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5“Whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people. I assure you: They’ve got their reward! 6But when you pray, go into your private room, shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 7When you pray, don’t babble like the idolaters, since they imagine they’ll be heard for their many words. 8Don’t be like them, because your Father knows the things you need before you ask Him.

9“Therefore, you should pray like this: Our Father in heaven, Your name be honored as holy. 10Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 11Give us today our daily bread. 12And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.]

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HIGHLIGHT: Matthew 6:5-13

EXPLAIN

Leaders: Feel free to use any of the “Explain” materials to guide discussion as it is needed or to expound on a certain area of the text as it comes up during your Life Group time, but the purpose of this section is to deepen your own personal understanding of the Word. Your members have access to all of this material as well.

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most famous examples of Jesus’ teaching, and one of the most widely praised moral doctrines of any faith system in the world. The sermon was revolutionary because it showed Jesus less concerned with rote, routine religion and more concerned with the hearts of those who would follow Him. Prayer is no different. When we pray, may it always be for the purpose of communicating with God, rather than being praised by men.

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v.5 Jesus began with the assumption that the people who were listening to Him would be praying. Prayer was a prominent part of Jewish life. They would stand to pray in the Synagogue, have special calls to prayer at certain times of day in the street, and relied on precedent from the Old Testament that they were to be constantly in communication with and petitioning God. However, what Jesus calls attention to is the fact that it’s not their posture or location of their prayer that ultimately matters, but the motive. We do not pray to a god who requires us to face east or look at an idol in order to hear us; we serve a personal God who desires that His children speak to Him.

v.6 The word “Room” could refer to a storeroom (Lk. 12:24), an inner room in a house (Mt. 12:26; 24:36; Lk. 12:3, 24), or a bedroom (Is. 26:20). Some have attempted to make the extra application that Jesus’ exhortation to pray in a “storeroom” reminds us that prayer is like a treasure box waiting to be opened. More accurately, notice that what Jesus is saying speaks further to the theme of this passage, and the theme of the Sermon on the Mount in general: if your outward actions are not supported by the motivations of your heart, you’re simply making noise. Perhaps worse, it might be that you are using your prayer life to impress others, making God a prop on the road to your self-aggrandizement.

v.7 Jesus condemned neither long nor repetitious prayer. In fact, He practiced both of those things (Lk. 6:12; Mt. 26:44). But as Spurgeon put it, “Christians’ prayers are measured by weight, and not by length.” There is a place for repetition and liturgy, but remember that God is a personal one—He wants your heart.

v.8 God’s foreknowledge of what His children need does not mean that we simply sit back and wait for Him to give it to us. By mentioning that God already knows what His children need before they ask it, He’s contrasting His Father with the gods surrounding the audience He was speaking to. In temples throughout that region (and throughout history), people believed that the strictness with which they adhered to the rituals prescribed for them indicated whether their god would hear them or not. Our God is not like that at all; He knows us even more intimately than we know ourselves. This should invite us to desire a closer relationship and stronger communication with Him.

v.9 To contrast ostentatious prayer (vv.5-6) and thoughtless prayer (vv.7-8), Jesus provides a model for how (not necessarily what) we should pray.

Among the first things is to make the conscious effort to keep God’s name holy. This means to not profane it by using Him irreverently or to reduce His name to a punctuation mark in a sentence. God is Father (not overlord or slave-driver), but He is also perfect, holy, and the creator of the Universe.

v.10 We are not to pray as a means to accomplish our own ends—like rubbing a lamp and making wishes of a genie—but to allow ourselves to be molded to God’s will.

v.13 The doxology at the end of the Model Prayer is not found in many of the earliest manuscripts. While it is theologically profound and preserved in future manuscripts, we include it in brackets because it was not necessarily recorded by Matthew in his gospel.

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AAPPLY Your Leader Guide will have material that the member guides do not have. The bolded material is what the people in your group will have, the other material is only for you to help guide discussion.

This guide can be as strict a script or as general a resource as the leader needs it to be.

1. What stuck out to you or challenged you in what you heard in the sermon or read in the text?

. Jesus warns the crowd to avoid praying like the hypocrites. What was wrong with the kinds of prayers Jesus referenced in verses 5-8? What kind of motives do the people praying this way have? How have you seen or experienced these kinds of prayers before?

The two examples that Jesus gave of “hypocritical” prayer lives were overly showy ones (vv.5-6) and thoughtless ones (vv.7-8). Praying for the approval of men is just as disrespectful as praying flippantly and without care. If you were developing a relationship with a friend but everything you did for them was to prove to the people looking on how amazing you are, that wouldn’t be much of an actual relationship. Likewise if you were running through the motions of communicating with them but you were staring at your phone the entire time. If we reduce prayer to the words we say before eating or to last-ditch efforts at getting a good grade on a test we didn’t study for, what do you think that means about how we value communication with our Heavenly Father?

. What do you think it means that Jesus addressed God as “Father”? Do you think of God as Father? How does that affect how you perceive God? How does it affect your communication with Him?

If you survey the religions on the planet today, you find that the majority of them worship impersonal, disconnected, deities. This could not be further from the picture of the God of the Bible. Jesus called Him “abba”—the word a child would call his dad—and invites us to be adopted into His family through Him. So the believer in Christ has the same privilege, to speak to the God of the Universe the way a child would speak to his father.

. What do you think it means to “hallow,” or honor God’s name as holy? How would having a strong prayer life help us honor God’s name as holy in our everyday living?

It’s one of the Big Ten, so to speak: don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. But do you think that this means more than just refrain from using an expression that features “God”? Invoking His name the way one would invoke a genie is certainly not honoring it as holy; treating Him as a formality you must undergo before being able to eat dinner would surely be the same.

. What sorts of things keep us from having a robust prayer life? What are proactive steps someone could take to improving their prayer life? How do you think having a robust prayer life would benefit you?

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RRESPOND Challenge your group to:

• Consider your own prayer life. What are things that need to change about it? • Commit to rising ten minutes earlier each morning this week to spend time in prayer.

Encourage one another through email, text messages, or coffee dates throughout the week to build up and encourage each other.