When You Pray (Mat 6.7-9)

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When You Pray (Mat 6.7-9)

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If you are anything like the disciples, prayer isn’t the easiest thing for you. In fact, difficulty with prayer has been the common lot of Christians for the last 2000 years, as it was for God’s Old Testament saints before that. Simply stated, we have difficulty talking to God, for that is what prayer is. We often feel God isn’t listening, or if he is, we don’t understand why he chooses not to answer, or at least not to answer how and when (it seems obvious to us) he should. What purpose is served by such enigmatic behavior by the God who gave his Son to save us?

All these issues and more are what Jesus is addressing when he gives us the Lord’s Prayer. He isn’t just giving us a rote prayer or a pattern for prayer, though he is doing both of those – he is addressing all of our difficulties with prayer.

On the front end, Jesus sets before us three seminal truths about God which serve as the basis of the everything in the Lord’s Prayer. For that matter, they serve as the basis for everything in the Sermon on the Mount, and indeed for everything in the New Testament. Those three truths are God is King, God is Father, and God is ours. And in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus doesn’t just tell us these truths, he puts them in our mouths. As we pray them, we also confess them, and as we confess them, we also learn them, and as we do all three, God transforms us and the world.

I hope this sermon helps you in your prayers and in your understanding of the Father, to whom Jesus brings us and tells us to pray. So let us turn once again to where Jesus always pointed the disciples when it came to talking to the Father – and that is to this little prayer, less than seventy words long, which the Church has honored with the title, the Lord’s Prayer.

I hope you enjoy the sermon.  Thanks for listening.  –Alan Burrow

Discussion questions

1. How does the Father regard the prayers of his children?  (Rev 5.8; 8.3-4.)

2. Jesus says the Father already knows the things we need before we ask him (Mat 6.8). How is this an incentive to pray, and not a disincentive?

3. Jesus says we ought to persevere in prayer and not give up (Luke 18.1). He also says we should not engage in vain or empty repetition (Mat 6.7). What is the different between vain repetition and perseverance?

4. Jesus tells us not to be like the heathen who think they will be heard for their many words (Mat 6.7), and he gives us a model prayer which is less than 70 words long (Mat 6.9-10). Yet Jesus himself spent all night in prayer (Luke 6.12). How do these things fit together? What should we take away?

5. In Hebrews, it says that Jesus, “in the days of His flesh, . . . offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and was heard because of his godly fear . . . .”  (Heb 5.7.) We get more detail in Psalm 22, which is Jesus’ prayer on the cross. It begins with the well known words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22.1.) It continues: “Why are You so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not hear; And in the night season, and am not silent.” So, before Jesus “was heard” (Heb 5.7), he was not heard (Psalm 22.1-2). What do you think the Father was doing here with his “beloved Son” with whom He was “well pleased” (Mat 3.17; 17.5)? (Hint: read Heb 5.8-9.) Does being “not heard” necessarily mean you have sinned or that God has turned his back on you? What was Jesus’ response to “not being heard”? (Psalm 22.1-5, 9-11, 19-21.) How does all this affect your understanding of what is going on when the Father “doesn’t hear” your prayers? What does the Father want you to do in those times?