Note: Devotion taken from last Sunday's sermon on Matthew 6:5-15 (audio not yet available).
And when thou prayest… (Matthew 6:5).
In the opening verses of Matthew chapter 6 (vv. 1-18), Christ
gives guidance for three spiritual disciplines or acts of piety to be practiced
by his disciples. Those include: almsgiving (vv. 1-4); prayer (vv. 5-15); and
fasting (vv. 16-18).
The second of these two disciplines is prayer. Christ begins,
“And when thou prayest….” (v. 5). This reminds us of the teaching on almsgiving,
“But when thou doest alms…. (v. 3).” Just as it is expected that a disciple
will give alms, it is also expected that a disciple will give himself to
prayer. Prayer is not optional in the Christian life. There can be no such
thing as a prayerless Christian.
Prayer is both speaking to God (giving to him praise and
thanksgiving; offering to him petitions, intercessions, and supplications), and
it is listening to God. It is being still and knowing that he is God. It is
listening as he speaks in “a still, small voice” as he did to the prophet
Elijah (2 Kings 19:12).
As part of Christ’s teaching on prayer in the Sermon on the
Mount, he provides his students what we call the Lord’s Prayer as a model
prayer (Matt 6:9-13), a pattern which we can follow.
One commentator has referred to the Lord’s Prayer as “the
compositional center” of the Sermon on the Mount (Alfeyev, Sermon on the
Mount, 217). Indeed, it is nearly dead center in this sermon. There are 54
verses from the mouth of Christ coming before the Lord’s Prayer (from Matt 5:3—6:8)
and 47 verses that come after it (from 6:14—7:27). We might round it to about
50 verses before the Lord’s Prayer and about 50 verses after.
Not only is the Lord’s Prayer the “compositional center” of
the Sermon of the Mount (Matt 5—7), but the teaching on prayer is at the center
of the teaching on piety in Matt 6:1-18 (with almsgiving coming before it and
fasting after it). Something is being told us about the centrality of prayer in
the Christian life.
Let us then have the attitude of the disciples who came to
Christ asking, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1), and let us take up the
spiritual discipline of prayer.
Grace and peace, Pastor Jeff Riddle
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