My goal these weeks is to ignite or re-ignite in your heart, in my heart, a passion for prayer.

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1 Prayer: Getting Your Heart Right Matthew 6:1, 5-8 Englewood Baptist Church Sunday morning, June 3, 2012 Matthew 6. I want to ask you today, brothers and sisters, do you have a passion in your life for prayer? Are you in the midst of a prayer feast or are you in the midst of a prayer fast? If your prayer life were painted, would it depict a land flowing with ripe and luscious fruit, or would your prayer life look like a land devastated by famine and rainless drought? My goal these weeks is to ignite or re-ignite in your heart, in my heart, a passion for prayer. Where are the believers who love to pray? Shouldn t we all be of that sort? Wouldn t God want us to make spacious room in our lives for prayer? When reading the Gospel accounts, we cannot follow the footpath of our Lord long until we stumble upon Him in prayer, crying out to the Father for power and for wisdom and for leadership. Around every turn, we find Jesus shutting out the deafening sounds of a clamoring world as He realigns Himself with heavenly purposes. If we want to be like Jesus, if that is our life goal, and it should be, then we must acquire a healthy addiction to prayer. Do you have it? In my 35 years of life, I look back with embarrassment at huge chunks of time, full seasons of pure prayerlessness. Sections of my journey were enjoyed without much interaction with God at all. I was doing my thing; He was doing His. I have repented of this. I m confident that you are as guilty as I, since we are known as creatures prone to wander. Like a little child who chases a ball into the street, you and I are so easily wander away from God and fall back on our own wisdom. We are all guilty. And so, I challenge you today, to recommit your life to prayer. Make room for it. Today, I have asked you to turn to the most famous chapter in the Bible on this subject. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us how to pray. Matthew 6. Of course, v.9 begins the model prayer, given as a template for the disciples. Some people call this the Lord s prayer, but it was not the Lord s prayer. If you want to get the Lord s prayer, look at John 17 as Jesus pour His heart out to God. This is the pattern of prayer for the disciples to follow. Each element included gives us a category to include in our prayer lives. And we will break that prayer apart next week. Today, I want to focus in on the preamble. Before Jesus teaches us how to pray and what to pray about, he provides two prayer don ts. And both of these prayer prohibitions have to do with hypocrisy. God pays no attention to the prayers of pretentious people. The heart must be right, before God will respond to your prayers.

2 The Psalmist writes in Psalm 66:18: If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened; Psalm 66:18 We must get our hearts right before we can expect God to respond to our prayers. Look what Jesus says in 6:1-2 So Jesus is introducing the idea of Christian actors people who like to pretend that they re generous and prayerful, but inside they are really just in it for themselves. He talks about giving to the needy in a discreet way, without blowing trumpets, or making a lot of noise. Do it quietly as though giving an offering to God. And then in v.5, he takes the same idea into the subject of prayer. Look at v Whenever you buy a drug at the Pharmacy, you take a look at the side of the bottle, and the bottle says how to properly use the medicine. The directions are boxed in for you to find easily. But next to the directions, you also find the warnings. A separate section. Do not do this. Don t take five of these at a time. Don t swallow this on an empty stomach. Keep out of reach of children. The reason that the company takes time to issue the warning is because a good thing can easily become a bad thing. This is designed to promote good health, but it can be used in destructive ways. Jesus issues a warning on the subject of prayer. Satan wants so badly to pervert prayer and to make it a mockery. I like the way John MacArthur says it: Nothing is so sacred that Satan will not invade it. In fact, the more sacred something is, the more he desires to profane it. Surely few things please him more than to come between believers and their Lord in the sacred intimacy of prayer. Sin will follow us into the very presence of God; and no sin is more powerful or destructive than pride. John MacArthur, The MacArthur NT Commentary Just like Satan wants to take the good gift of sex to produce fornication, or the good of financial blessing to produce greed, Satan wants to take the good gift of prayer to feed our pride. Watch out! Jesus says. The Devil is always on the prowl. He wants into your prayer life. And so, the Lord offers these two warnings: Warning 1. Prayer should not be for show. Look back at 6:1

