Prayer Principles (Part 1)

Prayer Principles

Matthew 6:5-7

By Pastor Jordan Hines

We're going to be in a two week series starting tonight in Matthew chapter six. And the reason for that is I will be gone the 16 April for the IARBC association meetings up at camp. So I will be gone.

So we're going to do a two week sort of series right now on the Lord's prayer. But today you'll see that we're going only through verses five through seven. So we're going to get the introduction basically leading right up to the Lord's prayer.

And really we're talking about principles of prayer. What are the underlying the big major things we have to consider as believers when we're talking about prayer? Prayer is something that we do every day. Prayer is something that hopefully, as believers, you pray for your family, you pray for your coworkers, you pray for your own needs, for, for health needs, for all kinds of things.

Just today we prayed for meals, we prayed for. My wife and I have prayed for each other like you prayed for your family. Prayer is crucial, and yet sometimes we don't consider why we're praying.

I want us to go through Matthew chapter six, verses five through seven tonight so we can see, see that it's more than just a list of rules. It's more than just a list of things. You should pray for this, this and this, or you shouldn't pray this way.

You shouldn't pray this way. We pray because we have a relationship with God. We pray because we love God.

And my prayer for us tonight is that we would see our relationship with God as valuable. And because we see it as valuable, we would pursue prayer more passionately. So in that spirit, let's pray and ask the Lord to help us understand why we can pray and the way that we should be praying.

Let's ask the Lord for help. God, we come before you as your children knowing that we couldn't come to our creator without Jesus Christ dying on the cross for our sins, without him raising from the dead, without him conquering sin and death, and being our intercessor, we know that as sinful people that we are in great need of a savior every single day. And I pray that as we study these principles, that we would gain a better understanding of what it means to be a prayerful, thoughtful christian God.

We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. Matthew six five seven.

I'll read those verses. They're on the screen for you as well. And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men.

Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you go, when you pray, go into your room. And when you have shut your door, pray to the father who is in the secret place.

And your father who sees in secret, will reward you openly. And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. The big idea tonight is that God cares about your prayer life.

God cares about you. God cares about me. He wants us to consider how we are praying and why we're praying.

We're going to see first that we pray privately in verse five through six, and then we pray sincerely. Let's look at verses five through six starting in verse five. There's sort of a comparison we're going to see on your sheet.

You can see there's a proud prayer, and then there's a humble prayer. And he compares them directly. And first, he always goes to the negative.

Don't do this. It says, and when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. So don't be like the hypocrites.

Let's get some interaction here. What is a hypocrite, Lynn? Right. Their actions don't back up what they're saying.

Let me ask you maybe a more interesting question here. What is one of the biggest problems people have with the church? They're hypocrites. In fact, in the context of Matthew, chapter six, what is happening? What is Jesus doing? What section of scripture are we in right here? There's a two or three chapter section here.

Beatitude sermon on the mount. Right. He's talking about the kingdom.

He's talking to his disciples and the large multitude of people that have gathered around. He's talking to people who know the law, people who know what it means to pray. So as he's calling some people hypocrites, some people are not going to like what he's saying.

This text also assumes that people are praying. What is he saying here? When you pray, not who here prays. And then, like, five people raise their hand.

It's when you pray, because we know that people here, they're listening, are praying. Don't be like the hypocrites. And then some people who are proud are gonna be like, well, I'm not a hypocrite.

I'm great. And that's obviously, like, what people are gonna be thinking at some point. This text assume that they are praying.

The hypocrite here is that the word is literally to be an actor, a person who professes belief or opinions that he or she does not hold in order to conceal his or her feelings or motives. You're hiding something. It's like when you watch a movie, you can tell that actor doesn't really have that character in their life.

They're not really living the life of that character. When they go home to their house, they don't live out the character in the scenes that they are in that movie or that tv show. They are different from who they're portraying.

That's what Jesus is calling out here. Don't be like the hypocrites. That's the command.

Don't be like them. And why? Verse five also says, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. So these people enjoy.

They love. They relish the opportunity to declare to the world how righteous they are. And I think we can be like that, too.

Even if it's just a subconscious attitude. We can think, well, we're believers. We're Christians.

We have it kind of figured out. We can go throughout our day, and even if we don't say this out loud, we can portray this attitude. They love to pray standing in the synagogues, a place of worship, and on the corners of the streets that they might be seen by men, which what Matthew is talking about here is the posture of these men.

