Prayer: Motivations Matter

As we come tonight to these verses about prayer and our relationship to God in prayer, we must consider that these are difficult things for us to understand. How many people in here can truly understand how prayer works?

I mean, when you think about it - Our God is truly sovereign, which means we don’t tell him anything that He already doesn’t know. But on the other hand, we see several places in the Bible where God changed His mind when His people prayed.

I can tell you tonight that I will not unravel the mystery behind prayer for us, but I will show you what Jesus thinks about hypocritical and meaningless prayer.

Matthew 6:5–8 NASB95

“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. “But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. “And when you are praying, 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.

Not even prayer is off-limits to sinful attitudes

When you read these words that Jesus says here it is a little bit of a shock, and I’m sure that these Pharisees were absolutely shocked when they heard Jesus rebuke their praying habits here.

I’m sure they thought to themselves “if I’m praying, no matter my heart condition or my motivation - then I must be doing ok - at least I’m praying!”

But the Lord rebukes them sharply.

Jesus was tempted very aggressively two separate times by Satan in the Bible. Once when He was led up by the Spirit to a place in the desert in Matthew 4, and another time in the garden of Gethsemane. Both times, Jesus was immersed in prayer and both times Satan was hard at work to counteract the work of God.

Listen friends, don’t think that Satan won’t try everything he can to interrupt your prayer life. He will do almost whatever he can to keep you from praying.

He will try and take your prayer life and turn it to a praise service for yourself. Remember that there is no area of your life that if it becomes self-centered - it can turn into sin quickly.

Listen to this quote from a commentary by Lloyd-Jones:

“We tend to think of sin as we see it in its rags and in the gutters of life. We look at a drunkard, poor fellow, and we say: there is sin; that is sin. But that is not the essence of sin. To have a real picture and a true understanding of it, you must look at some great saint, some unusually devout and devoted man. Look at him there upon his knees in the very presence of God. Even there self is intruding itself, and the temptation is for him to think about himself, to think pleasantly and pleasurably about himself, and really be worshipping himself rather than God. Sin is something that follows us even into the very presence of God.

v.5) “And when you pray”

Do we take it for granted that God expects us to pray?

I think all too often prayer is the neglected discipline in our lives.

Psalm 141:1-2 “O Lord, I call upon you; hasten to me! Give ear to my voice when I call to you! Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice”

Mark this though - Jesus is talking to those who are acting very religious. These are the “religious leaders” of that day. He is calling them out here again - for their motivations.

Once again, Jesus calls the Pharisees hypocrites. And by this time they are probably getting very tired of it. He tells them first that their giving is meaningless, and now he is telling them their praying is meaningless.

v.5) Stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners

Remember in Luke 18 about the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector? Remember where the Pharisee stood to pray? Standing by himself in a prominent place. He wanted to be seen. Where did the tax collector stand? In the back. He couldn’t even muster the courage to come up front and get that close to God.

Street corners - the idea here is that there were more people on the corner than in the regular part of the street so they would congregate on the corner.

There is a great danger in our prayers to be seen of someone else praying. As Christians, we all want others to think that we are great prayer warriors don’t we? YES, we all do. We all want that. But there are those, Jesus says here that pray just to be heard of men. Let me say that when we pray, we should be so focused on talking to our Father in Heaven that we could care less who was around us at the time. And when we are focused in prayer for an audience of ONE, then it won’t matter who is listening or who is paying attention to us. When we are praying, we should be taken up to a great place where we sit at the feet of our Father and talk to Him. Nothing else matters.

v.6) “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.”

This does not mean that God wants us not to gather corporately and pray. He wants us to be diligent about praying corporately. Every Wednesday night we have a prayer meeting here at 6:00 and I am always encouraged to see the few that show up and lift others up in prayer. Corporate prayer together as a church is important - BUT the focus here is on private prayer.

But Jesus says here “go into your room”. What does that really mean? Does it mean that we are to have a special “prayer room”. Not especially. If you have a room that you designate for prayer, then that is great, but what Jesus is referring to here is the devotion of our prayers. He is saying, “get to a place where you can get serious about prayer”. If that place is a special room in your house, then that’s great. But I will tell you for me, a lot of times it is while I am driving by myself in my truck. I can tell you that I enjoy very much my driving time. I can look into the sky, watch the landscape, and just pray and worship God for who He is and what He has done. I don’t close my eyes I promise. But it helps to get alone. Why? Because there are so many distractions to our prayers. I get a ridiculous amount of emails and phone calls in a day. There is always a distraction. I can tell you that I have felt closest to God sometimes when I am on the highway. Because when I am alone with God, I can just talk to Him. I can tell Him my cares, I can tell Him my worries, I can tell Him what is going on in my life. Sure, He already knows. But that is what makes prayer so great. We aren’t informing God, we are inviting God. When you think about the fact that Jesus always went off by himself to pray it seems that He knew what He was doing. Why did he do that? Because there were ALOT of people that were pulling for His attention.

