Matt 6.7-15
what we really need
(matthew 6.7-15)
Jason Procopio
Prayer is one of the most difficult aspects of the Christian life for me. When I was a kid it seemed not just strange, but completely, full-on crazy. In every movie where you see someone talking to someone who isn’t there, that person is either insane (best-case scenario) or there are demons or ghosts around (much worse). When I was taught at church to go in my room and speak to someone I couldn’t see or hear, it wasn’t God I thought of, but scary movies. So of course, I never did it.
It wasn’t until much later that I came to real faith in God, and accepted the truth that even if I can’t see or hear him, he is there, and I can and should speak to him—that he delights in hearing his children speak to him. But even after having accepted that truth, it was difficult. Even with other people, normal conversation is difficult for me. I have no problem with hearing God speak to me through his Word, but actually speaking back…? That’s much harder.
So I wish I had learned earlier the very simple lesson Jesus teaches us in today’s text. This text is an enormous relief to those of us who find prayer difficult, because he makes it truly, incredibly easy. The only struggle is remembering and believing that it really is this easy.
In the first six verses of Matthew 6, which we saw last week, Jesus warns us against doing the right things for the wrong reasons—for doing good things like giving, and praying, and fasting, to be seen by others instead of because we love our God and are seeking the reward that only he can give. In today’s text, v. 7-15, Jesus warns us against doing one of these right things—prayer—in the wrong way.
Prayer as Mantra (v. 7-8)
He’s just been talking about prayer and how we should not pray like the hypocrites, who pray to be heard by other people. He remains on the subject of prayer in v. 7:
7 “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.
Jesus moves from saying, “Don’t be like the hypocrites” to “Don’t be like the Gentiles.” Pagans often repeated certain words, or the names of their gods, hoping they will be heard because of their repetition. (Maybe the best example in the Bible is in 1 Kings 18, when the prophets of Baal stand on the mountain and repeat his name—“Baal! Baal!”—over and over, trying to invoke him.) So Jesus says, “Don’t do this. Don’t pray like the pagans.”
It’s important to understand that Jesus isn’t condemning simple repetition. There is a place for repetition in prayer. The Bible encourages us multiple times to persist in prayer, to be diligent in prayer—to come back to prayers over and over again, especially if they’re things God has promised us in his Word, or something he delights in (like praying that he would make us more like Christ, or save someone we love). That’s not what he’s talking about. So if your first thought was, Oh no, I always pray for the same things, don’t worry: that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Rather, Jesus is talking about what I’ll call “prayer as mantra”. Think of transcendentalists repeating a mantra, or monks intoning a chant. We can slip into a quasi-Christian version of this very easily. Jesus knows that when we lack inspiration, we will say certain things over and over again simply because we don’t know what else to say. Or even worse: we’ll say the same things over and over again, like a hammer hitting a nail over and over, hoping that if we keep going, eventually that prayer will make it through the wall. He’s talking about a kind of mechanical repetition that we think will help get our message across—as if God were a three-year-old who has to be told over and over again to not eat Play-Doh (just like the discussion I recently had with my daughter).
It sounds silly when I put it like that, but it’s far more common than we imagine—we do it without even realizing it. For example, for some of you, the next time you pray aloud, count how many times you say words like “Lord” or “Father” in your prayers. When I was a kid, I would get bored in prayer meetings, so I’d distract myself by counting how many times people did this—one guy repeated the words “heavenly Father” forty-seven times in a two-minute prayer.
Or another example—many people will simply say the name “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus”, over and over, as if he were lost, and they’re trying to guide him back to where they are.
If you do this kind of thing, don’t worry—like I said, it may be completely unintentional, little more than a verbal tic. But it might well go deeper than that. Try praying without repeating those words, and see how it feels. For many people, a vague kind of worry will creep in, because you have the feeling that your prayer would be somehow less effective without saying these things over and over.
Jesus tells us not to pray like that, not to imagine that by repeating a stream of buzzwords, God will hear you better or pay more attention to you; that’s simply not true.
