An Audience of One

Let’s just keep that between us that the pastor forgot his Bible. Last week, we talked about keeping secrets. We started this new sermon series on the core values of the faith with keeping secrets and I got, it’s been a while since I got that many strange looks from the congregation when I said, hey, one of our core values is keeping secrets.

You looked at me like, that goes against everything I’ve been told. Well, last week, we talked about keeping secrets regarding giving and fasting and how it’s between you and God. That you don’t have to go around making it look like you are very pious or very generous or whatever that might be, that it’s between you and God.

To an extent, it’s there are things in our faith that if we are going to deepen our faith and we are going to grow as followers of Jesus Christ, that we got to have stuff that’s just between us and God. Being a follower of Jesus is a lot more than what takes place here on Sunday morning. Can I get an amen for that one? Being a follower of Jesus Christ is about all week long, every day.

So today, we’re going to talk about keeping secrets. No, I didn’t forget what I preached on last week. Jesus does this again related to prayer.

And he uses a word in here that the world out there likes to hold against Christians because we’re imperfect, the word hypocrites. But sometimes we can be hypocrites and Jesus is trying to teach us to guard against that. A core value of our faith is to strive not to be a hypocrite, to strive not to be one person in public, another person in private, or one person in public and another person around people that don’t know us.

So when you stand as you are able, we’re going to look at Matthew 6, 5 through 8. And 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 their 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. The Word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God, thanks be to God.

Amen. You may be seated. Now if you are looking ahead and you keep reading in Scripture, and you see right after this is Jesus says, pray then like this.

And when Jesus says pray then like this, He tells us, He’s introducing the Lord’s Prayer. It wasn’t Earl that introduced the Lord’s Prayer. It was Jesus, in case you were wondering.

And with that, I believe what we’re going to talk about this week is how to pray. Next week is more what to pray. There’s a little bit of crossover, but today we’re going to talk about how to pray.

And I’m not saying, okay, close your eyes, put your hands together, bow your heads, and pray, especially if you’re walking or driving. How to pray is more like how is your heart when you pray? Jesus is looking at this and He’s seeing a lot going on with prayer. Jesus got pretty mad at some of the leaders at that time when they were buying and selling stuff outside the temple, making these enormous profits on travelers coming in.

And He said, My Father’s house is a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves. And Jesus is saying here, if we are going to be a house of prayer, then our individual homes need to be homes of prayer, that we need to pray in private. We need to pray in other settings before we come to church.

In fact, I heard someone say it once like this, that when we come to church, we need to be prayed up. We need to be prayed up to the point where we are in eager expectation of God to do amazing things, rather than come in here and saying, fill me, make it happen, let’s see if God’s going to do something today. Instead, we come in with this attitude of saying, I’m ready, God.

Whatever you have, I’m ready. Whatever you want, I’m ready. And we are prayed up and ready to go.

I think a lot of what Jesus is saying is like with music when we say, we’re singing to an audience of one. You know, we separate out the difference of performance and worship with singing by saying, we’re singing to an audience of one. Not singing so we’re playing, I’m not leaving you out of this.

Not playing so everybody goes, oh my goodness, that was so awesome. That is some high level heavenly skill. But you’re doing it so people are drawn in to worship.

The same way with prayer is that we pray to an audience of one. We don’t pray so others hear us. Well, sometimes if you’re praying out loud in public, you got to have others hear you.

But we pray for God and only for God. That’s kind of the how. Now with Jesus saying this, it reminds me of this article that David Mills pulled up from First Things.

And it says that it advocates one simple way to improve your prayer life, to stop multitasking. Multitasking is not your friend. I’m sorry if I just crushed somebody’s whole life.

The whole idea of multitasking as something good is based on the assumption about getting things done. I admit that the world often operates as though this were the case, but it is false. Human life and Christian life is more about love than about accomplishments.

Now I’ve lost the other half. It’s more about love than accomplishments. If we cultivate distractedness, as for example by multitasking, then we will bring distractions to our prayer.

If, on the other hand, we cultivate attention, this will bear fruit at the time of prayer. I will suggest that before we renounce multitasking and strive to do one thing at a time as far as possible. When I hear those words, I think of, I don’t know, when I go to the gym.

There are people who are there for an hour and a half or two hours. And I’m like, wow. But then in between sets, they’re not looking at their workout.

They’re scrolling through their texts. They’re looking at their social media a lot. And we have to use our phone to get into the gym, but then I just lock it in the locker so I can focus on what it’s doing.

When we drive, one of the most exciting things about having a third driver in our family, who’s now 16, and is that when he gets in the car, he takes his phone and he puts it in the console. And I was like, yes. If there’s no other greater accomplishment, that’s good.

But you don’t know, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but so many people, you get to a stoplight and they’re on their phone. And then they get honked at because they’re on their phone and they don’t see what’s going on. It seems like no harm, no foul at a stoplight, but they’re not paying attention.

