Matthew 6:5-15 How The Christian Ought To Pray

In this sixth chapter, Jesus’ teaching is especially focused on the Christian’s need to live as those aware they are in the presence of God. We find this repeated notion in verses four, six, and eighteen: God is a God who sees what is done in secret. Or, to use the language I used last week, our hearts are so transparent to God that no motive or intent can be hidden from Him. Our religious works, therefore, performed in faith and obedience to God’s will, must be done out of pure, holy, godly motives; there is no fooling God.

As the German theologian Adolf von Harnack said, "Christianity is a very simple but sublime thing: to live in time and for eternity under the eye of God and by His help." As people who have received such a salvation of sheer grace through the blood of Christ as we have, it is imperative that we are rightly motivated in all of our works; not to perform them for men, but to be pleasing to God. This is exactly what our Lord Jesus is teaching in this present context. Christ says you, believer, must, against the hypocrite, be motivated not by man’s praises, but must have an inner righteousness that cares only for the glory of the Father.

In this chapter, Jesus applies a principle stated in Matthew 6:1 to the three key spheres of Jewish religious life at the time: giving to the poor, prayer, and fasting. This morning, we consider prayer as a standalone unit.

Prayer. What is prayer? And how should the Christian pray? These are two questions that we spend far too little time thinking about. Prayer, says another, is "the expression of holy desires to God in the name of Christ, which by the operation of the Holy Spirit, proceed from a regenerated heart." You see, prayer is at the zenith of all spiritual life that a person can perform; yet it is that which our lives probably reflect a great disregard for.

Years ago, I wrote a short essay on the subject of prayer and I suggested that it is on prayer where Christians often become as "practical atheists". Why is it that we say we believe in God? Why is it that we say we follow the Lord Jesus Christ, but then we neglect the greatest means given by God to express that belief: prayer?

As Martin Lloyd-Jones says, "Everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer." He is not saying that prayer is difficult in itself, because it is just the opposite; it is so, so simple. It is just that prayer is so counter to what we make the Christian faith out to be. We think the Christian life is all about doing things for God, building things for God, and God says no. First, faith is about resting; it is about knowing, seeking, and asking. True prayer is a born-again believer’s commitment of mind and heart to both meditate upon God and communicate all of our being to Him in humble reliance.

In the words of Genesis 4:26, prayer is to "call upon the name of the Lord." The Heidelberg Catechism puts it this way: "Prayer is the most important part of thankfulness that God requires of us." If prayer is as important to the Christian life as this, then how should we pray?

I think many of us treat prayer like a game of ding-dong ditch. God calls us to pray earnestly and persistently about things in our lives, yet we often come to the door, knock once, and immediately run away before the answer, before the blessing comes, before we enter into deep communion with the Lord.

So I ask you: what good would that kind of prayer have done for the missionary William Carey, who spent eight years on the mission field before he baptised his first convert to Christ? And yet, through all that, he still said this: "The world appears little, the promise is great, and God an all-sufficient portion." He was a man of prayer.

Here, Jesus teaches us the right way to pray by using a striking contrast. In verse five, we see how the hypocrite prays; then, in verses six through fifteen, we see how the Christian prays.

How The Hypocrite Prays

Read again for how the hypocrite prays, verse five: "When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, so that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward in full." You see, their prayers are wrongfully motivated. There must have been something of a shock factor when Jesus first spoke these words. He is, of course, exposing the religious elite of Judaism in the day. He says those eloquent and seemingly righteous prayers that you hear them offer in the synagogues are not what you suppose. Jesus is saying they are performance fluff; they are motivated by the applause of man.

In Luke 18:9-17, Jesus tells the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, which perfectly illustrates what Jesus means here. It says there, "The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people, swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all I get.’" You see, friends, that is no way to pray. What do we see in a prayer like that of what Jesus said in Matthew 5:3, "Blessed are the poor in spirit"? A prayer like that reveals spiritual bankruptcy; at best, it is fraudulent entertainment of men. Prayer, by very definition, is man before God as an audience of one, but the hypocrite does not really pray to God; he prays to be heard and to invoke admiration from others.