But most importantly, Jesus tells us why we shouldn’t pray like this. His reason is so simple and so freeing that it hit me like a truck the first time I really paid attention to it. V. 8:
Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
What great news! And it’s so simple, we kick ourselves for forgetting it. Our prayers need not act like a mantra because nothing we can do or say will make our prayers any more convincing to God! He already knows what we need, and far better than we do!
We don’t need to heap up empty phrases and mindless repetitions—we don’t need to pray as if we were reciting a mantra. This is wonderful news.
The problem, though, is that for many of us, if you take away that mindless repetition, there won’t be a lot left. If I don’t say these same things over and over…what am I going to say? How am I going to pray?
So of course, Jesus steps in. Rather than simply telling us what not to do, he tells us what to do. He teaches us how to pray.
Or to put it another way, he gives us a piece of liturgy. He gives us something we can repeat to ourselves over and over, to remind ourselves of what is essential.
The Lord’s Prayer (v. 9-15)
Let’s read the prayer quickly, and then we’ll go over it point by point. V. 9:
9 Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
10 Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread,
12 and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
As you can see, this prayer has a beginning invocation (“Our Father in heaven”), and then six requests to help us adjust our priorities—the first three focusing on God himself, and the last three focusing on our own needs in the context of the Christian community. These things, Jesus says, are essential—these are the things that we should be focused on; it is in these areas that we should understand how God works in our lives.
One more thing before we begin (and this may be obvious, but it bears being said). When Christ tells us to pray something, we can be assured that God will always answer that prayer. If God himself tells you what to pray, it’s because he wants you to pray that way, because these are the things he wants to do. The petitions in this prayer are not just requests, but promises. And if he has promised to give us these things, it is because these are the things are what we truly need. Everything else we could pray for is either unnecessary, or an extension of these main things. So let’s see them together.
Firstly:
We need God to be known as holy (v. 9).
He begins by saying:
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
When Jesus speaks of God’s “name,” he’s not talking about the letters G-O-D, strung together. The name represents the person who bears it. When we speak of God’s name, we’re talking about who God is, as he has revealed himself. We know that God is holy—that is, he is entirely above and apart from all other things that exist. Only God is perfect in his character and perfect in his attributes. He is the source of all things and the reason for all things.
God alone is truly holy. So when Jesus tells us to pray that God’s name be “hallowed,” he is telling us to pray that God might be seen and treated as holy. That the world might see who he is, and what he is like, and respond to him appropriately.
This simple fact of the holiness of God should be the beginning point, not only of our prayers, but of our lives. If God is holy, then I cannot think of anything else as ultimate—only he is ultimate. If God is holy, I cannot look for my fulfillment in anything else—because he is my Creator. If God is holy, my priorities should become his priorities—because only he knows what priorities I should have.
The starting point for all our life, all our thoughts, all our loves, all our actions, is the holiness of God.
And that is why he can tell us to call God “our Father in heaven.” Christians can often turn the fact that God is our Father into something far too familiar, adopt a mentality that thinks of God as “Daddy”—as if when we pray, we’re coming to God for a hug.
But reminding us of the holiness of God’s name, of the greatness of who he is, keeps us from falling into that trap. God isn’t my Father like my Dad is my father. God is my Father in that although he is perfectly holy and perfectly “other”, perfectly transcendent and infinitely above me, he has established a relationship with me, through the life, death and resurrection of his Son. He has brought us into his people, into his family, and given us all the rights and privileges afforded to his children.
Knowing God’s holiness doesn’t diminish the goodness of this relationship; it increases it. For such a relationship with the Creator God should not be possible—and yet, in Christ, it is.
So we pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Next:
We need God’s reign over us (v. 10).
10 Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
So this is actually two requests that I’ve put together into one. And already, this should freeze a lot of us in our tracks, because at least right now, today, we don’t want this.
When we pray that God’s kingdom would come, that means that we want God to reign over the entire earth. And that means we’re praying for a world which is not a democracy. We are not praying for God to “serve at the pleasure of the people,” as we say about our presidents. We are asking him to do his will in this world even if his will is very different from ours.
And here’s the thing: God’s reign and his sovereign will extends to the minutest details of our own lives. When we pray this prayer, we are asking God to do what he will in our lives; with our health; with our professions; in our families; in our children… Everything.
