Praying God's Way

This is a true story. One day a minister had to go into New York City for an appointment. When he got there, he couldn’t find a parking place anywhere. So finally, in frustration, he parked in a no-parking zone, but he left a note under the windshield wiper of his car. The note 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 about an hour later, he found a $50 parking ticket under the windshield wiper. Attached to the summons was a note from the police officer who wrote it. The note said “I have circled this block for ten years. If I don’t give you a ticket, I may lose my job. Lead us not into temptation.”

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 misuse than prayer. Perhaps that’s why Jesus spent such 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 about prayer—two “don’ts” and a “do”. Then he’s going to give us a model prayer that can serve as a pattern for our prayers.

We’re going to look at that model prayer—which we call the Lord’s prayer—next week. But this week, I’d like you to consider those two “don’ts” and a “do”.

1. Don’t pray for public approval

Matthew 6:5 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.

When you pray in the presence of others, there is a great temptation to pray for the approval of the listening audience. You can suddenly find yourself using prayer as a vehicle to impress people. You can turn that simple act of communication with God into a kind of public relations ploy to make others think that you’re really spiritual.

Prayer is one of the highest activities that we can ever engage in. 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 an arena of temptation.

Many years ago, a famous preacher was invited to preach at a church in Boston. Just 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 essentially 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 the audience, not to God.

A few years ago, I was involved in the Billy Graham crusade on Long Island. Every night for a week, we saw upwards of 18–20,000 people jammed into the Nassau Coliseum.

Each night, they asked one of the local pastors to open the meeting in prayer. They didn’t ask me, and it’s a good thing, because I probably couldn’t have handled praying in front of 20,000 people without yielding to the temptation to pray so as to impress the crowd.

There are a lot of ways that you can turn public prayer into a performance. You can adopt a special “prayer language”, using words and expressions that you would never use in everyday conversation. Or you may find yourself using a tone of voice when you pray that is different from that you would normally use.

Here’s an example. I’m sure that in many churches around the country this morning, you’ll hear prayers something like this being offered… “Heavenly Father, we just want to lift up before you, O God, those who are laid aside on beds of illness, Lord, that thou wouldst heal them, Father by Thy mighty power, O Lord.”

Have you ever heard a prayer like that? Sure you have—lots of times! Does it strike you as strange that the one doing the praying uses God’s name five times in one sentence? Would you talk to anyone else like that?

Or that suddenly the one doing the praying steps into a time machine and is transported back to the 16th century in his grammar and syntax?

Or that instead of praying simply “Lord, please heal the sick”, he uses the long and flowery “we lift up before you those who are laid aside on beds of illness.”

Now please hear me well. I’m not trying to pick on anybody, because I’ve prayed those kind of prayers myself—long, windy, Shakespearean soliloquys.

I’m simply saying that we’ve got to ask ourselves the question: “Why do we pray like that?” The Lord himself suggests that we may be doing it to impress other people—impress them that we really know how to pray; impress them that we’re really in communion with God.

There are other ways to impress people with your prayer life.

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. It’s so easy to make a sort of cardboard cutout to show yourself to be more spiritual than you really are. You can go around dropping little hints that you are spiritual.

For example, you might be in a Bible study group. And you might say something like “Hey everybody, when I was having my quiet time this morning, I came across a really good verse.”

Isn’t that neat? Now everybody knows that you had your quiet time this morning! Of course, what they don’t know is that this morning is the first time you’ve had your quiet time in weeks!

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.

So what’s the remedy? Don’t pray in public? No. After all, the Bible teaches us to pray with one another in the Body of Christ. Jesus give us the remedy in v.6, in the form of a “do”.

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. If you want to learn true humility in public prayer, DO build a private prayer life.

Back in 1986, when the Soviet Union was still the world’s #2 superpower, 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 and friendship that could be have been gained no other way.

From that day on, the way that Reagan and Gorbachev conducted themselves in public was based on what happened in that little cabin in secret.

When Jesus says go into your room, he’s using a word that means “inner room” or “bedroom” or “storeroom”. (The KJV has “closet” and that’s accurate, except that it doesn’t necessarily mean a small room.)

The idea is that this is not a public room. This isn’t the living room or the drawing room or the family room of your house. It isn’t a place where you are likely to encounter other people.

And Jesus says, when you get in there, shut the door. Leave the world outside. It’s just you and God, one on one. Because prayer is a matter between you and God alone. It’s an act of communication between two people who have cultivated a relationship of trust and understanding.

You can’t truly communicate with someone when you’re playing to the grandstand—when you’re really more interested in what some third party thinks of what you’re saying.

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 if you are not also spending time alone with God in secret.

Ask yourself this question: Do I pray more when I’m alone in private than I do in public? If the answer to that question is no, then you’re in danger of falling into the pitfall of pride when you do pray in public.

Our public prayers ought to be the overflow of a strong secret prayer life. When you pray to God in secret, that’s where you really learn how to pray. Because when you go one-on-one with God, you can’t show off—you can’t play to the grandstand.

Your prayers will become sincere and simple, and that will carry over to your public prayer life.

There’s one more DON’T that Jesus wants to warn us about. It’s found in verse 7…

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.

3. DON’T pray empty words

Somewhere along the line, we’ve gotten the idea that prayer is like a statistical formula—the probability of an answer to prayer is in direct proportion to the total number of words prayed.

Taken to its extreme, that notion leads to the prayer wheels of the Buddhist monks of Tibet. Those monks write their prayers on slips of paper and attach them to prayer 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’re always trying to put a numerical value on fervency. We think that quantity equals quality.

The word “babbling” that Jesus uses in verse 7 is the word “battalogeo”. It comes from two words—“batta” which means empty, and “logeo”, which means to speak or to say. When you babble, you’re literally saying empty words.

Words alone do not a prayer make. Those words need to be filled up with heart content. 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. 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.”

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 effective prayers in the Bible were extremely brief.

King Jehoshaphat prayed “Lord, we don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” Nehemiah prayed in the split second before he had to answer the question of King Artaxerxes. The Apostle Peter, when he was sinking beneath the waves, cried out just three words: “Lord, save me!”

None of those prayers were eloquent. They were not full of well-crafted phrases and delivered with rhetorical flourishes. And they certainly were not lengthy. But they were effective because they were offered up with heartfelt sincerity. And God heard them and answered them.

We would do well to remember Martin Luther, who said “The fewer words, the better prayer.”

Jesus said that if you pray long, repetitious, empty prayers, it is simply proof 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.

But they’re not treating him as a person when they pray that way. They’ve reduced God to the level of a telephone answering machine that simply records the number of calls on a particular subject and dispenses answers accordingly. That’s an insult to God.

Jesus says when you’re talking to God, you’re talking to your heavenly Father who knows what you need even before you ask Him. So don’t ever think that you have to win his ear by praying lots of words.

Prayer is a constant battle. We can so easily abuse it and misuse it. We play games with it. We try to use prayer to impress people with our spirituality. We forget to build a private prayer life. We try to reduce prayer to a 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—off the mechanics—and focus on God.

And that’s what Jesus went on to teach his disciples how to do. He gave them the Lord’s Prayer to serve as a model. So come back and we’ll see what He taught them next week.