“Jesus the Teacher”
By Dayle K. Barrett
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Reading: Matthew 6: 5-18
Have you ever had one of those conversations where you just can't get a word in? You know exactly the person I'm talking about, don't you? They ring you up, usually late at night, and then they just go on and on and on and on about whatever their stuff is without letting you say anything at all. And you know it's happened because you look at your watch and about half an hour has gone by and you think, all I've said this whole time is, “uh-huh, yep,
mm-hmm”. Or if you're really good, you might have snuck in a “really?” Or a “that's crazy, man.” Some of you are professionals, I can tell.
It's okay once in a while, isn't it? Because we all need to vent. So, if you're a good friend, you do that. Your friend calls you, tell you all their issues. They're trying to figure out whether this thing they're doing right now is a talking stage or a full blown situationship. And you listen. You bear the burden. But if that was every conversation. If every single time this person called you, all they did was go on and on about whatever they were thinking and never let you talk, you might start to look at your phone a little bit differently when their name came up. Not sure if I want to answer that. I'm saying all this to say, sometimes I wonder if that's how God feels when he hears us pray.
Think about it. What do most of us do when we pray? We go to God and first we say the stuff we're supposed to say like, thank you God for, I don't know, the sun and the stars and the moon and the sky, the birds and the bees and the apples and the trees, and my clothes in my closet, and the food in my fridge, and the roof over my head. Then, once we've done with the formalities, we get to the stuff we really wanted to say, right?
God, I need help. I'm fighting with my partner. Or I'm feeling lonely because I haven't got a partner to fight with. Or my mum's really sick and she needs to be healed. Or my little brother is driving me nuts. Or I have no idea what to do about my kids. Or my job, I just can't go there one more day. God, I need your help.
If you have been following the news too closely, you might go to God and pretty much give him the headlines, right? God, we need you to do something. There's a famine in Africa and a drought in Asia and an uprising in Europe and a war in the Middle East. And Trump wants to annex us. God, do something! And God's up there in heaven and I imagine sometimes he's going, “uh-huh… yep… sure… Wow, really?... That's crazy, man…”
It's good to vent. It's good to get things off your chest. But when I think about it, when I call one of my friends to vent, only to vent, it usually means the person I'm venting to can't do anything about the problem, right? Think about it. You never walk into your doctor's office and say, “Hello, Dr. Smith, I've got a pounding headache, and my leg really hurts and I'm feeling nauseous. Thanks for your time!” and walk back out again. No, no. You'd go in, you tell them your symptoms and then you shut up and listen because your doctor knows more about your health than you do.
So why is it that when we go to God, we have so much to say, and we do so little listening. Sometimes we think of prayer as lots of words punctuated by moments of silence. The monks knew that prayer was supposed to be lots of silence punctuated by moments of words. In Ecclesiastes, chapter five and verse two, the scripture says this, “Do not be rash with your mouth and let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore, let your words be few.”
So, when Jesus is teaching the people to pray, He tells them not to just go on babbling like the Gentiles do, right? Don't be like them. Don't think you're going to be heard for your many words, for your grandiose speech, for how well you express yourself before God, because the Father already knows what you have need of.
That's an interesting perspective, isn't it? Every single time we pray, we're not giving God any new information. Nothing. Zero. Nothing that God doesn't already know. So, when I talk about prayer with people, I often get this question. If God already knows what I need, why doesn't he just do it? What's the point of prayer? Why am I spending this time on my knees telling God what I want and what I need and what the desires of my heart are if God already knows all of that?
I believe that, in this model prayer, Jesus doesn't just teach us how to pray, but Jesus teaches us why we pray. We pray for relationship. We pray for reordering. And we pray to receive.
I want you to think about somebody. I want you to think about somebody you know really, well. Not that person, someone you know even better than that. I want you to think about the person who you know so well when they start talking, you can finish their sentences. The person who, if you go out to eat with them, you know exactly what they're going to order before they do. That's how well you know them. The person who, if they call you, you know what it's going to be about before they even start talking, because you pretty much live in their mind - that person. When you talk to them, do you really learn anything new about them? Probably not. You could probably talk to them for minutes, if not hours, easily and not exchange any new information between you.
