Friday, October 23, 2020

PT-3 "The Audience of Prayer" (Matthew 6:5)

 

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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