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Most of us know what it feels like to pray with one eye on the people around us—wondering whether we sound holy enough, reaching for language we’d never use in ordinary conversation. In Matthew 6, Jesus warns us that prayer aimed at impressing an audience—human or divine—has already received its only reward.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, as I mentioned a moment ago, the next two weeks are going to find us looking at what Jesus has to say about prayer. There are a lot of people that have said a lot of things about prayer, and some of them have really insightful things that would be good for us to incorporate into our prayer lives. Others have suggestions that aren’t so good, but I hope that we can all agree that if you’re looking for someone who could tell you the best things about how to pray, the person you’re gonna land on is Jesus. And he tells us. He tells us how we should pray.
Now, as we think about this, it’s interesting to me how hard it is as a person to get to what Jesus actually says. He tells us what to do, and yet how hard is it to actually do it? How hard is it to actually pray as he calls us to pray? We do a lot of things around the sort of circumference of the area that Jesus touches on, but are we actually dealing with what Jesus has called us to do when he tells us how to pray?
Reminded me of something I read about in 2008. I don’t think I saw any stories about it in 2022, although then when I went to look back at what had happened years ago, I found out it did happen again, which was when China hosted the Olympics, they ran into a problem. Because what do we think of with the Olympics? Of course, we think of great feats of athleticism, right? The people are gonna go out and they’re gonna do amazing things, sort of things that we wish we could do, and maybe we watch and we think we could do until we try just a little bit of it, and we slink back to our corner after we injure ourselves. We see that, right? The other thing we imagine though is that much of this amazing athleticism is going to take place in beautiful, sweeping outdoor vistas. Beautiful woods or snowy scenes or whatever it might be depending on the Olympics. And then, of course, during the lead up to and the return from the commercial breaks on television, as they play those familiar Olympic tunes, they’re going to show the beautiful outdoors of the area where all this is taking place.
But China had a problem when they were hosting the Summer Olympics in 2008, and it seems it was the problem once again when they hosted the Winter Olympics last year, which is that the area around Beijing is incredibly, incredibly polluted. And they wanted people to see this beautiful outdoor scene, not, well, let’s take a look at what was there right before the Olympics in 2008. Here is a satellite image of that region of China around Beijing, and if you’ve seen satellite imagery, this doesn’t look too surprising. You have the white of clouds. But notice that gray down there, that’s not a thinner cloud, that’s smog. All over the whole region, right in the middle of that Beijing, all over that region, that was the smog that they were dealing with, just covering the land. Here’s another picture of it. You can see there, there’s Beijing up on top. There’s another city further down that isn’t labeled for some reason. But all that that you’re seeing there basically is smog, not clouds.
So imagine you are the Olympic organizing committee in China, and of course, especially since you have this very centralized government that wants to put on this huge, impressive feat for all the world to see, what are you going to do? Well, if you wanted to get to the heart of the problem, what you’d do is you would eliminate the pollution, right? You would figure out why is it that you have clouds that cover spans that would be more than a nation in size that are just smog. That’s what you would do. But they didn’t want to do that because they make a lot of money producing all that smog. It’s not just careless smog. It’s smog because they have industry there that they don’t want to hinder. And so what they did instead is decided they would do a few things. First, they turn off that industry for a few weeks before the Olympics so it could clear up. Because it’s China and they can say, you’re going to shut down your factory for a few weeks. The other thing they did though is then they took planes up and they seeded the clouds to cause it to rain so that the pollution would rain down on the land rather than being up in the sky. So it at least looked nice.
Here’s what struck me as I was reading about that though. You can shut down a factory for a few weeks, but if that’s your solution to get rid of those giant plumes of smog when you turn the factory production back up, it’s going to return. If your solution is to seed the clouds and make it rain down polluted rain, well, guess what? After that rain falls and you put more pollution up, it’s going to be right back up there again unless you constantly do that. And so it achieved an appearance of cleanliness, appearance, we might say, of holiness, but it didn’t actually address the problem.
A lot of times when we pray, we’re following that example. We’re seeding the clouds of our lives to knock the pollution down for a little bit so we look righteous. We’re shutting off our sin factories for a week or two so that it looks like we’re righteous. But what aren’t we doing? We’re not actually addressing the pollution inside our hearts that keeps pumping all that back out again.
