Many years ago when Rolex was the watch to have among the elite, a company sold imitation Rolex watches. The watches looked just like a Rolex. They had the name “Rolex” on them. But you could tell that it wasn’t a Rolex by the difference in the hand motion of the watches. Now though it looked like a Rolex it wasn’t a Rolex. It was a fake. In this passage of Scripture Jesus tells us that some prayer isn’t real prayer. Some prayer may have the characteristics of real prayer but it lacks the authenticity of real communication with God.
The key idea of the passage that Jesus conveys to us is that we must avoid entertaining false ideas of praying that are ineffective and diligently cling to the kind of prayer that is a vital link between ourselves and God.
Last week we looked at two patterns of prayer Jesus said we should avoid. We saw that hypocritical showmanship in prayer had a different desire than to communicate with God. This hypocritical showmanship wanted to receive the applause of men rather than the applause of heaven. It was focused on self-exaltation and the worship that took place was self-worship. Jesus said that we too could fall into this trap if we are not careful to seek to guard our motivations for what we do.
Jesus also described ritualistic paganism as another pattern to be avoided. We are reminded that we all can enter into this practice if our prayers become merely perfunctory instead of being heartfelt and need driven. If we lose the focus of who God is and that He cares for us then we may lose the urgency of our need in coming to God in prayer.
2. A Pattern to Follow
In verses 9-13, Jesus gives us a pattern to follow for our prayer. In other words, when we pray, what should our prayer be like? Jesus begins verse 9 with these words, “Pray, then, in this way.” This prayer (often called the Lord’s prayer) at which we are about to look is neither intended as a formal prayer prayed in a public setting to receive man’s favor nor a ritualistic prayer to be repeated again and again to receive God’s favor. To do so would be to neglect Jesus’ teaching of the previous verses. Last week Jesus told us to avoid seeking man’s favor and reject the idea that repetitious prayer can cull God’s favor. So let’s recognize that this prayer is not something to be instituted in our services so as to impress people who come with how lofty prayer can sound. And neither is it something that Jesus gave as a prescription for people to pray according to memory as if the words were the formula for gaining God’s attention.
What I have found in the spiritual life of people and churches is that if people or churches are simply reciting the prayers of others by rote without any understanding of its meaning or reflection for what they are really asking it is an indication that they are lacking any spiritual connection to God.
You know what I’m talking about. You can tell the difference between a tele-marketer who wants to communicate with you and the one who simply reads their script. (In monotone voice with unnatural breaks) “Hello, how are you sir? Good, I’m so glad to hear it.” You’ve been there. Now put yourself in God’s place. If you were to hear someone reciting Scripture in an attempt to communicate with you. (Same tone) Our Father, who art in heaven. Hallowed is your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done.” What would you think? Do you see what I am trying to say? Now there are many great prayers in Scripture. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use them as a basis for prayer. I’m saying that if we pray them without meaning them or understanding them then it is worthless. And this is what Jesus has said. So what I am saying to you is that Jesus never gave this prayer to be simply repeated as some mantra to obtain favor with God.
Then what is this prayer that Jesus gives to His disciples in verses 9-13? It is a model that should encompass each aspect of our devotional prayer life. This prayer should cause us to focus on how we should pray not what words we should pray. Let’s look at what this now includes:
A. A reverential worship
The first aspect that this model prayer includes is reverential worship. Jesus begins this prayer by the worship of God the Father. Too often I think that many Christians, myself included, do not give appropriate time to worship. We almost, at least without saying it, deny its importance. We give lip service to praise. We talk about praise. We casually say, “Praise the Lord” but it seems to hold very little attachment in our soul. God said, in Isaiah, that the Jews had come to this point in their religion. “They worship me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.”
We can pray and make requests and think that our time was well spent. But if we have a limited amount of time to pray and have a choice between praise and making requests we think that it would be a waste of time if we merely give praise without asking God for anything. However, a Christian heart, not filled with praise to God, is a miserable heart. The reason is, the Scripture says we were made to praise the Lord. Whenever we are not operating as our owner’s manual says we should then our motors aren’t going to be running as they were made to be. This means, as the Apostle Paul says, that we have to train ourselves to set our mind on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. He said, “Set your mind on things above not on things that are on the earth.” Too often we go through life with our mind on the things of earth. We neglect to set our minds on our real home and wonder why we are always down in the dumps. If you set your mind on the earth you will be acting like the residents of earth. But if you set your mind on things above then you’ll be able to function in this world like a child of heaven. Now inevitably I will hear the objection, “but how can I concentrate on the things I need to do if I’m always thinking about God?” But most of the time this question is a charade merely to give the one asking liberty not to obey the Scripture. My response is that I’ve never seen anyone truly fulfill this to an extent that would keep him from doing what he is supposed to do. As a matter of fact I find that the people who are more heavenly minded are the most level headed and responsible people as long as they aren’t using it as a sham themselves to avoid their responsibility.