They’re distracted by their phone. One thing I like to put in the other room when I pray is my phone because my phone distracts me when I pray. I hear that buzz and that buzz is saying, check me now.

And so I have to put the phone away because there are distractions that come up. Now, Jesus warns us about the following distractions, motives, environment, words. He mentions all three of those.

Back in Matthew 5, when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. They love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners that they may be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward.

Now, Jesus talks a lot about here in rewards and what he’s talking about is heavenly rewards. And Jesus talks about these rewards a lot. And if we are rewarded by people saying, you did a great job or that was, that prayer blew me away, we’ve received our reward.

Jesus is very clear. But he says your environment makes a difference. Get out of there.

Go into your own room so that you may be in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you. Oh, wait a minute. I was reading up on verses 3 and 4. It’s the same thing in 3 and 4. It’s the same thing in verse 6. It’s the same thing in verse 18.

If Jesus repeats it, it must be pretty important. So is that saying, that is saying that your environment can make a difference? What or how do you prepare yourself an environment where you don’t have any distractions? How do you take those away? Another one is motive. What are the reasons you pray? Jesus calls them right away in here.

He calls people hypocrites. If they stand on the corners or they pray out loud so everyone can hear them. And then he goes on to say your words.

He says, don’t be like them. Don’t heap up empty phrases that the Gentiles do for they think they will be heard for their many words. And then he repeats, do not be like them.

Your heavenly Father knows what you need before you ask. Now that could be, and some of you, does anybody make lists? And you got to check off that list to feel good about your day. And then we may do that in prayer.

Check off the prayer to feel good about that prayer. But there has to be time in prayer where it’s just one on one with God. And that’s one on one with God too, but more about listening.

More about trusting in God. And we’ll talk about that more next week. So first, regarding environment, I think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Are you guys familiar with that where after the Last Supper they went to the Garden of Gethsemane and Jesus went down on his knees and he prayed, and it was an intense prayer. We get this idea that it was a sophisticated, lofty prayer. Father, take this cup from me.

It was more of an ugly cry. Is that bad to say about Jesus? He was wailing. In fact, he was in so much anxiety and fighting, contending so hard in prayer that Luke says his blood, his sweat had droplets of blood in it from the constriction of the veins that were in there.

And it was just so intense that he was sweating blood. An amazing thing that it was intense. But Jesus prayed, nonetheless, it is your will, not mine.

Now when push comes to shove, can we just sit down and pray to God and say, it’s your will, not mine. You know, here’s my list, but it’s your will, not mine. Here’s what I want you to do, God, but it’s your will, not mine.

It’s tough to do. Now Jesus, I don’t know if you said this on purpose, but you said you lead the prayer in the training room. Did you? I don’t know why I said that.

Will you remind him of everything he says? The training room. Prayer during the week is like a training room. It’s like we go in there and we strengthen, we are strengthened through prayer.

And that lifts us up. And then if we pray publicly or if something big comes up and we have a friend who’s facing something really, really tough, that we are there and able to pray. It’s not like we hit that prayer world cold because we are prayed up, because we have been trained up.

Hey, thanks for saying that, whether you meant to or not. We have been trained through daily prayer in secret, in private, one-on-one with an audience of one so that we are ready. When the time comes to face the battle in prayer, we are ready to pray for who needs our prayer.

When the time comes to pray publicly, we are ready to pray with the right motive on our heart. Mark 1.35 says, And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place. And there he prayed.

Is there something magical about praying in the dark? Why Jesus did that? What’s the magic of praying in the dark? What’s Mark trying to tell us? Nobody else was there. Everybody else was sleeping. Jesus needed to get away.

Now, I’m tempted just to leave it and say, well, if Jesus did it, then you’re sure going to need to do it too. But he went and got up in the morning before everybody else and went and prayed. Now is there something magical about the morning? I don’t know.

I used to pray at night and I’d fall asleep in the middle of praying, so I started praying in the morning so I wouldn’t fall asleep. Wasn’t much theological behind that. Is there something about it that when we go into our own place without distractions, that the environment makes such a difference with our prayer, that it can strengthen us, that it can connect us with God? And there are many ways to pray, but when we pray up daily private prayer, we prepare for public prayer.

We prepare for being able to pray in hardship. Jesus talks about motive by saying, if you pray so others can hear you, you have received your reward in full. So they sound good.

So motive is more about self-gain. You know, James, who, you know, he’s one of those guys who doesn’t like to beat around the bush. He just tells you straight up and he says, you do not have because you do not ask.

You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions. James 4, 2B through 3. You ask wrongly, what are right motivations and what are wrong motivations? You pray for your own personal gain versus do you pray, okay, I’m going to give you one foreshadowing of next week, do you pray for the kingdom of God? What are your motives in that? Do you pray for God’s will or do you just say, okay, as long as God checks off my list, then I’m going to have faith. It’s tough to do.

It’s something that takes work and it takes a practice of a prayer life to do that. I don’t know if any of you know J.D. Walt who works for Seedbed for the Global Methodist Church. I heard him say in a class he was teaching that he gets up at like 3 in the morning and prays for a few hours and he’s on his knees crying and contending and praying so hard.

