The Christian Way of Prayer | Matthew 6:5-13
Brian Hedges | March 8, 2026
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to Matthew 6. We are going to be reading Matthew 6:5-13 as we look at a wonderful portion of the Lord’s teaching on prayer.
While you’re turning there, there’s a powerful scene in the award-winning film Gravity, one of my favorite films, that captures something profound about prayer. There is an astronaut (played by Sandra Bullock) who’s drifting alone in space; her oxygen is almost gone, she knows that she will die in just hours, and in these final moments of her life, she’s speaking to someone over radio, and she says something like this: “I know everyone dies—everybody knows that—but I’m going to die today, and that’s different. I’m really scared. Nobody will mourn for me, no one will pray for my soul. Will you pray for me, or is it too late? I’d pray for myself, but I’ve never prayed in my life. Nobody ever taught me how.”
It’s a striking moment in that film where someone in the face of death has this instinct to pray, to cry out to God, but she doesn’t know how. No one had taught her how to pray.
In many ways, I think that scene captures something that’s deeply true about the human condition, because deep down, we sense that there must be someone to cry out to in our times of need, but we often don’t know how to pray. We don’t know where to begin, we don’t know what words to use.
That is exactly why Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer that is the model prayer for his disciples, and it’s that prayer that we will study together today as we continue in our journey through the Sermon on the Mount. This is the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ, found in Matthew 5-7, and today, we really come to the very center of this teaching. The Lord’s Prayer is at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount. This is right at the apex. This is the climax of what Jesus says as he leads us into a way of life that has prayer right at its center.
It’s just important for us to note that, historically, the church has recognized the importance and the centrality of the Lord’s Prayer. In fact, along with the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer has been one of the most important pieces of Christian teaching, a tool that’s used for discipleship and formation. You find that reflected in many of the catechisms of the church. The church father Tertullian said, “In the prayer is comprised an epitome of the whole gospel,” and I think what we will learn together this morning is that though this is a very short, compressed prayer with just six petitions, it really encompasses the whole of the Christian life, and it has a storehouse of wealth for us as we study it together.
So let’s read it, Matthew 6, beginning in verse 5; we’re going to read verses 5-13. These are the words of Jesus.
“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.”
This is God’s Word.
In case you’re wondering, the traditional ending to the Lord’s Prayer that we usually use when we pray that prayer is not actually in the original manuscripts. It’s a good thing for us to pray, but it’s not in the text, and so not part of our exposition this morning.
I want us to focus this morning on Christian prayer, the Christian way of prayer, and I want to do that by looking at four things. To make this memorable, I’m giving it to you in four words that start with P. I want you to see that:
1. Christian Prayer Is Personal
2. Christian Prayer Follows a Pattern
3. Christian Prayer Must Be Practiced
4. Christian Prayer Is Possible
It’s possible for us because of Christ’s work on our behalf.
1. Christian Prayer Is Personal
Jesus’ teaching on prayer conveys a personal intimacy with and dependence on the Father that sets it completely apart from all other forms of prayer, and we could say that the personal nature of prayer is really seen in two dimensions, both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions. Vertically, there is this focus on praying to the Father, and that in and of itself is pretty distinctive. This is something that was distinctive of the teaching and the ministry of Jesus Christ.
When you read the Old Testament Scriptures, God has referenced as Father only about fourteen or fifteen times in all of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, and the main category for understanding the fatherhood of God was God as the Father of the nation of Israel, or maybe as a metaphor.
But in the New Testament, in the teaching of Jesus, God is known as Father. Jesus calls God Father sixty times in the four Gospels, and the New Testament calls God Father more than 260 times.
J.I. Packer once said that if you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, ask what do they understand about being a child of the Father? How do they understand their relationship with God? He says, “Father is the Christian name for God.”
Christian prayer is personal. It’s personal because it is the very center of our relationship with God as our Father.
This sets it apart from mere religion. You see that in Jesus’ teaching in these first few verses, where he says, “Don’t pray like this; instead, pray like this. Don’t pray like the hypocrites who stand in the street corners, who make a public show of their prayer. They’re praying so that they can be seen by men. They’re praying for others.” And Jesus says, “They have the reward.” He says, “Don’t be like this. Instead, seek your Father in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
Jesus says, “Don’t pray like the pagans, like the Gentiles, who heap up phrases. They think they will be heard because of their many words.” But Jesus, in contrast to that, is not calling us to pray for long periods of time. Instead, Jesus is giving us the simplicity of prayer that goes to the Father with confidence that the Father knows our needs before we ask, and we simply bring our hearts and our requests to the Lord in the confidence that he will hear us. So he begins his prayer, “Our Father in heaven.” The language here is personal, it’s simple, it’s childlike, it’s intimate.
