Sermon On the Mount: You Should Pray Like This (Matthew 6:5-15)

Hello, I'm Pastor Creighton, and thank you for tuning in to New Sun Churches Podcast.

We're a gospel center church in Port Perry, Ontario, proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

May God bless you today through his life-giving word.

This is the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

And Jesus said, 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 received their reward.

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.

When you pray, don't babble like the Gentiles, since they imagine they'll be heard for their many words.

Don't be like them.

Because your father knows the things you need.

Therefore.

You should pray like this.

Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done.

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors.

And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

For if you forgive others their offenses, your Heavenly Father will forgive you, will forgive you as well.

But if you don't forgive others, your Father will not forgive your offenses.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, Lord.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, we give you thanks.

We give you thanks that you are not a God who is intended to stay at distance from us or to stay unknown to us.

But Lord, you desire to make yourself known to us, and you have made yourself known to us through our Lord Jesus and through the word which bears witness to him.

We pray, Lord, that you would draw us deeper into the mystery of prayer, that we would encounter you, that we would encounter your word, that we would be renewed and transformed day by day, more and more, into life abundant.

This we pray in Jesus' name.

One of these days I'm gonna accidentally grab the hand sanitizer instead of my water bottle, and that's gonna be a very interesting sermon.

We've been traveling through the Sermon on the Mount the last number of weeks, asking the question: what does it mean to live life according to Jesus?

What does it mean to live a life that is reordered by God's kingdom breaking into earth, into the life that we live?

God's kingdom reorders the whole of our life.

We've just been going through one aspect of life after the other where God's kingdom is reorienting our focus, reorienting our hearts, centering us on God's promise realized in Christ.

And today is no different.

Today, Jesus would highlight for us what it looks like to pray in such a way that our prayer is reordered by the kingdom itself.

What is prayer?

One definition might be something like this: prayer is an expression, our expression, of adoration, of confession of sins, of petition, of making our asks, or offering thanksgiving to God.

It's our communication, our communion with God.

And the question is, if that's true or if that's the case, then how do we pray?

Jesus doesn't want to just leave us guessing.

He wants to both give us a structure and a model for prayer.

But even more importantly than that, Jesus is pointing us to the very heart of Christian prayer, the beating heart of our Father that we commune with in prayer.

I mean, I don't think anyone would be alone to say that we struggle to pray.

Prayer is a hard thing.

I find prayer is a hard thing.

And for many, many years, even in my Christian life, I struggle to have anything that resembled a consistent prayer life.

And even if we have something that resembles a consistent prayer life, I suspect many of us know what it is to feel frustrated in prayer, to feel unheard in prayer, to wonder if there's anyone else on the other side of all of this, or if our words are just hitting the ceiling and falling down.

What is it to pray in such a way that is reordered by the kingdom of God in Christ?

Here's what Jesus wants us to see in Matthew chapter 6.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

There's probably more that could be said about Christian prayer, but there's certainly not less.

Jesus reorders the very heart of prayer.

He reorders it towards God's kingdom in such a way that our prayer is personal, it is submissive, and it is dependent.

Jesus reorders the heart of our prayer towards a personal relationship with the Father, towards a submissive attitude towards the Father, and towards a dependence on the Father's provision for us.

So we're going to catch today, I hope, a vision of the distinctness of Christian prayer, what makes Christian prayer unlike prayers that aren't Christian.

And I hope we catch a distinctive assurance that comes with Christian prayer, a centeredness, a steadfastness that can take us through even the most challenging seasons of life and prayer.

So open up your Bibles with me, if you will, to Matthew chapter 6, and let's have a look at what Jesus wants us to know about prayer.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

The first thing Jesus wants us to know, or I should say this, the first thing that Jesus wants to do is reorder our prayer away from what's performative towards what's personal.

Jesus says, whenever you pray, verse 5, you must not be like the hypocrites, because they love to stand they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people.

Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.

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.

When you pray, Jesus says, don't babble like the Gentiles, since they imagine that they'll be heard for their many words.

Don't be like them, because your father knows the things you need before you ask him.

So two methods of prayer that Jesus highlights that in the end are faulty, and he points us rather away from an understanding of prayer that equates effectiveness with performance towards a personal trust in the Father.

Verses five and six, Jesus is saying, number one, when you pray, don't make it a public display.

Jesus is taking aim at the Pharisees, the religious elites, the what would you want to call, the super self-righteous, extra pious folks, who would stand in synagogues, would stand in street corners, and make long and elaborate prayers and assume that they are being heard by God because of their own personal piety and the way they wear their piety on their sleeve.

Maybe we know the sort of sour feeling of feeling like someone is really signaling their own, we'd call it virtue signaling nowadays, right?

I mean, that's kind of piety signaling or something like that.

It's look at how holy I am.

It's prayer that assumes its effectiveness comes from a certain kind of showmanship.

It's putting our own personal piety on display, the heart of which we've identified previously is really just a sense of self-righteousness.

Jesus points away from a prayer that assumes piety equals effectiveness, and rather points us away from public display and towards a private devotion.

Rather, go into your private room, shut your door, pray to your father who's in secret.

Jesus is trying to give a, he's trying to indicate us away from making a public display of our own self-righteousness towards a private, inner, quiet devotion before the Father.

The posture of the heart before the Father is being represented in the privacy of prayer.

Because I think a fair question to ask is something like: does Jesus disqualify public prayer here?

I was just praying a minute ago.

We'll continue on praying.

Is public prayer something that really we ought not to be doing?

And I think the answer here is Jesus is not aiming at public prayer per se.

He's aiming at the heart of prayer.

If all we make a habit of doing is praying in public, to be seen and esteemed by others, then there's a heart issue here.

We see Jesus praying publicly elsewhere in his ministry, elsewhere in the gospels.

Public prayer is not the issue.

The heart of prayer is the issue.

Do I assume the effectiveness of my prayers rests on my own making a show of my piety, if that makes sense?

That's one method of prayer Jesus finds faulty.

Here's a second.

It's babbling or rambling on.

Verses 7 and 8.

It's uh Jesus is taking aim at basically what a Gentile or a pagan method of prayer would be would just be to either babble kind of nonsense words as though they're kind of magic, or to just ramble on and on and on and assume that just sheer quantity of words heaped up to heaven is going to have some kind of effectiveness.

This might be, I don't know, roughly correspond to if we if we heard people pray like a mantra or just a kind of ritual cycle of something like it's it's this idea that if I say the right words or the right quantity of words, then that's gonna be effective.

That's gonna twist God's arm in the right sort of way.

And Jesus is pointing us away from this sort of babbling, rambling, performative prayer, and instead towards a simple trust in the Father.

When you pray, don't babble like the Gentiles.

Don't be like them.

Why?

Because your Father knows the things you need before you ask him.

When you come to prayer before the Father, Jesus says, remember who you're praying to.

It is not heaping up words that makes prayer effective.

It is the compassionate and kind heart of your Heavenly Father towards you.

God knows what you and I need better than we do before we even go to Him.

And what a confidence that is when we know the heart of our Father that we come to.

Prayer is not made effective by our piety, it's not made effective by our public performance.

Prayer is effective because our Father is kind towards us.

And therefore, when we come before God, we come before our kind and loving Heavenly Father.

See, Christian prayer puts no confidence in our performance, whether that's piety or whether that's persuasion.

It puts a wholehearted confidence in God the Father.

I have a friend of a friend who saves up every single penny he makes during his work year and takes one week of vacation a year to go down to Las Vegas.

And he goes down to Las Vegas and he plays the slots for about 12 or 14 hours a day.

But he makes one stop before he hits the casino, and that's mass at the local church across the street from his hotel.

