Jesus said, “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others.Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.” (Matthew 6.5)
You can find anything on the internet. Here's proof: I just ran across this famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount -- the one just before the Lord's prayer in Matthew 6 -- and my first instinct was to google “Solutions for Problems That Don't Exist”. I got 51,400 results from that exact wording. I chose a website called demilked.com, and my favorite Demilked solution was a five-finger nail clipper that allows a person to cut a whole hand's worth of nails at one time, with one squeeze. (Second place: “our patented high-suction device featuring an ergonomically designed tip to perfectly cradle each potato chip” which solves the non-problem that the last potato chips in the bag of Lays or can of Pringles are always the broken ones.)
So you're wondering how this time-honored wisdom of Jesus in Matthew 6.5 sent me on my silly web search. (Or maybe wondering if I have too little to do these days.)
To answer your query, I'll ask you a question: when is the last time you yourself waited for people to gather at church or on a street corner, waited 'til the crowd reached critical mass, then stood up, whistled the masses to attention, cleared your throat, and belted out a show prayer so they would notice and applaud?
The answer, I'll bet, is “never”. Jesus lived in an ancient Jewish community that was called to prayer six or seven times each day. Some of you have spent time in Muslim countries or neighborhoods and heard the very public call to prayer. (I've heard one in Bethlehem and in Tempe, Arizona.) Regular, summoned prayer is built into Muslim culture. Jews of Jesus's time would likely have experienced a summons like that -- without the electronic amplification, of course -- to call them regularly to prayer. In other words, they prayed a lot. Most of them did, at least. There was peer pressure to do it, so you could score points for praying publicly in their culture. That's why Jesus worries about hypocritical public prayer.
Their world is not our world, though. You may pray out loud at supper or at bedtime with kids or grandkids. But when a pastor or small group leader asks if anyone is willing to pray before a meeting or at a pot luck or anywhere else where people are gathered, most of us look at our shoes and wait it out. One must actually pray in order to be tempted to pray in front of people. I may be wrong, but I imagine that exhibitionist prayer is, for you, on the list of Demilked.com's “problems that don't exist”.
All of this tells us that we might have a different problem, though -- one for which we do desperately need a solution. We don't pray. This doesn't describe all of us, I know, but the Jesus of Matthew 6.5 assumes we pray, and a lot of us just don't.
The Pew Research Center recently asked a cross-section of us how often we pray, and over half of the American population tells Pew's researchers that we pray at least daily. I'm skeptical, unless we're counting the times we use the Lord's name angrily. The 55% number would be promising, but the results are self-reported. Most of us think we should pray — that good people pray. So the number is almost certainly inflated. In fact, “our father” can “see in secret” (the next verse in the passage) and knew our actual prayer frequency. God’s number would be a lot lower.
With options like "At Least Daily", "Weekly," "Monthly," "Seldom", or "Never," how would you have responded?
Here's my strange point: let's change our frequency so we can take “exhibitionist praying” off our list of “problems that don't exist”. How ‘bout we make it a spiritual goal as we walk toward Holy Week to pray enough that we might some day actually be tempted toward Matthew 6 exhibitionism? In fact, to American Christians in our time, Jesus might say, “Don't worry about being seen. I miss you. And there are things that I'm ready to do in this world if you'll only ask. Please, my children, don't worry if someone's watching. Just pray!”
So pray today, friend. And have a terrific Tuesday!
Prayer – God, lead us INTO this temptation. Draw us to prayer, in Jesus. Amen.
I would like to read a devotional on proper prayer. How to do it the correct way.