SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/23/2020 8:57 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 “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.”
I want to say first of all that this
SD will not be too long, and then I want to say that it will be a quotation
from John MacArthur’s commentary, as what he has to say in the section that we
will be looking at, in my opinion is so very important.
“It is that despicable fault that
Jesus zeroes in on. ‘And when you pray,
you are not to be as the hypocrites.’
Prayer that focuses on self is always hypocritical, because, by definition, the focus on
every prayer should be on God. As
mentioned in the last chapter, the term hypocrite
originally referred to actors who used large masks to portray the roles they
were playing. ‘Hypocrites’ are actors,
pretenders, persons who play a role.
What they say and do does not represent what they themselves feel or
believe but only the image they hope to create.
“The hypocritical scribes and Pharisees
prayed for the same purpose they did everything else—to attract attention and
bring honor to themselves. That was the
essence of their ‘righteousness,’ which Jesus said had no part in His kingdom
(5:20).
“An old commentator observed that the greatest danger to
religion is that the old self simply becomes religious. The ‘hypocrites’ of whom Jesus speaks had
convinced themselves that by performing certain religious acts, including
various types of prayer, they became acceptable to God. People today still deceive themselves into
thinking they are Christians, when all they have done is dress their old nature
in religious trappings.
“Nothing is so sacred that Satan will not invade it. In fact, the more sacred something is, the
more he desires to profane it. Surely few things pleas him more
than to come between believers and their Lord in the sacred intimacy of prayer.
Sin will follow us into the very presence
of God; and no sin is more powerful or destructive than pride. In those moments when we would come before
the Lord in worship and purity of heart, we may be tempted to worship
ourselves.
“Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes,
‘We tend to think of sin as we see it in rags and in gutters of
life. We look at a drunkard, poor
fellow, and we say, there is sin. But
that is not the essence of sin. To have
a real picture and a true understanding of sin, you must look at some great
saints, some usually devout and devoted man, look at him there on his knees in
the very presence of God. Even there
self is intruding itself, and the temptation is for him to think about himself,
to think pleasantly and pleasurably about himself and to really be worshiping
himself rather than God. That, not the
other, is the true picture of sin. The
other is sin, of course, but there you do not see it at its acme, you do not
see it in its essence. Or to put it in
another form, if you really want to understand something about the nature of
Satan and his activities, the thing to do is not to go to the dregs or the
gutters of life. If you really want to
know something about Satan, go away to that wilderness where our Lord spent
forty days and forty nights. That’s the
true picture of Satan, where you see him tempting the very Son of God.’ (‘Studies in the Sermon on the Mount’) [Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977], 2:22-23).
“From what we know in the scriptural
record, Jesus’ two most intense times of spiritual opposition were during His
forty days of solitude in the wilderness and during His prayer in the Garden of
Gethsemane on the night He was betrayed and arrested. On both occasions He was alone praying to His
Father. It was in the most private and
holy place of communion that Satan presented his strongest temptations before
the Son of God.”
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: It is my
opinion that in the first part of this quotation that MacArthur was not saying
that we should not be praying about things that are going on in our lives, but
we are not to be like the Pharisee who in the parable of the Pharisee and the
tax collector the Pharisee was telling God that he was not like that sinful tax
collector, but went on to say all the things that he “did for the Lord.”
My Steps of Faith for Today: My prayers
should bring glory to the Lord, and that is what I desire them to do.
10/23/2020 9:26
AM
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