And notice that it is a prayer that not only focuses on the Father, but it is a prayer that embraces the family of the Father. So there is this horizontal dimension to this personal nature of prayer. The prayer begins, “Our Father in heaven,” and as you read through the prayer you’ll notice these first-person plural pronouns. It’s not, “My Father in heaven,” it’s, “Our Father in heaven.” It’s not, “Give me this day my daily bread,” but, “Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Grant Osborne says that this word “our” shows us that this is a community prayer meant for the life of the church. Again, we just see here the personal nature of prayer, that prayer is this communication with God as our Father, and it is prayer that encompasses the whole body of believers. This calls us away from our self-centered approach to prayer, calls us to consider others as well.
When my brothers and I were kids, we sometimes used to play a game, especially in long car rides; we called it the “I game,” and the object of the game was to just speak without using the word “I.” So we would say all kinds of silly things—“Methinks that you’re going to lose this game,” stuff like that. Of course, it wouldn’t take long before one of us would trip up and we would say “I,” because it’s just so hard to get “I” out of our vocabulary.
But as you read this prayer from Jesus, “I” is nowhere to be found. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of family. Jesus teaches us to pray for the whole of the Christian family; that’s the horizontal dimension of prayer.
So Christian prayer is personal—language to the Father, language about and for the whole family of God.
2. Christian Prayer Follows a Pattern
This prayer follows a pattern. So point number two, Christian prayer follows a pattern, and we see that in the six requests that Jesus gives us that really break down into two basic sections.
In the first three requests, you have the Godward dimension of prayer, with kingdom priorities. In the last three requests, you have the manward dimension of prayer that expresses personal dependence on God for our needs. And that framework really covers the whole of prayer. Let’s just consider those requests briefly.
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Of course, we know that in Scripture a person’s name is closely related to what he is, and therefore, when God reveals his name, he is revealing himself as he really is.
To hallow something is to sanctify it, to consecrate it, or to treat it as holy. The prophet Isaiah wrote that the people of God will “sanctify my name,” they will “sanctify the holy one of Israel and will stand in awe of the God of Israel” (Isaiah 29:23). And so the idea here is that our first priority in prayer is to pray that God’s name will be sanctified, that it will be honored, that it will be reverenced.
This is a prayer of adoration. This is a prayer that essentially says what we sang together in that song this morning: “Your name is the highest, / Your name is the greatest; / Your name stands above them all.” It’s a prayer to worship God and a prayer that God will be worshiped in our own hearts and lives and around the nations of the world.
Then Jesus says to pray, “Your kingdom come.” As we’ve seen throughout the Sermon on the Mount, the sermon is Jesus’ manifesto of the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God is God’s saving reign, revealed in and through Jesus Christ. So this is a prayer that seeks the reign of God.
The scope of this is breathtaking. What are we asking for when we say, “Your kingdom come?” We are asking for nothing less than this, that God will subdue and defeat every evil; that his peace and his justice will reign in the earth. We are asking for the triumph of the gospel. We are praying that God would bring people to himself so that those who do not confess the name of Jesus will come to believe. We are praying for Christ to build his church. We are praying for the fulfillment of God’s saving purposes in the world, and we are ultimately praying for Jesus to come again and to bring us to that day when the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of God and of his Christ. We’re praying for the great missionary purposes of God in the world. All kingdom-oriented prayers fall right here, as we pray that God’s kingdom would come.
Then we pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is closely related; it closely follows, “Your kingdom come,” but here we are praying for God to work out his purposes and to do his will, and we’re praying that in our own hearts and lives that we would live according to the will of God. This is prayer for our own sanctification, our own holiness, our own obedience, our own submission to the will of God. We want God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
In heaven, God’s will is done perfectly, it is done without any inhibition. People obey God perfectly when they’re in heaven. The angels fulfill the word of the Lord, and here we’re praying that our hearts will be made like that and that we will do God’s will.
These first three requests focus on kingdom priorities; the last three express personal dependence on God. Again, it encompasses the whole of the Christian life. “Give us this day our daily bread.” This is prayer that God would meet our physical needs, our material needs, and it’s right for us to pray for that. We trust in God to meet our needs according to his riches in Christ Jesus.
