Journeys Through the Word
“When you pray, don’t babble on and on…”
Verse(s) considered:
Matthew 6:7-13
(7) “When you pray, don’t babble on and on as people of other religions do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again.
(8) Don’t be like them, for your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask Him!
(9) Pray like this: Our Father in heaven, may Your name be kept holy.
(10) May Your Kingdom come soon. May Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
(11) Give us today the food we need,
(12) and forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us.
(13) And don’t let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.]
Thoughts along the road:
I think we all grew up with at least one person in our lives that seemed to excel at public prayer. (Or so they thought.) You would sit and listen to them as they droned on and on about every conceivable object of prayer around the world while they were only supposed to ask a blessing on a meal. And then there are the pet phrases people use to sound holy, I know I have a few. Perhaps, you do too.
I grew up in one denomination that has books of prepared prayers that are to be prayed in special situation and are supposed to yield some rather specific results from God. I sincerely doubt their efficacy or appropriateness in light of Jesus remarks here. After all, God knows what we need before we do. Why pray at all?
Jesus answers that question in a completely unique way, He gives us an example which we should use as an example, but is too often used in rote repetition — precisely what He was warning us against.
Let’s take a moment to unpack that example and look at it’s essence. That, I believe is it’s simplicity and focus on God as God and us as needy creatures.
To honor and acknowledge God as God is the primary thing we need to do in our lives. Too many of us try to remake Him in our image and suppose that He conforms to our standards. He can never be remade to be like us and is a standard wholly above any standard we could set. We should want His will to be accomplished not ours. We would mess it all up in less than a nanosecond. He never will.
We also need to admit our need for Him in our lives. We need for Him to provide for us because everything that is comes from Him and comes to us only as He wills it.
We need forgiveness. We have all sinned. None of us are exempt from that. We also sin more or less continually and we need to ask for forgiveness daily (or even hourly).
He ties our forgiveness to how well we forgive others. That is a really hard part because we love our grudges. We love to hold others in low esteem because of how they have wronged us or someone we love or someone we know or sometimes someone we just know about. We are really good at judging and not forgiving because we can use that to feel superior to that other person.
But Jesus ties our being forgiven to our forgiveness. That is hard sometimes. Really hard.
Finally, we should ask to not be allowed to yield to temptation. We need to ask to be protected from the evil one. Temptation and attacks from the devil are part and parcel of our lives as Christians and we need to be aware of the spiritual battles raging around us all the time. Unless God protects us, we don’t stand a chance on our own. So ask. He will provide the help when and where you need it.
Where to go from here:
All of the things covered in this prayer are daily needs. Just as the children of Israel depended on God for their daily food as they wandered for forty years in the desert, so we also depend on Him for our daily needs both physical and spiritual. We simply cannot care for and provide for ourselves and need to be recognize, that to survive this life, we need Him and His care for us on a daily basis.
So we need to daily (at least) acknowledge God as God and go to Him in prayer for our needs as children go to a loving father. Because, that is exactly what and who He is.
Journeys Through The Word 