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Prayer - Matthew 6
A sermon preached by Ian Garrett

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Tonight’s topic is prayer – ie, talking to God. And I guess for most of us prayer is something we’d say we should do, but don’t do enough. How many times have you said, ‘I must pray more’?

Well my prayer as I’ve prepared this has been that it won’tleave us saying, ‘I must pray,’ or feeling more burdened or guilty. My prayer has been that it will leave us saying, ‘I want to pray,’ and that it’ll help us with some of the things that are hindering and discouraging us from prayer. So let’s pray now and ask the Lord to do that:

Father,
Thank you for these words we’re about to look at, which your Son spoke while he was among us here on earth.
We think of how he said, ‘Come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest… For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ And we remember he was talking of people weary and burdened by religion.
Father, we confess we so easily make the Christian life - even prayer - a burden. We often think of you wrongly and lay on ourselves, and on one another, routines and rules that miss the heart of relating to you as Father.
Father, may that not happen tonight. Instead, please show us yourself, and give us the desire and the direction we need to seek you afresh in prayer.
We ask in Jesus’ name.
Amen

So would you turn in the Bibles to Matthew 6. We’re in Matthew’s record of a teaching session by Jesus. And we’re in a chunk that starts at 6.1, if you’d look down at that. 6.1 (Jesus speaking):

¹"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. (v1)

So Jesus is warning us not to do apparently Christian things for the wrong reason. And one of those things is prayer, 6.5:

⁵"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. (v5)

So apparently there was a real problem of people praying in very public places, so that others would think how spiritual they were. Now we don’t have exactly that problem: mercifully, the Newcastle climate makes the temptation to pray on street corners virtually zero – like the temperature. But it’s just as possible for us to pray for wrong reasons. Eg, in front of our Home Group or whatever small group we’re in: it’s possible to pray in order to impress them rather than speak honestly to God. It’s equally possible not to pray for that same, wrong reason. We’re worried that we wouldn’t impress them if we prayed out loud – worried about what they would think about our faltering, feeble prayer - so we don’t say it. And it’s also possible to pray on our own for the wrong reason – or at least, for less than the best reasons. Eg, why will I get up tomorrow and read the Bible and pray first thing (as is my habit – although I don’t by any means keep it up without fail)? Because I ought to? Or because I’ve always been told it’s what Christians do? Or because I’ve just told you that’s what I try to do, so I now have to do it to live up to your expectations? Why pray? That’s my first heading:

Firstly, WHY PRAY? (vv5-6)

Well, look at v6:

⁶But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.(v6)

Let me just say: Jesus is not saying that all our prayer should be done on our own. This bit of the Bible is about individual prayer; other bits tell us to pray with others – but that’s another sermon for another time.

And here, unashamedly, the reason Jesus gives for prayer, end of v6, is: the reward. Not because I ought to, or in case you ask me whether I have. But for the reward. And in my experience, there are two great rewards of prayer.

The first reward is the time of prayer itself. Do you know that verse in Philippians 4.6-7

⁶Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. ⁷And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4.6-7)

I’ve sat down, in turmoil or worry about things, to pray - and got up having experienced exactly what that verse is on about. Eg, the two university missions I spoke on earlier this year were by far the most pressured and yet by far the most peaceful times of the year – because of prayer. There’s nothing like a time of prayer to draw us near to God and give us a real, felt sense of the things we say we believe – that he’s in control, and that he loves us. Somehow prayer brings those things home to us like nothing else. Like the hymn we just sang says:

Take it to the Lord in prayer;
In his arms he will enfold you
And his love will shield you there
(What a friend we have in Jesus, J.M. Scriven)

The other reward of prayer is the answers we see to our prayers. One that’s encouraged me ever since it happened was when I was raising money for my Gap year with a missionary agency in Kenya. I needed £1,500. I applied to various charities, and I prayed that I’d get the money if it was God’s will for me to go. I got £1,400 – which was enough of a green light, and enough to go. Then on the day I left, I opened a letter from a family friend whom I hardly knew. And it had a cheque for £100 in it. I think I paid it in on our way to the airport.

