Here we go, Matthew chapter 6, beginning in verse 5. You'll follow along with me.
"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. 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.'
So, the first thing we want to understand here is, Jesus is saying, "When you pray," not "if you pray." The understanding is that for those of us who are followers of Christ, who are people of God, prayer is a normal part of what we do. It is a normal part of our daily life. It is meant to be ongoing and continual. So, one of the first things that I want you to do is simply evaluate what your prayer life looks like today. Is it vibrant, or is it non-existent? Is it crisis-based, or are there other times you pray? And when you pray, is it a drive-by prayer where you put in your order and go to collect a few seconds later, or is it a deep, meaningful conversation?
Those are the points of evaluation I want you to consider this morning as we talk. When you pray, it's not "if"; it's "when" you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners. The word "hypocrites" is kind of interesting when you study it in the original language—the connotation is that of an actor, someone who puts on a mask to play a part other than who they really are. And so, that's the terminology that Jesus is using. These Pharisees, these religious leaders who stand out there and pray for public accolades, were hypocrites. They were praying like they had it all figured out when it came to the things of God, and yet they really didn't. And so he's pointing out, don't be like them. This is not for public consumption.
When you pray, now don't get me wrong, there are times where you may be asked to pray publicly. There are times where that is appropriate. But what we're looking at is the heart. Are you praying publicly, or are you putting on a show for others to watch? Or are you communicating with your heavenly Father? There's a difference in those two things.
Now, let's keep going here. So 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. And that was the issue last week if you'll remember with giving—if you're giving for public consumption, so others can see that you've been giving, then you've received your reward. There's nothing beyond that. There is no spiritual significance beyond that. You've gotten everything that's coming to you. And that's the point—if you're praying for other people's applause, then if you get those applause, that's all there is. That's not the purpose of prayer. That's not what God designed it for.
Notice what Jesus tells us here. "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. So a couple of points we want to point out, going back to this idea of how the hypocrites prayed. Prayer is a personal thing. And that's your first "P"—it's personal. It's not for everybody else. It's not for my neighbor. It's not for my wife. It's not for my kids. It's not for anybody's applause. It's my communication with God. It's personal. It has to be personal because this is God's invitation to come and commune with Him in fellowship.
But secondarily, notice what he says. "When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret." Prayer is private. One of the reasons so many people struggle with their prayer life is they don't block off a place and a time to pray. "Well, I pray all my way to work." That's one, as you're avoiding the other 120 idiots around you, right? You can't concentrate on prayer. And the whole point that we want to understand what prayer being private is, it's a conversation. Your deepest conversations are held in private. Prayer should be your deepest conversation.
The other thing about privacy is, privacy means I'm ready to listen. I come with expectation. Now, some of what I'm going to talk about today is going to be preaching to the choir, so make no mistake, I'm preaching to myself as well. How many times do we go to prayer, but we're not even ready to receive what God may have for us? Here's what I mean. How many times are you praying over something significant in your life, and you don't even have a notepad and a pen with you? You weren't planning on hearing anything. You were going to place your order, right?
The whole issue here is, are we coming to commune with God? Am I coming to really hear from Him? Am I coming to really understand His heart for me? Or am I treating Him like the drive-thru at Starbucks? Prayer is private. I need a private place. I need a private time. In my household, the best time to pray is around 5:30 to 6:00 in the morning because I'm the only one up. Nobody's distracting me. Clients aren't calling. My computer's not going off. It's personal. It's private. It's a time where I can concentrate. It's a time where I've got my Bible open in front of me. I've got a notepad next to me. I'm ready to hear what God wants to say to me. It's not just a one-way communication.
And that was always the intent. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door. Shut out the distractions. If you're praying with this thing in front of you on vibrate, or ringing, or lit up, your prayer life is going to be horrible because you know what's gonna happen. As soon as you start praying, it doesn't matter what time of day, this thing is gonna go off. "Oh, it's what he commented on Facebook." Sorry, Jesus, but that's the way we do it. Shut the door. Shut the door. You hear people talk about a prayer closet. Go hide and pray. That's the point because it's in those moments that you get quiet, and it's in those moments you can hear, and it's in those moments you can begin to write down what God is saying to you. I find in my own life so many times God is answering my prayers. I'm just not listening. The process would be a whole lot shorter if I would slow down, shut the door, and be quiet and listen.