I don’t think that we can pray rightly if we have not learned to praise rightly. This is why Jesus begins here. We need to be giving ourselves to proper praise so that we can give ourselves to proper prayer. In Jesus’ prayer, I think that reverential worship includes two features.
i. Recognizing God’s position
The first feature of reverential worship is recognizing God’s position. We cannot worship God unless we first recognize who He is. Jesus says that He is our Father who is in heaven. He is our Father. He is not the man upstairs. He is not to be addressed as one Christian author did as “Hey God.” He is our Father. He is worthy of respect. His position is that of our Father. He caused us to be born again. Peter says in his first letter that, “He caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” He is the Creator of all people but not the Father of all people. He is only the spiritual Father of those who have been born again. Jesus told those who thought God was their Father that in reality the Devil was their father. God is the Father of all who have placed their trust in Jesus Christ.
What we are recognizing in this aspect of worship is that there is a special relationship that exists between God and the believer.
Just as you didn’t get a choice of who your earthly father would be you didn’t get a choice of who your heavenly Father would be. When you trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, you received God as your Father. Jesus said, “Whoever receives Me, receives the One who sent Me.” In other words you couldn’t say, “I’ll take Jesus but leave out the Father.” In trusting Christ you didn’t have a choice in that.
There is no more important relationship than between a child and his or her father. I’m quoting from CLA’s legal alert that says, “Good father-child relationships are associated with an absence of emotional and behavioral difficulties in adolescence and with greater academic motivation. Good father-child relationships can actually prevent boys from getting into trouble with the police. Teenagers who are close to their fathers in adolescence have more satisfactory adult marital relationships. Girls whose fathers are involved in their upbringing are less likely to have mental health problems later in life.”
Now don’t fret if your relationship with your father wasn’t so good because God’s grace can overcome that. You are not doomed to struggle with this kind of rejection for the rest of your life. As a teenager I would say that my relationship with my father was poor at best. Yet God, through His grace, overcame that. God showed me what a real father is to be like so that I could be a godly example to my children.
What we need to recognize here is that as believers in Christ we have a father that loves us even if our earthly father didn’t. The Scripture says that even if my own father and mother forsake me the Lord will pick me up. And recognizing our child-parent relationship with God ought to be the beginning of our prayer. It should allow us to acknowledge that God, like a good Father, is concerned for us. He is going to meet our needs. He is going to supply not what we greedily want but all that is best for us.
It should cause me to recognize that as a believer in Jesus Christ I now have an awesome relationship with the Creator of the universe. And He is not just the Creator to me any longer. He is my Father. And we can rejoice in this. And Jesus says we must.
But notice also that Jesus says that He is our Father who is in heaven. God does not let us go our own way without intervening. He has a way of interacting in our lives, like a good father, that prevents us from continuing in the way that we want and turning us back to the way that He wants. We often want to turn back to our own ways yet God knows everything we are doing and works to turn us back. God has given me, as a father, a new sense. I call it FSP (Father Sensory Perception). It allows me, without any effort on my part, to see into other rooms and sense when something is not quite right and even recognizing what is going on. I think God has given this to me as a means of turning away the disobedience of my children before it turns into too great of a problem. It’s as if I can sense the evil building up two rooms away. “Richard, stop hitting your brother.” Paul, leave that box on the shelf.”
God in a similar fashion intervenes in our lives to correct us and bring us back to Him. He is our Father in heaven. If He is our Father in heaven He expects His children to behave like Him. God says in Exodus, “Be holy for I am holy.” He wants us to act like family members not like the devil’s children. And so states the letter to the Hebrews. The author says, “Those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives . . . But if you are without discipline . . . then you are illegitimate children and not sons.” What he says here is that God is going to bring pain into your life if you are His child and you decide to go astray. He knows just how to intervene in our lives so that our sin is revealed and we can turn from it. We have to recognize that this is a blessing to us. He corrects us so that we might be holy. A believer cannot continue in sin without being in misery. God is going to see to it. If you are not grieving over your sin and God does not discipline you for it then you are not His child. You may say that you are but by God’s lack of discipline God says you are not.
God is our Father who is in heaven and He wants us to live like the heavenly citizens that we are. Paul says this in Philippians 3. He says that we should follow godly examples because our citizenship is in heaven. What this says to us is that because our Father is in heaven He is not seeking to bring us down. In His discipline, He is not seeking to harm us. He does not desire our hurt. He wants to lift us up. He wants to mold us into the children of God that He has already made us. When you trusted Christ as your Savior, the Father made you into one of His children. He sees you as His child. Now He is working in you so that you can live like a child of God on a daily basis. “He who began a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
This should be the beginning of our reverential worship. Recognizing God’s position should cause us to praise Him. We have a special relationship with God. He is our Father. And He doesn’t want us to remain the same. As His children He wants us to become heavenly in our conduct. He is our heavenly Father.
