Transcript
We are in Matthew chapter six. We're in the story about Jesus. So we're going through Matthew Matthew's telling us eyewitness accounts about Jesus. And he happened to be in a section of Matthew where he's recounting Jesus's teaching one of his most famous teachings that goes from chapter five through chapter seven, and it's called the Sermon on the Mount. It's called the Sermon on the Mount because in the very first verse it says that Jesus called his disciples up to him and he had him sit down there kind of up on a hillside. This is near Galilee. Jesus has been teaching around the Galilee region there. It's a big body of water in Northern Israel, and he's been in these just these small towns. He's been healing people. He's gathered a group of people who are very interested in what he has to say. They're shocked with the authority that he teaches with.
And so he has this message that he gives. And we've looked at chapter five, we're now in chapter six and there's three. There are these three spiritual activities that Jesus talks about in this part of the sermon. He talks about giving to the poor prayer and fasting. And this falls within a broader context where Jesus is talking about righteousness. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean for you and for me to be a righteous person, a righteous person fits well, that's a good descriptor of a citizen in God's kingdom. See, Jesus came and he's saying there's this kingdom that's invading the kingdom of heaven. It's at hand, it's nearby. Jesus is the king of that kingdom, but it's like this invading society with an alternative set of cultural values and rules and relationships. And Jesus is teaching his followers about here's what it means to live in that kingdom, to be a righteous person.
And so last week we looked at this spiritual activity of giving to the poor, and we emphasized this idea of genuineness, that Jesus says that a righteous citizen in the kingdom of heaven is genuine in their giving. They're genuine in the way that they give to the poor. And so now we come to this section on prayer this week and next week we'll be talking about prayer. And so let's look at verse five through eight. He says this, 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 the people. Truly, I tell you, they have 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 before you ask. Let's pray for a moment. Father, we ask that you would work in our hearts as a surgeon. We give you permission to deal with the issues of our heart. We're spiritually hungry. We were designed by you. We were designed to hear these things. And yet there's this internal battle. There's this war between the flesh and the spirit. There's an internal rebellion as followers of you. We don't even like that internal rebellion, and yet we've given into it attitudes, pride, ways of thinking, that they just need to be eradicated from our life. And so we give you the next 30 minutes and we ask that you would speak to us through this text.
Teach us how to pray. Take away our hypocrisy. Give us just this simplicity, this ability to speak plainly to you and to trust that you're going to answer the things that we're praying for. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. So Jesus brings us now to this point of talking about prayer. So last week we looked at giving alms or giving to the poor. And now Jesus assumes that you and I as his followers, that we will pray. And prayer is just a word for talking to God, having a conversation with God. But it's a unique kind of conversation because he's physically not there. Now, we have conversations all the time throughout the week with people who are not there. They're called phone calls or zoom calls. They're not in the space. But what's unique about prayer is that we're having a conversation, but the responsiveness of God is not like a human responsiveness.
The answer of God is not so apparent. And yet prayer spans genesis through revelation. The Bible is screaming at us that we are ought to be people who are praying. But it's funny how there's this term prayer, the Bible. I mean the Bible uses the term prayer, but it's really just this. It's a term for this special communication between you and God. And the Bible expects that you're regularly, you're regularly talking with God. So there's three things that we're going to see here in this text. First of all is that there's genuine prayer, personal prayer, simple and direct prayer. It's first put to us in a negative way in verse five, let's look at genuine prayer again. He says, 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, you have your reward. So a hypocrite. This was an actor at the time of Jesus. In fact, you've often heard that Jesus was a carpenter. It's more likely that Jesus was worked with his hands, but there was not a lot of wood available to do carpentry. There was a lot of masonry. And the word that is carpenter could be also applied to the idea of being a stone worker. And near Nazareth, there was this giant amphitheater that was being constructed at Jesus's time. So it's very likely that Joseph and maybe Jesus constructed this large theater amphitheater as a stone worker. But one way or another, this term hypocrite here, that Jesus says you shouldn't be like in your prayer life. It's taken from the arena of theater where you would have somebody putting on a mask and playing a different role from who they are in real life.
