Prayer

Order of Service

• Call to Worship — Psalm 24
• Hymn — A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing (#289)
• Prayer of Invocation
• Scripture Reading — Psalm 4
• Hymn — All Praise to Thee, My God, This Night (#401)
• Pastoral Prayer
• Sermon
• Hymn — The Lord's Prayer (#725)
• Benediction — Numbers 6:24-26

---

Sermon Title: The Right Custom, Current, and Content of Prayer

Scripture: Matthew 6:5-15

I. Your Communion with God in Prayer Has a Right Custom

A. Two wrong customs frame the right one (Matthew 6:5-7)

1. The wrong custom of the hypocrite — fueled by a wrong motivation; prayer offered merely to be seen by others; self-glory is the end (Matthew 6:5)
2. The wrong custom of the empty talker — fueled by a wrong belief about God; heaping up empty phrases as though God is moved by the volume or eloquence of words (Matthew 6:7)
3. Both wrong customs stem from excessive concern with impressing men or God; both bypass the heart

B. The right custom: prayer in the secret place (Matthew 6:6)

1. The believer stripped of performance, communing with God alone
2. Jesus himself modeled withdrawing to pray privately
3. Private prayer is commanded, but public prayer is not excluded — acts and epistles show the church praying publicly
4. Whether private or public, the posture is always the same: a leaning of the heart toward God, seeking him and seeking from him

II. Your Communion with God in Prayer Has a Confident Current

A. The core of prayer: your Father knows what you need before you ask him (Matthew 6:8)

1. Six times in the passage Jesus refers to God as "your Father" or "our Father," driving home the relationship of adoption
2. God's foreknowledge of our needs is not a reason to withhold prayer — it is the very reason to pray with confidence
3. The father-child analogy: a father often knows what his child needs before the child can form the words, yet still invites the child to ask
4. The confident current flows directly into the Lord's Prayer: "your Father knows… pray then like this" (Matthew 6:9)

III. Your Communion with God in Prayer Has a Theological Content

A. The Lord's Prayer as a model of theological prayer (Matthew 6:9-15)

1. Jesus is not prescribing a single rote formula but forming and fashioning a way of thinking about prayer
2. As image-bearers, humans alone have the capacity for a conscious religious life; the prayer reflects our position as creatures before the Creator

B. Theological truths embedded in the prayer

1. God as Father and reigning Lord — "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come" (Matthew 6:9-10)
2. Creaturely dependence — "your will be done… give us this day our daily bread" (Matthew 6:10-11); we are not self-sustaining; all we have comes from his hands
3. The reality of sin and our need for forgiveness — "forgive us our debts" (Matthew 6:12); we owe a debt we cannot pay
4. Our forgiveness of others is not a condition of God's forgiveness of us; rather, as Calvin notes, it is a seal — Christ's forgiveness overflows into our forgiving others (Matthew 6:14-15)
5. Dependence for protection — "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" (Matthew 6:13)

C. Application: Do your prayers reflect your theology?

1. How well do you know yourself, your needs, the world, and the God to whom you pray?
2. Christian, do you love to pray? — even the hypocrite loved to pray, but we are called to love prayer rightly, for God's glory
3. The goal: that others might say of us, "he loves to pray" or "she is a prayer warrior" — not for our glory but for God's