Saturday, October 24, 2020

PT-4 "The Audience of Prayer" (Matt. 6:5)

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/24/2020 10:17 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                             Focus:  PT-4 “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.”

 

            We want to now look at some things from this verse that in and of themselves were not a problem with prayer, but the attitude is what we are looking at as we go through these different points.  The first one is “The hypocrites” loved “to stand and pray.”  As we look through Jewish history standing to pray was very normal, for in the OT we see God’s faithful praying while kneeling, while lying prostrate, and while standing.  However in the NT times standing was the most common position and did not necessarily indicate a desire to be noticed like what the Pharisees were doing.

 

            Next we look at “The Synagogues” and they were most appropriate and likely places for public prayers to be offered to God.  The Synagogues were the houses of worship and the reading of the Word of God and are still in existence today for Jewish people.  Many people lived too far away from the Temple to get there and so they prayed and worshiped at the Synagogues.  MacArthur adds “If done sincerely, prayer at any of those functions was appropriate.”  The functions he is talking about happened at the Synagogues.

 

            “ The Street corners” is the next place that we are going to talk about and one my first of all think that this was an odd place to have prayer, however because a devout Jew would stop wherever he was at the appointed time of prayer, may would pray on the street corners.  MacArthur writes “But the word used here for ‘street’ is not the same as that in verse 2, which refers to a narrow street (rhume).  The word used here (plateia) refers to a wide, major street, and therefore to a major street corner, where a crowd was most likely to be.  The implied fault here is that the ‘hypocrites’ loved to pray where they would have the largest audience.  There was nothing wrong with praying at a major intersection if that was where you happened to be at the time for prayer.  But something was very much wrong if you planned to be there at prayer time for the specific purpose of praying where the most people could see you.”

 

            So what was the real evil that Jesus is talking about here?  Well it was the scribes and the Pharisees desire to display themselves “in order to be seen by men.”  As mentioned it was not wrong to pray in those places, but they happened to afford the largest audiences.  So therefore the places where the hypocrites preferred to pray was places where people would see them.

 

            Now we have one more short section to be able to wrap all this up and because it is the weekend we will wait to do this last short section tomorrow.

 

10/24/2020 10:35 AM

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