And so the people that Jesus is addressing, he knows that they know how to seed the clouds of their lives and look righteous in a moment. But do they actually know what it’s going to look like to live a life where prayer is integral and meaningful, where prayer is actually speaking to what’s going on in their hearts and not just something that’s an exterior view? And that was their problem, but I think it’s often our problem too. Where prayer is this superficial thing. We see what looks good in prayer and we want to do that and maybe we’ve seen people that look like they’re good at praying and we want to look like them when we pray, but our hearts are still pumping out the sin pollution constantly.
As Jesus preaches here in this passage that we’re getting ready to look at, there are distinct problems that occur for both Jewish and Gentile people as they pray. They both have problems, they’re not the same problem, but they both have problems when they pray and he addresses them both. And let’s go ahead and now and see what Jesus says, Matthew chapter six, verse five.
He says, “When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they have received the reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them for your father knows what you need before you ask him.”
Well, as we think about prayer, let’s come before God in prayer and ask for his help. Will you join me in prayer?
Lord, as we come before you, would you help us to get to the heart of this? It’s not easy, Father, but we want to actually be those who are focused on you. And so as we come before you in prayer, would you help us to understand what prayer is even about and how to do it in a way that draws us closer to you? We pray in Jesus name, Amen.
As I thought about this passage, I kept asking myself the question, what’s the issue that can span both Jew and Gentile, people practicing religion in very different ways, because a lot of the Gentiles, you have some Gentile converts to Judaism and they may bring problems, but Jesus also seems to have in mind here, I believe, not so much that, but outright Gentiles. In other words, those worshiping other gods. So what is it about us that when we come and we pray, whatever God that person might be praying to, that there gets to be this messiness in what we do, that Jesus wants us to address as we come before the true God?
And I think if you look at what Jesus is saying here, there’s basically one thing that boils down to, and that’s that we pray to impress. Pray to impress. Who do we pray to impress? Well, we pray to impress different audiences at different times, but all too often in the church, we pray to impress those around us.
Have you ever been in a prayer gathering at a church? We haven’t, well, I take that back. We did do one when we first launched last year, but we haven’t, since we’ve been meeting in person, we haven’t done an in-person prayer gathering. We do the online prayer walks, which you’re not seeing everybody praying and hearing, so you’re not feeling the pressure. Oh, I need to make sure that my prayer sounds like it belongs here. But when you have an in-person prayer gathering, and we will do one of those one of these days, as you have one of those, there can be this great pressure that wells up in a person. I need to make sure that I sound holy as I pray.
Jim and I were joking just before the service about reading out of the Bible, and we were joking back and forth about it because, of course, we have all this technology here with screens that are showing the scriptures, and then there’s the Bible itself, and does it look more righteous if I’m reading out of the Bible, right? I’m gonna hold this up so you can see I’m reading out of the Bible now, okay? I want you to think I’m righteous. This is what makes me righteous. I’m holding on to this Bible, and I’m making sure that you see that I’m reading it out of these pages, these printed pages, with the love of their cover, not off of some screen. “It’s the attitude.” “It’s the attitude, yes.” Jim gets some brownie points there, yes, yeah. It’s the attitude. Same thing with prayer. It’s just really the same thing that Jesus is addressing in each step as he’s going through this chapter. In each step, same one that he was addressing last week. What’s our attitude when we’re giving? Is it so that people see what we give and they say, wow, look at that person. He or she is so generous. Are we doing it because we think God is so generous and I want God’s work to continue? Which one is it? And the same thing with prayer.
Now the temptation can be, and it’s not a crazy thing, to read what Jesus is saying here in these first words on prayer and think, well, what does he say? He says, verse six, but when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret. And you’re thinking that hypocrite pastor, ‘cause he just prayed multiple times in the service already. Well, I’m a hypocrite in lots of ways. I’m not saying you’re wrong there, exactly. But you might say, well then, but what about when he has Jim come up? Or what about when Kathy comes up? Or what about when Melanie calls us to worship? What about anyone that comes up here? Are we all hypocrites? Well, yeah, we’re all sinners, and so there’s that. But are we just perpetuating the sin when we come up here and pray? We can’t even listen to what Jesus says, I’m holding up the Bible again. We can’t even listen to what Jesus says here and understand that he says to go pray in private. What’s wrong with these Christians? Is that what Jesus is really getting to here?
