Praying Like Jesus

“So we want to thank you tonight for these mighty machines that you brought before us. Thank you for the Dodges and the Toyotas. Thank you for the Fords, and most of all, we thank you for Roush and Yates partnering to give us the power that we see before us tonight. Thank you for GM Performance Technology and R07 engines. Thank you for Sunoco racing fuel and Goodyear tires that bring performance and power to the track. Lord, I want to thank you for my smokin' hot wife tonight, Lisa, my two children, Eli and Emma – or, as we like to call them, the Little Es. Lord, I pray and bless the drivers, and use them tonight. May they put on a performance worthy of this great track. In Jesus' name. Boogity, boogity, boogity. Amen."

While this prayer will forever live in infamy, I’m not so sure I’d make this the model for your prayer life, but thank goodness that our Lord Jesus did give us a prayer we can immitate.

If you have your Bibles, turn to Matthew 6:5-13. As you do, let me set the stage:

Jesus had just called the twelve, and his ministry was gaining steam around the Sea of Galilee area. He was drawing large crowds, and Matthew says that Jesus took the opportunity to teach and preach to the crowds.

He went to a nearby mountain, he likely stood at the base and people took their seats above him (presumably for better audio) and he began to preach

Matthew has recorded snippets of his Sermon (often called the Sermon on the Mount)

One of the purposes that Jesus had for this sermon was to correct some misunderstandings about basic tenants of Jewish ethics and spiritual disciplines that had been influenced negatively by the religious elite.

Each snippet begins with “You have heard that it was said...” [presumably from from the Jewish teachers and their interpretations of the OT law] but then Jesus proceeded to clarify, correct, and reshape their views on the OT law, anger, murder, marriage, oaths, justice, love, giving, fasting, AND THE ONE I WANT TO FOCUS ON TODAY: PRAYER

So as we read this passage, I want you to pay attention to the ways Jesus corrects the Jews’ misunderstanding of prayer.

Matthew 6:5-13

Matthew 6:5–13 CSB

5 “Whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people. Truly I tell you, they have their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your private room, shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 7 When you pray, don’t babble like the Gentiles, since they imagine they’ll be heard for their many words. 8 Don’t be like them, because your Father knows the things you need before you ask him. 9 “Therefore, you should pray like this: Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. 10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

Prayer is not a performance, but personal correspondence (vv. 5-6).

[Blank Slide]

Jesus knows what it’s like to be a Jew.

To have a job, busting your rear trying to make ends meet, doing business in the city, selling products in the market

All the while, you pass by the road and can’t help but hear at every street corner, a guy dressed in holy clothes praying loudly something like the publican in Luke 18:9-14 “God, I thank you that I am not like other people— robbers, evildoers, adulterer— or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”

He calls them “hypocrites,” which carried the idea of actors in Greek theatre. They get out there and act as holy men, though on the inside they are decayed.

Jesus looks upon his crowd and has compassion them, because their idea of praying has been tainted by religious people who have used prayer as a weapon to elevate themselves above everyone else.

And they have robbed the people of the intimacy that prayer really is.

Jesus teaches them that prayer is not a performance, but a personal correspondence.

(v. 6) says, “But when you pray, go into your private room (PRIVATE ROOM WAS WITHOUT WINDOWS), shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret.”

I don’t think that this means that public prayers are not legitimate, because we see Jesus, Paul, and Peter pray in public and commend others to do the same.

What Jesus is speaking against is when prayer is used as a means to elevate the one praying above others who listen… This is to be outright rejected.

Instead, Jesus directs us to the kind of prayer that seeks a personal, uninterrupted, intimate relationship with the Father. This is the kind of relationship that our soul thirsts for and the kind of relationship that we can’t fathom not spending time with him alone . . . where you can be vulnerable and not feel like you have to put on a show.

Here’s the thing— we are Sons and Daughters of a Father who wants to hear our prayers, not merely our words. That is, he wants to hear prayers from the deepest recesses of our hearts, not a flamboyant self-seeking show.