And daily bread…as John Stott said (and I think Stott was following Martin Luther in this), daily bread really stands for everything that is necessary for life. This is our prayer for food and for health and for home and for family. It doesn’t deny the fact that God meets these needs often through means. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work for our daily bread or that we shouldn’t feed the hungry, as we are called to do, but it encompasses all of those things, and it expresses our ultimate dependence on God to take care of our needs.
If daily bread is our physical needs, “forgive us our debts” has to do with our spiritual needs, a prayer for forgiveness for our sins. Isn’t it amazing that, right at the center of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus holds forth prayer for forgiveness? This shows us the gospel centrality in this prayer. Jesus understands our need for forgiveness from the Father and who teaches us to pray with confidence that God will forgive our sins.
We might think of a parallel passage in 1 John 1 that tells us the way of forgiveness. The apostle of love says,
“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Jesus teaches us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins.
Then, the final request is also spiritual in nature, but maybe physical as well. It is a prayer for protection, for deliverance. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Jesus knows that we live in a fallen world, that we navigate this spiritual minefield, we have the great adversaries (the world, the flesh, and the devil), and here we are asking God our Father to protect us, to deliver us, to guard us through life as we seek to follow him.
So together these six petitions give us the shape of Christian prayer. We begin with God’s priorities, his name, his kingdom, his will, and then we express our dependence on him for bread, for forgiveness, and for deliverance.
But listen, knowing what this prayer teaches is no substitute for actually praying, right? This isn’t just to teach us about prayer, but it is to actually lead us into the practice of prayer, which leads us into point number three, Christian prayer must be practiced.
3. Christian Prayer Must Be Practiced
Here I just want to take five or six minutes to encourage us in our own prayer lives. I think for most of us, our problem is probably not that we don’t know how to pray at all, it’s more a problem of motivation or a problem of priorities or a problem of obedience.
But I want to remind you, as we’ve seen again and again in Matthew 6, that Jesus here assumes the practice of prayer in the Christian life. He does not say “if you pray,” he says “when you pray.” So the big practical takeaway for us this morning is simply this: pray.
How do you go about the practice of prayer? Let me give you three practical things to help you with your prayer life.
(1) Number one, pray this prayer and use it as your pattern for prayer. So none of us actually need to be that astronaut in space who says, “Nobody taught me how to pray.” Here it is. Jesus taught us, and here’s the teaching; it’s very simple. So one practical thing we can do is pray these words. Actually pray the Lord’s Prayer.
I would commend it to you as a practice to begin your day by praying the Lord’s Prayer. Before you get out of bed in the morning, just pray this prayer to the Lord, and maybe you’ll linger on one part or another of this prayer, but use it to orient your heart to the Lord.
In the Didache, which was a second-century Christian document, the Didache said that we should pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day. Jesus doesn’t lay that down as a command, but he does commend to us this pattern for prayer. There is a beautiful balance that will come into our prayer lives if we shape our prayers according to the Lord’s Prayer. We will be balanced in our focus—Godward and then expressing our dependence on God for our needs. The prayer is balanced in the kinds of prayer it includes. All forms of prayer are included right here. There’s adoration: “Hallowed be your name.” There’s intercession: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” There’s confession, right? “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” And there is petition: “Give us this day our daily bread, and deliver us from evil.”
The scope of prayer is beautifully ordered. It holds together intimacy on one hand and transcendence on the other. Intimacy with God who is our Father. We can speak to him with childlike simplicity because he is our Father, but we remember that he is our Father in heaven. This God who is our Father is also the sovereign king of the universe. And as the psalmist says, “Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever pleases him.” So we come to our Father with trust that he cares for us and also with confidence that he is the all-powerful God. There’s intimacy, there’s transcendence. This prayer stretches from the largest concerns for God’s reign and kingdom in the world to the smallest, most ordinary details of life in the provision for our daily bread. This prayer encompasses the whole range of human life and experience across time; past, present and future. For the past we say, “Forgive us our debts,” for the present, “Give us this day our daily bread,” for the future, “Lead us not into temptation.” And this prayer touches every dimension of our humanity, physical needs as well as spiritual needs.
This little prayer gathers up the whole life of the Christian before God. This is an amazing prayer!
The missionary Samuel Zwimmer put it like this: “Every possible desire of the praying heart is contained in this. It combines in simple language every divine promise, every human sorrow and want, and every Christian longing for the good of others.”
It’s all right here. So build this prayer into your prayer life. Pray this prayer and set it as a pattern for your praying.
(2) Secondly—there’s no substitute for this—actually build a private prayer life. Jesus says, “When you pray, go into your room, shut the door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you,” verse 6.