So why do you do it? You do it because you know them so well. You do it because you love them, and you enjoy hearing their voice and you like building relationship with them. The point of the conversation isn't a data exchange, it's relationship.
When Jesus teaches us to pray, the first words he teaches us are words of exactly that, they're words of relationship. He says, in this manner, therefore pray, “Our Father who art in heaven…”
Some people more recently have looked at the word “father” and thought that it's the word father as opposed to the word mother. That its distinction - the purpose of that distinction - is to establish the gender of God. That's not what the word's for. The word father in Aramaic is “Abba”. Father's really a bit of a clinical word. In this context, Abba is more like dad… not “daddy”- it's not all childish and infantile – just, “dad”. We know in English that there's a difference between father and dad, don't we? Father is a more clinical term. It describes the person who's responsible for half of your genes.
Somebody could be a father because they went to a clinic one day. But a dad is something different. A dad is a person who protects you, provides for you, nurtures you, a role model in your life, gives you the things you need, wants what's best for you. It's possible to be a father without being a dad. And if you live in a blended family, you know that it's possible to be a dad without being a father. The word we see in this text is a word about relationship. Our dad, our protector, our provider, our role model, our loving guardian in heaven.
So, when we go before God, one of the reasons why we pray is so that we can establish that kind of relationship with God - so that we can understand that the one who rules and reigns from heaven, the one who created all there is, doesn't just want to be our father, isn't just the being responsible for our existence, but wants to be our dad. Wants to be somebody who has a relationship with us. Somebody who we can talk to, who we can exchange ideas with, who we can have a loving relationship with. Our dad in the sky.
But if we're going to have that kind of relationship with God, if God is going to hear the things that we have to say and we are going to hear the things that God has to say, it's going to take some reordering. That's the second reason why.
Last week, many of you heard me say that fasting is a spiritual discipline that subordinates our flesh to our rational will. It puts things in the correct order so that my body isn't telling me what I have to do all the time. My will - that which I decide is right and good for me to do - rules over my body and so I have control over the things that I do. And it's good to have control. It's good to have discipline. But the thing is, your rational will might be wrong. Mine is, a lot of the time. So, if fasting is a spiritual discipline that puts your flesh under the command of your will, prayer is a discipline that places your will under the command of God's will.
This is why Jesus said in the next three petitions, “May your name be sanctified. May it be revered as holy. Your kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The first thing that prayer does is establish that relationship between us and God. Once we have that relationship, the second thing we do is we get ourselves in order. We place our will beneath that of God's so that we can see God's kingdom come to pass in this world.
When we pray like that, we're praying, “God, let your will be done in my life as it is in the life of the angels. Let your will be done in this city, Toronto, as it is in the new Jerusalem. Let the will be done on earth the way it is in heaven. I want to see, O God, the world that you dream about.”
That's perhaps a little bit different from the way we think prayer should go. Because often we approach prayer as if it's an exercise in getting God to do the things that we will, don't we? God, I want this. God, I need that. God, the world needs the other, without asking what it is that God desires or what God wants. We assume that God should be doing the things that we want.
That can't even work, can it?
How many Christians do you think there are in the world? Do think they all want the same thing? Do you think they're all praying for the same things? What if there are two football teams, both with an equal number of Christians, very pious Christians, and they're both praying? Who wins the game?
What if there are two countries at war, both of them Christian nations with an equal number of churches? Everyone's praying. Who wins the war?
If prayer is about getting God to do the things that we will, then that becomes very chaotic very quickly, doesn't it?
When I was a kid, one of my favourite things to read was the Argos catalog. Argos is a big store in the UK where you can buy anything that's worth buying. Furniture, appliances, clothes, homeware, and most importantly, toys.