And if you ask him why he does it, he'll give you an answer that's something like this I really want God to let me hit the jackpot.

So if I'm gonna have that happen for me, if God's gonna do that for me, I probably would do well to do something, you know, that's nice for God.

I go when I show up at Mass, God's probably a little bit more inclined, you know, to throw a bone my way.

That kind of a thing.

Now that is not to fault any particular denomination of the faith, by the way.

We are all of us, I think, susceptible to that sort of transactional mindset, but that's what it is, isn't it?

Prayer that's a transaction relies on our performance before God.

If I do the right things, show the right kind of piety, pray the right kind of prayers, then God's arm is twisted in just the right way, that he's a little bit more inclined to do for me what it is that I want.

And the simple answer is that is not what Christian prayer is.

Christian prayer does not come before God transactionally or performatively.

It comes before a Father who knows what we need before we ask him.

And yes, God might have a better idea of what we need than we do ourselves.

So we come before our Father humbly.

We come before him with open hands.

Praying to the Father requires not that we have the right words, not that we make the right performance, it requires that we personally know the heart of the Father for ourselves.

When we come before God in prayer, are we centered in his compassion for us?

Are we centered in the surety of his provision for us?

It might look very different than we would imagine for ourselves, but do we center ourselves in the reality that God has done and will do all the things that I need, the things that I can't even do for myself?

That's the heart of the Father in prayer.

It is a personal trust, not a performative action we take towards God.

Christian prayer isn't performative, but we might want to ask, what does it look like?

This is where Jesus gives us both a structure, a prayer to pray, but he also gives us a model for prayer, a model where we can shape and mold, have our the attitude of our heart shaped and molded more and more into God's will for us as we pray.

So, verse 9, we start to see that prayer is not, pardon me, prayer is reordered, reordered from self-interest to submissiveness.

Therefore, verse 9, Jesus says, you should pray like this.

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

I'm going to stop there just for now.

We see that prayer is being reordered away from what's performative to a personal trust in the Father, and now we are submissively bringing our requests to the Father.

Three things in particular, three requests.

Request number one, verse nine, your name, Jesus says, be honored as holy.

God's name is more than just, you know, you'd call me Creighton if you want to get my attention or something like that.

It's not like calling God by the right name so that he starts paying attention.

His name represents who he is.

His name represents his covenant promises, his assurance, his steadfast love, your name, who you are, everything about who you are, God.

Would it be honored as holy?

Would it be lifted high?

Would it be exalted?

Would it be magnified in the world and in my life as well?

Your name be honored as holy.

Your kingdom come, Jesus says.

God's kingdom is his reign and his rule.

And we've talked about before in the Sermon on the Mount how God's kingdom is breaking into earth through the person and ministry of Jesus.

We see God's kingdom breaking into earth, and we're praying that his kingdom would come more and more and reorder our life and reorder our world towards heaven, because boy, our world needs it, doesn't it?

And our lives need it.

And God's kingdom is breaking in, but it's not yet fully realized.

So even we Christians, in light of Christ's cross and resurrection, we still pray your kingdom come because we believe that one day Jesus will come again in glory and bring his kingdom with him.

Right now, earth legs behind heaven, but one day the two will be united as God intends.

Your kingdom come.

Would your reign and rule be realized in our lives, God?

And finally, the third petition here: your will be done.

God, would your purpose in the earth and in my life be accomplished?

This isn't to suggest that God needs our permission to accomplish his will.

He's not waiting for us to, you know, give him the thumbs up or the okay.

God will accomplish his will.

The invitation here is to align our own wills with his, to partner with God in the way that he desires us to partner with him in his kingdom work.

Christian prayer, in other words, prioritizes God's exaltation, his reign, his purpose over my own ideas and over my own plans.

Because after all, praying your name, your kingdom, your will, doesn't that at least in some way negate my name be lifted high, honored as holy, my kingdom come, you know, my order for the world around me, my will be done, my agendas, my designs, my goals be realized.