This idea of “praying in the closet” does not have so much to do with the location as the attitude. At my granny’s house they used to have a closet that was a hall closet, but it was forever deep. When I was a kid, I thought I could literally get lost in there. It was one of those things as a kid that you thought could connect you to some kind of a time-space portal you know? And there was a mountain of shoes and boots in there so much that you just kind of floated on the top of the pile. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to be in there. And I’m more certain I wasn’t supposed to be pretending to bury myself in the shoes in the dark hiding from my cousins. But let me tell you, our prayer closet is some place that we can go to hide from the crazy world that we live in. It is some place that we can go to be alone with our God. It is always available. We never have to make a reservation. One of the awesome things about prayer is that we can bend God’s ear any time we would like to. What a privilege we have to pray!

v.7) “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.”

Jesus was talking about the way that they prayed here. And you will notice that he doesn’t get on to them for not praying. It is just like the giving that we talked about the last couple of weeks, he is not trying to convince us that we should give or that we should pray, he is saying - WHEN you do this - do it in the proper manner. So, he is talking about the manner in which they prayed.

Now, I am not picking on anybody in particular here so, please don’t think I am trying to be rude or pick on you. But we have all heard those people who pray, Oh, Father, I prayeth you would be with thee this hour, and Father thine will be done, and Father if it pleases thou, then thoust shall be praised from thee, and thine, and thou, and thus…. and all of that 16th century stuff. You know what I mean. And I am not here at all to condemn people that are speaking reverently to God when they pray. I believe prayer is something we should take very seriously.

But, really - Prayer is a conversation that goes on between you and God. What about the little girl that is praying, “God, my mommy is real sick, please help her feel better” Now do you think that God heard that prayer any less than he heard the thee’s and thou’s and such? Absolutely not. God listens to the heart. And all God wants from us is a heart that is authentic and genuine in our prayers. Yes, God wants us to be reverent. But sometimes, we can’t even get past the hurt that runs so deep in our lives to get to the fancy words.

Say what’s on your heart when you are speaking to God, but don’t look for the thesaurus to find the holiest sounding word to form a sentence. And also, if you are praying around someone else, they already know that you don’t talk that way normally right? God doesn’t want pretenders. God doesn’t want actors. God wants YOU. He wants you to be YOU. Don’t try to be someone else when you pray.

Also, Jesus is saying here that it is not necessarily the length of your prayer but the sincerity of it. It’s OK for us to say the same thing in our prayer over and over, but we need to realize that God hears us the first time. I’m not trying to limit you when you pray. If you feel the spirit is leading you to pray a certain way then do it, but don’t say the same chant over and over because you think it will make more of a difference to whether God will answer you or not.

v.8) “Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.”

Isn’t this a great verse? You don’t have to inform God of anything. Isn’t that great? What if you did? What if you had to tell God everything so that he would know all of the comings and goings of your life so that he didn’t get something mixed up. God isn’t saying “Will, you never told me that your anniversary was June 5th so that I could flip that calendar over at the right time and remind you.” Now, that’s a silly illustration, but you get the idea. We don’t have to inform God of anything and that is a great and comforting thought. That is why we can be ourselves in prayer is because he already knows if we are making it up. He knows if we are pretending or if we are really being genuine.

Conclusion

As we close this morning, I would ask you to examine your life and determine what it is that you are making time for. A large majority of people if you were to ask them why they don’t pray more, they would say “I don’t have time”. And to that I would say - What do you make time for in your day? I understand some of us are busier with our work schedules and family events, but REALLY - I mean REALLY if you WANTED to pray, wouldn’t you MAKE time for it? Like I said earlier, you may get tired of me talking about prayer but I really believe that we are as Christians lacking in our prayer lives. We lack the commitment and we lack the desire. I’m just being flat out honest.

We miss out on so many blessings because we don’t pray. We lose the blessing of communicating with our heavenly Father, which is the greatest blessing there is. I think there are times when Jesus comes to us like He did to the disciples in the garden and says “Could you not stay awake just a little while and pray with me”?

Maybe you need to recommit yourself this morning to be a praying Christian. Really, there is no other definition of a Christian than a praying Christian. But maybe you need to come up here this morning and pray. Maybe you need to pray that you wouldn’t be so cold-hearted in your prayers, and that God would give you that fire in your prayer life that we all need so very much. This altar is always open, and it is a shame if we have things that we need to get right and we don’t just because we don’t want others to see us praying.

Come to Him this morning in prayer, and ask Him to renew that heart of prayer within you.

“We can do no more than pray until we have prayed”