Attending to Ourselves or God?

There is this creative tension with prayer - God who is sovereign and knows all things wants us to call upon Him. Add to that our tendency to put on a show or just say things without thinking about what they mean and you have a real quandary. In Jesus' day religious fakers abused giving, praying and fasting to get attention. Jesus addresses the issue of prayer in Matthew 6:5-8; a continuation of His contrast between true and false righteousness. He warns His followers of walking in the way of the deceived and deceptive; showing them the straight and narrow.

He says we are to avoid the sin of hypocrisy in prayer because it is a misuse of the purpose of prayer - diverting it from the glory of God to the glory of ourselves. And we are not to go on and on in prayer - the Greek battalogeo meant "to stammer", some thought it referred to Battus, King of Cyrene who stuttered, others to Battus the poet who wrote really long winded poems. Either way we are not to "heap up empty phrases" or use "meaningless repetition" when we pray. Prayers that are all words with no meaning have no place in our lives - mechanical mindless words don't fly with God.

Isn't it easy to pray without thinking about what you actually are saying? To use catch phrases and spiritual sounding words without thinking about what they mean? We are to avoid that when addressing God. It is an abuse of the nature of prayer - downgrading it from real, personal interaction with God to a empty recital. God knows what we need before we ask Him. We do not serve or believe in a God that is only concerned with how well or how long we can pray. And He is not unknowing that we need to inform Him or unfeeling that we need to talk Him into acting on our behalf. He is our Father who loves us and knows our needs.

So why pray? Calvin said believers do not pray with a view to informing God about things unknown to Him, they pray in order to seek Him, to exercise their faith in His promises, to declare that from Him alone is their hope and expectation that they will receive from Him all good things. Luther said it simply - "by our praying we are instructing ourselves more than we are Him".

What do we make prayer into? A way to get attention or gain a reputation? An empty exercise? Mechanical rather than relational? How can we guard against these errors? Our only hope is in staying humble and dependent like a child; under God's authority.

Jesus is always calling His people to reach for something more significant that what religious or secular people reach for. He teaches that true righteousness is greater because it is of the heart, true love is fuller because it includes enemies, and true prayer is deeper because it is sincere, the exercise of thinking people. What Jesus calls us to is so much better than what can be found in the unbelieving world.

Prayer is attending to God not ourselves. Which are you doing?