Real Prayer

Pastor Jeffrey Smith

In Matthew 6:5-6, Jesus was speaking on prayer and said, “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 others. Truly, I tell you, they have received their reward in full.”

Jesus is giving us an example of ineffective prayer. It is a type of prayer that does not please God at all. It's a showy kind of thing.

Jesus continued, “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father who is unseen. Then your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.”

Jesus is contrasting a type of person that wants to pray so that others recognize their spiritual depth with a person that understands real prayer, which is spending time in the presence of God away from other people. It's about you and the Lord face-to-face, one-on-one by yourself. That's what real prayer is all about. 

Why do we pray at all? We pray because prayer is about humility. There is something about us as human beings that when we pray, it reminds us that we are not the center of everything. We are not the point of everything. There a God in heaven that is above us. We remind ourselves when we pray, “Lord, I love you today. I thank you today. Thank you for creation. Thank you for all you've done.”

We usually want to put ourselves at the center of the universe, and we do it every single day, yet if we intentionally put ourselves in a humble place through prayer, we will realize, “Wow, this is not all about me. It's about our God.” It’s about humbling ourselves in prayer with no one watching and no one noticing.