Now don’t run away with a rosy picture of my prayer life. I still do what we just sang about:

O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer.
(What a friend we have in Jesus, J.M. Scriven)

And I don’t always see answers to prayer like the one I’ve just described. I know as well as you do what it is to be puzzled by apparently unanswered prayer, or delayed-answered prayer.

But overall, I can say I know those two rewards of prayer in my own experience: the reward of the time itself; and the reward of the answers. And when I’m in my right mind, remembering that makes me want to pray, and I hope it makes you want to pray – to start praying, or re-start praying, or pray more, whatever it is for you.

At which point, let me mention a practicality about prayer. Jesus says, v6:

⁶But when you pray, go into your room…

Ie, there needs to be something planned about this – when, and where. However much we want to pray, one of the main reasons we don’t pray is that we don’t plan to. We don’t plan a regular ‘when’ or a quiet, undisturbed ‘where’.

Now as I said and prayed at the start, I want to avoid burdening us. So can I say on the one hand, it is possible for us all of us to find a ‘when’ and a ‘where’ to pray. But can I also say on the other hand, that will look very different for each one of us, and that’s fine. Pray as you can, not as you can’t. And not as someone else can. So, eg, some friends of mine have just had their first baby. Life is now utterly different and pretty exhausting. But they’re discovering that in the during-and-just-after-feeding-time-quiet-spell is now one of their best times to pray. Or, eg, I’m not a great morning person, but I pray first thing because it’s uninterrupted. I find it’s better to be uninterrupted but less than 100% ‘on the ball’, than interrupted or distracted at some time later in the day. I’m not going to suggest a length of time to pray, because that’s legalism. It might have been Martin Luther - I can’t remember - who said, ‘I never pray for long; but I never go long without praying.’ Which is a helpful word. Pray as you can, not as you can’t. And not as someone else can.

But my question is: when and where do you plan to pray? Because one of the main reasons we don’t pray is that we don’t plan to.

Maybe one of our biggest ‘buts’ is, ‘But I’m too busy.’ And that really comes out of our deep-seated self-reliance. I mean, if I set aside 10-12 hours to prepare a sermon like this, I’ll easily kid myself that I’m too busy to pray for you for much of that - because I need to think and read and write. In which case, what I’m really saying is, ‘I can live without God’s help. I can bless you without God’s help.’ And that’s nonsense. And slowly over the years of my Christian life God has taught me again and again – not least through moral failure and fruitless pieces of ministry – that I need to pray because I need him to work in me and through me all the time. And the same is true of you. We need to pray. But How? That’s my second heading:

Second, HOW TO PRAY? (vv7-15)

You’ve planned a time that’s realistic for you; a place that’s undisturbed, where you won’t find anyone else – the university library, for example. But then, what do you do next? How to pray? Do you have to close your eyes? Do you have to do that kind of slouch that people do here in church that looks like someone’s just knocked them out from behind? Are you supposed to use lots of Bible-ish kind of words or can you just speak naturally? And for the internationals among us, does God speak anything except English? And do you have to use words all the time? Can’t God just read your thoughts and your emotions, and sometimes isn’t that enough – or even all you can manage?

How to pray? Read on, v7:

⁷And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. ⁸Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (vv7-8)

As part of my time at a Church of England training college I went on a week in London to get experience of ‘other religions’. And we visited a Hindu temple. And I saw a married couple pour a carton of milk over a phallic symbol and then pray to the statue behind it, using the same words over and over and over again, ringing a bell at regular intervals – presumably to keep the god-statue awake and listening.

That’s what Jesus means when he talks about ‘babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.’ That poor couple had such a false view of God (in fact, gods) that they thought some technique applied over and over again would finally get out of this ‘god’ the answer of the gift of a child. It was a fertility ritual.

But there is no technique to approaching God, once you know him as your Father through the Lord Jesus. V8:

8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (v8)

The truth about God, once we’ve come back into relationship with him through Jesus, is that he is our heavenly Father. I know that raises issues for some of us who’ve had unhappy experiences of human fatherhood. So can I say: our heavenly Father is a perfect Father, unlike our earthly ones – who, to different degrees, have all failed to deliver, or to ‘be there’ for us. So we don’t have to fill God in at length on what we need, because he already knows all about our situation and our needs. In fact, he knows better than we do, so that much of the time we need to pray for things but say, ‘If that really is your will; if that really is what I need.’ Eg, he knows better than we do what exam results we really need, or what uni place we really need, or whether or not we really need that job, or whether or not we really need marriage now or in the future; or whether or not we really need better health or more grace to cope with our present health.