How The Christian Prays

So that is how the hypocrite prays. Now, let us see how the Christian prays from verse six onwards. First, we want to see the two principles here. The first one is in verse six, and it is that praying in secret is the secret. Why is this? Well, prayer in secret removes the temptation to perform for others.

Praying In Secret Is The Secret

Now, as before last week, we must not stretch Jesus’ words here. As we saw last week, there are times when our religious works must be done in front of others, even though Jesus says things like, "Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." We get that, but the main point Jesus is making is simply that we do not do these works of ours so that people will notice. It is the same here.

So Jesus says in verse six, "But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door." Does He mean that no prayer is to be offered in public? Is this how we avoid the hypocrisy of the Pharisee’s prayer, by only praying in secret? Well, I might say to begin with, it might be. Maybe you do find that you are so conscientious of people listening to your prayer that you become disconnected from communing with the Father in prayer, and perhaps it would be best that you only pray in private. But otherwise, no, the point is not that you should only pray in secret, but that you should not pray to seek the ear of man.

The great principle, then, is this: private prayer is a litmus test of our desire to truly pray to God. If you cannot pray to God in private, you have no business praying to God in public; none whatsoever. Private prayer tests whether we have any genuine interest in God at all. A prayerless Christian is perhaps no Christian at all; it is that serious. Prayer in secret is a demonstration of a right motivation, because it is just you and the Lord. The text applies itself here in a very straightforward manner. As another has put it, "Prayer is the thermometer of our spiritual condition." Private prayer is the purest reflection of whether our souls are yearning for God and greater degrees of His presence in our lives. Prayer is living out, as a foretaste, the kind of communion that will exist between God and His people in the world to come, when the present barrier of sin is finally no more.

So, Christian, when was the last time that you went into your inner room, outside of the ears of others, closed your door, and prayed to your Father who is in secret? I mean, really prayed. Lloyd-Jones again says here, "Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God." So I am not asking how well you expressed yourself in prayer, or whether you were able to string together words as you desired; that is nothing. Even if you are just in God’s presence and you groan, you know that the Spirit groans for you. So that is nothing. I am asking whether you desire to know and communicate with God and so pray?

Praying Conscious Of What Prayer Is

The second principle, in verses seven to eight, is that we must be praying conscious of what prayer is. "And when you are praying," Jesus says, "do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. So do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him." Jesus’ point here is not that there should be no repetition in our prayers at all; rather, it is especially meaningless repetition, He says. He is referring to pointless babble. By the Gentiles here, He is referring to the prayers of pagan people who do not know God and suppose that the deity they call upon will hear them because they multiply their words more and more. He says, Christians, you are not to pray this way. Why? Because you must be conscious of the reality that when we pray to God, He already knows what you need before any words exit your mouth, before you think them in your mind.

You see, prayer does not manipulate God. Prayer presents a fallible, mortal, limited sinner saved by grace, and puts them at the feet of a sovereign, omnipotent, majestic God of all creation who lacks nothing, who needs nothing. That is why David says in Psalm 139:4, "Even before there is a word on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it all."

So there are these two great principles of rightly motivated prayer.

Now the Lord Jesus presents us with what we know as the Lord’s Prayer. This is what we could call the model prayer. It is more of a pattern than it is a prayer itself to be prayed, I think. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of mysticism, Christian mysticism we might say, that has been attached to the Lord’s Prayer as a rote kind of thing. But as I understand it, this is a pattern; it is a structure; it is the bones of true prayer. Jesus means that the Lord’s people would fill out its structure with their own devotional prayers. So He says, "Pray then in this way."

