Everybody prays. Every single religion has some version of prayer. Even people who don’t have any particular religion to which they subscribe still report praying at least on occasion. Looking up physically or at least mentally is an incredible natural gesture. Our inherent awareness that there is something bigger than us in this world to which we can turn for help when we need has proven remarkably hard to shake. But as much as everyone prays, one of the main requests pastors get from their members is instruction on how to pray better, how to pray more effectively. Today we are kicking off a brand-new, three-part teaching series aimed at addressing that concern. Let’s talk about prayer, what it is, what it does, and how to get it right.

A Simple Conversation

When kids are little one of the most natural motions for them to make is to reach up. Your kids did it. They may still do it. My kids all did it when they were the right size. Two of them look me in the eye now, so that season has passed, but it wasn’t all that long ago that their reaching up was a normal thing. Why is it that they reached up like they did? Because they wanted up. They wanted to get somewhere higher than they currently were, and into the comfort and safety of your arms. So, they reached up. 

I think there’s a metaphor there if we’re willing to see it. Practically everyone reaches up. And why? Because we want access to someone or something bigger than we are. We want access to the comfort and safety of the arms of our God. Even folks who don’t believe in the same God we do reach up. They reach up for the same basic reasons. They want help or comfort or compassion or power or something else that they cannot get on their own. 

They reach up—we reach up—because we have this inherent awareness that there is more to this life, more to this world, than merely what we can see. There is some kind of power that is greater and higher than our own. We may call it different things and refer to it in different ways, and not all those ways are equally correct, but there is a consistency at least in our awareness of the presence of someone or something more to this world. 

Even folks who have no real belief in God, whose outlook is basically all secular, nonetheless still find themselves occasionally calling out, crying out to someone. They reach up even if they don’t know to whom they are reaching or even that someone is for sure there to reach up to. They reach up because reaching up is natural. As followers of Jesus we understand why: We are made in the image of God and to be His stewards on Earth. You can’t be created in the image of God and not reach up to Him instinctively on occasion even if you don’t actually believe anyone is there. 

The real question, then, is not will we reach up or even should we reach up, but rather, how can we reach up in a way that sees us finding what we are looking for? Or, to put that in terms that might ring a little more familiarly to ears trained by some previous exposure to a church setting: How can we pray effectively? 

Prayer is the form our reaching up most often takes. From the most basic understanding, prayer is nothing more than a means of communicating with the divine. How you define that divine doesn’t matter all that much for our purposes right now (in a larger sense it obviously matters a great deal, but that’s not where we are just yet). Whatever it is that comes to mind when you think about the power in this world that is greater than any human power, your efforts to communicate or make contact with that power is prayer at its most basic level. And if your worldview framework allows for some sort of supernatural element to this world, you have not only reached out to that divine power before, you’ve likely given some manner of thought as to how your efforts to connect—that is, your praying—can be structured to maximize the likelihood that you receive the objective of your efforts—that is, that you get the thing you are praying for. 

Here, though, is where we run into a problem. The world thinks about prayer as a means of getting what we want from God or the gods or the Great Spirit or what have you. It is still communication, but it is utilitarian communication. This is because the kinds of gods the world has imagined weren’t ever relational. The ancient Amalekites didn’t pray to Molech just to tell him about their day. They sought to secure his blessing on their efforts to conquer their enemies in his name. The ancient Greeks didn’t pray to Zeus because they were particularly fond of him. They needed it to rain so their crops would grow so they could eat. Again, prayer was always basically utilitarian in nature. 

Because of this, as followers of Jesus today, we often think about prayer in the same basic terms. We need something. God has the power to make that something possible. So, we ask God to use some of that power on our behalf so we can have the something we need. The end. Effective prayer in this sense is prayer that gets us the aim of our efforts. When we get what we want, we know the prayer was effective. If we don’t, then it wasn’t. And I know we like to talk about the gift of “unanswered prayers,” but we don’t really mean that, if we’re being honest. It works as a handy explainer for our not getting what we want (which happens a lot if we’re being honest), but we nonetheless think in terms of “good” prayer being prayer that’s answered positively. 

But, when you spend some time engaging with the Scriptures and see how prayer is both envisioned and practiced by the various contributors, the practice seems to be about a whole lot more than merely getting what we want from God. Prayer is about talking with God, but in pursuit of a relationship with Him. The communication and its response are only the means, not the ends. 