Well, I don’t think so. Because what do we see over and over again in the New Testament church? Not just the church after the New Testament, but the New Testament church. Over and over again, we see them praying for each other. And not only from a distance, and then sending a text message on Jerusalem Mobile saying, “I prayed for you today.” Now, what are they doing? For example, Acts chapter four, God’s rescuing them, and it says, “And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, ‘The sovereign Lord who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them.’” That’s a public prayer, group prayer. So did they miss what Jesus was saying? Did the disciples not get it? And as they went and established churches, did they not get it either? I really don’t think that’s the point.
It’s much like what Jesus is saying in the first part about giving when he says, “Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Well, he doesn’t actually mean somehow you have to disconnect the two sides of your body. He’s speaking in the most extreme form. He’s speaking with hyperbole so that we get the idea. It’s a serious business that we have the right attitude here. You can’t disconnect your hands. Well, I mean, you could, but then you couldn’t use one of them, right? It’s not what Jesus has in mind here. He comes back to the point of attitude what Jim mentioned a moment ago. It’s all about attitude.
I like the question a commentator posed in reflecting what Jesus says here. He says, he asked, “How do our prayers and their frequency change when we’re praying in public or in private? Do you pray differently when you’re praying in front of other people? Do you pray more in front of other people?” If you find that you have these eloquent, beautiful prayers when everyone’s gathered around and you barely can remember to pray when you’re alone, what does that say? I think that’s what Jesus is challenging us to think about.
There are gonna be times where maybe actually we should take it completely to the extreme that we say, you know, I’ve realized that prayer for me has become about impressing the people around me and not about communing with the living God of the universe. And so what I need to do is not pray in public for a while. Now, some of you don’t like to pray in public and you say, whew, that sounds great. Burning off there. It’s not about that praying in public is a bad thing. It’s about what is our reason for praying in public. And for those of you that don’t like to pray in public, on the other hand, I think sometimes the challenge comes into the same place because why don’t we wanna pray in public? It’s because what are people going to think of me if they hear what I pray when I pray in public? What Jesus is challenging us to think about is whom is it that we’re praying to? Who is our audience for prayer? Is it the God or is it the people around us?
And so it is true here, if you notice, he talks about people standing in prayer. For they love to stand in verse five and pray in the synagogues and street corners. And so some people have said, oh, you know what the problem that Jesus is getting to here? They’re not on their knees. They need to get down on their knees and pray. What do we find in scripture? Well, here’s something interesting. If you think of another famous comment that Jesus makes on prayer, we find in Luke 18, the parable in which we have a Pharisee who is there right in the center of the crowd and he prays to everyone can hear, thank you God for not making me like that horrible sinner over there. And then what do we read in verse 13 about the horrible sinner of the tax collector? With the tax collector standing far off would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breath saying, God be merciful to me, a sinner.
Now notice there, he’s still standing. It doesn’t say, ah, so the Pharisee was standing, look at me, I’m so great as I pray. And then we have the tax collector kneeling down on the ground praying. They’re both standing. What’s the difference? The attitude, once again, exactly what Jim mentioned. We need to think about what is it that we’re saying and why are we saying it? Why are the words that are coming out of my mouth coming out of my mouth?
Here’s one that’s an interesting thing. I don’t think I really thought of until I became a pastor and I was at a church where we did do the Lord’s Prayer fairly often. Do you realize how much pressure it is to make sure the words come out right? No matter how many times you’ve said them, you may have said them over and over and over again in life, but then everyone else who said them over and over and over again for all their lives is listening and praying along. And you have to get out just in the right order so that everyone else that’s saying at the same time, you don’t throw the train off the tracks. And you think, boy, if I mess this up, if I put one of the words in the wrong order, people are going to think, boy, that’s a, boy, that what, an unrighteous heathen up there. I mean, if the pastor doesn’t know the Lord’s Prayer, come on.