They're not in a private place. They're on the street corner. They want everyone to see they're not doing this for God.

The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. In Luke chapter 18, verses nine to 14, talk a great deal about the posture of prayer. And I would love if someone would volunteer to read Luke 18 914.

This parable that Jesus shares is talking about what it means to really pray. Like, when I come to prayer, what is the attitude that I have? Luke 18 914. I think we have a slide for that as well.

Who has it, though? Josiah is on tip of my tongue. Yes, often he spoke this herald, his son. He trusted in himself that they were righteous and despised others.

Pray. One a pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisees stood and prayed nothing.

God, I thank you that I am not like other men. Extortioners, unjust adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week.

I give tithes of all that I possess. And a tax collector standing afar off would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven. But beat his breath, saying, God, be merciful.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. So let me ask you some questions. Based on this text you just heard that you can look it up in your own copy of scripture.

I want you to someone to describe to me the attitude of the Pharisees prayer. What was the Pharisees prayer like? What was the attitude of it? Arrogant, boastful, boisterous. Any other adjectives? Proud.

Right. So this pharisee is looking down on this tax collector because of the reality of his life, because of who he seems to be. And this is contrasted with the tax collector's prayer.

What's the tax collector's prayer like? What's the attitude of the tax collector in his prayer? What's he going? What's he trying to do in his prayer? Repent. He's repenting. And why is he repenting? He's a sinner and he sees it, right? Just like when we look in the word of God and we see we're a sinner, we repent and we confess our sins.

And as he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, he purifies us and cleanses us by the washing of the water, by the word, and he sanctifies us. All these things happen because we look at ourselves and we see we're sinners. That's the attitude that he has.

What kind of attitude should we have? More of? The Pharisees? Of the tax collectors. Tax collector. Right.

Because these tax collectors were looked on as the menace of society. Right. These people were not liked, just like tax collectors.

Today, it's tax season. It's very much reality in our life right now. We deal with it on a regular basis, like taxes are not fun.

And these people were gouging people, gouging their own citizens to gain from them. That's the kind of people. And yet these people looked at their life and they said, I need God.

I'm a dirty, filthy, rotten sinner. That's the attitude we ought to have when it comes to prayer. We need to come to God knowing that we don't deserve it.

Think about it this way. Some of you aren't too far away from college age, and you may have a debt, a bill that comes due. You have to go to the student loan or the financial aid office, and you know you are in debt, and yet you can go to that office confidently for one reason.

I haven't shared this on purpose because the person who you love, your father, your mother, has given you a check, and that check has the exact amount that is due for your bill. You didn't write that check. You didn't, you don't have the money in your account to pay your bill, yet your father, your mother wrote that check so that you can go to the bank, you can go to the financial aid office, and you can pay that bill.

I know I'm in debt. I know I can't pay the debt that I owe, yet my father or my mother has paid that debt because they have written that check. And I can go confidently and yet humbly to that office and take care of that debt, not based on anything I can do, but based on what my intercessor, my father, has done for me.

Next, we kind of see in the end of verse five the results of this proud prayer. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. So what kind of reward do they have? Right.

Yeah. Just Judy rewards. Yeah.

And we wouldn't be tempted by any of these things today? No. No, we're too good for that. We wouldn't do that.

No. We're drawn to these things just like they are. We're drawn to everyone else's attention.

We're drawn to the desire to be liked. We want to have friends, and having friends is not a bad thing. But if having friends causes you to suffer in your spiritual walk or your prayer life, that's an issue.

So we need to have, instead of everyone's attention, a desire for intimacy with God, a close relationship with God. And as we have this close relationship with God, we have forgiveness of sins. As we come to prayer.

We need to have a desire not for the praise of men, but for the praise of God. What does God value? And next we see the exact opposite in verse six. Who would like to read verse six again for me? Here it's on the screen and also in your bible.

Yes, Nathan, you, when you pray, go into your room. And when you have shut your door, pray to your father, who is in the secret place of your father, who sees in secret, will reward you openly. Thank you.

So there's some lessons we can learn from this verse. There are some things we need to get from this verse. First of all, there's a contrast here, obviously, that there's a command, again, to be different from this proud person that was praying before this hypocrite.

There are some lessons here. We ought to be praying in private. We ought to be eliminating distractions allowing our heart to be quieted, preparing our heart for genuine confession.