Now, on the one hand, this takes a lot of the burden off of prayer we normally put on it. We don’t have to measure the effectiveness of our prayer on the grounds of whether or not we get what we ask for from Him. If you pray for a certain outcome, and that outcome doesn’t happen, that doesn’t mean your prayer didn’t matter or wasn’t effective. On the other hand, this makes prayer a lot harder because the nice, neat, helpful checkbox of did-we-get-what-we-want is eliminated, and knowing whether or not our prayer was effective becomes more challenging to determine. Or, at least, we have to determine it on other grounds. 

Understanding some of these basic ideas about prayer is important, but it still leaves us with the question of how we can pray in a way that actually matters. For the next three weeks, in a brand-new teaching series called, Talking to God, I want to do some work together in pursuit of an answer. We’re not going to give prayer any kind of a comprehensive treatment over the next three weeks because it is a way bigger topic than that. Many whole books have been written about prayer. We’re going to just barely scratch the surface. But we are going to scratch the surface in some ways that will help make your own practice of prayer a more fruitful venture. I’m not necessarily going to give you specific ways to pray. Rather, we are going to think together about what exactly prayer is, how it works, what some of the results of pursuing it can be, and how God helps us with the whole process. To put that another way, rather than telling you how to pray, we are going to let the Scriptures guide us into a fuller understanding of how to think about prayer in the first place. 

This morning, we are going to start where any good exploration of a theological topic should start: with some of the things Jesus said about it. We are going to look at some practical things Jesus had to say about prayer, and spend just a few minutes thinking through a model for prayer that He gave us. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you, find your way with me to the Gospel of Matthew. This bit of teaching from Jesus sits right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6. 

The middle section of Jesus’ most famous sermon gets really practical. Jesus focuses in on our personal relationship with God and the kinds of spiritual practices that can deepen and develop it. He starts with giving—something we spent the last few weeks talking about—and winds His way to fasting—something the evangelical church doesn’t tend to give nearly as much attention to as we arguably should. Sandwiched in between these two are some of the most revolutionary teachings about prayer ever spoken. Take a look at this with me. 

“Whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people. Truly I tell you, they have their reward.” Jesus comes out of the corner swinging here. Let’s break this down together. He starts with the assumption that prayer is something the people were practicing. As we have already made clear, this was a pretty fair assumption on Jesus’ part. Everybody prays. Everybody prays today in a culture that is pretty thoroughly secularized in its basic worldview framework. Everybody really prayed back then when secularism wasn’t even a thing in any meaningful sense. The world then was so religious that Christians were often called atheists because they only believed in one God. 

Given that everyone in His audience was already praying, Jesus had some council on how to do it properly. Prayer then was often a public spectacle. People prayed to be noticed by others as sufficiently spiritual. Remember that Jesus was addressing a Jewish cultural context here. Jews then had a set of prescribed prayers for different times of the day. The religious elite recited these prayers for all to hear. And most people looked at these guys as deeply spiritual and obviously well-connected to God because of their ostentatious keeping of the law. Their religiosity is something we have been trained today to look at skeptically, but then it was most decidedly a merit in their favor. That was the model the crowds would have had in mind when they thought about praying. 

But did you notice what Jesus called these kinds of public prayers? He chose a very specific word: hypocrite. These guys were hypocrites. Their spirituality was nothing more than a show for the public. Their devotion didn’t penetrate to their hearts. They wanted all the benefits of being known publicly for their spirituality, but they still wanted to live life on their own terms. Now, it so happened that their terms were at least somewhat defined by the terms God had given the people through Moses, but simple devotion to the law wasn’t their goal. That had been lost long before. They were all about keeping their standards, not primarily His. They dressed theirs up to look like His so everyone would applaud them, but they weren’t really. And their increasingly vigorous rejections of Jesus’ teachings in the coming months would make clear this was the case. 

Jesus doesn’t speak any direct judgment over these folks, but He makes clear their efforts are pointless. Indeed, prayer as merely a performative or religious exercise is meaningless. It doesn’t accomplish anything of worth in our lives or the lives of the people around us. Now, it can be used to attract desired attention in our direction, and to convince people we are a whole lot more spiritual than we really are, that much is true. Think how many people you have known in a church setting who carried a reputation for being a really good prayer, and were afforded high respect because of that. Maybe the person had a deep and abiding relationship with God that served as the foundation for their praying, fully warranting the respect for their spirituality, but maybe not. Either way, being known as someone who prays well brings with it social credits. But unless there is a genuine and deep relationship with God supporting our practice of prayer—and especially in public—our praying is meaningless. It’s all sound and no substance. If that’s the case, whatever social rewards we gain from it will be the extent of what we get. God’s not going to give us the time of day.