So you just start to think, I have to get right so that people think that I’m actually a decent pastor. Do we use words to impress people? Are we using them to come before God? Another way to check this is to think, and this can be either in private or in front of people, are you using language like you normally use? Do you suddenly sound like you live in King James’ court when you pray? You never use the and thou any other time in life. You’re not even really sure how to tell when thee should be there, when thou should be there. You’re not really sure what the difference between ye and thee are. All you know is that when you pray, you better use those because that’s holy language.
Now, of course, we should be reverent before God. And certainly if one of the things that you’re working on in your Christian walk is to clean up your language and your language is a little bit on the salty side, I would not recommend, I mean, it would be good to allow God to convict you of that and it’d be a great place to start in prayer. But are you using the sort of words that you normally use or do you sound like a completely different person when you’re praying? Is it about conversing with God or is it about saying certain things so that it sounds impressive, so it sounds holy? You know, sometimes the person we’re trying to impress when we pray is ourselves. I need to make sure I can get through this prayer in a very impressive format so that I know I’m holy. But it’s not about am I holy and it’s not about other people thinking whether I’m holy, it’s about knowing that God is holy and coming before him.
This week I went onto Facebook and you know how Facebook has those memories? It pops up 10 years ago, it keeps getting, it’s amazing now, it’s what, 15 years ago. How can Facebook be that old, I don’t know. But you know, it goes way back and the farther back it goes, often the more cringe-worthy it is. It’s sort of like, oh, did I really say that? And one of the things that struck me sometimes when those memories come up is that, especially when I was in college studying theology, when I was in seminary, you’re reading all these theological works and if you’ve never actually gone and read a theology book, there’s no shame in that. But let me just give you an insight. It’s not gripping reading usually. It’s not written like a novel. It’s often written in a way that almost seems like the theologians are trying to make it as hard to understand their point as possible. You wonder, how can these people also be pastors? Well, maybe you don’t come with that. You say, well, the pastors do that too. And sometimes we do, a lot of times we do.
And one of the things that struck me as I looked at those memories is I’d be reading, I could probably, even if I didn’t know the content, could tell you what I was reading at the time because of how obscure the things I was posting were in the way that they were written and I have to think about why in the world would I post that? It doesn’t make any sense. It didn’t make any sense in that book I was reading. It doesn’t make any sense now, but it sure sounded impressive. Sure sounded theologically astute.
It’s actually an old joke amongst theologians that theologians as they learn play a game called theological one-upsmanship—I can’t even get out. But in other words, who can be the most obtuse? Who can be the most convoluted in how they say something so that they sound smarter than the other person? Well, if you can use a double negative and talk about something that seems like it’s completely contradictory and then put it out as a profound statement, you sure sound smart. And then if I can do it twice and then add two or three other languages into the mix of my sentence, then I’ll sound really smart. What’s it all about? It’s about sounding like the smartest person in the room, the most righteous person in the room. And it’s kind of one of those things I really wish Facebook wouldn’t remind me that I’d ever done when I look back and I see that, oh, I posted a status and it’s talking about saying yes to the no of the yes or something like that. And it’s sort of like, oh yeah, I was reading Karl Barth and I, what did I post that for? Pardon? Why did I post that for? Yeah, why did I post that? What was wrong with me? Yeah, maybe I was learning something really interesting. A lot of times I was, but why not actually say it in a way that someone else would get it without having to go and read the whole thing and make their head hurt too? Why not learn how to actually communicate it with the goal not to look smart, but to communicate truth about God? So oftentimes I know I would like to impress other people rather than God. And I think that’s something that we fall into. It’s certainly what Jesus has in mind as he addresses many of the Jews that are listening to him who knew the law, knew how to speak when they were going to pray at the synagogue in an impressive way. And they really wanted people to be impressed.
Well, that’s our first challenge, but there’s a second challenge too. And I think this one we can fall into almost, I don’t want to say easier, but I think it’s almost harder to detect ‘cause it almost seems like it should be this way. And oftentimes when we pray, we’re trying to impress God. Take a look again at verses seven and eight. It says, “When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them for your father knows what you need before you ask him.”
