This sermon examines Jesus’s model for prayer in Matthew 6, emphasizing that believers should approach God with the humble trust of a child coming to a majestic, transcendent Father. By contrasting true Christian faith with manipulative pagan practices, the message highlights that prayer is not meant to bend God’s will to our desires, but rather to align our hearts with His kingdom while seeking His glory, daily provision, and spiritual protection.
Transcript
I’d like for you to open your Bibles to the Gospel of Matthew and I want us to look at Jesus’ pattern for prayer as we consider and think about the things that we’ve thought about for the past few weeks as we’ve considered this question of prayer. Matthew chapter 6, beginning in verse 5. On another occasion, it’s recorded in Luke chapter 11 that one of Jesus’ disciples came to him and asked him, “Would you teach us to pray like John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray?” Jesus gave some instruction there on prayer which includes some of the words that we have in the Sermon on the Mount that he gives here.
So in Matthew chapter 6, beginning in verse 5, this is the instruction, the precious teaching of our Lord Jesus in guiding us as we take our prayer offerings to the Lord. Jesus said:
“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 repetitions 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. Pray, then, in this way:
Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”
Let me ask the Lord to bless His precious word to us. Father, as we reflect on this wonderful guide for prayer that our Savior gave to us. As we look at this passage and think about it this morning, as we do a quick survey to reflect on what we have been thinking about and learning in regard to our pattern of prayer, how we are to pray, and what our heart is to be like as we pray. We ask, Father, that you guide us into this truth today. Please shape our hearts through your words. Help us, Father, to set aside our own agendas to be instructed by the purity of your word. We ask for your protective grace and the blessing of your Spirit. Please guide me as I speak, to not introduce anything that is extraneous to your word, my Father, to only reflect and be able to communicate better an explanation of its truth and practical ways so that we can live them out. Guide us in these ways, we pray, in Christ’s name. Amen.
Reviewing Our Study on Prayer
Back in January, we started looking at prayer because, as far as a study is concerned, there’s probably no study of the Bible that’s going to draw us closer to the Lord than learning how to come before our Creator God, our majestic God, and offering prayers to Him that we know are heard by Him. It’s a privilege that only believers have. In the first sermon, the idea was that true confidence and power in prayer comes to us through the righteousness of Christ, not through our own personal merit. We looked at some legendary prayer warriors like George Muller and John Nelson Hyde, and we gave some examples of the remarkable ways that God blessed through their ministry of prayer.
We thought about how wonderful it would be if we were able to have a ministry looking to God’s grace and blessing that was effective like that. To be a prayer warrior, a person who can go to the Lord in prayer with confidence that God hears our prayers and that our prayers are answered. We began to look at what it means to abide in Christ, and the next sermon had to do with abiding in Christ and maintaining fellowship with God, walking in the light, confessing our sins to restore broken fellowship, and then coming confidently to the specific promises of God’s word as we offer them up to the Lord in prayer.
God Uses Ordinary People
One of the extraordinary things that we looked at that Sunday was how God uses ordinary people. The example that James gave is the example of Elijah. What James said about Elijah is that he was an ordinary man just like us. That made me start thinking, so even though this is a comment on a sermon two weeks back, I thought I would expand on that just for a moment. Our access to God is an extraordinary privilege. We think of ourselves as ordinary people, and we should, because we are ordinary people. There’s not much to me, and there’s certainly not much to a tiny group of people. If the world thinks about it, a handful of people in a little country church, what can they do for the Lord? We might be surprised. We might be able to do extraordinary things for the Lord if we put ourselves in His hands.
We were recently reading through the book of Exodus, and I thought about Moses. In Exodus chapter 3, Moses has that encounter with the burning bush. God gives him the commission of going to the Pharaoh to deliver the Hebrew people from the Egyptians. Moses says, “Who am I to do this? Why would they believe me? If I tell them that the Lord appeared to me, they’ll just say they don’t think the Lord appeared to you. What if they deny what I say?” God said to Moses, “What’s in your hand?” He says, “A staff.” He says, “Throw it down.” He throws it down and it becomes a serpent. Moses flees before it. God says to Moses, “Pick it up by its tail.” He does, and it turns into a staff. He says, “So that they might believe.”
