Matthew 6:5-8 — How to Pray

LINDA: Jesus says something in this passage that sounds like it ought to end prayer altogether, so before we argue about it, let's just hear it... Frank, would you read it?

FRANK: Matthew six, verses five through eight. "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 men. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. But when you pray, go into your inner room, shut your door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not babble on like pagans, for they think that by their many words they will be heard. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him."

LINDA: Then why am I asking? Jesus just handed me the best argument against praying I've ever heard, and he put it in the middle of teaching me how to pray!

FRANK: [laughs] He did, and he did it on purpose. Welcome to Dig Deeper, I'm Frank Edwards, here with Linda Brown, and we are in Matthew six today, the second of those three acts of piety we started earlier in the series: giving, then prayer, then fasting. Today is prayer. And Linda's question is exactly where the passage is headed, because Jesus names the very fact that seems to make prayer pointless, and he offers it as the reason to pray rightly.

LINDA: Sell me on that, because right now he's making prayer harder. First I can't pray where people see me, then I can't use too many words, and then, as a bonus, God already knows what I'm going to say anyway.

FRANK: The controlling claim is this... God's knowing doesn't cancel prayer. It purifies it. And the word doing all the purifying is "Father." Jesus sets two wrong ways of praying side by side, and they're wrong in opposite directions. One man prays to the crowd. The other prays at a god he isn't sure is listening. And the setting helps. A devout Jew prayed at fixed hours, three times a day, with the morning and afternoon prayers timed to the temple sacrifices, and he prayed standing. Standing was completely ordinary, and public prayer was fine too, since the synagogue existed for it. But fixed hours create an opportunity, don't they? If you know the hour is coming, you can arrange to be on the busiest corner when it strikes.

FRANK: And then Jesus says, "they already have their full reward." The Greek verb is apechousin, and it's a word off a commercial receipt. You'd write it on a bill when the debt was settled. Received. Nothing further owed. So picture it. The man stands on the corner, the street slows down, heads turn, somebody whispers "what a holy man"... and Jesus says, there it is, that was the payment, stamp the receipt. He asked for an audience, and he got one. He never asked for God.

LINDA: The applause is the payment. He got exactly what he prayed for, and it was the crowd.

FRANK: And the sad part is how small it is. He traded the attention of the Father for a few people glancing up from the market stalls. Then Jesus gives the alternative, "go into your inner room." The word is tameion, and it means the storeroom, the small chamber in the middle of an ordinary house where the supplies were kept, often the one room with a door that actually shut. It isn't a chapel. It's the pantry! So why would Jesus pick the plainest room in the house?

LINDA: Probably because most people listening don't have a prayer closet. They have the kitchen at eleven at night. Dishes in the rack, the table wiped down, somebody's cereal bowl still sitting there, the house finally quiet. If that counts as the inner room, I'll believe it. If he means a special holy space, a lot of us just failed before we started.

FRANK: The kitchen after everyone's gone to bed is about as close to a tameion as most of us will ever get. The door isn't really about architecture. It's about audience. Shutting it means nobody is grading this. And the Psalms had already prepared that room long before Jesus described it. David, hunted in the wilderness, keeps saying things like "you are my hiding place," and "in the day of trouble he will keep me secretly in his pavilion." Psalm ninety-one: "He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty." In the Psalms the secret place isn't somewhere the spiritually advanced go. It's where the desperate run. The street-corner prayer wanted a stage. The inner-room prayer wants a refuge.

LINDA: Which brings up the second guy, the one babbling. What's actually wrong with him? He isn't showing off. He sounds sincere.

FRANK: He's sincere, and he's afraid. The word is battalogeō, and it has the sound of stammering built into it, lips flapping, syllables stacked on syllables without saying anything. In the Greco-Roman world you had to get a god's address right. Prayers to Isis ran through title after title. Petitions to Zeus or Artemis piled up alternate names and every shrine where the deity might be listening, because if you left one out, maybe nobody was home. Length was insurance. And the most vivid picture in Scripture is First Kings eighteen, the prophets of Baal crying out from morning until noon, cutting themselves, raving... to a god who, the text says, gave no answer. They had no idea whether their god wanted them. So they tried to wear him down.

LINDA: Now I'm confused, though. There are people who pray the Lord's Prayer every single night, same words, standing at the counter before they turn the light off. Isn't that repetition? Should they stop?

