Yesterday, I talked about being on the alert for the danger of living out our relationship with God in the presence of others with a focus on impressing others. This is especially dangerous when we are investing our time thinking about God through spiritual practices like prayer. Jesus exposed how the people of His day misunderstood and misused prayer with the wrong focus and motives:
"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 repetition 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." Matthew 6:5-8
To understand what Jesus is communicating here, we first need to understand what prayer looked like in Jesus day. In Jesus day, people prayed out loud in the temple. So, for those who wanted to show how spiritual they were, they would pray in a raised voice so as to attract attention and impress others. And if that was not bad enough, they would also repeat their prayer requests over and over again. Jesus, responding to what He had seen in the temple, tells that crowds listening that those who pray to be seen by men are posers, they are putting on an act. Jesus point was that the reason that people were posers was because they misunderstood and misused prayer and prayed with the wrong focus in mind. You see, prayer is more about communion with God than it is communication with God. When we pray, we are, in a mystical and supernatural way, entering into the presence of God. When we pray, we are spending time in the presence of God not only to speak with God; when we pray, we are to be carving out space to hear from God. But how often do our prayers look something like this: “Dear God, thanks for this day, OK got that out of the way; God please bless me, protect me, give me, make her like me.” So we come to God with our list of what we want Him to do for us and spend little or no time quiet before Him to let Him speak to us. So prayer ends up being a one way conversation when it was designed to be a dialogue; where God speaks to us by His Holy Spirit through a part of Scripture that He brings to our attention, or through an impression that He places on our hearts, or through bringing to remembrance a piece of counsel we have received from Him or others in the past.
Jesus is not talking about a private prayer closet here; Jesus was communicating to the crowd, and to us today, is that we are not to pray with a focus on us or so that the people around us, who are visible, can see and hear us. A person who is in a growing and maturing relationship with God will spend time contemplating or thinking about God through the practice of prayer, either individually or in groups, with a focus of having communion with God and with a focus of hearing from God as well as being heard by God.
Now a natural question that arises is “well what does the prayer of a person who is in a growing and maturing relationship with God look like?” We'll look at that tomorrow.
So what do you find yourself focusing on when you pray? How do you define prayer?
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