As we reflect in our prayer to God, praise should be foremost on our lips. Praise should go to our Father who is in heaven because only He could have conceived of something this great that we should be the children of God. Praise Him.
ii. Recognizing God’s character
The second feature of reverential worship is recognizing God’s character. Let your name be holy. What does Jesus mean by this? First we have to realize what the name meant in Bible times. The name meant more than just a title. It represented the character of an individual. Sometimes it represented physical characteristics of a person. Jacob’s brother Esau was named such because he was hairy and that is what Esau means. However, the names of God represent not physical characteristics, because God is spirit, but they represent who God is at the very core of His being.
So what does it mean that we pray that God’s character should be made holy? Isn’t God holy already? Of course He is. The word holy means to be uncommon or special. It means that God is exalted and greater than anything else in all creation. He is so far above creation by virtue that He made all there is. Everything owes its existence to Him. This is why He is special or set apart or holy. He alone is the eternally existent one to whom everyone must give an account. When we pray that God’s name be holy we are asking that others might recognize how great God is.
Now when Moses wanted to see who God was, God revealed Himself to Moses, in His glory, by describing Himself. The Lord began to say, “I am the Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth . . .” God was revealing who He was by expanding the understanding of the characteristics of His name, “the Lord.” Moses wanted to know how holy God was and it came about through knowing His name.
So when we begin our prayer, Jesus says that it ought to be with the intention that others would know how great God truly is. When we pray, how focused are we on seeing that what we ask for brings this to pass? Or is our only focus to see that our agenda gets carried out. Are we really seeking God to bring this to pass so that His name may be honored or are we asking because it will make our life easier? Do we say things like, “God save my spouse, so there won’t be any more tension in our home?” or “God help me to stop lying because I look so foolish when I get discovered?”
If our prayers do not resonate with the heart of having others see how great God is then we our prayers are merely a sounding board for the self-improvement cult (that is the me first club).
We need to begin with this mindset, “Let your name be seen as awesome” otherwise we will pray selfishly. And I think that this is why Jesus begins His prayer by focusing on God. If we don’t start by focusing on God we will focus on self. There is nothing wrong in praying for the salvation of your spouse. And certainly the answer of such a prayer should make life easier. But too often the giant “I” ends up becoming the focus of our prayer. I too am guilty of this. How many times have I asked God for something because it was the easy way instead of the way that would bring Him the greater glory? We all have done it. I think that this is why Jesus gives us this model. Let us not be hasty to rush into our requests before we have sought the attitude in our prayer that we would want God’s glory to be our top priority.
If we have this attitude in our prayer, that is, that God should be exalted, then each thing for which we pray would include the request that God should enable us to think, speak and act in a way that will not bring shame on the His character. When people hear that you are a Christian does the way you live reproach the reputation of God? Is the Lord despised because your lifestyle says, “small god?”
Does what comes out of your mouth or what you do, allow people to think that our God is not wonderful? In His Word, God says, “You shall be holy for I am holy.” Our life should reflect God’s holy character. If it doesn’t, our life makes a mockery of God. I think this is why Peter says that moral excellence should be the first thing we add to our faith as Christians because that which is visible and outward is what most openly declares to others what God is like.
And so when we worship God by saying, “Let yourself be thought of as special (holy)” we are not just recognizing God’s great character and how there is no one like Him. But in a sense we are asking God to allow us by our own conduct to give people a picture of who God really is. So let us seek to live in a way that pleases God because it also exalts Him.
I think it is significant that many of the New Testament writers break into spontaneous praise when they think on who God is and what He has done. How often do we neglect to praise God for what He has done? Have you thought of all that He has done? He has formed a universe and placed in it all kinds of marvelous things of great beauty and awe. He has set forth to redeem us through a great plan of salvation whereby He made Himself known to us. He came in the person of His Son and showed us His glory by His miracles and His love and His sacrifice. How great are these things? And yet the Scripture says that these are merely the fringes of His ways. They really do call for our intense and lengthy reflection. If we fail to meditate on who God is and what He has done then we will be sadly lacking in our worship of Him. If we neglect to recognize His position and His character we will be less than whole Christians. Can I encourage you this week to diligently praise our God? Let me ask you to set your mind on the reasons God needs to be praised. As you read the Scripture this week make a concerted effort to look specifically for things in the Word that should cause you to praise our God.
Don’t neglect this aspect of prayer. Praise is the essential essence of prayer. It is the heart of prayer. As I said earlier, if we don’t take the time to praise rightly we will find out that we are not praying rightly. If we are not taking time to rejoice in our great God then we will fail to rejoice in our life.