What was that? A piece of wood that was cut from an olive tree. It turned into a serpent and swallowed up all the demonic serpents that the Pharaoh’s magicians produced. In the hands of Aaron, that staff turned water into blood when Aaron struck the water with it. It was stretched out over all of the plagues and judgments upon Egypt. One at a time, they stretched forth the staff and all those things happened:
- The frogs
- The lice
- The thunder, hail, and lightning
- The locusts
It was lifted up to divide the waters of the Red Sea, serving as a rod of healing and escape for the Hebrews. It was used as a means of provision in the wilderness when Moses struck the rock at Horeb to miraculously provide all the water needed by the multitudes and the livestock. Moses held it up for victory for the Jews; they had to hold Moses’ arms up while he held up that staff. When Moses’ leadership was questioned as a test, that rod miraculously budded, bringing forth almond blossoms. Finally, it was used one last time at the end of the wilderness wanderings to bring water out of the rock in the desert of Zin.
Moses says, “Who am I? I’m just an ordinary man.” God says, “What’s in your hand?” Moses says, “An ordinary stick.” God takes an ordinary stick and does some really extraordinary things. There was no magic in the stick. There’s nothing special about Moses. There’s nothing special about any one of us. But in the hands of God, because of the power of God, we can be used in wonderful and remarkable ways.
Praying in the Name of Jesus
The access to that God gives us is through prayer. Last week we looked at praying in the name of Jesus. We looked at the verse, “Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.” Praying in the name of Jesus is not something to punctuate the end of our prayer. It is approaching God through Christ’s authority, merit, and mediation for us. To pray in His name means to come to the Father clothed in Jesus’ perfect righteousness rather than our own sinful record. We have access to God because we are in Christ Jesus. That should give us confidence. Our confidence comes from the fact that it’s not something we merit, but something Christ has done for us. He has already purchased the answers to our prayers.
The Pattern of Prayer
As we reflect on Jesus’ prayer, I want us to consider these things we’ve already looked at and see how the pattern Jesus gives us to pray reinforces and helps us understand with clarity what we’re about when we come before the Lord to pray. Jesus says, “Pray then in this way: Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name.”
The foundation of Christian prayer is the relationship we have with God. Without it, we have no access to Him. The very first thing Jesus said is that we come to God as our Father. He’s our Heavenly Father. We come to Him as one born into the family of God, as a child of God.
When you have a baby, when Jared and Jess were expecting Edmund, we went to the hospital. Their baby hadn’t been born yet, but as we were walking through that ward, all of a sudden we heard the sound of a newborn baby crying. That is an emotional thing. When you hear that sound in real life, it’s powerful. It’s a very natural thing. The baby is saying, “I’m alive!” and proves it’s alive because it cries out as one who is dependent. As a little one dependent on its mother and dad, it comes needy and instinctively cries. When you come to faith in Christ, it is absolutely natural for you to cry out to God in dependence on Him. It’s a genuine expression of genuine life in God to have that occur naturally in you.
We come to God as our Father. Jesus’ teaching on this was remarkable and introduced something new that wasn’t fully understood in Jewish history up to that point. Several times in the Old Testament, God is called Father. But in each of those times, He is called the Father of the nation. It’s not personal. Jesus teaches that we are to come before God recognizing we have a relationship with Him as a Father who loves us. He uses the word Abba, an Aramaic word for daddy. It is a personal name for a father. You come before God in this uniquely personal way, knowing He cares about you the way a parent loves a child and wants to meet their needs. That was radical and scandalous among the Jewish teachers of the day. But it is wonderfully true that we come before our majestic God recognizing He loves us as His dear child. It’s a precious reality we only have in Jesus Christ.
Our Father who is in heaven. I’ve been working on a little project on the side, a catechetical instruction. In the study, I was looking at American Sign Language for some help and came across the sign for God. The American Sign Language for God is the hand held vertically coming down to the face. What it’s saying is that God is transcendent. He is far above us. He is way more than we are. The only way we have access to Him is for Him to condescend to us. We can’t climb up to Him. God accommodates Himself to us by giving us His Word and the person of Jesus.
