Matthew 6:5-15
October 10, 2004—9:30 Worship
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
When I was growing up at the First Baptist Church in Boston, I can still remember how my neck ached during the long prayers our pastor would say in worship. I confess that sometimes I even felt asleep!
Christians have different ways of praying. Most of us put our hands together and bow our heads while sitting on a chair. Our Catholic Christian friends use rosary beads to remind them to pray regularly while kneeling behind a pew. Many Korean Christians get up early in the morning before dawn and prostrate themselves in the church sanctuary to pray before going to work or school. Some of us use a bookmark that has a favorite prayer to recite or we count on others to get us started by using one of the many daily devotional booklets.
As a child, I received this glow-in-the-dark head of Christ bookmark with the Lord’s Prayer on it that I taped onto my bed headboard so that I would pray every night before going to sleep. How do you pray?
Practices of the Christian Faith
For the next couple of months, the messages that Pastor Chris, our seminarian Lauren Ng, and I will deliver will focus on how to become a faithful and healthy congregation. Last Sunday, Pastor Chris preached on the fellowship of the early believers and how they broke bread together. Today we will look at prayer.
Matthew 6:5-15 is a part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The section that we read this morning is actually smack in the middle of three practices that Matthew wants Christians to practice. If you go back and look at the beginning of this chapter, Matthew talked about almsgiving—giving to the poor. Then following verse 15, we see the instructions on how to practice fasting.
The Christian faith is not just a collection of beliefs to be believed, it is also a set of deeds to practice. There are things that Christians believe because they are Christians, but there are also things that Christians do because they are Christians. Jesus tells us that praying is one of those things that Christians do.
What’s the reason for Matthew to highlight these three practices for Christians to follow and not others? The answer is that these are representative practices, examples drawn from the world of Matthew’s congregation. They are not the only important disciplines of the Christian faith, but ones that Matthew’s readers, with their Jewish roots, would immediately recognize as significant, since almsgiving, prayer, and fasting were among the main outward marks of the Jewish faith.
Jesus takes up these three familiar practices in order to illustrate that when you follow Jesus, you practice your faith with a difference. Unlike practicing almsgiving, prayer, and fasting in Judaism where people can see, now we practice these things for only God to see. Jesus teaches that practices are not performed for the benefit of other people, but only for God—for “your Father who sees in secret” (Matt. 6:4, 6, 18)
Money is giving to the poor, prayers are prayed, and fasting is performed not so that human eyes can see and be impressed, but before God alone. Now this does not contradict Matthew’s previous chapter that says that Christians should be shining lights so that others can see their good works (Matt. 5:16). There are two kinds of actions or practices here. When Christians are performing God’s work in the world, we do so not to expect recognition of what a wonderful person we are or our church is, but instead we might say, “What a merciful God that we serve!” We do these external things in public to give glory to God in heaven.
But there is also another kind of Christian practice that we can call, “internal disciplines.” These are worship, acts of personal devotion, almsgiving, fasting, and prayer. When we practice these, we perform them before God alone—before “the Father who sees in secret.” We pray to God our Father who is in secret.
Genuine Prayer
For today, let’s focus on prayer.
At first glance. Jesus appears to be speaking out against two kinds of prayers: Public Prayers that are said in corporate worship and small groups and Lengthy Prayers.
Read Matt. 6:5-7.
To understand Jesus’ word that he was against public prayers and lengthy prayers would take this passage out of context. Jesus himself prayed in the presence of others, at the synagogue and with his disciples. The example of the Lord’s Prayer begins with the pronoun, “Our” which suggests that he and his disciples were praying publicly together. And we know that Jesus sometimes prayed for a long time, perhaps even all night as suggested in Matt. 14:23-25 when he went up the mountain by himself to pray and only after early in the morning did Jesus come down from the mountain, walked on the sea and calmed the storm.
Jesus is warning us that public prayer can be hypocritical when we are trying to flatter ourselves instead of genuinely praying to God. In Matthew’s church, some worshipers would make a lavish show of being prayerful; firing off prayers uttered to be heard not by God but primarily designed for other people. They would use flowery words and complicated sentences to show how intelligent they were. Public prayer is not meant to flatter oneself.
So Jesus, trying to make a point tells them to “go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.” It would be as if he had said, “When you pray, go into the deepest part of the loneliness forest you know and hide behind the tallest redwoods where not even the birds and the squirrels can see you. Then, in that secluded and unseen place, you will know that all true prayer—whether it occurs in the quietness of your bedtime, in the middle of rush-hour traffic, or in unison in a large congregation—is spoken only to the secret presence of God.”
Jesus also spoke against empty lengthy prayers because in the popular religions of the first-century world, getting the gods to respond to one’s needs was a bit like a person today attempting to get some service from a government agency. You don’t know where to go or who to ask. There were so many gods; one was never sure from which god to request a certain service. Chinese people are somewhat like this—there are gods for prosperity, good health, getting a good job, having many babies, harvesting a good crop and so on that it’s better to pray and worship all of them, just to play it safe.
So what happens is that once one did locate the right godly contact, the belief is that a little verbal bribery would often ensure deliverance. The prayers of the Gentiles or non-Christians were to pile up divine names in hopes of hitting the right one filled with positive compliments to season the god’s favor. So when Jesus criticizes piling up “empty phrases,” he was not necessarily targeting lengthy prayers but flowery and verbose words that try to charm the favor of the gods. Lengthy prayers can be unnecessary. It’s like coming up with the right combination to unlock the god’s favors.