That’s a frightening request. Or at least it’s frightening if we don’t fully believe that God is good—that his will is gracious, and that his reign is just. The loss of democracy is no loss at all if the King who reigns is perfectly good and perfectly loving and perfectly just: if our King will always do exactly the right thing, at all times. That’s not a loss; it’s a gift.
Next:
We need God to provide for our physical needs (v. 11).
11 Give us this day our daily bread…
We’ll be coming back to this in a couple weeks, later on in this chapter. But when we ask God to give us our daily bread, we are simply asking him to provide for our physical needs—the most basic things, like food, clothing and shelter. These are things we need in order to live, so these are the things we ask for.
The reason this picture would have been evocative for Jewish disciples is because they knew the story of the manna in the desert—how God provided food for the Hebrews every day that they were in the desert. Every morning, new manna was on the ground, which they would collect. That’s the picture: trusting God daily for the things that we need.
It may make us uncomfortable to not be more specific with this request—to not actually give him a shopping list of our needs—but what did Jesus just say, in v. 8? Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
He knows what we need far better than we do. Many of the things we ask God for are things we don’t actually need. Our prayers so often devolve into self-seeking nonsense. We pray for things, not only that we don’t need, but that are actively bad for us.
And in a way, that’s okay. We aren’t God’s colleagues; we’re his children. Children ask their parents for things they don’t need all the time; but if we’re good parents, we don’t get angry at them for asking—we’re just glad they’re talking to us. So we say no, and we show them—over much time, and with much patience—why the things we give them are actually better for them than the things for which they ask. And we trust that they’ll learn over time to ask for better things.
When we pray such a simple prayer as Give us this day our daily bread, we’re putting our needs in God’s hand, and submitting to his wisdom: “You know what I need; please take care of me.” And we can trust that he will do it.
Next:
We need God’s forgiveness (v. 12, 14-15).
12 …and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
Jesus follows this petition with a bit of further explanation in v. 14-15:
14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 15 but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
This can be a troubling idea. It seems as if he’s saying that God’s forgiveness of us depends on our forgiveness of others—and we know that’s not true. Everything the Bible says about salvation us tells us this isn’t the case. God saves us before we do anything to please him; he forgives us before we forgive others. We are saved by grace, through faith (Eph. 2.8). Faith is what saves us, and nothing else.
I think he said it this way in order to make it as clear as possible that there is a link between God’s forgiveness and ours. God’s forgiveness of us doesn’t depend on our forgiveness of others; but there is definitely a link between the two.
The first step in our salvation—the first thing God does in us when he gives us faith—is that he makes us penitent. That is, he makes us aware of our sin, and sorry for our sin; he shows us that we need to be forgiven. And then he helps us believe the good news that in his Son, through his sacrifice, we are forgiven.
If God saves us, if he has truly forgiven us, we will be penitent. That’s just the way it is, and that’s the way it is every time. If we are not penitent, we have not experienced repentance and faith.
And what happens when we begin to understand the weight of our sin, and the forgiveness we have received in Christ? As we grow in our understanding of our own sin, and of God’s grace to us, we naturally grow in our desire to extend that same grace to others—to forgive others as God has forgiven us.
Why? Because our sin against God is far greater than anyone’s sin against us. We’re not just talking about one isolated offense, or even a series of offenses, but all of them—all of the sin of our heart, every sinful thought, action or attitude, from our birth to our death. God doesn’t merely forgive a sinful act, or even a series of sinful acts; he forgives sin—all sin, in all its myriad grotesqueries, for every one of his children. Even a great sin committed against us is small compared to the sin God has forgiven in us.
So you see, in the light of the forgiveness we have received, it becomes unthinkable for us to not extend the same forgiveness to others.
If God forgives us, we will forgive others. It is a process—it does take time—but if we understand God’s grace to us, we will definitely grow in this area; we will learn to forgive others, as he has forgiven us. If we stubbornly persist in our refusal to forgive others, we need to take a good look at our hearts and wonder whether we’ve truly experienced forgiveness for our sins. Because if we have, such hard-hearted lack of forgiveness goes against everything we are now.
So we pray—that God would forgive our sin, and that he would help us to forgive others.