It’s really important to remember God already knows. You don’t need to convince him. A friend of mine always likes to joke about the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. We don’t have to win God and influence God. We don’t need to get his attention. If you’ve been in sales at any point in your life, you know the big thing is right, how to close the deal. How are you going to make sure the person doesn’t walk out the door without signing the dotted line? And sometimes we act that way with God. How can I get God to sign the dotted line on the miracle I need in my life? I need to make sure he understands the easy financing terms. It’ll work out beautifully. What does Jesus say? It’s not about that. We’re not trying to convince God to go along with our plans, and if we just say it right, he will. It’s not about that. He already knows what we need.
So why does he call us to pray? He calls us to pray to be in relationship to him. And a loving relationship isn’t about impressing, it’s about loving. Isn’t that funny? One of the wonderful things when you’re around a real genuine friend as opposed to people that you maybe hope would be your friends is that that change from trying to impress the person that they decide, well, this is someone worthwhile to talk to, to just being able to be yourself because you’re not trying to establish that, right? But God has already decided to be around you. He loves you. That’s the beauty of the gospel. He loves you. He gave what is unfathomable. The Son of God went on the cross for us and died on the cross for us while we were still sinners. Well, we are still sinners. Why do you do that? Because he loves us, and so we don’t need to impress God. We don’t need to somehow convince Jesus that it was worth going to the cross for us. What do we need to do? He calls us to be his children, to love him.
Now, here’s another place we often get tripped up when we look at this. Jesus says in verse seven, “When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do.” And the word that he uses there is even more wonderful in that it’s basically a word that sounds like it is. It’s this babbling sounding word, and it’s meant to convey that you’re just making noise. I’m just audibly filling space so that God pays attention to me.
It’s not about forbidding all repetition because here’s an interesting thing. I was reading through cross-references for this passage, and someone pointed out a really interesting parallel that I’d never thought about before, and that’s this, Matthew 26, 44. What does Jesus do before he goes to the cross? He keeps praying to the Father. And it says, “So leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time saying the same words again.”
So the heavenly Father already knows what we need. We don’t need to use repetition. Jesus is using repetition. To the heavenly Father, what’s going on here? Comes back once again. There’s that key word again, attitude. What is the reason that we’re doing something? Why does Jesus keep praying to the Father before going to the cross? He already knows what he’s going to do. He already knows the span of history. Why are they doing it? To be in relationship with the Father in this excruciating moment. To bring what he was overwhelmed with in that moment, in his human nature, he was overwhelmed with what was coming at him, and he did what we should do too. He came to the Father, and you didn’t need to keep coming up with novel ways to say it. Sometimes it’s the opposite way we go. Well, I can’t say the same words, so I’ll just say a bunch of different words. You didn’t need to do that either. He comes with the same words because he just needs to be with the Father.
Sometimes it’s the length. Sometimes it could be a short prayer, but if your short prayer is just filler, if you just needed to, you felt like you needed to pray, so you figured out how many words would make it feel righteous enough that you prayed, and you fill it up with that many words, and then you hit the little sun-betting with amen on that prayer and feel good about it, that’s not good, right? Not about length, but it is also about length as much as we fall into that trap of thinking, well, if I pray a longer prayer, maybe God will care.
This can be a problem that we run into both in more traditional church settings where there’s pre-written prayers. Sometimes it’s the Lord’s Prayer itself, right? The more liturgical the church, you often have a higher frequency of praying the Lord’s Prayer together, and it can be where you get to that point in the service and it’s kind of a little time for your brain to rest because you hit our Father and you just know where the rest is and your brain doesn’t even need to engage anymore. Or it can be a deeply profound thing. Here’s this comforting part of the service I’m coming to. It’s all about attitude.
Same with less formal worship settings. We generally have prayer here that’s not pre-written, informal, and inscribed at Little Hills. And that can be a very good thing ‘cause we’re going to pull it out of our hearts. We’re gonna pray what’s burdening us at the moment, but it could also be an opportunity to do a lot of that babbling because I need to pray and I really don’t have anything to say. I’m just going to, right?
