Thursday, October 22, 2020

PT-2 "The Audience of Prayer" (Matt. 6:5)

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/22/2020 10:33 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                             Focus:  PT-2 “The Audience of Prayer”

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                        Reference:  Matthew 6:5

 

            Message of the verse:  5 "And when you pray, you are not to be as the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, in order to be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.”

 

            These ritual prayers that we spoke of yesterday could be given with three basic attitudes, and the first one would be sincerity, then indifference, or pride.  It was certainly all about the attitude of the worshiper those Jewish people who were right with the Lord, like Daniel was, used the time to worship and to glorify God.  They thought about the words of the prayer and they sincerely believed what they were praying to the Lord.  However others went through the words perfunctorily, as they mumbled the syllables as fast as possible in order to get done.  Then others, such as the scribes and the Pharisees, recited the prayers very meticulously as they made sure to enunciate every word and every syllable in a perfect way.  They had three times a day to put them self on the stage so others could look at them, and perhaps thought they were very spiritual.  This was the first fault, and now we will move onto the second as I promised we would in our last SD.

 

            MacArthur writes “The second fault that had crept into Jewish prayer life was the development of prescribed prayers for every object and every occasion.  There were prayers for light, darkness, fire, rain, the new moon, traveling, good news, bad news, and so on.  No doubt the original intent was to bring every aspect of life into the presence of God; but by making the prayers prescribed and formalized that purpose was undermined.”

 

            We have mentioned the third fault, and that was the practice of limiting prayer to specific times and also occasions.  Whenever a specific time came or situation arose then prayer was given, and this was done with no relation to genuine desire or need.  Again I can’t help but think of Peter walking on the water and then about to go under because of lack of faith and he cried out to the Lord “Lord save me.”  I have mentioned Daniel and he used these times as a reminder to open his heart to the Lord.  As we look at the early church, which made up of mostly Jews we see they used these three times to pray and I am sure that for the most of them it was a time of worship and to bring glory to the Lord.  The Lord must have really loved to see His children talk to Him in a meaningful way those three times a day.

 

            The fourth fault was in esteeming very long prayers, as the offer of these believed that a prayer’s sanctity and effectiveness were in direct proportion to its length.  In Mark 12:40 we see a warning from Jesus “for appearance’s sake offer long prayers.  Having a long prayer does not necessarily make it an insincere prayer, however a long public prayer lends itself to pretense, repetition, rote, and many other such dangers. I believe that the longest prayer that I have ever heard was done by a retired Pastor who is now with the Lord, and he was praying at a service where our youth Pastor at the time was being ordained.  The prayer was very meaningful, but also very long.

            We will now look at the fifth fault that was singled out be Jesus in Matthew 6:7, and this was that of meaningless repetitions, that patterned after those of pagan religions.  An example of this would be with the heathens confronting Elijah, or perhaps it was Elijah confronting the Baal worshipers as seen in 1 Kings 18.  These Baal worshipers would actually cut themselves and continue to cry out to their god and after a while Elijah kind of made fun of them wondering if Baal was sleeping or in the restroom. 

 

            The problem is that through the centuries the Jews had been influenced by such pagan practices as they often added adjective after adjective before God’s name in their prayers.  Apparently they were trying to outdo one another in mentioning His divine attributes.

 

            I will conclude with a paragraph from MacArthur’s commentary:  “By far the worst fault, however, was that of wanting to be seen and heard by other people, especially their fellow Jews.  Most of the other faults were not necessarily wrong in themselves, but were carried to extremes and used in meaningless ways.  But this fault was intrinsically evil, because it both came from and was intended to satisfy pride.  Whatever form they prayer may have taken the motive was sinful self-glory, the ultimate perversion of this sacred means of glorifying God (John 14:13).”

 

            Lord willing we will continue to look at this fault in our next SD.

 

            Spiritual meaning for my life today:  Learning more about prayer has been a welcome subject for me as I am learning the good things about my prayer life and some other things that I need to change.

 

My Steps of Faith for Today:  Remember prayer is a privilege because I am communicating with the all powerful, all knowing God who desires me to talk to Him and a consistent basis.

 

10/22/2020 11:08 AM  

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