So, we need to pray with a true view of God as our Father. We don’t need to badger him to care about us. He does - 24 hours a day. And we shouldn’t think in terms of ‘twisting his arm’ for things. If something is good for us now, he’ll give it to us now. If something is good for us later, he’ll give it to us later. If something is not good for us, he won’t give it to us at all. And that goes a long way to explaining the delays and the apparent non-answers to some of our prayers. And probably one of the hardest things for us is trusting his goodness when our idea of what we need and his idea of what we need seem to differ. And at times like that, I find Romans 8.32 a great help:

³²He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? (Romans 8.32)

Ie, our Father gave his greatest gift to meet our greatest need – when Jesus died for our forgiveness on the cross. So does it make any sense not to trust him over our lesser needs? But it’s not easy, is it?

But then, when we get down to prayer, what do you actually say? What kind of things should we pray about? Well, read on in Matthew 6 for one answer. It doesn’t say everything, but it can be prayer-transforming to use. 6.9:

⁹"This, then, is how you should pray:

(Notice he doesn’t say, This, then, is what you should pray – just repeat these exact words.’ He says, ‘This, then, is how you should pray - pray along these lines.’)

" 'Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
11Give us today our daily bread.
12Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one. (vv9-13)

One of the ways I pray is to have my Bible open at this prayer, with a bit of paper and a pen. I read over the prayer to remind me of the lines I should pray along. And then I think about my life, the day ahead, the things on my mind, the decision that faces me – whatever - and jot down ideas of what to pray for along these lines. And then I pray, with what I’ve jotted down to keep my mind from wandering or going blank. Let’s just go through it:

" 'Our Father in heaven (v9)

That helps me to remember that he’s both willing (he’s my Father) and able (he’s in heaven, he’s God) to give me anything that he knows will be good for me. And it also reminds me, if I feel too sinful and unworthy to pray, that he’s my Father, and that I may have been a lousy son (today, this week), but I’m still a son, and I have exactly the same access to him as I’ve always had, thanks to Jesus all-forgiving death on the cross (see Romans 5.1-2, Ephesians 3.12)

hallowed be your name (v9)

If you went on a guided tour of St James’ Park and were about to step on the pitch, you might be pulled up short by the guide saying, ‘Excuse me, sir, but please don’t step on that. It’s hallowed turf.’ Ie, it’s sacred: treat it with the respect and honour it deserves. And ‘Hallowed be your name’ is saying to God, ‘May you be treated with the respect and honour you deserve – by me, for a start.’

¹⁰your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven. (v10)

In the picture, the box stands for time and space where we live. The crown stand for God whose Son Jesus has died for us on the cross, risen from the dead, and will one day return to wrap up history with the day of judgement – that’s the big arrow, beyond which lies heaven and hell. Or to use the Bible’s other phrase for heaven – the kingdom of God. Ie, the place where everyone willingly submits to God as King, ie, where God’s will is done, perfectly. Which is why it’s a perfect place, with no sin and none of the consequences of sin.

So when we pray, ‘Your kingdom come,’ we’re ultimately praying about the ‘far horizon’ of the future - that Jesus will return. But by implication, we’re also praying that his will would be done before then. I mean, you’d have to be a fool to pray for Jesus to come again to judge while you were still on the wrong side of him. (As people look out on the world this Remembrance Sunday and say, ‘Why doesn’t God step in and end all the suffering?’, they don’t realise how foolish it is to pray for God to step in as Judge when they’re still living in rebellion against him themselves.) So as I pray, ‘Your kingdom come,’ by implication I’m also praying, ‘Help me to do your will today, in anticipation of your return. May your kingdom, your rule, come more in my life, in my obedience, today.’ And by implication, I’m also praying, ‘Help me to make you known to others, in anticipation of your return, so that they have the opportunity to hear the gospel and turn back to you and be on the forgiven side when you come.’ Ie, I’m basically praying for Christians to become more godly, and non-Christians to be converted - so that we’re all ready for Jesus’ return.