It comes back once again to attitude. It’s my attitude. If I’m praying the same prayer for the thousandth time, but my attitude is I mean every single word of this and God, I need you to hear me right now because I need your help and strength. God’s going to honor that prayer. He’s right there with you in that prayer. Doesn’t mean he’s gonna do it exactly the way we want ‘cause he knows what’s best for us, but he’s going to be right there with us.
And likewise, if we’re pouring out our heart and everything is coming out from the depths of our soul, he’s not gonna say, “Well, it wasn’t structured enough.” It’s a pretty good prayer, but the meter wasn’t quite right. Could’ve used some rhyming to come back and try again. He’s not gonna do that. - You didn’t use the proper adjectives pronouns? - Yeah, not the proper adjectives and pronouns. It’s not, you didn’t manage to make it tweetable in a tweet thread.
God cares about our attitude. And sometimes that’s going to include continuing to come back to God in prayer. And we’re not just saying, we’re not coming to that so that we can justify, well, we’re going to pray the Lord’s prayer again next week, which we are, is not so that I can justify that as we plan the service. It’s because that’s what Jesus says as well.
Take a look at Luke 18, verse one. It says, “And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” He said, “In a certain city, there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in the city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’”
And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. Will not God give justice to his elect who cried to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily, nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Is Jesus saying that God is unjust? We know Jesus a little better than that, right? He’s not saying that the heavenly Father is that unjust judge. What he’s saying there is if an unjust judge will do this, how much more is God going to hear your prayers and work in your life? How much more is he going to hear your cry for justice and bring that justice? How much more so because he’s not unjust. So if the unjust one will do it, just to get that widow out of his hair, then the heavenly Father will do it too.
It’s not about how many or how few words, it’s about that relationship. And so it is as Jesus is anticipating going to the cross, what’s he doing? He comes back and back and back to his Father, the Son and the Father in this incredible, beautiful mystery of the God of the universe, the Son praying to the Father about what was to come to him, he repeats it because he’s just in relationship with his Father. And sometimes we’re going to come and we’re going to repeat things. And that’s okay if we’re coming for the relationship, if we’re coming to experience God, if that’s our attitude, I want to be in God’s presence. I’m not trying to impress him because I know 10 prayers I can repeat and get them word perfect. It’s spot on, I’m not doing it because of that. It’s not because of anything like that, it’s because this is what’s burdening me and I’m going to bring it to the one who loves me.
Well, I thought tonight I might debut my little magic show. I’ve decided to become a magician. You may have thought this was a church, starting next week, we’re going to have live performances. I have lions already on order and the cheetahs, they’re coming. - There’s a lion in your cheetah right now. (laughing) He spoiled it. I mean, I wanted everyone to get at least a good roar out of it, a roaring laugh.
Anyway, so I have here this magical children’s ministry bag, right? Kathy put together these beautiful bags. If you bring your kids here, they have something to do during the service, it’s so wonderful. And I decided, you know, I’m going to magically make a bear appear. And so let’s see, I just need some magic words, right? What are some magic words? Abracadabra, okay, Abracadabra. Any others? Hocus pocus, hocus pocus. (gasping) A bear. (clapping) Oh, a bear. That’s next week. I can’t bear this.
So here’s a little story that you may have heard. The best we can discern, do you ever wonder where some of those magic words come from that people use in magic shows? And of course, for the most part today, when they’re using them, we know that they’re really illusionists, right? That’s the fancy schmancy term for them, because we don’t really think they’re doing anything magical. It’s about sleight of hand and so on, or being really cheesy and just pulling a bear out of the bag, whatever it might be.
Well, here’s an interesting thing that struck me years ago. The term hocus pocus originally, the people that would use it weren’t using it because they thought they could put on a good show for their friends. They hadn’t gone down to the hobby shop and bought some card tricks and so on. They said it because they actually thought it could do something magical. And it appears the reason they thought that is it sounds remarkably similar to the Latin mass when the priest would be up there and he’d say, what we say in English is, this is my body, which is for you.
