Perhaps you think of prayer as a personal affair and that there isn’t a right or wrong way to pray. But Jesus doesn’t say “You can pray just as you do, God knows your heart,” No, Jesus says, “Do not pray like this, but… (vs 9) Pray then like this…” So before we get to the right way to pray, let’s examine some of the wrong ways to pray.

I was waiting for my knife to be sharpened at a gun shop. I couldn’t help eves-dropping on a conversation between the shop clerk and a customer who was enquiring on how to apply for a gun license.

In South Africa we have some of the most intimidating gun control laws in the free world. An applicant must successfully pass a written examination on gun laws and gun safety, followed by a practical test in which competency and accuracy is tested. The police interview you, two other references, and they inspect the compulsory safe at your home address in which you must store the firearm. The process can take over a year.

In addition, one of the requisite steps is that you must provide a substantiated motivation as to why you want the firearm, including crime statistics in your neighborhood, distance from the nearest police precinct, etc.

The gun shop clerk was coaching the customer on how to craft his motivation. The clerk asked, “Why do you want the gun?” The customer replied with refreshing honesty, “To shoot unwelcome people on my property.”  The clerk patiently explained that if you say you want a gun to shoot people, the police will certainly deny your application. He wordsmithed an alternative motivation, using terms like ‘self-defense’ and describing his home as an ‘isolated premises’ along with other nuanced reasons for needing a gun permit.

He kept coaching the customer on acceptable reasons and the exact wording that would improve his chances of a positive outcome.

As I was listening to all of this it occurred to me that people are willing to put a lot of effort and thought into making requests that are important to them. From gun licenses to scholarships, to marriage proposals, to immigration visas, to applications for home loans. If something is important to you, you will research how to ask for it properly. But often when people want something from God, they put no thought into how to frame their petitions. They assume God will accept any request, from anyone, in any format.

Well, they would be wrong.

God has very specific ways in which he wants us to communicate with him and make requests. And Jesus coached his disciples on this very topic.

In Matthew 6 Jesus provides a template for prayer that has become the most famous and repeated prayer of all time, known as the Disciples’ prayer, the Lord’s prayer, or simply as the “Our Father.”

Jesus taught how to pray on two different occasions, in Matthew 6:5-13 and Luke 11:1-4. And although the two prayers are as similar as fraternal twins, they are not identical twins.  The dissimilarities prove that Christ never intended this as a formula or rote prayer. It was a model or pattern for prayer. Of course, it is not wrong to pray it word-for-word, but that was not the intended purpose of the prayer.

Over the next few Mondays we will work through the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and learn how to pray. But first…

Six insights from wrong ways to pray…

Perhaps you think of prayer as a personal affair and that there isn’t a right or wrong way to pray. But Jesus doesn’t say “You can pray just as you do, God knows your heart,” No, Jesus says, “Do not pray like this, but… (vs 9) Pray then like this…”

So before we get to the right way to pray, let’s examine some of the wrong ways to pray.

1. Disobedience (it is wrong to pray when you are in unrepentant sin)

Proverbs 15:8 The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright is acceptable to him.

If your prayers are not being answered, take a moment before you pray and consider if there is unrepentant sin in your life you need to confess: greed, drunkenness, discontentment, grumbling, lust, pornography, neglect of service in the church, unfaithfulness in church attendance, lack of faith in God, or hidden hypocrisy of living one way at work and one way at church.

Add confession early in your prayers.

2. Hypocrisy (it is wrong to pray for show)

Matthew 6:5 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 …

Sometimes people come to a prayer meeting to show off that they pray, and to show off how they pray.

They seize the prayer meeting as an opportunity to scold others, to gossip, or to curry respect. Some will lapse into an unnatural dialect of Elizabethan English: “Oh Looord, who art ensconced in celestial glory among the cherubim, we beseech thee to bestow thy bounty upon this poor wretched worm…”

It’s not that praying in public is wrong. What’s disgusting to God is praying to be seen by men. If you love to pray in public but not in private, be warned – your prayer is reaching is the ear of man, but not the ear of God.

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