And it's a lot easier to do these things, to have repentance, to have confession when you're not in front of people. And I think that's really important to note that we have to be able to be around other people, invest in other people. But first and foremost, if your walk with God is not right, if your prayer life is not right, you have no business telling someone else anything spiritual whatsoever, because God wants to be close with you.

God wants to be your friend. If you draw near to him, he'll draw near to you. And if you have nothing spiritual to offer someone, you should be really careful with the words that come out of your mouth.

Otherwise that might be the inward, fleshly man talking. We need to be careful to tend to this, tend to a humble prayer, to pray in private to God, your father. What reason does he give? In verse six he says, your walk with God is personal and shouldn't be dealt.

It should be dealt with personally in a secret place. In verse six it says, pray to your father, who is in the secret place, and your father, who sees in secret, will reward you openly. The reason we pray is to walk with God, not with the crowd.

Because when the rubber hits the road, the crowd's going to be wrong compared to God. Because what's popular, especially in this world, is worldliness, not godliness, because the world says you are it. What you think is right is right.

What you feel is right is right. Everything is about satisfying yourself. When we look at the Bible, we look in his word, we see, well, we're not enough.

The wages of sin is death, and I'm a sinner. It's the opposite of what the world is telling me. And when I look at confession, I look at what I ought to be doing.

It's pretty clear that I'm a sinner. It's pretty clear that the sin we need to confess is owed to God. I was reminded of psalm 51, verses one through four.

In this psalm, David has committed the sin of murder and sexual adultery, immorality. And he's confessing these sins to God and he's crying out to God. So he's certainly sinned against other people in this situation.

But first and foremost, he sinned against God. Allow me to read this text for you. Psalm 51.

One, four. Have mercy upon me, o God, according to your loving kindness, according to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sins, for I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is always before me. This is the key verse, verse four.

Against you you only have have I sinned and done this evil in your sight that you may be found just when you speak and blameless when you judge. The sin that I've committed is certainly affecting my kingdom. It's affecting my servants, it's affecting Uriah, his family.

It's affecting Bathsheba and her family. But it's affecting God. That's what he points to.

I think if we thought through more the fact that when we sin, God mourns and God tears up and God is sad for us because he looks at us as his creation, his loved people, who he just wants to hold and be close to and walk with and give the gospel to the world with and see himself reflected in. He sees us and he sees us choosing to sin instead. That brings him sorrow.

And the sin that we have is first and foremost before God. And that sin is the reason why Jesus Christ came to die on a cross for our sins. That's the reason we just celebrated Easter.

We have to realize that when we come to God, we're coming boldly to the throne of grace, just as Hebrews 416 tells us. But we're also coming as sinners. We're coming as people who need him every single day.

We also see that God will reward his people openly when they humbly seek him privately. This is an interesting concept that's brought up over and over in scripture. Just a couple of references that I want us to see.

Starts in Matthew 2016. Same book. Who would like to read that verse? Actually, let's get more people reading scripture.

Who would like to say that? Lynn? So the last will be first and the first last. For many are called. Okay, last shall be 1st, 1st shall be last.

Many are called, but few chosen. The idea of humility and pride is, in scripture, always up to God. God gets to choose where people are.

God gets to choose what is great and what is not. God gets to choose who is worthy of his affection and who is not. God gets to choose.

It's based on his character. It's based on his love. It's based on his justice and judgment.

It's not based on what I feel. Again, in psalm 51, verse 17, just a couple verses later in the chapter we just read, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit and a broken and a contrite heart. O God, thou wilt not despise.

God wants a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart wants us to come to him in a loving, childlike way. And David, this broken man is looking back on his great sin and he's saying, I'm a broken vessel. I need to be repurchased, to be bought back, to be redeemed.

And his weaknesses are clearly on display. And yet God continues to use him. And what's the result of this? At the end of verse six? And your father, who sees in secret, will reward you openly.

The reward here is answered prayer. The reward here is not that men will follow you and men will praise your name, and men will want to be your friend. The reward is that God will be close with you, that God will hear your prayer, God will answer your prayer.

He will restore you from sin, he will forgive you of sins. The reward is that we will have peace with God. The commentators that I read didn't have much to say about this.

They didn't have much to say about their reward. And I think that's kind of interesting because they talk a lot about everything else. I think the reward, especially in this context of the kingdom, may be talking about future reward in the kingdom of God, especially talking to a jewish audience, as the kingdom is promised.

And the reward here is something that may not materialize in front of us today, meaning that I'm not going to stand up here and promise you that your life's going to go great if you share the gospel or if you pray every single day, think of the life of Daniel. Think of the man who was faithful to pray to God three times a day. What happened to him? He was thrown into a den of lions, and God didn't have to deliver him from that.

