The Lord's Prayer: Stop Performing! (Matthew 6.5-8)

This sermon was preached on June 9th, 2024.

This is just how my brain works, but the concept of language and communication blows my mind. We make sounds and communicate to each other thoughts and ideas and feelings? It’s baffling. Being able to speak and be understood is one of those things we do so often that I think it's easy for us to forget how much of a miracle it is. And it’s at the core of what it means to be human.

Babies are born and they are immediately making sounds that signal what they need. They eventually learn to speak by being spoken to, the words of their family and caregivers/friends helping their brain develop and drawing from them words of their own.

This summer we’re looking at the topic of prayer by taking an in-depth look at the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray. And I’m bringing up the concept of language and communication because to talk about prayer is simply that: the word we use to describe our communication with God. It’s as simple and as complex as that. Prayer is creatures communicating to our Creator. Prayer is daughters and sons of God speaking to our Father.

The next two weeks we’ll look at the concept of prayer, and after that we’ll look at each individual line of the Lord’s Prayer to see what it teaches us about God, about ourselves, and about what it means to live in the world that we are in. This morning we’re going to hear Jesus’ teaching about prayer in Matthew 6 and what he reveals to us about what prayer ius.

5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Prayer is Not Performance

When the topic of prayer comes up, I think most Christians start to break out in cold sweats. “Eek. I know prayer is important but I don’t pray anywhere near as much as I should.” So let’s go ahead and address that out of the gate. Feel all of that right now, and let’s get it out of our systems.

Jesus did not come and teach us to pray so that we will live in a perpetual state of guilt about measuring up to something. Prayer isn’t about earning anything, it’s not about praying a certain amount of words or for a certain amount of time. So I give you permission, on the authority of what God has done in Jesus, to give up that guilt. Don’t waste any more time on it.

I know, easier said than done. But what I’m saying is that if I say “prayer” and the first place your heart goes is “guilt,” that’s not God giving you an insight about yourself and trying to guilt you into praying more. Should I pray more? Sure. Prayer is wonderful. But any thoughts about needing to pray more that does not lead us immediately to prayer is a distraction.

All of this is because of a basic truth: Prayer is not a performance. It's family talk as God’s children. God is our Father. We’ve been adopted into his family through faith in Jesus. Our Father wants us to meditate on his words to us. Our Father wants us to cast our anxieties and cares upon him, not try and wear them by ourselves. God does not begrudge us when this happen. He doesn’t sigh in frustration. This is what he desires. Above all else—God wants you to know this truth above all other truths: He loves you, stop trying to earn it, let that be the most important truth in your life.

Prayer is not a performance. We aren’t trying to impress anyone—not God, not others.

Here Jesus speaks of those who ‘love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.’ These may seem like those who are true pray-ers. After all, they're completely comfortable praying in public. But as Jesus says, they are doing all this to be seen.

But to do this to be seen is the opposite of everything that prayer is designed to be. God cares far more for us realizing who He is and who we are than us going through the motions and pretending. Again, prayer is not performance.

Praying to be seen is like doing a grand romantic gesture to get applause from other people. Have you ever seen those elaborate proposals or high schoolers asking their date to the prom in these ways that are specifically set up to be recorded and posted on the internet in hopes of going viral? Those grand gestures rarely have to do with making the person they’re asking know that they are seen, known, and loved. They very much have the goal of being seen by others.

That’s not what prayer is. Give up on that, because it’s vapid. People could think you’re incredibly close to God today and tomorrow you do something to disappoint them and they write you off. Human admiration is a fickle thing that will collapse underneath your feet—it’s only a matter of time. Toss it aside. It’s not worth investing any time in. Stop performing.

You don’t have to perform for anyone else. You don’t have to perform for yourself—after all your own opinion of yourself is as faulty and fickle as everyone else’s. And you don’t have to perform for God, because he’s already told you what he thinks of you. He delights in you. He moved heaven and earth to find you and bring you home to himself. He removed every obstacle that stood between him and you, and all that remains for you is the mercies of God that are new every morning.

You don't have to get his attention. You already have his attention. His eye is set on you, his ear turned toward you, his love set on you from eternity past.

Give up trying to perform, you don’t have to do it. Give up the guilt that comes with prayer as performance and step into praying as someone who is delighted in by your heavenly Father.

Prayer is Family Talk with Our Father

So we don’t pray to perform. We also don’t pray as a way to get to something else. We don’t pray first because we want to grow in power or purity or admiration. “There is only one reason for a deeper prayer life, and that is to love God more deeply and to know him more fully. Too often those who begin the road of a more intimate walk with God do so with a hidden agenda.” Steve Brown

We seek a deeper experience of prayer because of who God is. As I said, he’s our Father. And how do children learn to speak? By being spoken to. That’s exactly how we learn to pray—by taking seriously that God has spoken and what He has said. We learn to pray by hearing God’s Word and opening our mouths to respond—his words drawing out from us words of our own.

Jesus hits at this in our passage by speaking of praying according to how God has revealed himself when he talks about praying in private, unseen by others, because God himself is unseen. God cannot be seen, he doesn't have a body like ours. He isn’t limited in time and space like we are.

That’s not Jesus saying that we should only pray in private, only him making clear to us that our Father hears us in the privacy of our own homes or places just as well as he does in the big religious places of churches or temples. We don't have to go to a special place to pray. Our God is not more powerfully to be found in a cathedral or in a mountain top. No, in the places where we may think he is not, our Father is with us. As his children we are never alone.

Jesus says that we don’t need to think we are heard because of our many words—because “your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” We don’t have to use a bunch of words because God has told us who He is—one who has all knowledge. We can pray without fears that if we leave some details out that God will forget. He can hear us better than we can speak it.

Prayer is not something that points to an insufficiency of God’s power or knowledge. But it’s part of God’s ordering of things, how he has arranged us to call upon him for the sake of his mission in this world. All of that means that our prayers must be in line with who God is. It's not just an expression of our desires.

That’s why we don’t pray that God will make us filthy rich. Or that God will give us lots of sexual partners. Or that God will kill our enemies. Or that God will allow us to be able to steal. Our prayers must be consistent with who He is. Which means that a large part of prayer is the work God is doing within us as we respond to his words, forming us to be people who values what he values and love what he loves. Forming us to be children who copy our loving Father.

So prayer is not performance. It’s our family talk with our Father, and we don’t cheapen it by doing it to be seen by others. We bask in the presence of the eternal God who has entered time to make sure that his love finds us.

Speaking with a Kingdom Accent

We take on the accent of where we’re from—which trains how we hear and process words and say them ourselves. My favorite example—Rise Up Lights/Razor Blades. It’s the exact same sounds. Where we’re starting from not only determines how we say words, but also how we hear them.

To live as children of the Father is to learn to speak in his accent. It means what I spoke about a little while ago—becoming people who love what he loves and values what he values. We become people who hear words through the filter of who He is. It forms how we hear and how we speak.

This summer as we continue to look at the topic of prayer from the perspective of the Lord’s Prayer, I want that to be our hope—that we learn more and more to hear God’s Words spoken to us (you are righteous, you are forgiven, you are being transformed, you will never be let go), and let his voice shape how we speak. To take on the accent of our Father.

And to do this we give up the ideas of perfection and performance. As I said earlier, prayer is family talk. It’s not a formal debate or a speech. It's family talk, and your Father loves your voice. He’s doesn't have a grading sheet out. So let’s put away our grading sheet and talk to our Father.