BROADCASTS.com

Today, our Wilderness Wanderings comes from special guest, Nina Schuurman-Drenth, who is a candidate for a Masters of Divinity and for ordination in the CRC.\xa0\xa0

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. 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. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matthew 6:5-8)

\xa0

It is striking to make note of the fact that in one of the only direct teachings Jesus does about prayer, his primary instruction is to keep it simple: don\u2019t be flower-y, don\u2019t flaunt your religiosity, don\u2019t babble on.

In this passage, Jesus is referring to the practices of Gentile nations - the pagan nations surrounding Israel - who believed their practice of repeated prayer provided some kind of magic power to protect or heal them. In contrast to that practice and belief, here Jesus is teaching his followers that God his Father does not require repeated words, redundancy or flaunting in order for prayers to him to be heard. He is teaching that God wishes for prayer to be not merely transactional but also intimate and conversational. The Heidelberg Catechism puts it this way: \u201cwe must pray from the heart.\u201d Simple, true, honest, heartfelt: that is the \u201cbest\u201d way to pray.

This \u201cbest\u201d kind of prayer - this simple, honest, true kind - might surprisingly, paradoxically also be the hardest kind! One of the hardest things we could try to do, in any endeavour but especially in prayer, is to be wholly honest. Anne Lammott puts it this way: \u201cMy belief is that when you\u2019re telling the truth, you\u2019re close to God. If you say to God, \u2018I am exhausted and depressed beyond words, and I don\u2019t like You at all right now, and I recoil from most people who believe in You,\u2019 that might be the most honest thing you\u2019ve ever said.\u201d And indeed, this is the prayer God most wants to hear. Why? Because, as David Benner writes, \u201cthe self that God persistently loves is not my prettied-up pretend self but my actual self - the real me,\u201d but we tend to continually confuse our real self with some ideal self that we wish we were. In other words, it could be that the most poisonous thing that\u2019s ever happened to our prayer lives was our sense of duty to appear pious or holy or \u201cacceptable for church,\u201d whatever that might mean to you. And in our effort to put on this facade, what some have called \u201cthe false self,\u201d we\u2019ve put away the Self that Jesus died for, the Self he has gone to all lengths just to be with.

So my invitation for you is this: say to God now, in your own heart, in your quiet place, exactly what is the most honest thing for you to say, no caveats, no babbling and no beating around the bush. He is strong enough for it, and can handle whatever it is you have to say. Let\u2019s take a moment or two of quiet to do that right now.

\xa0

Notes
1. Anne Lammott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2012).
2. David Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2015), 57.