Reflective Bible Study

In all the things Jesus talked about, none was probably more close to His heart than when He talked about prayer. While He left heaven and became human to be closer to us, prayer served as His main connection back to the Father in heaven.

This means that when Jesus turns the focus of His teaching onto the subject of prayer, He wants us to pay extra close attention to a few things. When Jesus was walking the earth in the first century, there were two types of people who prayed, and Jesus makes a clear distinction about what type we should be: “When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites. They love to stand in the synagogues and on the street corners and pray so people will see them. I tell you the truth, they already have their full reward. When you pray, you should go into your room and close the door and pray to your Father who cannot be seen. Your Father can see what is done in secret, and he will reward you.” (v. 5-6)

In Jesus’ teaching, the hypocrites are those who pray for the attention of people rather than the praise of God. Jesus all but says that God ignores these prayers. Jesus tells us that whatever praise they receive from those who witness their prayer will be their only reward.

However, Jesus contrasts these hypocrites with what we might simply call the “secret-prayers” – those people who keep their prayers to God between them and God. While I doubt these people would never pray in public, they would only do so if asked or if the situation called them to do so. The number of public prayers would be minimal when compared to the number of private prayers in the lives of these individuals.

It is this second type of person who God wants us to be. This type of person intentionally places focus on their personal relationship with God when no one is watching and builds the foundation of their life on that relationship with God. What we do when no one is watching determines what we will ultimately be when the spotlight shines on us.

God tells us that those who do things for human approval only receive human approval as their reward. Instead, God rewards what we do for Him in secret. When we focus on Him over what others think, we will be rewarded by the only One who can give us the “reward” of a lifetime – i.e. the reward of eternal life!

After Luke begins his gospel with a formal greeting, instead of sharing Jesus’ back story and His birth story, Luke goes even further and chooses to focus on the birth of Jesus’ forerunner in ministry, John the Baptist. While John’s birth is not as miraculous as Jesus’ birth, it was a birth that God did have His hand in.

While reading this event, a phrase jumped out at me that has important implications for everyone who has chosen to include prayer as part of their lives.  When Zechariah entered the temple to burn incense, he realized he was not the only one in that inner room of the temple – an angel appeared to him standing beside the alter. “When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard.” (v. 12-13)

While we are quick to move through this story and get to the promise of the angel, and Zechariah’s doubt, too often we miss a key phrase at the beginning of the angel’s message. After calming Zechariah’s nerves as much as possible by saying, “Do not be afraid,” the very first part of the angel’s message is, “Your prayer has been heard.” (v. 13)

This is important, because all too often, when we pray, we may wonder or doubt if God really hears us. If God chooses not to answer us, or if He determines that the time isn’t right for us to receive a response, we may wonder if God really has heard us. It is in this first part of the angel’s message to Zechariah that each of us can see that God really does hear our prayers. It was years, and maybe even decades that this elderly couple had prayed for a child, and perhaps they had long since given up now that they were old.

But whether our prayer was spoken 5 minutes ago or even 5 years ago, God has heard it, and He has been working (and perhaps waiting for the right time) to give us the best possible answer for us. God hears our prayers, and He answers them at the perfect time and in the perfect way from His kingdom perspective – the perspective that results in the greatest number of people being saved for eternity.

Zechariah’s prayers didn’t fall on deaf ears. Instead, God was waiting for the perfect time to give him an answer.

If we were to dig into the gospels looking to find habits that Jesus had, one of the more notable ones we would find is found right near the beginning of Mark’s gospel. While Luke also includes this event near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, I imagine that we don’t read about it more because after a couple of days like this, the disciples would not see it as being as unique or significant to include in their gospels.

As I think about this, this event is included in the two gospels that were not written by members of the 12 disciples. I imagine the two disciple-authors simply understood this to be part of who Jesus was.

The habit Jesus had: early morning prayer: “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (v. 35)

Perhaps, since this was early on in Jesus’ ministry, He caught the disciples off guard and this event stands out because they had to go searching for Him. While they were searching for Jesus, I wonder if many of the disciples were bothered that Jesus had asked them to follow Him, but now they couldn’t even find Him.

Eventually they did find Him, and they probably found Him praying. Jesus’ prayer life and His connection to the Father was His top priority throughout His entire ministry leading up to the cross. There are plenty of times Jesus spent the night in prayer, and I suspect that the times we know of are only a tiny sample of the times that He actually focused on prayer during the night hours.

If Jesus is to be an example for us like He was to the disciples, then we should also focus on our relationship with God through prayer as the first thing we do when we get up each morning, and as the last thing we do before going to sleep – not to mention keeping the communication open during the daytime hours as well. If prayer was a habit in Jesus’ life, we should make prayer a habit in our own lives as His followers.

Of all the challenging words Jesus ever spoke, one of the most challenging in the entire gospels comes at the close of this passage. After talking about loving our enemies and going the extra mile, Matthew quotes Jesus as saying something that sounds completely impossible: “So you must be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (v. 48)

If there is only one thing I know, it is that God is perfect and I am not. While I constantly strive to do my best, there is no way that I can ever reach perfection, because at the very least, my past is far from perfect.

However, what if we are missing something from this idea when pulling this verse and looking at it on its own? On its own, this verse sounds impossible.

But something does stand out in Jesus’ words in this paragraph’s worth of teaching. In the entire paragraph that contains Jesus’ thoughts on this, the only words that are past tense are at the beginning, when Jesus draws His audience’s attention onto something they have heard taught in the past. Aside from that, everything is either present tense or a promise for the future.

This is important for all of us. If the entire context of this statement is the present tense, then we must move past our “past” mistakes and focus on the decisions we make today.

However, while it is great to put the past in the past, another challenge we have in Jesus’ statement here is the question: What does it mean to be perfect in God’s eyes?

To help answer that question, we should draw from another gospel writer’s record of this event. In Luke’s gospel, he includes a similar closing phrase, but with a different, more tangible concept in place of perfection. In Luke’s gospel, we read “Show mercy, just as your Father shows mercy.” (Luke 6:36)

One of the most appealing characteristics of God is that He is a merciful God. When we have made mistake after mistake, God is willing to show us mercy and forgive us. What if the mark of perfection in God’s eyes is not knowing it all, seeing it all, or controlling it all? What if the mark of perfection is having a love in our hearts that extends mercy to others?

Jesus’ teaching in this passage centers on the idea that God gives gifts to those who follow Him and those who don’t. God doesn’t selectively bless based on whether an individual is His follower. While following God’s ideal plan for our lives leads to happiness, peace, and contentment, these are simply the results of the steps He has laid out. God extends mercy to everyone, and this mercy gives each person the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they will turn their lives towards Him.

God has called us to be perfect like He is perfect, which is demonstrated by loving others like He loves them, and showing mercy towards both the people we agree with and those we don’t.