Jesus says, when you're having your conversation with God, when you're praying, you should not be like the hypocrite. And then he cites something that would've been common for his audience. They would've been able to kind of recall, oh, I've seen that hypocrite. Yeah, when I was growing up in the synagogue, there was that one guy. There was that one guy who he really was kind of flashy in his prayers, and he really drew a lot of attention to himself when he was in the synagogue. And oh, yeah, yeah, I remember. I know that lady that she kind of stands on the corner. She prays really loud and she gets a lot of attention. So the crowd, Jesus's crowd would've been able to relate to this example. And Jesus says, don't pray like that. They're doing that so that they'll be seen by people. That's literally, Jesus gives the motive. They're doing their spirituality so that others will watch them. And he says what he said in the previous text, he says, they've got their reward. Sure enough, they're seen and they're esteemed, they're esteemed. Eugene Peterson, he in his message Bible, he says it this way, when you come before God, don't turn that into a theatrical production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for stardom. Do you think God sits in a box seat?
Jesus is saying this is the kind of person who's using their spirituality as a status symbol. They're doing a performance hoping for approval somehow in the last 30 or 40 years. I think it goes back before that the Western evangelical Christianity, which we're a part of, we're Protestants and we're Protestants, we're evangelicals. That's a term that's about 60, 70 years old. It just evangelical. It means that we believe that God wrote the Bible, the Bible's inspired and it's iner. Now, evangelicals kind of co-opted now to refer to a voting block, but it originally was just a description of these are the people who are Protestants, that when they look at the Bible, the 66 books of the Bible, they believe this is God's word without error. And they as a group believe that. And so that group, we've written books and then you have bookstores, and there became this kind of commercialization of that crowd, and it's kind of unique to us.
Now, Catholics, they also have their published books, but they're really strong with more of the institutions and academics that was more of that society and that tribe. But for Protestant, evangelical Christianity, we kind of got this whole production of commerce and commercialization that has occurred. When I was growing up, one of my first jobs, I volunteered in a Christian bookstore and you'd have all these new things that are published that would be coming through, and there's good books that are out there, the good stuff that was written. And both of my parents are actually writers and there's good stuff. But there's this thing about this wing of Christianity, this body of Christ, where there's really a show that's going on a little bit later. You have TBN where it's like we're going to create and make Christian tv and kind of turn spirituality into a show.
And then we kind of ended up with kind of Christian rock stars or Christian celebrities is what we call 'em. And they kind of go on the speaking route like they successfully planted a church and their church grew is big enough and they're now the stars, and we'll platform 'em and we'll go to their conferences. And then we got into Christian music and we got the Christian rockstar scene, and they're putting out their latest album. And a lot of it just runs parallel to a secular format. That's not necessarily bad, but it exposes and it creates a space where we are vulnerable to the hypocrite, particularly vulnerable, to kind of using spirituality as theater. Like Eugene Peterson says here, and I think I talked about this a couple weeks ago, but I was listening to this interview with a Greek Orthodox person, and that's another wing of the Christian, big broad Christian family.
And they don't have that. Their spiritual leaders don't go on the speaking circuit. If you're the pastor of a church or they call it a priest, you're the chief servant and you have some fancy title, but you've taken up this call because the church affirms that the Holy Spirit's called you to this role, but you're the chief servant. You're not the hero of the story. You're not going out and being platformed. It's much more of a humble role. And that seems to align more with what I see in the pages of this story of Matthew, Jesus advocating for this humility and not a showiness. Well, there is here this negative example, right? And Jesus is don't be like the hypocrite. There's an echo of Genesis three here and the fall. If we go back to Genesis three, humans have wrestled with the temptation to be disingenuous and hypocritical with their spirituality. Remember Adam and Eve, they had this relationship with God where God would just meet with them. He talked with them in the cool of the day. There was just this beautiful intimacy that humans had with Jesus.