3 God does not reward man-pleasers. He had already made that clear in Matt. 5:16, that we should let our light shine before men, so that, they can see our good deeds and praise our Father in heaven. Every time you make a sacrifice for people, you must make sure that your heart is pure. You have to search your motives and ask yourself, If I give this money to Mr. Jones, to go on this mission trip, and he never sends me a thank you, if he never even acknowledges his receipt of the gift, will I be OK with that? If the answer is yes, then God smiles upon the gift and charges it to your account in heaven. If they answer is no, then you are giving a gift with the goal of recognition and you are not eligible for heavenly reward. Human beings so easily make this mistake. We do the right thing, for the wrong reason. And when we do that, we receive nothing from God. And that s what v. 2 is about Secret giving is the superior kind of giving because it s all about God getting the glory. When Mr. Jones receives an anonymous gift, he can give no glory to any man, He can only give glory to God. And that is what you want to do with your money. Use your money to help people give greater glory to God. Don t use your money to gain applause or the label of generous. Your motives mean everything. And the same principle applies to prayer. V.5 Now let s talk about Judaism for a minute, just so you can fully understand the kind of discipleship that was prevalent in Jesus day. I want you to grasp what Jesus was getting at in his sermon. Jewish people were devout. I don t mean this in a negative way. They were extremely structured with their spiritual disciplines. We see this in a positive way when we read Daniel. What landed Daniel in the Lion s Den was his habitual practice of praying out his window. Three times a day, Daniel prayed. It was like clockwork. It was a ritual. He was one who used that time to connect with God and his heart was always in it. He was no hypocrite. But what was happening in Jesus day was this massive accumulation of actors. People were using prayer as a platform for self-promotion. Since they knew when the set times of prayer would be normally 9AM, 12 noon, and 3 PM they would make sure they were at those major intersections, easily-seen street corners in order to be seen by men. In other words, they wanted the largest audience possible when they prayed. This was not about God getting glory. They was all about man-glory. And so, what is Jesus saying here? He is saying, Whenever you pray, offer your prayers purely to God.

4 One book that has had a huge impact on my life and development is a book called, Ordering Your Private World, By Gordon MacDonald. I read this in my early 20s and it has always stuck with me. He describes something called the Sinkhole Syndrome, when a person is on the verge of collapse because his spiritual life is out of balance. Our Western cultural values have helped to blind us We are naively inclined to believe that the most publicly active person is the most privately spiritual. We assume that the larger the church, the greater its heavenly blessing. The more information about the Bible a person possesses, we think, the closer he or she must be to God. Because we tend to think like this, there is the temptation to give imbalanced attention to our public worlds at the expense of the private. More programs, more meetings, more learning experiences, more relationships, more busyness; until it all becomes so heavy at the surface that the whole thing trembles on the verge of collapse. Fatigue, disallusionment, failure, defeat, all become frightening possibilities. The neglected private world can no longer hold the weight. Gordon MacDonald And so what happens? Like a Sinkhole, suddenly, without warning, a person s life just falls apart. A major moral failure, or complete burnout, or a poor decision that has longreaching consequences. Since his whole life has been a show, it is now shown for what it is. I think it s important for you to understand that meaning of that word, hypocrite. The word hypocrite was used for professional actors who used large masks to portray the roles that they were playing. This was a theatrical term. What these actors would say and what they do when they performed did not represent what they said and what they did off the set. As an actor, they are paid to portray an image. Do you realize how often we do this? We tell people, I am so sorry, I will pray for you. And we have no intention. We sign sympathy cards, You can count on my continued prayers. And we create the impression that we are frequent intercessors. We grow comfortable with the fact that, as long as people perceive me as a man of prayer, then that is what matters. It makes no difference if my secret life resembles my persona. That s what Jesus warred against. That s what Jesus referred to when he said: There is no reward for self-promotion. So the next verse provides the answer. V.6. What Jesus says is clear: Your life should be significantly public. Yes! Let people see your good deeds! Make your faith VISIBLE! Show pie graph. 50% public.

