Praying God's Way

Here’s a true story you can probably relate to as a New Yorker. You know how hard it is to find parking in Manhattan. Well, one day a preacher had to go into Manhattan for an appointment and he couldn’t find a parking spot. So finally, in frustration, he parked in a no-parking zone, and he left a note under the windshield wiper of his car. It said “I have circled this block ten times. If I don’t park here, I’ll miss an important appointment. Forgive us our trespasses.”

When the minister returned to his car an hour later, he found a $50 parking ticket under the windshield wiper, and attached to it was a note from the police officer who issued it. The note said “I have circled this block for ten years. If I don’t give you a ticket, I’ll lose my job. Lead us not into temptation.”

Well, both those men were quoting from the Lord’s Prayer, and like many people today, they were misusing it. In fact, it seems that there is nothing more prone to abuse and misconception than the subject of prayer. People have the wierdest ideas about prayer. Maybe that’s why Jesus spent a long time talking about it in the Sermon on the Mount. Let’s look at what he said…

Matthew 6:5-8 And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is going to give us a workshop on prayer. He’s going to tell us three things we’d better be aware of when we pray, and then he’s going to give us a model prayer to serve as a pattern for our prayers. Let’s look at those three things first.

1. When you pray, don’t play to the crowd.

Anyone who has ever prayed in public knows what a temptation it is to pray for the approval of the listening audience. You can suddenly find yourself using prayer as a vehicle to impress people; a kind of public relations ploy to make others think that you’re really spiritual. There’s nothing more satisfying to your ego than to have someone come up to you after you’ve prayed and say “My, what a beautiful prayer that was.” Even more gratifying to your pride is to learn that other people say about you “Boy, he sure can pray up a storm” or words to that effect.

Prayer is one of the highest things that man is called to do. But as holy and sacred as the act of prayer is, Jesus warned us that our pride is always standing by to see how it can muscle in on the action. And that is especially true when we pray in the presence of others.

Whenever we pray in public, (and by public, I mean anywhere that other people can observe us. It may be in church, or it may be at home, or it may be elsewhere.) we are entering the arena of temptation. Many years ago, a famous preacher was invited to preach at a church in Boston. Before he got up to speak, one of the leaders of the church led in prayer. Reflecting on that prayer years later, the preacher said “Never has such an eloquent prayer been offered to a Boston audience.”

He hit the nail on the head. That prayer had been offered to the audience, not to God. And that’s precisely what we do when we try to impress people with our prayers. We’re praying to them, not to God.

Let me tell you that I’m glad, when Billy Graham came to town last year, that they didn’t ask me to open or close any of those services in prayer. God knows I couldn’t have handled praying in front of 20,000 people! I would have made a fool of myself in an attempt to impress the crowd.

Rob Portlock is a well-known Christian cartoonist. He once drew a cartoon where the pastor of a church had prepared a life-size cardboard cutout silhouette of himself kneeling in prayer. He placed this cutout prominently in the window of his study so that passers by could see it. But meanwhile, the cartoonist showed the pastor sneaking out of his study to go play golf.

That was a funny cartoon, but it hurt when you laugh because there was so much truth to it. We all in one way or another have made cardboard cutouts that show ourselves to be more spiritual than we really are. Nowhere is this more true than in the area of prayer. And the pitfalls of pride are many.

In our clumsy attempts to be eloquent, we can unconsciously adopt a special “prayer language”. We can find ourselves using spiritual jargon or holy clichés or a tone of voice that we would never consider using in everyday conversation. Many people slip back three hundred years in time and use the King James English when they pray, complete with Thees and Thous. We may find ourselves patterning our mannerisms and our voices and even our posture to imitate great men and women of prayer - all in an effort to impress each other with just how fervent and sincere and spiritual we are.

I can remember when as a young Christian, I learned that when you were praying with others, you looked more earnest and sincere if you bent over and put your head in your hands, and if you were wearing glasses, you always took them off - presumably to wipe the tears that you would generate in prayer. And if you were praying in a group, it could become almost a contest to see who could pray the best prayer.

Jesus said that this is the stuff we’ve got to watch out for. We’ve got to guard against letting our pride take over our prayer life. And when we do anything in prayer to call attention to ourselves, that’s exactly what is happening. Pride is taking over. We’re playing to the crowd instead of praying to God. When you find yourself thinking more about how you are praying than what you are praying, you know you’re in trouble.

So what’s the remedy? Don’t pray in public? No. That’s not an option. The Bible teaches us to pray with one another in the Body of Christ. The solution is given to us in v.6

Matthew 6:6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

2. The antidote to prideful public praying is to do a lot of private praying.

Let me try to illustrate this from the world of international diplomacy. In 1986, President Reagan had his first summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva. There were big public sessions and receptions, with hundreds of press and photographers present. Everyone was polite and reserved and proper. But at one point in the talks, Reagan drew Gorbachev aside, and they walked down to a little cottage by the lake - just the two of them, with their translators. No advisors or other diplomats went with them.