Lastly:
We need God to protect us from sin (v. 13).
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
Now, God has promised that he will not tempt us to sin (James 1.13)—why would we need to pray that God wouldn’t do what he has already promised not to do?
The answer lies in the second part of the sentence: but deliver us from evil. We know that there is one who tempts us constantly. The devil and our own sin are at war with our souls, trying to drive us to sin, or to break us, through the trials we face throughout our lives. Evil is constantly working to drive us away from God rather than towards him.
So Jesus is saying, "Ask God to shield you from the evil which wants to break you.” God might well lead us into situations we would never have chosen for ourselves. He might well lead us into times of suffering. But he will never lead us into situations which will destroy our faith, or drive us to sin. If we sin, it’s because we decide to sin—it’s not because God didn’t protect us well enough. When Jesus tells us to pray that God would deliver us from evil, he is telling us that all of the infinite protection at God’s disposal to shield us from sin will be ours.
Learning to Pray
There are a few striking things about this prayer that we need to see, beyond its mere words.
Firstly—and if you come from a charismatic church background, like me, listen closely to this—it is remarkable that what Jesus tells us to do here isn’t remotely spontaneous. Some Christians imagine that if it’s not spontaneous—if it doesn’t flow freely from whatever our heart happens to be feeling at the time—then it’s worthless (or at least worth less). The problem with this idea is that whatever our heart happens to be feeling at any given moment might be wrong—we might be passionate about the wrong things, or more likely, we aren’t passionate about the right things.
So Jesus doesn’t tell us to pray spontaneously: he tells us, “Pray like this,” and then gives us a prayer to pray.
The Bible is full of prayers like this—examples of what godly prayer looks like. People who prize spontaneity will resist praying these prayers themselves, because they’re not original. But prayer without the Bible almost always turns into navel-gazing. What we usually end up praying for is self-centered nonsense: asking God for things that wouldn’t be good for us, which he’ll never give us because he loves us. So we lean on the Bible to help us know how to pray what we ought.
And that’s the second truth we need to see. Prayer in the Bible is never just “talking to God”, or even just teaching us how to talk to God. The prayers in the Bible teach us the truths which should motivate us. When we know what is most important, we will pray for what is most important; and we will have confidence that God will answer, because these are the things he says are most important, and which he told us to ask for.
Which leads us to one final truth. Like I said before, there are many prayers in the Bible. Almost every prayer in the Bible—if it is a prayer of which the Bible approves, and isn’t used as a bad example (like maybe Jonah’s prayer in the belly of the fish?)—is, in one way of another, an extension of the truths we see in this one.
Think of it this way. As you know, a few months ago we did a series on our church’s vision statement. We wanted to have a clear vision for the church, so that every big decision we make, every initiative, every ministry, could be traced back to it—so we could know why we are doing what we are doing.
Well, this prayer could be seen as God’s vision statement. These are the things that God prioritizes. It starts with who God is: the holiness of his name, the greatness of his reign on earth and in heaven, for the glory of his name; and it continues to show that who God is overflows in goodness to his people—to provide for our needs, to forgive our sins, to protect us from evil. If we want to know why God does what he does, there’s our answer.
Obviously we will pray for other things than these. But when we pray, we should have this prayer so firmly anchored in our minds and our hearts that everything we ask for in prayer can be traced back to one of these truths.
When we ask God to bless our ministry, it is so that he might be glorified.
When we ask God to help us obey him, it is because he is our King, reigning over our lives, and he has promised to protect us from temptation and to deliver us from evil.
When we ask God to save our loved ones, we are praying that his reign would come to bear on their lives as well.
When we ask God to provide for our material needs, it is because he has promised to do so—and it is to remind us that everything we truly need, we will always have.
God knows how difficult prayer can be—particularly if we tend to be scattered in our minds or in our affections. So thanks be to God: he teaches us to pray. He shows us that these are the things that are most important to him; these are the things he has promised; and so when we pray for these things, we can rest in perfect assurance that he will do them. And as we pray this prayer, we teach our hearts to share these same priorities, to share these same desires, and to have this same focal point: our holy God, to whose kingdom we belong, and who cares for us according to his perfect and gracious will.
