Matthew 6: 7-15 New Revised Standard Version
7 “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 9 “Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. 10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. 14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 15 but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
SERMON
Recap: How NOT to Pray
Last week, we heard Jesus tell us how not to pray. We should not pray as the hypocrites do—merely to be seen—but that we should pray privately, for God’s eyes alone. Our prayers should be vertical prayers, meaning that they must be God-ward. Anytime prayer is meant for a worldly audience, it ceases being prayer and becomes some kind of conversation, usually a monologue. When we pray to impress or influence others, when the direction is not vertical but horizontal, we make our prayers more for the ears of others than for God.
“But shouldn’t we pray when we’re in groups?” Yes, of course we should, but when we do, we must take care to keep God the focus of our content rather than the others in our circle. When you pray, ask yourself: “Am I praying for God’s ears or those of my brothers and sisters?” We should all ask that question constantly.
“But what about Pastoral prayers? Aren’t your prayers meant for our ears?” The answer is yes and no. Yes, the prayers I publicly pray must be comprehensible to anyone listening so that they can offer the same words up from their own hearts. Yes, the words of these corporate worship prayers are attempts to speak for the whole congregation at once, as one voice. To this extent they are flawed and imperfect, but they also are God-ward. Our collective prayers in content seek God’s ears alone and God’s glory alone. If you should hear prayers stray from this line, you are right to speak up and say something about it.
Don’t Heap up Empty Phrases
Jesus tells us not to “heap up empty phrases”—literally, “don’t babble”—as the Gentiles do. We know a few things about ancient Greek worship. Among their practices was a way of praying that was just babbling in the hope that they might hit the name of an unknown god and call that god into service by doing so. It’s not unlikely that this practice was later baptized into practice in places like Corinth, where this kind of prayer was called tongues. But let us hear Jesus, who says do not pray this way.
It’s not that Jesus was against tongues, but He was against the kind of prayer—and any kind of prayer, by extension—that attempted to earn or cajole God’s presence. Those who think they will be heard for their many words need to take it down a notch, because God doesn’t need us to be wordy. As Jesus says, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
Your Father Already Knows
And isn’t that good news? What is required in order for God to hear and understand us? Nothing. He already knows what we need and He knows what we mean to pray. There are no prayer “experts,” though there may be some very silver-tongued devils seeking to mislead people by their eloquent prayers. There are no requirements to our prayers, other than that they are honest, from the heart, and spoken to God alone.
You might ask, “But if God knows what we need even before we pray, then why do we have to ask for it? Why pray at all?” To make the question even more dramatic, keep in mind that Jesus also teaches us importunity in prayer—constance, persistence, even repetitive knocking at His door.
The only sense I can make of this is that prayer is more about our relationship with God itself than it is about influencing earthly outcomes. The result of prayer is a deepening relationship with God much more than it is about effectively influencing worldly events.
My father, a famous tightwad, made me bow and scrape whenever I needed something from him—the car, ten bucks for gas, a tiny loan now and then—and I asked him why he always made it so difficult. He said, “Maybe I like to hear you ask!” I think there is some truth about our Heavenly Father in this as well. He commands us to pray because He likes to hear us ask. He likes us coming near to Him. He wants us leaning upon Him. He desires our fellowship, which is an amazing wonder beyond description.
We pray to have and to exercise our relationship with God—not one another.
We Do Not Know How to Pray
Because we are flawed and fallen, there is no natural reason that we should think we would even know how to talk to God. The Apostle Paul reminds us that we don’t know how to pray at all:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. —Romans 8: 26
Here, too, is good news. We may doubt that we can ever find the right words, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.
So enough with how not to pray, for Jesus does teach us how to pray, and the prayer He gives us is perfect.
Our Father
The Lord’s Prayer begins with an intimate address for God. Jesus instructs us to call Him “our Father who is in Heaven.” Abba, Father—as simple as Dad. As Jesus refers to God as “my Father,” He invites us to call Him, “our Father.” God the Holy, God the Infinite and Unthinkably Almighty, Eternal, All-knowing, and All-Powerful One—we are to call Our Heavenly Father. Nowhere in any world religion is there a more intimate address, and the Disciples must have been bowled over by it. It’s like meeting the Queen of England and having her say, “Oh come on—you can call me Lizzy.” Only moreso.
Simone Weil, one of the great souls of the 20th century, said that she limited herself to saying the Lord’s Prayer to only once per day because she found it so overpowering to pray. She said she never prayed it once without feeling changed.
I think I can say the same about that first line because I can stand to be reminded at least once a day that even I am invited to call Almighty God Father.
Three Petitions
Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done
In these first three petitions, we pray for ourselves and for the world by losing ourselves in God. Hallowed be THY name, THY kingdom come, THY will be done—the emphasis is always on the otherness of God, and when we pray these from the heart, we center ourselves not in ourselves, but in the otherness of our heavenly Father. Our center is no longer self, but God who is Lord, King, and Judge. To pray these is to acknowledge God’s absolute goodness and total authority over Heaven and Earth. We pray, “God, YOUR identity matters, not ours; YOUR goals, not ours; and by YOUR means, not the ways we devise for ourselves.”
Anyone can say they believe in God or believe that He is Lord, but that is insignificant—even Satan and devils believe—but when pray these things from the heart, we totally surrender ourselves to His lordship. It’s one thing to believe, but another to surrender ourselves to Him. It is the surrendering that matters, and we need to nothing more than pray this prayer for it to become real for us.
