How Not To Pray

The Bible is full of exhortations to pray and examples of people who prayed along
with the prayers they prayed. But the only place in the Bible where any specific instruction about how to pray is given is in the Sermon on the Mount. Here in Matthew 6:5-15 and the parallel passage in Luke 11:1-4, Jesus provided His followers the most important teaching on prayer in the history of the world (i.e. The Lord’s Prayer). As we will see in the weeks ahead, Jesus provided this epic prayer not for us to mindlessly and mechanically recite but to serve as a model, a guide, a pattern, or a blueprint for the kind of conversation we are to have with God when we pray. But before Jesus taught His disciples how to pray He had to teach them how not to pray. Like every other aspect of Judaism in those days, prayer had been corrupted and perverted by rabbinic tradition. Most Jews were completely confused about how to pray the way God wanted. Prayers had become standardized; words and forms had been established and prayers were read or repeated from memory with little or no attention paid to what was being said. So before Jesus could teach His disciples how to pray, He had to undo what they had already been taught about prayer. He warned about the TWO KINDS OF PRAYER we need to avoid because neither of them accomplish anything.

1. DON’T PRAY HYPOCRITICALLY - PROFITLESS EXHIBITION (vv. 5-6)
2. DON’T PRAY MECHANICALLY - MEANINGLESS REPETITION (vv. 7-8)