Page 24 - The Importance of Prayer Student Textbook

and a true understanding of sin, you must look at some great saint, some unusually devout and devoted
man, look at him there on his knees in the very presence of God. Even their self is intruding itself, and
the temptation is for him to think about himself, to think pleasantly and pleasurably about himself and
to really be worshipping himself rather than God. That, not the other, is the true picture of sin. The
other is sin, of course, but there you do not see it as its acme, (The pinnacle) you do not see its essence.
Or to put it in another form, if you really want to understand something about the nature of Satan and
his activities, the thing to do is not to go to the dregs or the gutters of life. If you really want to know
something about Satan, go away to that wilderness where our Lord spent forty days and forty nights.
That’s the true picture of Satan, where you see him tempting the very Son of God”. This is why I once
again want to say that we must learn to live for an audience of one.

In verse six we are instructed that, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy
door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
Notice that He says when thou prayest, which gives us great latitude. There is no prescribed time to pray
but our Lord assumes that prayer will be held to a high priority because it was a priority for Him. But
notice he instructs the disciples to go individually into a prayer closet. This is in direct contrast to
hypocrites who prayed for public recognition. A prayer closet is nothing more than a private secluded
place to pray. It has nothing to do with the location but with the attitude. Our attitude should not focus
upon ourselves but upon Him alone. Please note that times of cooperate prayer were practiced in the
scriptures but in this model prayer there is an emphasis upon privately communing with God. Do what
you have to do to get your attention away from yourself and others and on Him and Him alone.

Please do not take what I just said and carry my words beyond what I said. I did not say it is always
wrong to pray corporately. If we take this interpretation to the extreme, then we have our Lord sinning
when he prayer corporately in the garden with the disciples and when the early church gathered for
cooperate prayer throughout the book of Acts. However, much of our prayers should literally be in
secret. Jesus’ point has to do with the singleness of intention. Is our private and cooperate prayers
prayed for an audience of one? The supreme attention is to be on God and in that sense, even the most
public prayer is in secret.

The second prohibition is found in verses 7-8. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen
do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them:
for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. He speaks to the issue of using
vain repetitions thinking we can influence God to hear us because of our use of repetitive asking. Warren
Wiersbe says in his commentary on Matthew that all of us have some routine prayers in our system of
prayers; and once we get rid of them then we can really start to pray. For example, many of us
repetitively say the same prayer over and over before we eat a meal without giving any attention to
what we are saying. We do the same in prayer meetings, Therefore, I think there is some validness in the
statement of Wiersbe. Looking closely at the scriptures we can see an example of this in the events on
Mt Carmel. When Elijah had a contest with the worshipers of Bale that is found in I Kings 18:26,29. The
worshippers of Bale hour after hour repeated the same phrase over and over thinking it would awaken
Bale to hear them. Through the year’s Judaism had been influenced by pagan practices such as this. Not
to be outdone the Jews would use adjective after adjective before God’s name thinking that this would
influence God. Again, as I commented above, we can take these comments to extreme interpretations
saying that asking for the same thing more than once is a demonstration of a lack of faith. If this is the
proper interpretation of this passage, then we have our Lord and the apostle Paul lacking faith. (see
Matthew 26:39-44, 2 Corinthians 12:7-8)

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