Matthew 6:7-10
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
July 21, 2024
In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus urges His followers to pursue exceptional righteousness. In doing that, He’s urging them into a pursuit that rules out the enjoyment of complacency or self-satisfaction. Yet, He promises it’s a small price to pay for the reward it brings: a closer walk with God and a closer approximation in our life of God’s character and conduct. Because Jesus loves us just as we are, He calls us to become better than we are.
In this portion of His Sermon, Jesus illustrates what this elevation of our life looks like by describing how it affects three traditional spiritual practices: charitable giving, praying and fasting.
At the end of last Sunday’s sermon, we began to reflect on His words about praying. Jesus draws a contrast between two kinds of people who pray. Some seem to “love…to pray”; but it turns out that they love neither praying nor the One to whom they pray – but rather themselves and the opportunity public praying gives them to put themselves in the spotlight and proudly parade their piety. They thereby degrade a holy activity into an exhibitionist parody of true spirituality.
By contrast, other people pray, in public, but more often “in secret”, because God dwells “in secret” as well; and, in the secrecy of being alone with God, they evade the distractions and temptations of public prayer and can connect all the more deeply and honestly with God.
To pray right then is to avoid hypocrisy and to serve God more in prayer than oneself – though Jesus knew that to serve God first is ultimately to serve oneself best.
In the initial verses of today’s passage, Jesus makes the additional point that to pray right is to avoid, not only hypocrisy, but also verbosity, and to remember praying is conversing with Someone who is neither indifferent to our well-being nor reluctant to help us. Because God passionately cares about us and is eager to bless us, piling on words with Him is needless as well as faithless.
Long-windedness in prayer is rooted in wrong ideas about God. Jesus says that those who “heap up empty phrases…think that they will be heard because of their many words” – as if God will only be moved to respond if we put out enough verbiage and put in enough time. What kind of God is that? Jesus tells His followers not to pray like those folks pray because they do not think about God as those folks pray. His followers grasp that “your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” God is neither ignorant and in need of our instruction, nor hesitant and in need of our persuasion. He is the perfect Father we never had but always wanted – the Father who loves us without limit and knows what we need better than we do. In prayer we can say however much we want to say, and spend however much time we need to spend; but only if we’re not trying to work God over but work on ourselves. It is the work of prayer to center ourselves upon God, let the truth about God sink into our mind and heart, and solidify our commitment to trust and obey Him like Jesus.
For the sake of briefly doing all that, Jesus gives us what we call the Lord’s Prayer, a pattern for prayer to follow in order to pray right. “Pray then in this way,” Jesus says as He teaches it to them.
What we should note right off the bat about it is that Jesus prioritizes divine concerns over human ones. His prayer has us begin by addressing God as “our Father who is in heaven”, not to heed proper spiritual etiquette, but to recollect and recognize with whom we are speaking: a God who is personal, loving and high above us. That takes the sting out of demoting our pressing interests to second place. For, since God is both great and good, He is worthy of occupying first place and worthy of our entrusting our concerns to His care while we attend to serving His purposes. Remembering who it is to whom we are praying instills in us a fitting reverence, deference and confidence. It puts us in a frame of mind free of both fear and presumption, free of both anxiety and egocentricity. It also enables us to keep aware that life is first and foremost about honoring God as He deserves – and not about our succeeding in our ambitions, getting what we want or feeling what we like to feel.
In leading us to pray first for the hallowing of God’s name, the coming of God’s kingdom and the doing of God’s will, Jesus’ prayer adheres to the prioritization of the Ten Commandments which reveal our God-directed duties before our human-directed ones.
Jesus tells us to start our praying by focusing on God and asking for three things. First, we pray that God’s “name” be “hallowed”. “Name” here does not mean the word by which the person is identified, but the very person so identified. So God’s “name” is to be understood as God Himself. Now God is already holy, already separate and above all other beings. Thus, to “hallow” God’s name is to respond to God in line with His pre-existing holiness. It is to affirm our resolve to live out our recognition that there is none like Him, that unique praise and devotion belong to Him, and that He’s more to be desired and sought than everything else.
Second, we pray that God’s “kingdom” “come”. Again, as God is already holy, so God is already “King” or “Ruler” over all that exists; and thus in one sense God’s kingdom has already come. Yet, in His sovereignty, God has granted certain beings freedom of will; and because they choose to use that freedom to rebel against His reign, God’s authority is often disregarded (albeit within the limiting parameters God sets). So to pray this prayer is to affirm our resolve to submit to God’s reign over us in particular and to bring what and whom we can under God’s rule. To pray that God’s kingdom come is to labor for it to expand in this insubordinate and often incorrigible world until the Messiah comes to set everything right.
Third, we pray that God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. As God’s name is already holy and as God is already King, so God’s will is already perfectly fulfilled…”in heaven”. To pray this prayer is to affirm our resolve to carry out every wish of God for our individual life and to dedicate ourselves to do what we can to align life on earth with life in heaven.
We can authentically – that is, non-hypocritically – pray the first half of the Lord’s Prayer just to the extent we are making a good faith effort to kill off self-centeredness in us. We can hallow God’s name more, the more we repudiate our preoccupation with our reputation and popularity. We can facilitate the coming of God’s kingdom more, the more we give our best to serve God’s royal purposes. We can help God’s will be done on earth, the more we walk in it and enact it.
Life is not first and foremost about our salvation, or our self-improvement or our pleasures and comforts. It’s about God. So the best prayer of all is to give our all to embody God’s exceptional righteousness.
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