And then the fall occurred, it says in Genesis three, seven, it says, then the eyes of both Adam and Eve were opened, and they knew that they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. It's either covering up, they're hiding, I can't be found in naked. And then verse eight, then the man and the wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Again, this idea of like I can't be seen as I am. The amazing thing about spiritual hypocrisy or doing the spiritual show is that you've come into the kingdom where you're safe, you're loved by God, and you don't have to put on a false persona any longer. You've been liberated from hypocrisy. And yet there is this form of using spirituality as a mask.
And we see it goes back to this garden scene. You go a little bit further in the Old Testament. You get to the life of Saul, the first king of Israel. There's a story in one Samuel 13 where Saul has fought a battle and he's at the end of the battle and he's impatient. His troops were deserting him. They were going back home, and he decided to take on the role of a priest and offer sacrifices to kind of boost the morale of his troops. When he offered the sacrifice, this was supposed to be the role of only the priests. It was not supposed to be something that the king would do. It was a spiritual act intended to boost the morale and had nothing to do with a genuine prayer to God. And when Samuel, who was the prophet saw he was a prophet and he was a priest, when Samuel saw what Saul had done, he said, God's done with you, the king or the line, the lineage of kings is no longer going to be with you.
Saul is one of the greatest examples of a disingenuous spirituality. He's uses spirituality to get public approval rather than a genuine expression to God. And then the last example of this, you would go over to Acts five. In Acts five, there's the story of Ananias and Sapphira. And man, the church is just banging. It's exciting. People are coming to Jesus. The church is growing, and there's not just this crowd that's gathering, but there is a real work of the spirit that is authentic and it's manifesting itself where people are just motivated to sell their stuff and to give it to the church. And then the church is redistributing it out to people who are poor. And it says in Acts four that nobody had lack that this church was a church where nobody in the church was poor because of the sharing of stuff together.
And then we get zoom in on this character, Anani and Sfi, they sell some property, they give it to the church, but they say this is the full amount that we sold the property for. When really they held back part of it, God struck both Ananias and Sfi dead on the spot. It was not because God wanted the full amount. God wanted a genuine expression of faith. Here's the principle. God does not want people doing spiritual stuff so that they are more accepted in spiritual circles and that is the kind of community you and I want to be a part of. How refreshing is it when you encounter somebody that's genuine in an age where there's so much media, so much television, when you encounter somebody who just is comfortable in their own skin and they're willing to say, you know what, I messed up, or I'm not perfect.
They're not trying to put on a show, but they're authentic. That kind of person is attractive, and Jesus is saying, look, this is what it's like being in my kingdom is you're not praying. You're not giving to the poor to put on a show. The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom where Jesus people are genuine. Now, it's not just a genuineness, but look at the personal nature of this prayer. If we go to verse six, Jesus says, here's what I want you to do. 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. If you're putting yourself in a private room with the door shut, talking to God, God is either real, personal and close, or the whole thing is a fraud. I mean, if you're in your closet praying, you're either talking to your clothes and your shoes or you're talking to God, it's either real or it's not real.
Think of for a second a business convention. You're stuck in a social setting with business peers. The conversations are superficial, formal, and distant. Sometimes people have a gift for being in the social setting, but the gift that a person has for that setting, which I don't have, it's this gift of actually being friendly and phony at the same time. Being able to pretend you're genuine, but not really giving away too much genuineness. There's a little bit of a script. Let me walk you through Alex's experience in this setting. It's a bustling business convention. People are milling and engaged in conversations. The main character Alex navigates through the crowd, Alex's inner monologue as he greets various people with a polite but distant demeanor, he's sang to himself another year, another convention, time to put on the professional mask again, scene one, Alex and a business pure Jordan are talking.
Alex or Jordan says, Alex, great to see you. How has the year been? And Alex says, oh, you know, business is boring or booming. Just closed a big deal last month, and you and Jordan says the same here. Lots of exciting projects. Let's catch up more over coffee sometime. And Alex's inner monologue is exciting projects. I doubt he even remembers my name. Catch up over coffee. Oh, that's code for I'll see you next year with the same small talk. Move to scene two, Alex. In a group of peers, everyone's laughing and exchanging stories, but the laughter feels forced. Alex says, absolutely. That merger was a game changer in the market. We've all seen the impact, haven't we? And a group member says, definitely. It's a whole new playing field now, and Alex is saying in his head, none of us here really care about that merger.
