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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