The Lord’s Prayer
After warning his disciples about the wrong reasons to pray, Jesus reassures us that we can pray, not as outsiders or strangers, but as God’s children. We can tenderly, honestly, and confidently whisper our prayers to God and know that God like a mother is listening with her heart to her children, even finishing our sentences before we get to them. It’s like when I went to visit our granddaughter, Evi last week. She would say, “Help me, Yeh, Yeh” and before she needed to say it again, I knew exactly what she wanted. That’s why Jesus taught us to first say, “Our Father…”
The Lord’s Prayer appears in both Matthew and in Luke. In Luke 11:1-4, we see a shorter version. But in Matthew the longer version has a rhythmic style that suggests that it was used in corporate worship like we do every Sunday. Here at FCBC, we believe that it’s important to say and learn the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday as a way to pray to God because it was Jesus who taught it first to the disciples. But it’s also important that as a community of Christians that we all share this rich tradition of saying together the Lord’s Prayer. Our fellow worshipers are saying this same prayer in the sanctuary this morning. And if anytime in your life, you feel that you have forgotten how to pray, we hope that you’ll always have the Lord’s Prayer to recite.
So what is the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer? The prayer can be divided into three sections:
1. The Address to God
We begin our prayer by addressing God as our Father. God is as close to us as a parent—a “father” who knows everything we need before we ask; one who, at the same time, is majestic, heavenly God, providing for the whole creation.
When we think that God is only the God in heaven and of the whole creation, we are tempted to use formal words that cause us to be distance from God. And when we only refer to God as our personal Father, we can also lose sight of the truth that the almighty God is the creator of the universe where there are many other people who know him.
When our words are too small, we are nonetheless taken into the very presence of God who embraces the whole of creation. When our words are too formal and remote, we are nonetheless met in the middle of the road by the God who will not stay far away.
2. Victory of God
In verse 10, in just three short phrases, we plead to God to set things right, to push back all that harms and destroys, and to come in power to save all creation. But first, Jesus teaches us to say, “hallowed be your name.” What this means is asking God to “show the world who you are.” Hallowed means make your name holy. Make it special and sacred. You know how sometimes, you might say to a new parent, “That’s a great name for your new baby!” It means with a good name like that you will have a good reputation! When we pray to God, we say, “Now there’s a God who has a good name!”
If “hallowed be your name” seeks the holiness of God’s name, then “your kingdom come” wants to put a face with the name. We ask God to come and roll back all the forces that enslave us; to occupy the beachhead and to overthrow the tyranny that crushes us so that “God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
The words, “your will be done on earth” recognize that only God can save the world. No revolution, no reformation, no program for social improvement, not even any missions program can fully heal the wounds of the hurting world. Only God can do this so we cry out, “Your will be done on earth!” But as soon as we have said these words, “on earth,” we become aware of ourselves that we are earthbound. We are on earth. Although our prayers ascend into the heavens, they come back to where we live and work.
It is God’s heavenly will that is to be done, but it is on earth that it is to be accomplished. When we want to do God’s will, we realize that the God of salvation leads us in God’s name to our neighbor in need and for us to become earthly agents of reconciliation.
3. Petitions for God’s People
For the next three verses, the Lord’s Prayer shifts from a focus on God to a focus on the needs of God’s people. We see: “give us bread, forgive us, and rescue us.”
The first, “give us this day our daily bread” basically asks God for the food necessary to make it through the day. For most of us, we have full pantries and stuffed freezers that distract us from the truth that if it wasn’t for God to provide us with our needs, we would perish.
The second petition is to ask God to “forgive our debts.” This is, of course, a plea to God to forgive our sins, but the very next phrase, “as we also have forgiven our debtors,” seems to imply that we get from God only as much forgiveness as we can give to others. If we understand this verse this way, it would appear that God waits to see how forgiving we are and then, matches our level. This interpretation is theologically nearsighted. Our behavior does not somehow transform an unmerciful God into a merciful one. God is forgiving even when we are not. God is generous and merciful because God is God.
So what does this verse mean? In Matthew 6:15, we see this again when Jesus said, “if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” In order for us to understand this, we must first remember that this prayer is for those in the church, those who are already believers, followers of Jesus. In other words, Jesus is speaking to people who already have been forgiven, people whose sinful debts of enormous proportions have already been wiped off the books, people who have been trained in the school of forgiveness, people who have, through no merit of their own, been given passports in the kingdom of heaven. So being citizens of God’s kingdom, forgiveness is part of what we do—all the time, naturally, like breathing in and out.
The point here is that we are to forgive when we are followers of Jesus. And therefore, we ask God to forgive us for our debts like the way that we are forgiving others everyday.
3. Finally the third petition, “do not bring us to a time of trial” may mean daily temptations or the final judgment. But for us to think that God causes us to be tempted would interpret the Lord’s Prayer beyond its intended purpose. The Lord’s Prayer for the apostolic church is more of a fervent prayer pleading to God to hold them together and to give them strength to accomplish their mission in a difficult world. Just imagine our congregation heading out the front door of the church to do God’s work in a violent and confused world and we ask, “Keep us safe out there, and rescue us from evil, O God. Let the forces of evil tremble when they see us coming, rather than the other way around, and bring us home at the end of the day even stronger in faith than when we go out.”
When we pray, we are not to be hypocritical by trying to flatter ourselves in public but instead pray secretly to God who hears. When we pray, all we need to do is to speak to God as our Father expecting him to finish our sentences. When we pray, we pray that God’s will is to be done on earth and as earthbound followers of Christ, we are agents of reconciliation. When we pray, we thank God for our daily bread, seek God for forgiveness while we are forgiving others, and to ask for strength and courage to go out into the world. This is genuine prayer.
Let us pray.
Gracious Lord God in Jesus Christ, thank you for teaching us to pray. We ask that you bless us with your mercy and grant us your peace as we do your work on earth. Amen.