Prayer Power: Beginning with Reverence
(This blog is adapted from a portion of a sermon Brendan preached on 8/4/2024. The link to the sermon in its entirety is here).
Prayer is one of the primary means by which we satisfy our deepest spiritual longing, that longing being for intimate community with God. It is the lifeblood, the power epicenter, of the believer–it’s what gives us strength to keep going, what gives us direction for our lives and ministries, and what gives us hope in dark days.
Prayer is the one thing that is always openly available to us and often the last thing we think to turn to.
If you think about it a little deeper, you start to realize how wonderfully unthinkable it is that we have access to such a thing as prayer. Because what “access to prayer” really means is “access to God.” Through prayer, we may boldly approach the throne and speak with the holy creator who himself spoke forth the realm of time and space and everything that populates it.
And not only that, but this Creator in question is one who fiercely desires relationship with you. One who knows you intimately. One who understands you and your most secret, most heartfelt fears and insecurities and desires and passions. That’s who you have access to through prayer.
To put it lightly, that’s quite a privilege. To not put it lightly, it’s one of the most beautiful things that have ever happened to you, whether you realize it or not.
Prayer is a big deal. We should all be doing it, and we should all probably be doing it more. I’ll speak for myself, at least, and say I should. Because prayer shouldn’t just be a lifeline–it ought to be a lifestyle.
So if prayer is pivotal to our lives, then, and indeed it is, it stands to reason we should know how to do it. Fortunately for us, Jesus tells us how in Matthew 6:5-10. That’s where we’re going to be spending our time in the next several weeks.
This is a passage that is familiar to a lot of us. It’s otherwise known as the Lord’s Prayer. Some of us have read this countless times or perhaps can recite it word-for-word without really thinking about it. In fact, I think “without really thinking about it” is a key phrase there. If there is a scripture in God’s Word that we are repeatedly exposed to over many years, we can begin to gloss over it.
That is always done to our detriment, and the Lord’s Prayer is no exception. Because if you pay attention and perform a verse-by-verse reading of this passage, and you unpack its principles, and then you apply them to your prayers, you will see the depth and intimacy of your prayer life increase. You will feel closer to God. Your relationship with him will be more joyful. You will feel more peace as you go about leading your families, work in your careers, and serve in your ministries.
As we read through our Matthew 6:5-9 today, you will see that the foundation of prayer is worshipful submission to God. That is to be the baseline in our approach of the Lord. Because when you come to Him in humility and reverence, you create a space in your heart to obediently receive what He has for you. That is our central idea: in prayer, we have a mission of submission.
To start, Jesus provides a sort of preamble to the Lord’s prayer that sheds some powerful insight on what prayer is by telling us what it isn’t.
Matthew 6:5-6
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
In other words, prayer is not something we do for the sake of public perception. We don’t do it so our friends and family say “look how spiritual they are” or “wow, they have so much faith.” We do not pray with others for the purpose of self-exaltation, but for God’s exaltation as we humbly submit. That is key.
Matthew 6:7-8
And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Let’s unpack this. In Jesus’ day, it was common for people of pagan religions to speak the same word repeatedly in their prayers. They would utter strange things and often repeat words over and over in order to enhance their prayer’s effect.
Now some believers had adopted this into their prayer practices and included these vain repetitions in their prayers with God, thinking that if they could work harder at their prayers and increase the length of their prayers, God would have a better chance of hearing them. Jesus is saying “don’t do that.”
What we learn from this for today is that prayer is not contingent on our own efforts or how good we are with words; so long as we humbly approach God in submission, He will receive us. We don’t have to jump through all these hoops in order to be granted an audience with him.
So right off the bat, as we approach our reading of the Lord’s prayer, we can approach it knowing that prayer is not for our exaltation but for God’s, and a successful prayer life does not rest on our own abilities or human efforts or saying exactly the right words. It rests on reverential submission to the Lord.
Matthew 6:9a
“This, then, is how you should pray…
I’m going to pause here real quick just to clear something up. When Jesus says this is how we are to pray, this does not mean all our prayers need to follow the exact structure and verbiage of the Lord’s prayer down to a tee. Jesus’ prayers in the Gospels don’t even all follow this exact structure. Old Testament prophets don’t pray in this exact structure. The apostles in the book of Acts don’t pray in this exact structure.
When Jesus says “this is how you should pray,” instead of meaning “you must say all these things exactly,” it means “follow these principles of prayer I’m about to lay out for you. They will lead to a more worshipful, more effective, more powerful prayer life.”
Matthew 6:9b
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name…
That brings us to our first major point in this series of blogs:
Approach with Reverence
It is not accidental that the first thing Jesus tells us to do when we pray is approach God with a certain level of reverence and respect. We’ve heard the phrase “hallowed be your name” a lot, but what does it mean? Well, in the original Greek, the word for “hallow” is hagiazo. It means “to acknowledge something as great or as holding exceptionally high value.” It also carries connotations of separating something from profane things and dedicating it solely to the Lord.
Jesus is saying, then, that in our prayer life, we must acknowledge the Lord’s supreme majesty. We must know and proclaim him as the sovereign God of everything. We set him apart from all other aspects of life as the only recipient of our reverence and awe.
Now doing this accomplishes multiple things, all of them positive. For one, it fosters in us a humble spirit. When we have this baseline understanding that there is a God we must rely on, who sits so far above us in might and holiness and wisdom, and he is worthy of all worship and honor and praise, it tends to put our ego in check. Nothing disabuses you of the notion that you’re the center of everything like coming into contact with, well, the actual center of everything.
And guess what? The more we grow in humility through prayer, the greater our worship and awe of the Lord becomes, which leads us to approach him with even more humility. It’s a cycle. In short, approaching prayer with reverence really helps us realize the buck does not stop with us, and we are not the masters of our own lives. That’s a good headspace to be in.
The second thing approaching him with reverence accomplishes, and I mentioned this before briefly, is it increases our willingness to obediently receive what God has in store for us. Because when we pray knowing he’s up here and we’re down here, it kind of just naturally follows that we submit, accepting his commands and his promptings.
As a flawed but nonetheless useful illustration, think of two different kinds of soldiers. One of them feels like they should be the one who is actually in charge. They think they’re really the one that keeps things running in their unit, and their track record is such that it should be pretty clear who knows best. Are they going to submit well to their superior officers’ authority? Or are they going to be wrestling with their pride, constantly arguing with their commanders’ decisions and living in silent rebellion?
Picture next a soldier who recognizes the position of authority that his superior officers hold over him. He acknowledges them as people who have a degree of wisdom greater than his own. They have experience he does not, and he respects them for it. He knows they’re in that higher position for good reason, and when they speak, he ought to listen. Praying with reverence helps us be more like the second soldier and less like the first.
The third thing approaching with reverence accomplishes is it teaches us to rely on him. Once we understand that we have the privilege of communicating with a holy, powerful, awe-inspiring, boundlessly beautiful God whose power and understanding far surpass our own, we are relieved of an enormous weight.
That weight is the burden of figuring everything out by ourselves. It’s the burden of having to power through our struggling ministry simply by using our own strength. It’s the burden of caring for our family’s spiritual and physical well being by ourselves. It’s the burden of relying on our own mental acuity and coping skills in order to keep ourselves from emotionally collapsing.
In our reverence, we acknowledge that God is completely sufficient, and in doing that, we are freed from the curse of se