Consider: in praying Hallowed by Your name, we are praying for something that already is. God--God alone—is holy. When we pray, May Your kingdom come, we are praying for is absolutely promised by God to occur. We pray for what shall be by God’s authority. And when we pray You will be done, we ask for the inevitable, for God’s will surely shall be accomplished.
We pray for what is, and we ask for what shall be, and in doing so, we surrender our own ideas of what is and what ought to be.
But this is not resignation, as though we’ve given up on life, but rather a passionate desire for all things to be as they shall be and not else. This is what it means to surrender our will to God’s will.
Again, we ask for the total conformity of everything in time to align with the will of God. Simone Weil said it this way:
We have to desire that everything that has happened should have happened, and nothing else. We have to do so, not because what has happened is good in our eyes, but because God has permitted it, and because the obedience of the course of events to God is in itself an absolute good.
This is not easy to absorb, I know, but consider what is the necessary affect of daily praying, “YOUR name, YOUR goals, YOUR way—not mine.” I will also say that this is the perfect formula for human happiness, because if we pray this way and mean it, our hearts will be overflowing in gratitude.
If we only had these three petitions, the prayer would be enough. It would change our lives daily and forever.
Daily Bread
Next we pray for our daily bread, which can be just that—asking God to provide us with what we need to survive in this world. We pray for food, for shelter, for medicine—for whatever it is we need to go on another day. As Israel in the wilderness depended upon God for manna each day, we too depend upon God for all our needs and remain grateful for what He supplies.
But of course it also works at a deeper level. The daily bread is spiritual help as well. It is inspiration that we may not merely survive, but flourish as His children and disciples. Our daily bread is His gift of the Holy Spirit, which gives us hope when things are dicey, faith when we are doubtful, and love when we are fearful.
In this sense, our daily bread is our share of His Spirit needed to sustain us.
From Mercy to Mercy
Next is forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. This is a prayer for God’s mercy to us even as we show mercy to others. Jesus tells us that one can’t live without the other—there is no receiving mercy for those who refuse to be merciful to others. It could be that those who are most judgmental, when finally standing before the Judge of all judges, may not be able to receive the forgiveness of God—although it is offered freely—because they will never stop condemning themselves. To be merciful includes being merciful to yourself, which is another way of saying that in order to be saved we must be able to receive God’s mercy.
To be forgiven as we forgive others is to live from mercy to mercy. We may not feel particularly merciful, but as we give it, we become merciful. That is God’s will for us all.
Lead Us, the Unleadable
Finally, we pray for God to lead us and deliver us. When we are put in dire situations that demand more of us than we feel we can give, that is the true time of trial. We pray that God would protect us from ourselves—from our own weaknesses that would cause us to cave in and abandon hope. We are praying that God would protect us from ourselves, and lead us when we find it most difficult to follow.
Jesus is the Good Shepard and seeks out the lost sheep. Even when we stray and become utterly lost, we pray for Him to find us, to lead us, and to put our feet back on the right path.
And deliver us from the evil one.
The final line is for God’s ultimate deliverance. The evil one could mean the devil, but it could also mean any evil one who threatens or oppresses heart and soul. There is much cruelty in the world, and Jesus’ first hearers lived under the thumb of Roman oppression. The prayer for deliverance is that which cries out Hosanna, which means something like Lord, save us!
The cry of conversion is just this: Lord, save me! Lord, rescue me! As the prayer begins with acknowledging God as sovereign Lord, so it ends with our calm request that He would complete His plan and finish the Creation by His return.
Brief, Intense, & Frequent
Martin Luther said Prayers should be brief, intense, and frequent—BIF. God is not impressed with wordiness. Jesus teaches us to pray in private as well. We don’t need a special room, just a quiet heart. We can fill our days with little, heartfelt prayers delivered amid our other activities. And we should never think of the Lord’s Prayer as anything other than what Jesus teaches us to pray.
As a young Protestant, I used to think Catholics were kind of funny about these prayers. I’d heard of people going to confession and being told to go pray The Lord’s Prayer ten times over, and my thought was, “What a bunch of pointless repetition!” I went to confession once—you know, just for the experience—and Father Pat Carroll, who sat knee to knee with me as I confessed, told me to go pray the Lord’s prayer five times. Perhaps he saw a little bit of an eye-roll in me, because he immediately instructed me: “Pray it slowly, and think about every word and every phrase as you pray.” I did that, and after the second time through I felt renewed. By the fifth time, I felt like I understood the prayer more deeply than I ever had before.
The Catholics are not wrong about this. It is the perfect prayer. It needs repetition not for God’s ears, but for our own hearts to absorb its power. Let’s be clear: it is what Jesus teaches us to pray. There is no improving upon it, though we evangelicals try so hard to do so. We should pray this prayer every day—even more than once if you can stand its power—and outside of this, let’s keep our prayers BIF: brief, intense, and frequent.
QUESTIONS
- How do we “heap up empty phrases” when we pray?
- Is there a problem with long prayers and long prayer vigils?
- Vertical prayers are God-ward prayers. What are horizontal prayers?
- What is required for our prayers to be heard?
- If God knows what we need before we pray, then why do we pray?
- What is special about our invitation to address God as Father?
- What are the first three petitions and how does praying them affect us?
- What are different meanings for “daily bread”?
- How does forgiving others help us receive the forgiveness of God?
- What is God’s provision to lead each one of us?
- Who, aside from Satan, could be the “evil one”?