God transcends us. We should think about His greatness. Think about His attributes:
- He is infinite
- He is majestic
- He is holy
- He is perfect
- He is glorious
- He is all-powerful
This entire universe, everything you can see, picture, or touch, has come about by the power of His creative work. You can’t think about those things without being overwhelmed. One of the things we absolutely should do each time we pray is spend a little time thinking about who we’re praying to and His greatness. It’s not like talking to a buddy. He is an exalted God. We come before Him confidently with childlike trust, to a God who is infinitely glorious and powerful, yet in a relationship with Him like a father and child.
True Prayer vs. Pagan Magic
Then we come to the requests themselves. It’s really interesting that when Jesus gives the pattern of prayer, the initial and primary focus is God Himself.
- “Hallowed be Your name”
- “Your kingdom come”
- “Your will be done”
The first prayer is that His name be glorified and kept holy. That everything we do works to His glory. That His kingdom is established in this world, and that His will is done. The fundamental purpose of prayer is not to bend God’s will to our will. That’s not Christian faith. That’s magic.
In the ancient world, there was a collection of Greek papyri dating from about 200 BC to 500 AD called the Papyri Graecae Magicae. It’s a collection of texts compiled for magic scripts used in pagan worship. They believed that with the right formulas, they could command deities or cosmic forces to do their bidding. They thought they could bend the will of their god to their will using the secret languages of the gods, using words like Abrasax or palindromes like Ablanathanalba (which sounds a bit like Abracadabra). The idea was that knowing the secret language gave you power over the god.
Why do we care what they taught in pagan worship? Because sometimes in preaching today, you get magic. There are people preaching a false gospel that is all about us, what we want, and how we can get it. They give formulas for how to bend God’s will to your will. They say things like, “When you pray, you must believe you have already received what you asked. And if you do, God has no choice but to bring those requests to pass because prayer and faith are spiritual laws that even God can’t violate.” They teach that if you think, speak, and believe big, God’s answer is automatic if your faith is strong enough.
That is not Christian faith; that is pagan magic. The Bible never teaches that we can bend God’s will to ours. Jesus prayed, “Your name, Your will, Your kingdom.” Praying that God’s will is done requires us to humbly set our will aside in a spirit of self-denial. The purpose of prayer is to bring our will in line with His will. We don’t command God. If we come to Him in faith and prayer, He will use us to bring glory and good in this world for His eternal glory. Praying “Thy will be done” means we accept what He sends without complaining, trusting His guidance and what He gives us, even if it means hardship.
Power of Attorney and Praying for Our Needs
Adding the name of Jesus to your prayer doesn’t force God to do what you want. God has given us power of attorney to sign requests with Jesus’ name. But if you were given power of attorney over your parents’ estate because they were sick, and you decided to sell their assets to take a long trip to Europe for yourself, that’s fraud. That’s a breach of fiduciary duty. Power of attorney means you use those resources for their purpose. If you’re given the right to sign the name of Jesus, you don’t spend it on yourself. You spend it to the glory of Christ.
We are in a family relationship with God, and He knows your needs before you ask. Our life is important to Him, so we pray these other requests:
- “Give us this day our daily bread”
- “Forgive us our debts”
- “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil”
“Give us this day our daily bread” is an unselfish request. It’s not “give me my daily bread,” it’s “give us our daily bread.” We are praying for ourselves and the family of God to have our physical needs met to His glory.
We also pray spiritually: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” We ask God to show us mercy as we confess our sins, and remind us to show mercy to those who have hurt us.
“Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” These are spiritual warfare words. We live in a world at war with God. It’s a dangerous place, so we look to God in humble dependence for protection from evil and temptation. We come to God daily to confess our sins and seek His guidance and blessing so we can survive this world spiritually. We have needs, and there is nothing wrong with taking them to the Lord, asking Him to work to His glory by bringing healing, blessing, provision, and strength. We should expect God to answer because those things are for His glory, but we trust His will. We are praying for the will of God to be done. We come to the Lord expecting His great blessing for His glory.
Father, we struggle a bit as we consider this theology of prayer. We need this guidance from You. We won’t ever achieve this faithfully just by thinking about the principles. It takes Your work and change in our hearts to help us come with great joy, seeing ourselves as part of Your great kingdom work. Help us to bring these things to Your throne of grace for Your glory, and to share in that joy. Help us to grow in this and make it an everyday part of our life. We ask that You be glorified through what You will do with Your people here at Mayflower Hills Baptist Church. We ask this, Father, because the kingdom belongs to You, the power is Yours, and the glory is Yours forever. Amen.