So those are ‘God’s kingdom concerns.’ And we need to pray along the lines of his concerns. But we do also have our own concerns, too, and he wants us to bring them to him as well, v11:

11Give us today our daily bread. (v11)

Ie, ‘Give us what we need to live on today; give us what we need to get through today.’ Maybe that’ll translate into thanks for food and prayer for our farmers. Or into asking for restored health to manage a day’s responsibilities, or for ability for an exam or a piece of work we have to do today. Notice (1) that it’s a request for bread - we’re talking about needs, not luxuries (and we’ve already been reminded that God knows our needs better than we do.) And notice (2) the repetition of ‘today’ and ‘daily.’ Several times, the Lord Jesus tells us to live a day at a time. Eg, look over at 6.34 (at the end of a passage on not worrying about our lives):

³⁴Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (v34)

Prayer is the great antidote to anxiety, and as we pray we’re to live a day at a time and not take on ourselves the burden of possible futures that may never happen. Only God knows the future. We know about today, so let’s live there, and pray about it.

¹²Forgive us our debts [which means spiritual debts, sins],
as we also have forgiven our debtors. (v12)

Jesus died to pay for the forgiveness of all our sins – past and future. And if you’re a believer in Christ, you are covered with forgiveness for life. But as and when we become conscious of particular sins, we need to ‘clear the air’ with our heavenly Father and confess them and then get up and carry on, trusting they’re forgiven. It’s not that sin splits the relationship (as if we need to ‘confess our way back into relationship with God’ every time we sin). But sin does spoil or cloud the relationship, so that the ‘air needs clearing’ - with confession on our side, and with God giving us fresh assurance of our forgiven status in Christ). Sometimes people worry whether they’ve remembered everything they need forgiving for. The answer’s always: no. We only notice a fraction of what we need forgiving. So, confess what you do notice, and trust his forgiveness not just for that, but for everything you didn’t even spot.

¹³And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one. (v13)

Ie, ‘Don’t just forgive me for past sins. Please keep me from future sins. Please strengthen me for testing experiences and tempting situations coming up today.’

And then, v14, there’s a kind of footnote, picking up on v12:

¹⁴For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. ¹⁵But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (vv14-15)

Ie, God won’t stand for it if I come along asking him to forgive my sins against him, but refusing to forgive someone who’s sinned against me. That’s just insincere. Now for some, I know, that raises costly issues of forgiving big hurts. But God’s forgiveness of us cost him his Son on a cross. And however costly it is for us to forgive that other person, it was costlier for God to forgive us.

Let me do two last things.

The first is to give you a pause to fix in your mind the one thing that’s most helpful to you, most relevant to you, from all this. What one thing will you remember and take away to help your praying?

The other thing is to say that in the box at the bottom of this sermon are some practical suggestions for praying and where to get more help on prayer. Let’s pray now.

Father,
There is much that we have not had time to cover – questions and puzzles and hindrances that we have when it comes to prayer.
But thank you above all for the reminder of yourself – that you are a Father who is both able and willing to give us everything and anything which you, in your wisdom, know will be good for us. Please forgive us that often we have a different picture of you in our minds which sometimes leads us not to pray at all.
And thank you for the reminder of ourselves – that we are small, weak, dependent people. Please forgive us for our self-reliance and for the illusion of independence under which we we so often live.
Please help us to take into our prayer lives the things you have shown us today. Please help us to pray.
We ask in Jesus’ name.
Amen

PLAN: When to pray regularly; who/what to pray for (eg, start with 1 or 2 people a day); pray along the lines of the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ - for your day, for people/things on your mind.

PRAY: after the 6.30pm service at the front; in your small group (join one!); at the Central Prayer Meeting (8pm, Wednesdays, fortnightly, Church Hall); with a Christian friend once a week; use the JPC Prayer Diary (part of the monthly ‘Newsletter’).

READ: Bold I Approach – interactive Bible studies on prayer – ‘Quiet Time’ material
A Call To Spiritual Reformation, Don Carson, IVP – a MUST for chs 1, 7, 9 let alone the rest of the book which looks at prayers in the Bible for us to learn from.