You might remember the Sears Wish Book. When it got close to Christmas, I would wait with bated breath for the Christmas season edition to get dropped off at the house. I'd pick it up and I'd start flicking through it all the way to the back. That's where the toys were. Then I'd watch the commercials, and I'd see all the videos of the cool new toys and what they did, and I'd start marking pages. Then when my mum came home from work, boy was she in for a treat. I'd say, “Mum, mum, did you know there's a new Power Rangers set out? Yes, there is, new Power Rangers set. They've got Megazords, they've got the sword that lights up and it's all shiny and it makes real sounds. And my mum would look at the commercial and she'd look at the catalogue and she'd look at the price. Then Christmas would come, and I'd be all excited and I'd get my present and I'd rip it open and open it up and then... maybe a set of books?
Mum would say, well, you already have a Power Ranger, Dayle.
But Mum, Jason the Red Ranger is a Mighty Morphin, Power Ranger. Now it's the turbo series, you know, with the cars and the… do you know anything at all?
But mum knew something that I didn't. Mum knew that in about 18 months, I'd be sick of Power Rangers. Wouldn't be watching them anymore. And those toys? I wouldn't be playing with them anymore. Those books she bought me (I loved reading books), and I was really good at reading books. They'd help me and make me smarter so that I don't know, might get good grades, go to college and become a minister or something.
When I asked for what I wanted, my parents knew what I needed.
In Romans 8, it says this: “Likewise, the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because he makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.” What does that mean, friends? It means that when we pray for what we want, God hears what we need. That's why often you're not getting what you're praying for. Because the Spirit who stands between you and God knows the will of God and relates to God what it is that you need - not what it is that you said you wanted.
Here's an interesting thing. The older I got, the more I started to figure out what my parents wanted, what was important to them, what their priorities were, and therefore what they were willing to spend money on. So, over the years, I got better at asking for things that they would actually buy me.
Not because they suddenly decided that the latest video game was important for me, but because I started to figure out what it was that they wanted me to have. When I asked for a MIDI keyboard so that I could do songs on the computer and work on my music exam for GCSE, I got it. When I asked for a drum kit because I was a member of the concert band and the big band and all those other things at school, I got them, just as expensive as a new PlayStation. But this time it's about doing my parents' will, so I got what I asked for.
Here's the thing, friends. The more we pray, the more we establish a relationship with God, the more we go through the yeses and the no’s that we hear in response to our prayers, they all teach us what God's priorities are. And as we deepen our relationship with God, we learn to pray for the things that God desires for us. And then we receive more of what we're asking for.
Prayer is to build relationship. Prayer is to reorder. And prayer is to receive.
The last three petitions in the Lord's Prayer are not about God and God's will and what's going up in heaven and to the coming kingdom. They're about the person praying. But listen to what they are: “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.”
You see, by the time you've established a relationship, and you've reordered the way your will and God's will coincides, you know what it is you need to receive. Those are the things that God has always desired to give to his children. God wants to give you provision. God wants to give you pardon. And God wants to give you protection.
Daily bread sounds like it's about making sure you have enough to eat every day. Actually, the word daily there literally means something more like proper or appropriate. He's saying, God, give us for this day the things that are appropriate to me. Give me for this day the things that you desire me to have. Provide for me, O God, provide for me, the things that will give you pleasure in me. And pardon me because I know I don't even deserve them.
Forgive me of my sins as I forgive those who sin against me. What does that mean? God, let's rebuild this relationship between me and you and between me and everyone else. And finally, God protect me because I don't want to go astray again. I don't want to lose this relationship we've just built between me and my heavenly dad.
Prayer is for relationship. Prayer is to reorder and to receive all the things that your heavenly Father has for you. So next time you pray, I challenge you to do this. Give God everything you have to say. Tell God all the things that are on your mind. Do it because God wants to hear. But when you're done, be quiet and listen.
Listen for God to tell you He loves you and to keep telling you until you believe it. Listen for God to show you what His will is so that you can make it manifest in your life. And listen to receive from God the provision, the pardon, and the protection that He has for you. Thanks be to God. Amen.