Let's notice what else he says here. "And your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Verse 7, "And when you pray, do not keep up empty phrases as the Gentiles do." Your prayer needs to be purposeful. The real question is, why are you here? Here's one that most of us can relate to. I grew up in a home where a prayer was said over every meal. Anybody else relate to that? A few years ago, though, I realized that there were times I was praying over a meal, and I wasn't even thinking about what I was praying. I was just rattling off words. "Lord, thank you for this meal and bless it to our bodies." And I'm still guilty of that at times. And the truth is, if I really searched my heart, I am neither thankful nor am I concerned about how well I'm going to be nourished. I'm going through the motions. Ouch, right?
And that's what Jesus is warning us about. Don't rote memorize and spit out words that seem righteous and holy. Give thought to what you're doing. You're in the presence of a holy, mighty God. Why are you there? If you're going to say grace over your food, take 30 seconds and think about what you're getting ready to say. Don't spit out meaningless prayers. Here's the danger. We're going to get into what's known as the Lord's Prayer. I memorized it as a kid. I know people that will tell me, "I pray that every day." Really? Do you think about it, or do you just spit it off like other facts? It's easy to do. It's easy to do, but it doesn't take the place of meaningful conversation. I've been married for 30 years. Can you imagine if I sat down with my wife and had the same conversation every day?
Now with my kids, sometimes it seems like that, right? Clean your room, clean your room, clean your room. Take a little trash, right? But if you did that with your wife, what kind of relationship would you have? Or with your husband. Dead, really. "Don't you have anything else to say to me? Is that all there is?" We do the same thing with God at times. So, notice what he's saying. Be purposeful. When you go to pray, why are you there? What is it that you really need to be talking with God about? What's the purpose of that conversation? I'm not just here to spit words at you, God. I really want to know your heart.
Notice what else he says to us. "They think that they will be heard for their many words." Don't be like them, "for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him." I really want you to lock into that. I have a saying that I share with people sometimes. God knows more about leading you than you know about following Him. All right. I really want you to hear that. He knows where he's headed more than you know how to get there. Right? There's never a time, see, we tend to pray by crisis. Anybody relate? Anyone wanna be honest that you relate by crisis, right? There's never a time where God says, "Well, I didn't know you were going through that. Are you kidding me? Where have I been?" He already knows. He already knows what you need before you ever ask. He already knows where he's leading you. He already knows where the provision is coming from.
That's the thing I marvel about. One of the things I look forward to when I get to heaven is to see all those times where I thought my goose was cooked, and God was already putting the answer in motion long before the heat ever got turned on. And every now and then, I get a glimpse of those times in life, and I go, "Wow, that's cool." He was already answering the prayer before I even knew I needed to pray it. That's the promise of this word.
Now, I want you to think about that. If God's not caught off guard by your crises, if you could remove that burden out of your prayer life, how would your prayer times change? If it wasn't always about you and your crisis of the moment, how would your prayer life change if it was really about intimacy in a relationship with your Heavenly Father? How would your prayer life change, and say, "I'm in trouble again. Haggai, bail me out of this one"? It would be revolutionary.
What Jesus is really laying out for us are the keys to a powerful prayer life, and this is one of those keys. Your father knows what you need before you ask him. He already knows. He's already got the plan in place. So, Jesus gives us the pattern. Okay, well, if he already knows what I need, and he wants me to pray, then what should I be praying about? What does it need to look like? So he gives us this pattern, and I want you to understand it's a pattern. It's not for you—there's another "P" word—to parrot, to mimic back. That's not what it's for. It's a pattern. What does this pattern look like? And it starts with this.
"Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be your name." And the reason he starts there is because you've got to put things in the right perspective. You have to remember that God is still on the throne, and you're not. You have to remember that God is still on the throne, and the crisis of the moment is just a crisis of the moment. It's not the end of the world. You have to remember that He's the creator of all things, He knows all things, He sees all things. It changes the perspective of prayer. When I'm reminded of just how big my God is, my challenges of the moment seem to diminish very quickly. And the more I focus on His glory and His might and His power and His sovereignty, the more that fills up my vision. That becomes more of what I see, and I begin to see less of the challenges of my life. Does that make sense?
"Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be your name." I've got to have Him in the right place. If I'm treating Him like the Starbucks drive-through, He's not in the right place. He's not allowed in the genie. He's God Almighty. He needs to be in the right place. He moves on to say, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." What is being said in this pattern is the priority, God, it's not really about what I want today; it's about what you want. If you'll remember when Jesus was preparing to be arrested so he could be put on trial, so he could be beaten and tortured and put on the cross and put to death, he was in the garden and he was praying. He said, "If there's any way this cup can pass for me." If there's any way. He was looking ahead. "If I can skip the cross and the beatings, and if there's any way." But then he said, "Not my will be done, but yours." It's not about what I want. It's not about what I feel. It's about what you're doing, and that's what I want. I want you to be exalted in my circumstance, in my situation, in my crisis of the moment. I need you to reign supreme in this situation, even if it's not the outcome I'm asking for. Think about that. Oftentimes, we pray for the sick.
My daughter-in-law's grandmother died about a week ago. As much as the family would have loved for her to stay, the ultimate healing for her was to go. Sometimes that's the tension between "not my will be done, but yours." I don't want the pain, and yet what's best is the ultimate healing with you. That's one we can understand fairly easily. The selfish side of me says, "Hey, make it. Make them well. Make them whole. Make them stay." But the spiritual side of me says, "That's home. And I don't want to hold them back." "Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." What he is really saying is, "God, I don't want my plans to supersede your plans. I don't want to get off course from what it is you're doing in my life and what it is you're doing in the world around me, because I realize there's a much bigger picture at work than just what I see. And I want to be in line with your will."
Here's one of the things that makes prayer powerful: when you start praying in alignment with the will of God, guess what happens? Oh, this is audience participation. You can speak up. Nobody? Come on. Prayer gets answered, right? And it gets answered in big ways. Why? Because I'm not praying against the current. I'm flowing in the current. One of the most revolutionary things that I began to implement in my own prayer life is when people asked me, "Would you pray for me, Pastor?" I will actually stop first and ask God, "What do you want me to pray here?" And then I pray. And it's not always what they're asking for, but it's always what they need. And I've seen God do amazing things in my prayer life just from that simple step of stopping and saying, "What do you want me to pray? I don't want to be praying against your will. I want to be praying in harmony with your will because you've already got this figured out. Show me what I need to be praying. Adjust me. Adjust my mind. Adjust my thoughts."
Then he comes down to, "Give us this day our daily bread." He brings us to this point of provision. Most of us, if I dare say, and if we were honest, we start and stop at provision. And church lingo, sometimes the church prayer meeting is called the organ recital. And the reason it's called the organ recital is because prayer time at church often can just dive into, "Let's pray for so-and-so's knee. Somebody's got a bad heart. Somebody's got cancer. Somebody's got this." Those are all important things. We just don't move beyond that to where we're not praying for all the people who are perishing in our world. We're not praying for spiritual depth. We're not praying for the things that are the heart of God. Because I can pray for healing all day long, but the reality is anybody gets healed, still going to die. So am I really praying for the right things at times?
So we have to begin to seek the kingdom of God. In fact, what's interesting in this chapter, we'll get to it in a few weeks, Jesus said, "Hey, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and then all these other things that you're consumed with will be added to you." Seek first the kingdom. But notice here, "Give us this day our daily bread." He didn't say ask for tomorrow's bread, next week's bread, next year's bread, two years from now is bread. Because part of what he's going to tell us later on in this chapter is, "Don't worry about tomorrow. There's enough worry for itself today. You can't handle tomorrow's worries today. All right. One day at a time. Give us today's bread. Give me what I need today."
Now here's the thing I want you to see about the pattern. The steps that he had us go through—first, before we ever asked for anything. The first step was to put God in the right place. "God, you are on the throne. You are my provider. You are the one who cares for me. You are the one who knows all of my needs. Hallowed be your name, God. I'm going to ask for things, but I don't want to ask for anything that is not in alignment with your will. And so your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
And now that I've got the right perspective, and now that I have the right priority, it's time to ask for provision. "Here's what I need today. Here's what I need today." Now, is that saying you don't pray for things that are ahead of you? That's not what it's saying. But you can't be consumed with those things. The priority is the moment. You are in the presence of God Almighty. Discuss what's happening right now.