In v. 6, Jesus tells us about the kind of prayer practice that can actually do us some good. “But when you pray, go into your private room, shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Prayer is a conversation between you and God and no one else. Now, if someone happens to get the chance to listen in on that conversation and is encouraged in the direction of a deeper and richer relationship with God because of it, all the better, but that’s only a collateral benefit and not one that should be pursued with intentionality. What should be intentional when we pray is seeking to get some time with God that nobody is a part of but us. 

And the thing is, this really shouldn’t be hard to understand. If God is at all like the Scriptures portray Him as being, He is a relational God. He desires a relationship with us. Well, how many strong, enduring relationships have you built by just talking to someone in public and when people are paying attention to your doing it? How many deep and abiding relationships have you nurtured by only ever asking someone for something and then getting upset with them when they don’t do it in exactly the manner you have requested? Personally, I can’t think of any that worked that way. Not a single one. So, what do you think the odds are that doing this kind of thing with a relational God is going to accomplish something beneficial in your life or in anyone else’s life? 

On the contrary, how many strong and enduring relationships have you built by spending quiet, focused time with the other person talking with them about all manner of things? Pretty much all of them, right? And the substance of the conversations you have with them doesn’t have to be deep and profound all the time. Sometimes you have serious conversations, but sometimes you have conversations about nothing at all. You just talk. And you laugh. And sometimes you cry. You get fired up occasionally. You help talk each other down. You share hopes and dreams and plans and preferences. And while occasionally those conversations happen in public places, they’re still just between the two of you. Or maybe there is a small group of you together, helping everyone grow closer by the conversations you are having together. 

When you do this with another person, you are rewarded with a good relationship. When you do this with God, Jesus says, He will reward you as well. With what? He doesn’t say. All sorts of things, I would imagine. Perhaps “answered” prayers, sure, but I certainly wouldn’t limit our conception of these rewards to that. How sad if that were the case. How about encouragement and strength? How about patience and wisdom? How about a deep and abiding assurance that you aren’t alone? There are all sorts of ways God can reward us for this, and most of them are relationally focused, not merely giving us the things we have asked for. 

But if the Jews of Jesus’ day and with whom all of His audience were familiar were prone to these kinds of hypocritical prayers, they weren’t the only ones praying. Gentiles prayed too. They prayed to different gods whose character was not anything like the character of the God of Israel. The result of this was a different conception of what prayer needed to be. They prayed to gods who didn’t really care about them. They didn’t like them all that much. They were prone to all of the same faults and failings we are as people. As a result, prayers to these gods focused as much on getting their attention as they did on getting what the supplicants wanted. The exact methodology was different, but the outcome was the same: empty prayers that didn’t actually accomplish anything of value. 

“When you pray, don’t babble like the Gentiles, since they imagine they’ll be heard for their many words. Don’t be like them…” We’re not going to talk God into anything with an overabundance of words. It just isn’t going to happen. We’re not going to find a particular sequence of words that will make God more inclined or even somehow bound to do as we ask. Our praying won’t ever give us any power over Him. All of that kind of an approach to praying assumes on a God who doesn’t know us very well and isn’t all that interested in helping us with much of anything. With a god like that, of course you would pray like that. And you wouldn’t get anything out of it. 

Jesus says that’s not the kind of God we serve. “Don’t be like them because your Father knows the things you need before you ask him.” And before you ask, no, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever ask God for anything since He already knows everything. We should of course present our requests to God. Paul tells us as much in a passage from Philippians we’ll look at next time. Jesus Himself goes on from here to give us a model prayer that includes asking God for various things. But we should do it with the understanding in place that He is a good Father who loves us deeply, who is perfectly aware of our needs, and who is highly motivated to make sure we have all our needs met. To put that a bit more familiarly, we should ask from the standpoint of a child with a good and loving father. 

If we believe God is other than He is, we’ll approach Him as other than He is. The problem is that when we approach Him like He’s someone else entirely, we usually wind up just approaching this other god that doesn’t really exist, thinking we’re approaching the God who does. Then we get all upset over the fact that the God who does exist isn’t doing what we want. But we never actually approached Him about our need in the first place. We went somewhere else thinking we were asking in His direction. We shouldn’t be surprised we don’t get what we need from a god who doesn’t exist in the first place. And the God who does exist is wise enough to know that things we ask for aren’t always—or even often—really things that we need. They’re wants only. And while He’s not entirely opposed to giving us the things we want (especially when our wants line up with His wants), many of the things we want aren’t all that good for us, or won’t be all that good for the people around us. I wouldn’t want to imagine how many bad outcomes He has saved us all from by telling us no. He knows what we need. 