The President and the General Secretary sat by a fireside and talked man to man. One hour went by, then two. The aides bit their fingernails nervously as they waited. But out of that encounter in private, in secret, literally, was forged a relationship of trust and understanding that could be have been gained no other way. From that day on, how Reagan and Gorbachev conducted themselves in public was shaped by what happened in that little cabin.

In contrast to that encounter in Geneva was another encounter that took place just last January between Secretary of State Baker and the Foreign Minister of Iraq, Tariq Azziz. The two men met at the height of the Persian Gulf crisis, with armies massed on both sides of the border of Saudi Arabia. The talks did not go well. Although they sat at a table face to face, the two sides were more interested in generating world support for their positions than they were in really talking to each other. So no real communication took place.

Prayer is a matter between you and God alone. It’s an act of communication between two individuals who have cultivated a relationship of trust and understanding. You can’t communicate with someone when you’re playing to the grandstand. That’s why if public praying is all you do, then you’ll do it very poorly. Your public praying will be nothing more than public posturing unless it is undergirded by a vibrant private prayer life.

A pertinent question we all ought to ask ourselves is: Do I pray more when I’m alone in private than I do in public? If the answer to that question is no, then we’re in danger of becoming the hostages of our pride when we do pray in public.

Our public prayer ought to be the overflow of a strong secret prayer life. When we pray to God in secret, that’s where we really learn how to pray. There’s no place for spiritually showing off when we get with God one on one. If we do a lot of private praying, our prayers will be sincere and simple, and that will carry over to our public prayer life.

3. Quantity doesn’t make for quality in prayer.

Matthew 6:7-8 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Somewhere along the line, we’ve come up with a kind of mathematical notion of prayer. We’ve got this prayer equation that says that the probability of an answer to prayer is in direct proportion to the total number of words prayed.

Taken to its extreme, you have the prayer wheels of the Buddhist monks of Tibet, where they write their prayers on slips of paper and attach them to wheels. Then they spin the wheels, thinking that for each time around, that prayer goes up to heaven.

Whether it’s the prayer wheels of the Buddhists, or the rosary beads of the Catholics, or the all night prayer meetings of the evangelicals, we’ve got this idea that if we can somehow tie up God’s switchboard with the quantity of our prayers, He’s got to answer us. We’ve put a numerical value on fervency.

Donald Carson tells the following story about a church he pastored, which could be true of any church.

“In the church where I ministered, it was a regular custom in our midweek prayer meeting for the men and boys to go off and pray in one area of the building and the women and girls in another. Some churches, of course, have much smaller breakdowns. There are advantages to smaller groups - for a start, more people can participate. But there are also disadvantages. There is a genuine need for times when the whole church family prays together, partly to promote unity and partly so that each group within the church learns of the spiritual concerns of the others.

In any case, I had inherited this segregated situation and felt it was only one option, not a necessary part of the church’s tradition. So one night I suggested that we all meet to pray together, at least for that week. After the meeting was over, one good man came to me deeply troubled. He felt we had wasted time because “not as much praying could be done”. It was true, of course, that not as many individuals led in prayer out loud; but there was no reason why just as many as ever could not have prayed. And in any case, the sheer volume of words is not the crucial factor, scarcely even an important factor.”

Someone has said that our prayers, to be more effective, need to be cut off at each end and set on fire in the middle. We must get away from this idea that a long prayer is an effective prayer. It isn’t Biblical.

Ecclesiastes 5:2 Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.

Some of the most poignant and effective prayers in the Bible were a whole lot shorter than when some of us say grace before meals! Like King Jehoshaphat when he prayed “Lord, we don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” Or Nehemiah, who prayed in the split second before he had to answer the question of a Persian king. Or Peter, who cried out as he was sinking beneath the waves “Lord, save me!” Those prayers weren’t very eloquent. They weren’t full of polished phrases. They weren’t lengthy. But God heard them and answered them.

Martin Luther said “The fewer words, the better prayer.”

Jesus said that long, repetitious prayers are really a sign that you don’t know God. That’s how the pagans pray. The pagans think that by their endless repetition, God will hear their prayers. They’ve reduced God to the level of a telephone answering machine that records the number of calls on a particular subject and dispenses answers accordingly. It’s an insult to his personhood.

We need to remember that when we’re talking to God, we’re talking to our heavenly Father who knows what we need even before we ask Him. So let’s not bore Him with the details. There’s nothing wrong with praying for a long time, just as long as our heart is in it.

John Bunyan, the man who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress said “In prayer, it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

Prayer is a constant battle. We can so easily abuse it and misuse it. When we’re not using prayer to impress our friends with our spirituality, we’re trying to reduce prayer to some mumbo-jumbo magic formula that works automatically.

Prayer is simply the act of communication between man and God. Prayer happens best when we get our minds off ourselves, and off the mechanics, and focus on God. That’s what Jesus is going to show his disciples how to do in the Lord’s Prayer. But we don’t have time to look at that this week.