I think, man, I’m having trouble getting up at 5.30 or 6 to go work out and he’s already gotten through a couple hours of prayer. What is your motive? It reminds me of, I got a, let’s see if I can pull it up again, a meme from a friend of mine this week that showed a left and a right comparison. The one on the left, I won’t say his full name to out him, but it’s a pastor named Joel who, in his book called The Power of I Am, said these words and wants us to say these words.

I am prosperous. I am successful. I am talented.

I am healthy. I am positive. I am beautiful.

I am attractive. And on the right it shows the Apostle Paul saying, I am wretched. Wretched.

Which one is more Christlike in the prayer? The prosperity gospel itself goes totally against what Jesus said and what James said here that you pray for your own gain. Jesus said you pray with your heart in the right place. Now thinking of the motive, then there is also the words.

The words that we pray, sometimes we want to see, we want to impress. I can use big theological words or I can make a prayer, a public prayer, take 10 or 15 minutes and there’s a lot of words in there and a lot of big sounding stuff. That was terrible language right there, big sounding stuff.

That was not purposeful, lofty words. A bad example I will use for that is me. When I was at the church in Salina, I would do everything once in a while through the service.

I would do the children’s time about once a month. I would do the prayer time about once a month. I had someone on staff parish come up to me about my prayer time and she said, you pray so powerfully and with the Holy Spirit.

You need to be praying every single week. We don’t want to hear anybody else pray. You pray.

And I started praying, worrying about if I was praying well enough. If I was showing them the Holy Spirit and all this and my prayer got worse because of my head and wondering, am I living up to that every time I pray? I love our little groups that, you know, at first, I would say the prayer only to get us going, but like this morning, and we do it at least once a month where everyone prays around the group. And it’s really cool because everybody else has a lot to say in prayer too.

That’s really cool. And I love to hear it. I love to hear a group that they don’t mind praying with others.

But in order to do that, we got to be praying on our own. Sometimes on the opposite extreme, we don’t want to pray publicly because we don’t think we know what to say. We don’t think we have the right words and we don’t think we have anything to offer.

But I try to think of it like this, that in Romans 8, 26, Paul says, Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. You might sit down to your prayer time and not have that much to say.

You might pray publicly and not have that much to say. You may wonder if you have the right words or the right theology or the right things to say. But Paul says, it doesn’t matter.

The words we use when connected with the right motive and the motive can be honed in on if we are in the right environment when we train up. Thank you Earl, I’m going to use that all day. When we train up in prayer, we, it doesn’t matter so much what the words are, as long as we’re praying from the heart.

As long as we’re praying with what is on our mind. As long as we’re praying with what we have felt God has been guiding us and leading us to. Because the Spirit can take our, if Jesus can take our jumbled up mess of a life and turn it into something that glorifies God, then the Spirit can take our jumbled up words and turn them into something beautiful before God.

Something amazing, just like Monica mentioned, when we sing, we hold back if we don’t think we’re going to sound like a professional singer. But, the Spirit takes those and turns them into something beautiful before God. So it is with our prayer.

Now in all this, and even with James, it doesn’t say, okay, if we have the right environment, if we have the right motive, and if we trust in our words, that God’s going to do everything we ask. The point is that that draws us into prayer so that we can seek God’s will every day and trust in God’s will and know what God would have us do. So that whether something big comes up and we’re ready to pray or whether we need to pray with a group of people, we pray with the right motive.

In all of that, God gives us the power to do that. He doesn’t necessarily check everything off our list, but soon our lists turn into God’s lists, and God leads us and guides us towards all of that. Because there’s no way you can have such lofty words that God doesn’t already know what you need.

He already knows what we need. We may be dancing around everything in our prayers, but what we need. We can talk for two hours to God and God can say, okay, I heard all that, but here’s what you need.

Because God loves us. God knows us. And we need time with God.

That’s a lot what this boils down to is we need that time. So why do we clear distractions for an audience of one? Just a couple of things here. So we can have more of a God.

That our prayers transition to, I want this, I want this, I want this, I want this, I want this, to, I want you. God, I want you and your spirit. Luke 11, 13 that Dana read is just one of the words that, one of the verses that transitions my mode of thinking.

And I actually have, I pray this every time because this is what I need and God knows what we need. If you then who are evil, notice that Jesus doesn’t say you then because you’re born good and you don’t need to change anything in your life. If you then who are born evil or depraved, know how to give good gifts to your children.

I mean when he first started reading I was like, yeah, it’s going to be stones and serpents for Christmas. How’s that sound? If you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him? You do not have because you do not ask. Ask for more of the Holy Spirit.

Ask for more of God in your life. Ask for more of God’s will. When we pray for more of God’s will, I think of John 5, 19 where Jesus says, so Jesus said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, the son can do nothing on his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing.

For whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. And so for us, we pray, God just show me what you’re doing. Just give me…