It's just something to talk about. Something to fill the silence. Scene three, Alex is alone. He steps away. He's looking for a quiet, quiet corner. In his head, he's saying, this is exhausting. Everyone's wearing a mask, including me. We're friendly, but it's all phony. We talk, but there's no real connection. It's like we're all playing a part in a show that no one really enjoys. And then scene four, Alex's later in a quiet hotel room, he kneels and he starts to pray. Lord, here I am. No masks, no pretense, just me as I am his inner ong. He says, this is different when I talk to God. It's real. There's no need for masks, no need to impress. It's just an honest conversation from the heart. Why can't all my interactions be this genuine? Yeah, Alex's longing for a society that Jesus is loading. Jesus is teaching the Sermon on the Mount and it's a reversal.
But here's the thing. I think people who aren't followers of Jesus long for genuineness, but if you're not a follower of Jesus, you've got to play your angles. You don't have this meta narrative where you see this arch that ends in eternity with rescue and redemption. You see, it's not safe to be genuine if you're not a follower of Jesus. Not always because you don't know the rules. There's not necessarily a sense or a framework of what's safe, am I secure? And Jesus is really trying to establish his kingdom and say, here's what it means to be this new society. Again, there's this difference between the formal acquaintance, this ritualistic surface level, often about appearance, and this idea of having a close relationship with God, this personal relationship where it's deep, honest, not concerned with outward appearances, but with genuine connection. Formal acquaintances, we've got this guarded limited sharing of personal matters, but then in close relationships and open and vulnerable, sharing our innermost thoughts and our feelings again, you have this interaction, the formal acquaintance, this interaction, it is sporadic and based on necessity where in close relationships you have regular committed communication regardless of life's circumstances.
I think we can relate to those that contrast between the formal and the distance, the distant and a close relationship. We are wired for close relationship. We're wired to have this personal relationship with God. That's why we read Psalm 43 at the opening of our service because it is an expression authored by the Holy Spirit, through a human in a desperate place who is liberated and free to tell God, God, I feel downcast. Why am I downcast? Why are you downcast? Oh my soul. Put your hope in God praying that God would remedy the situation with enemies and to take care of what's wrong.
And notice what Jesus says at the end of verse six, and your father who sees in secret will reward you. So you're in this secret place where it's just you and God, no pretense, and it says, God's there. God's there. And what does it say? It says, he will reward you. This word reward is most oftentimes translated in your Bible and mind. He will give you, he will pay back to you. It's reciprocal language, but that legalistic, Josh, that sounds mechanical. Well, it's Jesus who's saying it. Jesus is literally saying, you go and you pray in that private place, there's a reward that the Father has for you. He will reward you. Again. The Bible screams a consistent message about prayer. That prayer is effective, that prayer is important. It is a piece of the puzzle. Talking to God in a genuine, authentic way, leaning into your personal relationship with him brings about a result you will be rewarded.
But not only is prayer to be genuine and personal, it's also to be simple and direct, simple and direct. In verse seven and eight, Jesus says this, 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 before you ask him. Notice the contrasting kingdom prayer with the way the Gentiles pray. He already said, don't pray like the hypocrites. Now he says the Gentile. So a gentile is somebody who's non-Jewish at the time. When Jesus is teaching that, he's saying, look at the pagans, the people that are praying these pagan countries or these pagan people groups or those who are falling like a Greek mythology, the people of Rome, all these different groups that were unified under the Roman Empire. There's this babbling and the calculation of that pagan prayer is as if their God is a vending machine.