When you have an audience, it’s harder to be authentic with the Lord. When you have an audience, it’s easy to turn prayer (a supposed dialogue) into a monologue.

APPLICATION

As a preacher, this is a big temptation. It’s just understood that at family meals, you’re going to get called on to pray.

The day after Thanksgiving, we make it to my extended family’s Thanksgiving lunch in Hopkinsville and I get asked to pray. Mere hours later when we drove to Eddyville for Thanksgiving dinner, I get called on to pray there, too. And what’s fascinating is that I am tempted to articulate my prayers a certain way, cover all my bases, make sure I thank the host for working so hard on the food, make sure I thank the Lord for his blessings, throw a gospel presentation in there somewhere, alter call if possible all without not going too long so that the food gets cold.

In those moments, I feel this pressure of “he’s the preacher, his prayers have to be perfect” and I pray in a way that meets all of these expectations. Maybe you, as the father of the household or the mother of your children feel this pressure too. Jesus speaks a calm word to all of us: Son, Daughter, your prayers are not a monologue to an audience of your peers. They’re a dialogue with me, the Father, in the presence of many witnesses.”

Prayer is not about incantation, but transformation (vv. 7-10).

[Blank Slide]

Jesus would have been giving this sermon on a mountain, and when he said “Do not pray like the Gentiles do,” he might have even pointed across the Sea of Galilee

You see, the Jewish settlements were on the west side of the Sea of Galilee, and 8 miles on the other side, the Gentiles would have been in the Decapolis on the other side.

Certainly the communities were separate, but there would have been significant communication between the two groups.

So imagine Jesus pointing to them saying, “don’t pray like them over there” who “babble”

There is some evidence that these Gentiles would have concocted a formulas of nonsensical combinations of sounds in order to to get the attention of the gods. The Jews would certainly be aware of this practice, and there are some ancient texts that show that Jews sometimes embraced these practices.

Jesus points to the pagans who spend so much time trying to find the right words/sounds that would be the key to unlock the gods favor and he says, “DON’T DO THAT!”

Why not? Interestingly, because (v. 8) “your Father knows the things you need before you ask him.”

For Jesus, he says there’s no need to mix and match the right words to gain the attention of the Father. There’s no need to ramble on with words just because you think there’s value in a necessarily long prayer (consider that Jesus’s prayer in the later verses is only 6 sentences). I think we believe the lie that long or pretty prayers get us “As” in the eyes of God.

But listen, packaging your prayers in pretty Christmas wrapping and a neatly tied bow will not make it any more acceptable in the eyes of God, because he knows what’s on the inside before you ever hand it over to him.

Marina and I have walked through this recently with two miscarriages last year. After we had tried for a year and had nothing but setbacks, that thought creept into our minds, “Did we not pray for the right things? Did we not pray enough? Should we have prayed for this or that? Should we have been more strategic when we prayed?”

The fact of the matter is, the Son knows the Father intimately, and Jesus tells us that the Father knows what is on our hearts before we ask him. The presentation of a prayer has virtually no effect on how it is received.

Your prayers don’t have to be a certain length to be heard. In the midst of crying, they don’t have to make complete sense. Your prayers don’t even have to be spoken or written to be heard.

Do you want to know why your prayers are heard?

First, because you pray to a God who hears.

Second, because you already have the ear of the Father. The veil is torn. The barriers of sin have been removed. You have access to the Father through the Son Jesus Christ, who through his death, resurrection, and assension, have reconciled us to God. Amen and Amen!

But perhaps you had the same question that I did when I read this. If the Father knows the things we need before we ask him, then why pray at all? If God knows what I want him to do, then isn’t prayer pretty much a meaningless exercise?

Get this: the power of prayer lies is in how it moves us more than how it moves God.

When you pray how Jesus teaches us to pray, not only do you put into words the praise and adoration that God deserves, but you also steep your mind and heart into awesome truths about who God is and you are transformed as a result.

Follow me into the first part of Jesus’s prayer.

