Lesson Three • The Wording of Prayer
Devotion 2: Praying as the Gentiles Do
Pastor John Carter
Jesus continues to teach us to walk through the aspects of prayer.
Matthew 6:7 starts, “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do.”
What comes to your mind when you hear Jesus telling us not to pray like the Gentiles, heaping up empty phrases? First of all, this has very little to do with ethnicity, but more with methodology. Jesus was telling people not to pray in a certain method.
I spent 17 years of my life in a foreign country, Japan. One of the amazing, yet sad, aspects of the Japanese culture is the absolutely beautiful, but spiritually empty places called temples and shrines that exist all over the land. From the furthest northern region of Japan to the southernmost tip of the Island and all throughout the entire country, you will find temples dedicated to many different types of gods. Most of them have an image graven out of wood or stone to represent that particular god.
When I read this passage, I could not help but remember the sounds of Buddhist and Shinto priests praying to their gods in the temples. The prayer is more of a chant and it has a sense of rhythm to it. I have a very clear picture in my head of what this aspect of “empty phrases” means to me. If you have never traveled outside the United States, you may not have much to compare this idea to. Maybe you have spent your whole life in the church and all you have to compare is what you have heard either from the stage or when someone was praying a blessing over the food. If I can say this as kindly as I possibly can, let me tell you there were many empty phases all the time. I think of a culture far away from the United States and consider the literal graven images that people prayed to and have the sounds of repeated prayers of monks in my mind. I have also heard the same form of prayer in the church. We often learn this aspect of prayer in the traditions of Sunday School. We tell our kids to fold their hands, close their eyes, and bow their heads. We often will teach them to start out with the phrase, “Dear Jesus,” and the prayer is not done until someone says, “Amen.”
We have our own heaps of empty phrases that we use to make our prayers sound super spiritual. As we looked at this aspect in previous weeks, oftentimes we find that we add these extra phases to make others who might hear, think we are really close to God.
Please do not misunderstand what I am saying. It is not wrong to teach our children reverence in prayer, I am not in any way trying to mock or ridicule any aspect of teaching our children the power of prayer and how to do it. All I am saying is that sometimes we can, with all good intentions, miss the boat. The prayers of the Japanese monks are rituals. They say them and memorize them all in hopes that their perfect execution of the prayer is what makes it heard. It is like the prophets of Baal we talked about yesterday. Having grown up in church, and being saved as an adult later in life, it was really hard for me not to revert back to praying the way I heard it done before. If I am being honest, I will still catch myself from time to time saying a phrase that I just heard prayed as a kid.
The point of all of this is that God wants to hear the heart, not just a “perfect prayer.” His desire is relational. When I hear the word “empty,” I think it really sums up the aspect of prayer that God does not want. He does not want us to just go through the motions. He does not want the conversation to be empty. He wants to know the depth of our thoughts in our prayer. He wants to know the heart behind what we desire. Do we desire our own selfish motives or are we genuinely caring and putting others before ourselves when we pray?