As he was saying that over the bread, and in Catholic theology, they’d say that it becomes physically the body and blood of Jesus. It’s actually a physical transformation. He would say these words, hac est inum corpus meum. And if you’re kind of in the back of the cathedral, it might sound kind of historically like hocus pocus. And the people heard that and they didn’t quite get it right and they didn’t know Latin. They’re just sitting in the back of the church, but they hear this phrase and they think, wow, if that guy up there can say hocus pocus and turn bread and wine into body and blood of the savior, then if I need to go get rid of my neighbor and turn my nasty neighbor into a cat or whatever, well, I’ll just say hocus pocus and out comes a bear, right? I mean, that’s what they thought.
Because what they were thinking was, it’s all about saying certain words and causing God to do something or causing the spirit world to do something. And so I can do that to transform different things. And what they were missing is what happens when we come to the Lord’s Supper. We’re not saying magical incantations and somehow evoking the powers that be into transforming something, we’re coming into relationship with our Lord.
When we come to prayer, we’re not saying magical incantations. If you ever said a prayer and you thought, maybe I could just word this a little differently and then God would feel obliged to do it. What are we doing? We’re basically saying God is being controlled by magic. If we really believe that it’s just all about the wording, we’re talking magic. That’s what Jesus is saying. You’re not going to impress God, you’re not going to control God. Here’s what you need to do. You need to relate to God.
We need to reorient. And that’s what the Lord’s Prayer is about. When we think about as he structured it and the things that we prayed through tonight, it’s about reorienting. Here’s two important questions. Am I treating God as a spell receiver or as a person? And if you’re trying to get the words just right and make sure they’re profound enough so that God has to do it, then we’re falling into this spell receiver mode.
Maybe a better example of the day would be if you have one of those home assistants like Alexa and you know you have to phrase it just right or she’s not going to respond. Of course, she responds when you don’t want her to too, but if we’re thinking in that mindset, I just need the heavenly Alexa to do something, we need to reorient. We come before God as our Father. Second question. Is what I’m dealing with important enough to bother God with?
And here’s, I think, sometimes why we want to couch it in really profound language because we think, well, what I have isn’t important enough to bother God with. And then other times we think, well, I’m not going to pray about this at all because not important enough to bother God with. Jews apparently at the time of Jesus, some of them believe they should only pray three times a day. And we might say, well, that’s pretty good. They’re praying three times a day. But they were only going to pray three times a day because they didn’t want to weary God by praying too much.
Here’s what we need to understand. We’re not going to impress God by how much we pray. We’re not going to avoid angering Him by praying less than or not bringing certain things up to Him so He’s not bothered by them. What God wants each and every one of us to know is that He just wants us to come and relate to Him, to be in relationship to Him. God already knows that’s the big thing we need to hang on to. We’re not forcing things, we’re not informing. And most importantly of all, we’re not trying to impress God and we’re not trying to impress other people when we pray. Coming before Him and relating to Him.
So it is that Jesus gave us the Lord’s Supper not to impress each other as we partake of it, not to do it just right so that God is impressed and decides to have mercy on us. Why did He give it to us? So that we could relate to Him. He invites us to dinner, He invites us to a meal to remind us that we’re His.
Now if you’ve never trusted in Jesus, if He hasn’t let yet your Lord and Savior, don’t take this because it’s not magical. I’m not going to say hocus pocus and turn this into some kind of elixir that’s going to make everything right in your life. Here’s what you need to do, you need to trust in Jesus. You need to understand that the God of the universe knows your needs, loves you and wants you to come into His presence. And so what you need to do is not say something magical, you need to come before Him, pray, confess your sins and say, “Jesus, I want you to be my Savior.” No special right magical way to say it, just trust in Him. And then next week come and join us and take this with us.
And so it was on the night that He was betrayed, Jesus took the bread and He broke it and He gave it to them saying, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And in like manner after supper, He said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink of it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and you drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”
Let’s pray. Lord, we come before you at this table and we can’t say the right words to make ourselves worthy to partake. We can’t say the right words that somehow makes this nourish us. What we can do is come before you out of the universe who loves us, and that’s that you would nourish us by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as we eat this bread and we drink this cup, we might be nourished by the body and blood of our Savior Jesus. We pray this in His precious name, amen.
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