When we pray your name, your kingdom, your will, we are, as it were, setting aside or submitting our name, our kingdom, our will to the God that we trust is even more caring and providing than we could be for ourselves.

This is a challenge, I think, to a way that a pothole, let's say, that I so frequently fall into in my prayer.

I wonder if you fall into this pothole as well.

We can get into the pothole of praying like a grocery list.

Do you ever do that?

I mean, prayer lists are a good thing, don't get me wrong.

I'm not trying to knock that.

But praying can become a grocery list.

Like, God, I want thing A to happen.

I'd like thing B to happen.

I'd like thing C happen for my friend.

I'd like thing D happen so that I could, you know, get ahead at work.

And all of those things matter, and they matter to God.

I'm not trying to say that they don't.

But if we're not careful, our prayers can become a list of our own self-interestedness in a way that we just try and get God to do our will or realize our purposes for the world.

And it can be quite devastating when that doesn't happen for us.

When I was a lowly curate in Ottawa, there was a celebrity who very publicly converted to Christianity and you know made a lot of headlines and a lot of interviews talking about his conversion to Christianity.

And I confess, as excited as I was to think that that might be the case, my prayer was, I hope this guy's getting discipled, because that is a hard burn if you're not getting discipled.

And sadly, in the years that follow, he had a quite just as public as his conversion to Christianity, he had an equally public deconversion from Christianity.

And among other things, he said he's no longer a Christian because Jesus didn't answer his prayers.

And that's devastating.

But I wonder what kind of prayers it is that he is making.

I wonder what kind of prayers it is that I'm making.

Am I making my laundry list before God and expecting him to do my will, my kingdom, etc.?

Or do I take my list and say, God, you know what my will is better than I do?

But let me slide that across the table and let me pray for your will to be done, your kingdom to come.

Because maybe, just maybe, your will and your kingdom and your name.

Are even better than I can imagine for myself.

This challenges prayer as a list.

It's not persuading God to realize my agenda, it is submitting my whole self, my agenda, my ideas, to a Father who loves me.

Prayer is reordered away from self-interest towards submissiveness to our loving Heavenly Father.

Christian prayer is concerned with the vertical.

It's concerned with God's name, his kingdom, his will, but it's equally concerned with the horizontal.

I wouldn't want us to get the idea that we can't name our earthly needs before God, because that's exactly where Jesus goes.

Let's briefly look at verses 11 to 15 here.

Jesus gives us three more petitions that have to do with our horizontal experience of life as we live it, both physically and spiritually.

Verse 11.

Give us today, Jesus says, our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we have also forgiven our debtors, and do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

We're naming our needs before the God who provides, both our physical needs and our spiritual needs.

Give us today our daily bread, is all about our complete physical dependence on the God who provides.

Bread in Jesus' day is daily sustenance.

It's more than just, you know, the pre-dinner roll or something like that.

It is the difference between life and death.

And it's more than just the bread that we eat.

Church reformer Martin Luther very rightly observes that this phrase daily bread indicates everything necessary for the preservation of this life, like food, a healthy body, good weather, house, home, spouse, children, good government, and peace.

Everything we need to get on in life, God is concerned with too, and we have permission to name it before Him.

Forgive us our debts.

Jesus is naming our spiritual penance before God.

Not just our physical needs, but our spiritual needs as well.

We have a need for forgiveness, for God to mercifully acquit us of our debts, or other translations would say our sins, our transgressions against God and against God's commandments, for which we justly deserve God's righteous condemnation.

But just like we sang, our sins they are many, his mercy is more.

When we come before God, we do not become before a God who is miserly with his grace.

We come before a God who is abundant with his grace, who is far more eager to forgive us than we were eager to commit the sin in the first place.

That is the God that we come before.

We pray for spiritual need and forgiveness.

We pray for a spiritual need and deliverance, right?