Christian Standard Bible (Chapter 6)

Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

“Our Father in Heaven” - Jesus teaches us to acknowledge the God we are praying to. Not a generic god. Not to the “universe” in hopes that karma will work all things out according to our hopes. But we pray to a personal being— that is, our Father and the Father of the Universe who is seated on the throne over creation in heaven, ruling and reigning. Remembering that we are praying to the God of the Bible means something for how we approach him.

“Your name be honored as holy” - When we approach God’s throne in prayer with his glory as our aim, we preach to ourselves that our glory is not to be sought, and this his glory is the first priority.

I was at a business banquet one night on a college campus, and a lady gave the opening prayer. The entire prayer was about “give us success,” “give us careers,” “give us advancement and recognition for our efforts.”

Our Lord Jesus teaches us to remind ourselves and proclaim to our God that our first priority is his Glory . . . and as we ask for God’s name to be our primary aim, his Spirit is working out this reality in our hearts.

“Your kingdom come, your will be done” — When we pray in recognigition that we make requests in the shadow of God’s sovereignty, we begin to loosen our hearts grip on those things that we know need to be surrendered to him.

I think we see Jesus himself doing this in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus knew before the foundations of the world that his primary calling was to become a man and be crucified on the cross. Yet, when he was mere hours from that precise moment, he asked God if there was any way this could be taken from him, to please do so. But if not, then let God’s will be done.

Implicit in his plea is that the Father would incline his own heart towards his Father’s will so that when the time came to suffer in the stead of sinners, he would do so, and do so willingly. Praise be to Jesus Christ!

When we preface our prayers with recognizing that God’s will is and should be the priority, the Holy Spirit works within us to answer those prayers— we begin to hold on to the blessings of this world with an open hand as we train ourselves to submit to his will even when things don’t turn out the way we think they ought.

I conclude this second point by saying, prayer is not a magic formula. Instead, prayer is where we offer to God a sacrifice of praise from our hearts, meanwhile our hearts are being transformed in the process.

Once we have set the table of praise, Jesus then teaches us to come to him with our requests.

Prayer is not just about physical needs, its also about spiritual needs (vv. 9-13).

When we gather our requests for God’s provision, what are most of the requests for?

Health

Traveling mercy

General Provision - jobs

Jesus certainly invites us to ask for these earthly things, being that the first thing he asks for is provisions of daily bread (v. 11). But I think that the stronger emphasis is on the other two spiritual requests: Asking the Lord for his forgiveness of our past sins and for his protection and deliverance from future sin.

In our approach to evangelism, we say that our spiritual needs are greater than our physical needs. Let our prayer requests reflect this reality.

Jesus teaches us that we should ask God to forgive us our debts.

Do you know that it’s good to ask God continually for forgiveness for our sins? “BUT CHRIST HAS ALREADY FORGIVEN US, WHY ASK FOR FORGIVENESS” Let me ask you this, husbands and wives, though you are super secure in your marriage and have pledged to never separate, do you think its a good idea to apologize and ask for forgiveness from the other person? Sure, you know that person will forgive you, but you still seek forgiveness when you sin against them, because that’s how relationships are maintained.

In the same way, though our relationship with God is secure, we still do well to acknowledge our sin before a holy God, and ask him for forgiveness. We are comforted to know that he stands ready to forgive us.

“And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” — Jesus knows good and well what it is like to be tempted in every way by Satan (in the wilderness; Matthew 4). He was delivered from temptation and did not sin; and thus when we are being tempted by sin, we can take refuge in him.

Hear this from Hebrews 4:14-16

Hebrews 4:14–16 CSB

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens—Jesus the Son of God—let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need.

Brothers and sisters, let me close with this

The Lord Jesus wants your prayers, not your performance. And it is a beautiful thing when you spend time in prayer awknowledging who God is why you adore him. Not only do you offer God the praise that he is worthy of, but God will open the eyes of your heart to behold him who hears you. And when you make your requests to him, especially when you come to him with your spiritual needs, you can be sure that God hears you and will answer you.

John 14:13–14 CSB

Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.