The more money or language you put in, the more snacks you'll get out. It's almost as if heaven is a busy customer service line, and if you call enough times, you'll get the nice representative and Jesus saying, no, that's not how it works. That might be these other pagan, gentile religions, but that's not how heaven works. That's not how prayer works. He uses the term babble as if there is a prayer that is this mindless activity of inputs saying just something rote over and over and over again. I think that's where maybe kind of our Protestant tradition moves away from the written prayer and we pray spontaneously. So when I pray on Sunday mornings, I'm praying what is on my heart? It comes from this text. Now I've become more and more of a fan of a really well written prayer, and I've begun over just the last few years to actually write out my own prayers and structure them and realize, wow, there's a way to really structure a prayer well, where it really comes from the heart, but it is meaningful.
It's theologically rich. It stirs my heart and faith. But Jesus is saying, look, no. There's this kind of praying that is totally alien for the kingdom of heaven. It's based on this works and kind of this mechanistic inputs and outputs and isn't rooted in relationship. And instead, what Jesus wants is he wants you and I to be simple and direct. This brings to our minds one Kings 18 in the story of Elijah. Elijah proposes a competition between the priests of Baal and himself because Israel has been carried off into idolatry. Baal is the primary God. That is the pagan God being worshiped. And so Elijah calls those priests up to the top of a mountain and he says, let's have a competition. Let's build an altar. You pray to your God first, and if he sends fire from heaven, we'll know that Baal is the true God.
And then when you're done, I'm going to pray and ask God to send fire from heaven. And if he sends fire from heaven, then Yahweh is the true God. Now, there's three options, right? You have the one option is that Bal sends fire and Yahweh does not, and so Baal is God, or you have a non-answer, or you have Yahweh, I guess you have four options. You have Yahweh answering, sending fire, or you have no answer at all. And so you've got a 50 50 chance here in this competition if you're the ball priests. So they took up the bowl that he gave them, Elijah, and he prepared it, and they called on the name of ball from morning until noon saying, ball, answer us. But there was no sound. No one answered, and they danced around the altar that they had made at noon. Elijah mocked them and he said, shout louder for he's a God. Maybe he's thinking it over. Maybe he was wander. He wandered away or maybe he's on the road, perhaps he's sleeping and you'll wake him up. They shouted loudly and they cut themselves with knives and spears according to their custom, until blood gushed over them all afternoon. They kept on raving until the offering of the evening sacrifice, but there was no shout. No one answered. No one paid attention. Can you believe it? Ball didn't respond back then it was Elijah's turn,
And it says, after the time of for the offering, the evening sacrifice, the prophet or the prophet Elijah approached the altar and said, Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel today, let it be known that you are God in Israel and I am your servant, and that at your word, I have done all of these things. Answer me, Lord, answer me so that this people will know that you are the Lord, that you are God, and that you have turned their hearts back. Then the Lord's fire fell, consumed the burn, offering the wood, the stones, the dust, and it licked up the water that was in the trench, simple and direct prayer that is what the Bible wants of us, not cutting yourself, not dancing around, trying to get God's attention. He heard this simple prayer from Elijah, and Elijah knew this. He had a long relationship with God. He did many conversations with God, and he knew that God didn't need to be woken up or tricked into answering this or cajoled. And yet sometimes in our own life, the way that we pray is this idea of, man, I've got to just convince God. I got to get God to give me attention.
Jesus came, he lived a life that you and I could not live. He died a death that we should have died so that we could live the life we don't deserve to live and be saved from the death we should have died. Jesus made it possible for us to step into the most amazing society, a place of genuine communication with God, a place of personal intimacy with God in a society where we can speak plainly to God, knowing that he hears us. That is what Jesus wants his citizens to know, and it's an invitation that is extended. It's so personal that we can take communion together, and he extends to us the image of his body. He's like, come and take of this symbol that represents my body being broken by blood being shed for you. Jesus has made a personal investment so that you and I can enjoy this genuine prayer life. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you for this teaching. We pray that you would teach us by your spirit to pray in that private place. Teach us to in prayer, in faith, trusting in you. Thank you for the promise that's here, that you will reward us for that private prayer life. Thank you, God, that you know beforehand what things we have need of, and that you are this personally involved in our lives. We are so grateful, so grateful. Continue to stir us up in this regard. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.