Prayer Must Focus On God

Let us break it down. The first thing we need to see is this: prayer must focus on God. Jesus shows that our prayer ought to have a clear focus on the Godhead. This is the idea of Ecclesiastes 5:2: "For God is in heaven, you are on earth; therefore let your words be few." In other words, do not think it is proper to rush into prayer and begin working through your list, your things that you want to get off your chest, before considering in adoration God’s person and character. God is in heaven; you are on earth. Be careful how you approach Him. It is God whom you address. So we say, "Hallowed be your name," as the text reads.

Consider Hannah as she poured out her heart in 1 Samuel 2:2: "There is no one holy like the Lord; indeed, there is no one besides you, nor is there any rock like our God." That comes before she made any petition. Solomon, at the dedication of the temple, prayed in 1 Kings 8:23, "O Lord, the God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on the earth beneath." Nehemiah prayed in Nehemiah 1:5, "I beseech you, O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who preserves his covenant and loving kindness for those who love him and keep his commandments." You see, we should not have anything to say about ourselves before we have something to say about God; show that you understand it is his name, his honour, his glory that is preeminent in the world.

Verse ten has the same essential point: "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." This is to ask that God would establish his presence in the world among men; it is essentially that the gospel would go forth in power, that God would work by his Spirit to bring about obedience to Christ in the hearts of sinners. It is calling out that the great God who is glorified and magnified by angels in heaven would so work among men on earth that his name would be magnified by man. So, prayer has to be focused on God.

Prayer Ought To Be Deliberate

The second thing is that prayer ought to be deliberate. We see this in verses eleven, twelve, fourteen, and fifteen. Prayer ought to be deliberate. Just earlier, Jesus has warned us against babbling prayers as the Gentiles do, thinking God will hear us simply by multiplying words. It is clear in the three ways he fleshes out the remainder of this prayer structure that the Christian’s prayer has to be a deliberate prayer. In other words, when you pray, Christian, go in with purpose; do not go lightly to prayer; pray in confidence and with purpose.

There are three brief ways that we need to see this. Verse eleven: prayer brings petition. In verse twelve, and then drawing from verses fourteen and fifteen, we see that prayer offers confession; and in verse thirteen, we see that prayer requests help. These are very deliberate things.

First of all, prayer brings petition for needs. Jesus says in verse eleven, "Give us this day our daily bread." Daily bread here represents our material needs, and we should pray for these things so that we might have life and strength to serve God and live for him. Now, of course, we live in a society and age where we have an abundance. We do not understand what it is like to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread." We do not know what it is really like to pray that the Lord would provide for our needs because we have so much. But there are many believers, like those in Pakistan, like those in many places in the past and still today, who might look ahead a few days or a few weeks and not know how they are going to get by. The principle that Jesus is teaching is that we can pray about all of our needs, beginning with our most essential needs. Christians need to be reminded that God lacks no resources; the earth is the Lord’s and all it contains; the cattle on a thousand hills belong to the Lord.

Think of Elijah and the famine in 1 Kings 17:4: "It shall be that you will drink of the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to provide for you there." There is no resource lacking in the Lord, and we pray knowing that if anything be his will, it shall be done without hesitation.

How do we apply this in our context? As I said, we have no lack; we do not really pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," do we? Because we have so much. Well, praying in this way is an acknowledgement that provision comes from God, and that we must do. The ability to work, the ability to have life and to live in such a place as we do, it is all a gift from him. This is what it looks like for us: before we have dinner every night, we say, "Father, we thank you for your present provision for us, and we pray that you would, by your sovereign grace, continue to provide for us in the future as well." That is how we reflect this call, "Give us this day our daily bread." God does answer prayer, friends; may we never doubt him. Luke 11:10: "For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks it will be opened." We qualify that, of course, with when it is in accordance with his will, but come, seek him in prayer.

The second thing we see here of deliberate prayer is that prayer confesses guilt. Verse twelve: "And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors." What is so apparent here is that while, as Christians, we have the assurance that because of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for us, where he laid down his life so that we would be without sin, we are justified, declared no longer guilty; that is all true, but we still sin, and we need to confess sin still.