FRANK: Look at what Jesus actually condemns. "They think that by their many words they will be heard." The fault is in the "think." It's a belief about God, that the words earn the hearing. Repetition itself can't be the problem, because in Gethsemane Jesus prays three times, and Matthew says he used the same words. And the very next thing out of his mouth here is a prayer meant to be prayed again and again. So the question isn't how many times you say it. It's whether you believe the saying is what gets you in the door.

LINDA: I'll give you the counter, then. But the bigger problem is still sitting there. If he knows before I ask, my asking tells him nothing. It's like handing somebody the note they already wrote. At that point prayer is theater with an audience of one, and you just told me theater is the problem.

FRANK: If prayer were information, you'd be right. But what does a father want when his child is hungry? He knows the kid is hungry, he can hear it from the next room, and he still wants the child to walk in and ask, because he wants the child, not just the request filled. That's the doctrine under this whole passage, God's fatherhood over his people, and the specific form of it that theologians call adoption. It runs through Scripture. Israel is called "my son, my firstborn" in Exodus. But the full weight of the word waits for Jesus, the true Son, who alone could say "Abba." When he tells you to pray "your Father," he's handing you what belongs to him by right. You didn't earn that address. It was bought, by his life and his death.

LINDA: That still sounds a little like a boss who knows you need the day off but wants you to come ask anyway. Kind of a power move.

FRANK: A boss makes you build the case. You come in with reasons and a schedule and a justification for why you deserve it. That's what the pagan was doing, building the case. Psalm one thirty-nine turns it around completely: "Before there is a word on my tongue, behold, Yahweh, you know it altogether." Think about what that frees you from. You don't have to explain. You don't have to find the right framing or prove the need is real, because he's already ahead of you on every bit of it. The knowing isn't a test you have to pass before he'll listen. It's the reason you can skip the speech.

LINDA: The knowing is what lets me stop explaining. That is what you're saying?

FRANK: Yes, and the rest of Scripture shows you what's left once the explaining is gone. The Lord's Prayer, right after this, is short. And in Luke eighteen you have the Pharisee standing and praying, the text says, "with himself," listing his fasting and his tithes, while the tax collector can barely lift his eyes and says, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." That's it. And Jesus says that man went home justified. He didn't have the vocabulary. He had the Father's attention, which was never in doubt.

LINDA: Here's the part nobody likes, though. The prayer at the kitchen sink, where nobody's awake, is also a prayer nobody will ever give you credit for. And the part of me that wants to pray in secret wants somebody to know I did. Wants to mention it tomorrow, casually, so it sounds humble. That's what this costs. You pray, and you let it stay unmentioned, forever.

FRANK: The hunger to be seen is old and deep, and I don't think Jesus is shaming it. He's redirecting it, because you are seen. That's the thread all through the Bible. Hagar, a runaway slave, pregnant, alone in the desert, becomes the first person in Scripture to give God a name, and the name she gives him is "You are a God who sees." Second Chronicles says the Lord's eyes "run back and forth throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong" for those whose hearts are his. That isn't surveillance. It's searching. As Matthew Henry wrote: "Yet there is not a secret, sudden breathing after God, but he observes it." A secret, sudden breathing, the half-sentence you say drying the last pan... observed.

LINDA: Seen by God sounds wonderful in the afternoon. At midnight, in a quiet house, with the dishwasher humming, it can feel like you're talking to the cabinets. Some people listening aren't worried about showing off. They're worried nobody's there at all.

FRANK: Then look at how Jesus describes him. "Your Father, who is unseen." He tells you in advance that you won't see anyone. The quiet isn't evidence of absence, it's what the room is supposed to feel like. The promise doesn't rest on what you feel at midnight. It rests on who he is, and on what the Son did to open that room. Jesus went off to lonely places to pray himself, and then he went further than any shut door could take him, to a cross, so that the way into the Father's presence would stand open for good. You aren't shouting across a distance. The distance was dealt with.

LINDA: And the reward at the end? "Your Father will reward you." Isn't that just a better payout? The street guy gets applause, I get a prize, and we're both still praying for what we get.

FRANK: Compare the two verbs. The hypocrite's reward is apechousin, paid in full, account closed, a transaction. The Father's reward is a promise still open, and it comes from a father, not an employer. What does a child get for coming into the room? The father. His attention, his care, his provision for needs he saw before the child did. The reward isn't a prize separate from God. It's being known by him and answered by him... it's being his.

LINDA: The street corner gets a receipt. The kitchen gets a Father.

FRANK: Your Father saw your need before you had words for it, and when you shut the door, you aren't shutting him out; you're shut in with him.

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