He wants us to ask because that means we are moving relationally in His direction which is the ultimate goal, but we shouldn’t think of Him as some God who is distant or aloof or uncaring. He is a God who loves us, who desires a relationship with us, and who loves to communicate with us and for us to communicate with Him in pursuit of that relationship. This, more than anything else, should shape our understanding of and approach to prayer. Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves us. Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. 

When you pray—because just like Jesus could safely assume with His audience, I feel like I’m pretty safe in assuming everybody here prays at least every now and then—this idea is what should always be most presently in your mind and heart. Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. That’s it. Everything else you know or think you know about prayer comes second to that. Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. 

If you knew there was a God who loved you perfectly, how would you talk to Him? If you knew you could bring everything on your heart and mind and drop it at His feet, what would your communication with Him look like? If you knew that nothing you ever said to Him was going to push Him away or make Him turn His back on you, what would you say? What would you ask? Because of course you’ll ask Him things. There are things you need. There are things you think you need that He can help you understand maybe aren’t so essential as you once believed. There are things you think you know that He can help you see maybe aren’t quite so true as you once thought. And if this God really does love you—just like with a person of whose love you are entirely confident—you are going to be willing to hear what He has to say. Sometimes He’ll communicate it directly somehow. Sometimes He’ll communicate it through His word—which is why it is always a good idea to combine your conversations with this God who loves you with your engaging with His word. Sometimes He’ll communicate it through a fellow follower of Jesus—which is why it is always a good idea to combine your conversations with this God who loves you with your engaging with His body. Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. 

Okay, but what should this conversation look like? Well, that depends. It won’t always look the same. Sometimes the conversations will be pious and reverent. Sometimes they’ll be gentle and loving. Sometimes they’ll be pleading and desperate. Sometimes they’ll be angry and hard. It all depends just like conversations with a person who loves you aren’t all the same. Indeed, prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. 

Still, having some sort of a guide would really be helpful. Thankfully, Jesus goes on here to give us a model. We call it the Lord’s Prayer, which is kind of funny because He gave it to us to pray. We probably would have done better calling it Our Prayer. This is a prayer that can be prayed word-for-word as it is totally fine and often appropriate to repeat a prayer someone already prayed before. It can also be used as a topical jumping off point for our own praying. When we use every part of it, this will help us avoid getting stuck in prayer ruts. 

You’ve heard this prayer before. “Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” 

This prayer is remarkably simple, which itself serves as a nice reminder that our prayers can be remarkably simple too. Remember: God knows what you need. You don’t have to be fancy or formal with your words. You can just be honest. Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. 

And when you talk to Him, it’s good and wise to praise Him. This is a part of recognizing Him for who He really is. This will help make sure you are actually praying to Him rather than firing prayers off in the wrong direction toward a make-believe god who can’t do anything for you anyway. Our prayers should submit our wills and desires to His. This is another part of acknowledging rightly who He is. He’s God and we’re not, so the things He wants to happen are better than the things we want to happen. Therefore, it makes good sense to pray for the things He wants to happen. Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. 

We can ask Him for the things we need. We all have needs, and He is the God who can meet all our needs. Laying our needs at His feet is a good and wise thing to do. And if we accidentally slip in a few wants, that’s okay too. He’s a good and gracious God. He’s a God who loves us. He’ll gently help us see what really are our needs and what aren’t. And because one of our deepest needs is having right relationships, we can ask God for that too. We can ask for His help in achieving and maintaining right relationships with both Him and with the people around us. Right relationships in a broken world generally come because we are living with a spirit of forgiveness toward those who have hurt us. One last thing is that we can and should ask for His help in overcoming the temptations of this world and standing firm in the face of opposition from our enemy. The fight we are facing in this life is a spiritual battle. If we want to thrive through it, we need the help of a spiritual God and the spiritual weapons He can provide. So we ask Him. 

We could, of course, go into quite a lot more detail here, but that’s enough to get you started. The real thing to remember from today, the most important idea that should serve as the foundation point of all our praying, is that prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. If you don’t remember anything else from this morning, remember that. Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. Remember that, and get to praying. Pray for yourself. Pray for your family. Pray for sick and struggling people in your orbit. Pray for those who are on a journey toward God but are still far from Him. Pray for those who are currently journeying away from God and are experiencing the challenges of life disconnected from its source. Pray for the church. Pray for this church and the work God is doing here. Pray for the community you live in from the small to the big and beyond. Do all of this and more, but do it in pursuit of a relationship with God. When you do that, all your praying will be effective. Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. 

Okay, but what does prayer actually do for us? Come back next week, and we’ll explore one really powerful thing prayer can accomplish.