Then he moves on, "Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors." I used to think this was kind of an interesting thing because I kind of wrestled with, well, shouldn't I have already asked forgiveness of my sins before I come to prayer? I mean, if I know that I need to ask forgiveness for something, shouldn't I do that? That's a barrier to my prayer life. But then I had this realization one morning. I was sitting by a window watching the sunlight come through, and you can see the dust floating around the sun. And then you can look on the coffee table that was cleaned off yesterday, and it already had a layer of dust on it that you wouldn't see if it wasn't under the sunlight. And then it, you know, the light bulb clicked on. Oh, as I'm exalting God, as I'm saying, "Your will be done, not mine," I'm moving deeper into his presence. The light of his presence is going to shine in more places of my life. And in that process, I'm going to become aware of things that are a hindrance in my relationship with Him at the moment.
I likened it to this. In the prayer time, God begins to open the closet door and shine the flashlight in and go, "See that? That's got to go." "Oh yeah, that does need to go." Right? This whole idea of "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." When you're deep in your relationship with God, when you are in his presence deeply, He's going to begin to show you relationships that need mending. Here's a place where you haven't forgiven. You need to let go of that because it's poisoning you. And so, this is a housecleaning process that God takes us through as we're in his presence. He begins to shine that spotlight on different areas of our life as we move through this prayer time.
And he brings us here to protection. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Now, you may struggle with that one a bit. "Lead us not into temptation." What? Would God ever do that? Well, we know from Jesus' own experience that after he was baptized, the Holy Spirit led him into the wilderness to be tested. There are times your faith is tested. The promise is there's always an emergency exit. The danger is, most of the time when we find ourselves falling to temptation, it's not that we fell. It's that we kept walking past the exits. So my least favorite saying in the church world is when somebody says, "Well, I fell into sin." No, you didn't fall into sin. You walked past each and every exit door and kept going. And if we get real honest, most of the time, you wanted to go to whatever the temptation was. The devil knows your hot buttons. He pushes them. What I'm really asking God to do here is, "Hey, shove me out the exit door if I'm too stupid not to go there myself." Right? Put some barriers in my path. End relationships that are harmful to me. So that's a lot of what we're doing here because as I'm asking God to make me whole, he's not just going to point out things within. He's going to point out things in my environment. "See that relationship there? That one's trouble for you because you're not willing to resist that temptation. You need to change your friendship. You might need to sever the places you're going on Friday night because you keep walking into sin. And then can't understand why God's not bailing you out." "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil." Remember, God knows what you need before you ever ask for it. He knows more about leading you than you know about following him. So, "lead us not into temptation but deliver us." There's always an exit. Always an exit. The question is, do you want to take the exit or not?
So, here's the thing we want to land on. What Jesus is doing here in this message is he's really teaching us how to pray. And it may be different from the way you've been praying. The big "P" here is, it's personal. And when you make it personal, it becomes powerful because it's a real conversation at that point. It's not just me spinning off a prayer that I've memorized or I've said all these years. But I'm really giving thought to what that conversation is. "God, I'm here in front of you right now for this reason, and I want your will to be done. And I want you to reveal things in my life that are holding me back in my relationship with you. And you know my hot buttons as well as the enemy does, and I want you to help me find the exit. And if I'm too stupid to see it, push me out the door."
Alright. We sang a song this morning that I love. One of the lines in it, "This is how I fight my battles." And here's the line that I love. "It looks like I'm surrounded. I'm surrounded by you." The scriptural basis for that line actually comes out of Second Kings. Elijah the Prophet was surrounded by an army that was there to kill him and his circle. And the servant was, of course, a little concerned. "Oh no, they're gonna kill us before the day is over." And Elisha said, "Lord, open his eyes that he can see." And if you'll remember the account, his eyes were opened, and around the army that was surrounding him, he could see an angelic army, a flaming fire surrounding them.
God knows what you need before you ever ask for it. The surrounding army is there, even when you don't see it. The exit is always available, even if it's not readily apparent. As they tell you on the airplane, the exit could be behind you. It could be over the wing. Here. But there's an exit. Make no mistake.