In the same book, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, when they were standing before the king, they didn't know if God was going to save them. When they said, we're not going to bow to your idol, they didn't know. The results may not be here on this earth, but think about eternity.

Think about how long that is compared to a short 70, 80, 90 years of life on this earth. The rewards that we get, that we receive are eternal, and they are relational too, meaning that we, as we walk through life, we can have the peace that the world does not have. Lastly, we need to pray sincerely.

He begins the command in verse seven, in a negative command. And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathens do. This vain repetitions is an interesting word.

It's literally to babble these empty phrases, to utter many and especially useless and purposeless words. It's Charlie Brown's teacher. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

It's empty. It doesn't make any sense. They're just saying things to be heard, but they don't really mean anything.

You could think about politicians maybe in this sense where they're going to say what sounds right in a soundbite. But then you check their voting record and you see, well, they didn't quite do what they said they were going to do. They're saying a lot of things, but they're not doing a lot of these things.

They're vain repetitions as these heathen pagan outsiders. The word can be translated gentiles. And talking to this jewish audience, I believe that it would communicate a great contrast between people who are of the faith and people who are outside of the faith.

Now, obviously, we are gentiles. I don't think anyone here is jewish, but I think what it's trying to communicate here, what Matthew is communicating, is that these heathens who don't know God, who don't walk with God, who are not a part of the family of God, they just say things and they don't really mean them and they just want people's attention and they're babbling. We ought to stray away from those things.

We ought to be purposeful in our prayers. I think this is a really common thing that we fall into. It's a really common trend that we have where our prayers can just be.

Thank you for this food. Thank you for this day. Thank you for this, this or this.

But do we really mean it? Do we stop and consider that I would not have this food if God did not allow me to have this food? How many things did God sovereignly orchestrate for me to have this breakfast or this lunch or this dinner or what if it's a big thing? We're thanking the Lord for this church. How many people across, how many decades did it take for this church building to be built, this fellowship to be established, the relationships to be formed for us to get to the year 2024, for us to meet here tonight, we ought to be thankful. Thankful that God has brought us together around the truth of his word.

That doesn't change. We ought to be thankful. We ought to.

To really reflect on who we are in Christ so that we can pray more sincerely. It is impossible to pray sincerely without faith. It's impossible to pray sincerely without knowing the person you're praying to.

Because on a basic level, praying is talking to God. And that's what we are doing when we pray. The end of verse seven says they think that they will be heard for their many words.

This is the reason why these people use these phrases. They are rewarded by being heard not by God, but by men. They're rewarded by the applause of men.

And that goes back. You can study the previous passage where he talks more about these hypocrites. Hypocrites in a different context.

But this is a larger section where Matthew brings up. This is what Jesus taught about hypocrites in this context. This context.

This context. And we ought not to be like the hypocrites. What he's saying is we ought to be genuine.

We ought to be real. It can't just be what we say. It's what we do.

It's what we do and believe. So be reminded today of what prayer is. It is talking to God, our creator, the one who made us and loved us, and loves us currently and will love us.

Be reminded that we're talking to God for the sanctification of our hearts so that he can work in us. We are praying to God for the intercessory, for intercessory prayer. So we're praying for other people for their needs.

We're praying for quiet fellowship with God. We're praying that so that we can feel connected and close with God. And that means eliminating distractions.

We're also praying for help against temptations. Because this world has many temptations, this world has many problems, many things that draw us away. And yet we have the power of God.

We have the ability to go to God in prayer anytime that we want. And that's amazing. Let's pray knowing that we can go to God and we can pray sincerely.

We can pray privately. And right now we're as a group, we're as a body of believers. But don't let that stop you from talking to God, truly, from your heart.

When you pray, no matter where you are, it's you and God. Talk to your creator today. Let's thank the Lord for his message tonight.

God, thank you. We are so blessed that you have chosen to save us, that you have chosen to give us eternal life. You've given us a hope that lasts for all of eternity.

And you've given us a challenge that even though the world around us may not appreciate our sharing the gospel or our prayers or our lifestyle of Christianity, we are not doing this for us or for men. We're doing this for you. So I pray that we'd be faithful in our daily lives, to obey, faithful, to pray, to talk with our God.

God, thank you for bringing this church together tonight. Help us to have safety and fellowship. In your son's name we pray.