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

Now, does God lead us into temptation?

James very clearly says that when tempted, no one should say, God is tempting me.

God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone, but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed.

That should be assurance for us that God does not will to send us headlong into temptation.

We could rather translate this petition as something like this God, would you deliver us from evil, from the evil one, so that we may not be led into temptation.

God does not desire temptation for us, but he will deliver us from sin if we run to him.

See, Christian prayer refuses the idea that we can be physically or spiritually self-reliant.

Instead, we depend wholly on the Father's abundant daily kindnesses.

When I was a student in England, I went and visited the orphanage in Bristol that was run by George Mueller.

And if you know the story of George Mueller, it's an incredible story.

And if you don't, please Google it.

I don't have time to tell it in detail.

It is amazing.

George Mueller ran orphanages for thousands of children without more than three days' worth of revenue in the bank.

He ran it wholly by prayer.

And when there was no food on the table, he asked the children, it's time to get down on our knees and pray.

And the bread truck would break down before their orphanage or milk would be delivered because there was too much or something like that.

George Mueller says, The orphans under my care are provided with all they need only by prayer and faith, without anyone being asked by me or my fellow laborers, whereby it may be seen that God is faithful still and hears my prayers.

So here's the challenge for me, and this is a challenge for me.

Do I believe that God's kindness is more dependable than my ability to provide for myself?

That's not permission to just sit on my hands and let God, you know, do everything for me.

God calls us to do good work as well.

But I'm amazed at myself when the last thing I think to do when I'm in need is pray.

That's convicting.

But how do we how do we come to a place where we depend wholly on God's kindness, his kindness to do for us what we can't do for ourselves?

Maybe we begin with this: we look to Jesus.

Jesus who teaches us to pray is himself the good news to which Christian prayer points.

He is the very gospel himself.

Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father, Jesus says.

When we look to Jesus, we don't see someone who is like the Father or suggests what the Father is like.

He is someone who in his life, in his incarnation, puts the Father's heart on display.

And so when Jesus shows us his love through the cross and the resurrection, we know that the Father loves us to the cross and back.

Jesus is the one who submitted wholly to the Father.

My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, he says, at the foot of his cross and at the Garden of Gethsemane, yet not as I will, he says, but as you will.

Jesus is the one who wholly submitted to the Father for our sake so that we could have a share in his abundant life.

Truly, truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself.

He can only do what he sees his Father doing.

For whatever the Father does, the Son also does.

When we see Jesus' dependence upon his heavenly Father, we see the one who is dependent on the Father for our sakes, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves, to rescue us from our sins and from death, and to bring us into life and life abundant.

Jesus is the one, not just through his teaching, but in his person, who reorders our prayer as our hearts encounter the goodness of God revealed in him.

Jesus Himself reorders the heart of our prayer towards a personal relationship with a loving Heavenly Father, towards a submissiveness, a willingness to lay our plans and designs down at his feet, and a whole dependence on God to provide for our physical and our spiritual needs.

We see the distinction of Christian prayer.

It's not about twisting God's arm through ritual, through performance, through the right words.

It's about coming to a God who loves us and shows us his love for us in Christ.

And that is the great assurance of Christian prayer, isn't it?

The great assurance of Christian prayer is that as we humble ourselves for Christ, we will be exalted with Christ.

As we refuse to cling to our lists and our agendas, we will in time gain all things in Christ.

And as we die to ourselves, we will live abundantly with Christ forever.

As we submit to God's will, Jesus teaches us, and depend wholly upon his provision, may we, through prayer, come to know the immeasurable love of the Father shown to us in our Lord Jesus.

So let's pray.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever.

Amen.

We hope that you've been blessed by God's word today.

If you live in the Port Perry area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at 10 a.m.

If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.

Please find our contact information at newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.

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If you feel called to support our ministry with a financial gift, please go to newsongportperry.ca slash giving to make your contribution.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.