How Do You Pray?

In Matthew 6:5 Jesus revealed what those who pray must first consider if they want their prayers to be heard and answered. Again, the Lord assumed that those He addressed were going to pray. He said, “When you pray,” not if you pray. From there, He proceeded to warn against two classes of people whose prayers will not be heard: the hypocrites who pray to be seen of others and the Gentiles who pray with excessive but empty words.

First, he addressed the hypocrites of His nation because of the face they presented to those around them of devotion and obedience to their covenant God while caring only for how they appeared to an observer. The Lord focused on their righteousness (or lack thereof) and what their righteousness (right living) must demonstrate—how they kept their covenant obligations (Matthew 5:20). Deuteronomy 10 defines these covenant expectations: “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your good” (vv. 12, 13).

Fearing the Lord is rightly understanding who Yahweh is in all His greatness as described in verse 14: “Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it.” Obviously, no sinful human can fully grasp the magnitude of this awful truth and thus respond correctly to His awesome holiness in a way that even begins to acknowledge His majestic and glorious greatness. Yet, there must be a desire for God that fully consumes the whole of one’s existence. Fearing Him is to be fully consumed with Him.

Walking in His ways requires careful attention to His Word and responding in love, which is one’s grateful and humble response to God’s elective grace. “Yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day” (v. 15). Yet conveys the powerful truth of God’s condescension and desire to relate to chosen creatures. One would think that those to whom He revealed such gracious accommodation would respond with great love and careful obedience.

Praying is communicating, a natural activity, connecting with Him in everything relating to that relationship. Sadly, those who could identify as those on whom God set His heart were not so characterized. Their praying was not motivated by the fear of God and their love for Him. Instead, they were bound to formal worship expressed in externals, devoid of any response to God. These hypocrites fulfilled their obligation to pray, not to engage their God, but to impress only those who watched them. Jesus saw this as self-rewarding and wholly inadequate to enter the kingdom of heaven.