5 Be a witness. Be famous for your servant s heart. But also, Jesus celebrates this secret portion of a person s life. Show pie graph. 50% private Prayer mostly falls into the realm of the secret world. Is your life largely public? If so, what can you do to begin building this private conversation with God. Let me give you some quick suggestions: How To Steal Some Secret Time For God Schedule lunch alone. Tell your co-workers. Sorry! No Los today. I ve got a lunch appointment with a friend. End appointments during the day with a few minutes of prayer. How many times do walk away from a friendly discussion with a simple see ya later. How about offering those subjects shared to God? Take more walks. Get away from the noise to hear the whisper of God. Turn off the radio in your car. Tune in to God and confess your anxieties, your fears, your failures. Schedule a spiritual retreat or a day of prayer. Make it four weeks from now if your schedule is cramped, but set aside a full day to hear from God, to talk with God. Fast from technology and TV. Take a few weeks and tune in to God. Read a book on prayer or spiritual disciplines to get your juices flowing. This week, I downloaded the audio version, Power of a Praying Husband, so that I can gain some fresh insight into praying for my wife. I want to stoke the fire of my secret prayer life! These are just ways for you to think about increasing the volume on prayer, of shutting the door and getting alone with God. God honors that, and rewards that. Now, let s move on to vv.7-8, which issues the second warning 2. Prayer should not be repetitious. Here Jesus shifts from the subject of prayer audience to the subject of prayer content. He is now concerned with the nouns and the verbs and the adjectives we employ in our prayer lives. Have you ever noticed that a person s personality affects the way he prays? Different people pray in different ways and God celebrates the diversity. What Jesus warns us against, though, is the kind of prayer that is passive and it not really engaged with God. He s talking here about the kind of prayer that people sometimes

6 offer at meal times when the whole family is together and the children are being too loud. We need to get this out of the way so that we can get after this pepperoni pizza. Lord, we thank you for this food. We thank you for our friends. Forgive us our sins. Amen! You know what I m talking about. Prayer is reduced to a matter of mere etiquette. That is meaningless prayer that really doesn t matter to anybody, and it certainly doesn t matter to God. The prayer offered simply for the ceremony. No concentration required. Just empty phrases. Jesus says Don t use empty phrases! I like the way the ESV translates that. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases. The NIV says babbling like pagans. The KJV says vain repetition. It means to say something without thinking. You can listen to somebody without really listening. You can also talk without really thinking. To really get at the meaning of this, you have to the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus was praying with such intensity, such focus, such mental labor, that he was sweating profusely, like drops of blood. Take that experience and flip it upside down and you get this flippant, glib, trite, casual approach to prayer and that produces no reward from God. Do you pray long prayers? That s wonderful, so long, as you are fully engaged in that prayer. Jesus prayed all night long before he went and called his first disciples. The early church engaged in prayer meetings that went long into the night, and they were fruitful because their hearts and minds were actively engaged. To put this very simply, Jesus is talking about quality over quantity. And we understand this perfectly, those of us that have listened to sermons all our life know this to be true. Long sermons are not necessarily the most impactful sermons. More words does not guarantee a greater response. Concerning the craft of preaching, a wise man once said to me, If you don t strike oil in 30 minutes, stop boring! More words will not win an audience. And the same is true in prayer. We mustn t think that we have to pray long words and long sentences and long paragraphs to receive a response from heaven. Pray in a meaningful way, and when it reaches it s conclusion, land the plane. This takes the pressure off of many of you because you are a man of few words. Gentleman, just walk over to your wife, put your hands on her shoulders, and say, I want to pray a short prayer for you. I want to intercede for you. Do that for your anxious daughter who is about to deliver a speech in her speech class, or your son who is nervous about the soccer game. Be a man of prayer. So let me tie all this together with a few probing questions. I want you to ask yourself these things: Do I have a passion for prayer? Am I growing closer to God?

7 Am I masking spirituality, or practicing spiritual disciplines? Am I offering meaningful prayers to God or am I a checking prayer off my list? Jesus half brother, James became a pastor of a prominent church in Jerusalem. Over the years, he earned a nickname. People referred to him as Camel-knees because of the calluses that were caused from hours upon hours in prayer. Most nicknames I have had over the course of my life have been insulting, but what a blessing it would be, to be buried under the earth, with a gravestone that says, Here lies Ben Camel-knees Mandrell. Wouldn t we all be blessed to be more faithfully committed to prayer?