The ways that you and I continue to fall short of God’s impeccable standard, the way that we still break his commandments, will not incur his wrath; that has been turned away in Christ. But, as another has said, in the believer’s sin there is still fatherly displeasure of God. We are to still seek forgiveness; the prayer of the believer is the prayer of David in this regard. Psalm 51:2-3: "Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me." Listen, it is so simple: we do not want to come before our holy God without being conscious of the fact that we are sinful, flawed men and women; we are beggars in the courts of God; we have need of confession. Yet know that any guilt that we do have is not to drive us away from God; it is to drive us towards him.

God wants you to come with your sin to him, Christian; he wants you to confess; he is longing that you would. Blood-bought sinners should have great confidence to come before the throne in Christ’s name and confess again and again, and ask that God would forgive and help us to war against sin. Remember that you are calling upon him as a Father. 1 John 1:9: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." He is our Father. That confession of sin makes up the core, I think, and key element of this Lord’s Prayer, as is evident by Jesus’ application in verses fourteen and fifteen: "For if you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions."

I think we are being shown two things here. First of all, there is obviously our personal need to approach God and confess our sin, but there is a test given here as well, so that we would not become like the hypocrite. It means we are commanded to come to God and confess our sin, and God is saying, "Come to me and confess your sin on the proviso that you are not being hypocritical. Come seeking my forgiveness, knowing that you have forgiven those who have sought your forgiveness." It means forgiven people forgive; that is what it means. If God is going to forgive you, you need to have been a person who is going to forgive others. This is talking about Christians here, so we are talking about genuine, born-again believers. You become a hypocrite if you are seeking God’s forgiveness but will not forgive others.

May we not be like those children of Israel in Hosea 7:2, where it is said, "And they do not consider in their hearts that I remember all their wickedness; now their deeds are all around them, they are before my face." They forgot their sins were before God’s face; they forgot that God reads the heart. He knows the kind of hypocrisy that we can come to him with in prayer, so we need to be open and honest with God.

There is a third point here about deliberate prayer: prayer expresses need of daily help. Verse thirteen, our final sub-point. Just as an aside, I leave out the latter half of verse thirteen. If some of your Bibles have little square brackets around the end of verse thirteen, this is because those words, "For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen," do not appear in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew’s Gospel; they are known to be a later addition by some scribes in the chain of textual transmission, and so I do not preach them. They are not original to Matthew. But the beginning of Matthew 6:13 is, and it says this: "And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

This aspect of our prayer is one in which we make ourselves vulnerable before God. We have just been shown the necessity of confessing our sin; now we are confessing our need for God’s daily help to fight what are ultimately spiritual battles in our lives. It means, as Calvin so beautifully put it, we have no strength for living a holy life except so far as we obtain it from God. So we are praying to God, saying essentially, "Father, as I go into this world, which is full of temptations, and as I go on in this life, in which I have a heart that comes forward with its own sinful temptations that lead me away from you, Lord, keep me from my own sin; keep me from myself; preserve me in this world; do not let me stray into what my heart often desires, which is not of you, Father." That is what we are praying: daily help. We must seek the throne daily for the grace that we need to fight the spiritual battles of the day. We are saying to the Lord, "May we not succumb to Satan’s desire that we would deny you, Lord, with our hearts and with our minds." God is telling us that we need to come to him in this way: "Lord, deliver us daily from evil. When I am tempted, as I shall be, to sin, Father, keep me from it."

Conclusion

Thus ends the Lord Jesus’ teaching here on prayer. As I intimated at the beginning, this is a part of our lives that is so often neglected, and I hope now, having heard these words, that we would not be found any longer to be prayerless people, if that is what we have been until now. Let us seek the Lord daily in prayer, as he calls us to, as our heavenly Father.