5700 Rudnick Ave. Woodland Hills, CA 91367 (818) 346-6968 Home > Resources > Prayer Resources > When You Pray Don’t Rattle Off Long Prayers PRAYER RESOURCES   WHEN YOU PRAY DON'T RATTLE OFF LONG PRAYERS Maxie Dunnam Matthew 6:5-8, (Phillips):   And then, when you pray, don‘t be like the play actors. They love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at street-corners so that people may see them at it. Believe me, they have had all the reward they are going to get. But when you pray, go into your room, shut your door and pray to your Father privately. Your Father who sees all private things will reward you. And when you pray don’t rattle off long prayers like the pagans who think they will be heard because they use so many words. Don’t be like them. For your Father knows your needs before you ask.   Thomas Moore saw seclusion as a kind of spiritual greenroom to which actors returned in their hired garments from the heat and public display of the stage. Jesus urged us not be “like the play-actors” who pray to impress others. Prayer is relationship. It is primarily communication between one person and God.   Two inserts ago we made the distinction between simply being alone and being alone with God. We are not necessarily better persons when we are alone, only more genuine perhaps. The result of being alone and naming ourselves before God is that we can level about ourselves with God and with others. Thus solitude is preparation for more honest relationship and more deliberate participation with others and the world. So Jesus insists that our growth in prayer, our growth in relationship to the Father, is dependent upon that time alone with God.   In our aloneness with God, Jesus says, “Don’t rattle off long prayers” like the world that Jesus knew, the gods of the people were remote, unpredictable, far removed from the affairs of earth. Prayer for the most part, in much of the religious practice of that day, was the effort on the part of an individual to win attention. So one made a lot of noise, rattled on and on. Such is not necessary; in fact, Jesus said it’s repulsive to God. God is near—as near as breathing. God hears our longings even before we put them into words. God “knows your needs before you ask.”   This does not mean that Jesus was against using words in prayer. Nor was he against asking God to meet our needs. On many occasions he poured his longings out to God and petitioned God in specific terms. Here Jesus is making the important point that it is not God who has removed God’s self from us, but we who have removed ourselves from God.   The nearness of God, if we have the grace to grasp it, will transform our praying and our living. God’s nearness makes all conversation with God intimate.   That means prayer can be a renewing and strengthening experience. When we are honest, most of us will admit that we are not nearly as strong as we sometimes think we are and often pretend to be. A word of ridicule, the turning away of a friend, an unexpected illness, even minor failures—not to mention big failures and tragic happenings—shatter our confidence. This happens to practicing Christians. We think our confidence in God is great enough to keep us strong in faith and commitment, but these threats to our security explode the thought that we are mature in our faith.   So we come to God regularly, not to “rattle off long prayers” but to spend time in reflection, simply to be alone with God and to gain perspective for living.