. She wasn’t worried about anyone else. “This is my place. This is where I belong. I have a right to be there.” And so she climbed up into her mother’s embrace.
That’s the kind of directness and confidence Jesus calls upon us to embrace as we pray here. Isn’t it? It’s how He prayed, after all. This is what, no doubt, at least part of what so struck the disciples as they listened to their Lord prayer in Luke chapter 11 and made them say, “Lord, teach us to pray! You have an intimacy and a directness with Your Father that we feel we know almost nothing about. But we want it. Would You teach us?” And so He taught them to pray, teaches us to pray, just like His prayed. “Abba, Father.”
Now, that means by the way you can’t pray like this if you are not yet a Christian. You can’t do it. We are not automatically children of God. We become children of God only by faith in His only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, trusting Him to deliver us from sin and death and hell by the cross where He gave His life for sinners like us. But when you do trust in Him, you are adopted into His family and given all the rights and privileges of a child of God. You are an heir of God and a co-heir with Jesus Christ. And you can go to God as He, the Lord Jesus, went to God and call Him “Father. Father.” The prayer of a Christian is never obsequious or fawning. It isn’t fear-filled or timid. It climbs confidently into the Father’s embrace, knowing for sure this is where we belong. This is where you belong, believer in Jesus. If only we could grasp the reality of God’s Fatherhood and the wonder of our adoption as children of God through faith in Jesus Christ, I dare say our prayers would be utterly transformed. We would run at every opportunity into the presence of the Lord of glory, the King of the universe, the sovereign one before whom the angels veil their faces in modesty and reverent awe, and I can run into His throne room and call Him “Father.” I’d never fail to speak of Him, you would never fail to speak to Him of everything that burdens your heart. You would go to Him boldly and often if only we were more acquainted with our privilege. Children of God. “Behold what manner of love has been given to us that we should be called children of God.”
There is amazing intimacy here, isn’t there? But it is wedded, notice carefully as we close, to fitting reverence. He’s not simply our Father, but He is “Our Father in heaven,” transcendent, reigning and holy and high and lifted up. He’s not Daddy. He’s not. He’s not an earthly father, easily manipulated, twisted around a beloved child’s little finger, or an absentee who is never really there for his children, or an abuser who dominated and controlled and wounded them. No, no, He is our Father in heaven. To Him belong all the perfections of holiness. He is good, all the time! He never spitefully wounds or neglects or overlooks His beloved children. Never. He has all wisdom. He always knows what to do. Always. And He has all power, so that whatever the need, whatever the crisis, whatever the burden of your heart, no matter how enormous the weight of your sin, the power of God wedding to His love in Christ is more than a match.
If He were merely Father, we might abuse Him or fear Him or take Him for granted. And if He were merely the God of heaven, we could never come to Him, never begin to approach Him. But He is our transcendent Father, our almighty Abba. He is mighty and merciful. Near. He is near. And yet high and lifted up. He is eternally for you in Jesus Christ, and yet before whom we must all bow in holy awe and unceasing reverence. Because He is Father, His heart inclines toward His children. Because He is our Father in heaven, there is no impurity, no inadequacy, no inefficiency in His love. And all of that means that the first priority, if we ever hope to grow in the discipline and delight of prayer, is to become more thoroughly acquainted with our privileges, especially the greatest of them all – the privilege of our adoption as children of God. Your, your Father sits on the throne of heaven, reigning over all His creatures and all their actions! Your Father! And He invites you to come to Him, to call on Him, to rest in the embrace of His love and mercy. “Call to Me. Talk to Me. I am ready to hear you.” Full of infinite power wedded to limitless love. Why are we so reluctant, so inconstant in our prayers when the one we address is Abba Father?
The practice, the pattern and the privilege of prayer. Let’s bow our heads and call to Him together. Let us pray.
O God, as we think about prayer, as we hear our Master, the Lord Jesus, teach us about prayer, I, we together, we are cut to the heart. How threadbare and poor our best efforts at prayer seem. Forgive us for using prayer as notices, as sermons, as self-display. Forgive us for thinking that doing the work, saying the words, mouthing the routine will somehow gain us merit points in Your presence. Forgive us, O God, for our pride in prayer. Forgive us for our laziness in prayer. Forgive us for our neglect of prayer. Forgive us for the attempt some of us may have made, who are not yet Christians, to speak to You while our hearts are in rebellion against You. Together, every one of us, whether we have been Christians for decades or we are not yet believers, we now bow in Your presence and acknowledge that You are the mighty God who longs that sinners should come to Him and be reconciled to Him and speak to Him as Abba Father through faith in Your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so in repentance, we bow down and ask You to have mercy on us and make us people who delight to come to You, to climb into Your embrace in the certain, sure knowledge that that’s where we belong, knowing that we have Your heart and Your ear. Would You do that in every one of us, we pray? For Jesus’ sake, amen.