This means that as followers of Christ, we are called to this. This is a command, and as followers of Jesus, we must obey. We must enter the secret place and seek the face of God our Father.
We do this not because anyone else is watching. We do this not because we’re trying to get a good grade on some kind of a spiritual quiz. We do this because God is our Father and we are his children. We do this because Jesus is our king and we are his subjects. We do this because Jesus knows the best way to live, and as we’ve seen in the Sermon on the Mount he invites us into the good life of flourishing that is within the kingdom of God. So if we want to flourish, we will follow the teaching of Jesus and we will pray.
My guess is that for most of us, right here is the hindrance. This is the obstacle. It’s that we have not actually set aside any kind of meaningful time in our lives for prayer. And if you haven’t done that, you’d probably say, “Well, I just haven’t found time to do it. I don’t really have time for this kind of prayer life.” I just want to call you out on that if that’s what you’re thinking this morning, because if you’ve got time for TV, if you have time for social media, if you have time for food, if you have time for sleep, if you have time for anything else, you’ve got time for prayer.
Our problem is not lack of time, our problem is lack of obedience to the Lord and a lack of trust that this is really what is good for us and what we need. So build a private prayer life in obedience to Christ.
(3) Then third, let the Lord’s prayer shape not just your prayers, but let it shape your heart and your life. This isn’t just a pattern for prayer, it is a pattern for living, and what we see very clearly in this pattern is that the kingdom of God comes first; everything else comes after that. We begin with God’s name, God’s kingdom, God’s will. And then we focus on our needs for bread, for forgiveness, and deliverance. So this prayer will shape the very priorities of our lives.
That’s why Jesus can say later in this chapter, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (verse 33). So let this prayer shape your priorities in your heart and in your life.
4. Christian Prayer Is Possible
Finally, I just want to end by reminding us that Christian prayer is possible because of Christ’s work for us. We could call this the possibility of prayer or even the privilege of prayer.
I want to just pause on this for a minute because I do think that we tend to assume this. We tend to assume that we can come into the presence of God. We maybe take it for granted, and we fail to realize that the great storyline of the Bible concerns the disruption in our relationship with God that results from sin and the fall, and the whole story of the gospel is about how God has overcome that rupture, he has healed that rupture in our relationship with God, and he’s done that through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. So let’s not take it for granted; instead, let’s treasure the great privilege that is ours to be able to pray because of what Jesus has done for us.
Friends, this will also help you on a psychological level, because there will come those moments in your life, if you have any self-awareness at all—moments that I’ve certainly experienced and you will too—when you get down on your knees to pray or you begin your time of prayer with the Lord, and you don’t feel like your prayers are going past the ceiling. Instead, you’re thinking of your sins, you’re thinking of your guilt, you feel shame, or you just feel far from God. You just feel like, “Why would God listen to me?” You don’t feel like in those moments that you have a right to pray.
What are you supposed to do in those moments? What do you do when you come before the face of God and what you feel in your heart is that “God is not going to listen because I am not a good enough person”?
This is what you do: you remind yourself of the gospel. You preach the gospel to yourself, and you believe the great truth of Scripture, that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost,” that “there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus,” that if we confess our sins he will forgive us, and that “if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous,” that Christ is the high priest who leads us into the very presence of God.
You remind yourself of those truths, and you remember that this is the great secret to all prayer, to all genuine communion and fellowship with God; that through Jesus Christ and him crucified we have access to the throne. We have access to the presence of the Father, and we can come with boldness and with confidence because we come through the name of Jesus.
Perhaps no uninspired writer has captured the reality of this more powerfully than John Newton. John Newton is the famous author of that greatest hymn, perhaps, or at least the best-known hymn, “Amazing grace! how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me.”
If you know anything of Newton’s story, you know that he was saved from a horrible past. He was a slave-trading sea captain who was converted. He called himself the old blasphemer who had been saved by God’s grace and eventually became a pastor, and he became a hymn-writer, and we know “Amazing Grace,” but he actually wrote hundreds of hymns.
He wrote a hymn that’s not as well-known, but it’s a hymn about prayer, and I think it’s my favorite hymn about prayer. I want to just end by reading the words of this hymn to you, because Newton wonderfully and beautifully presses home to us how we can come with confidence to the throne. This is what he said.
“Approach, my soul, the mercy seat,
Where Jesus answers prayer;
There humbly fall before his feet,
For none can perish there.
“Thy promise is my only plea,
With this I venture nigh;
Thou callest burdened souls to thee,
And such, O Lord, am I.
“Bowed down beneath a load of sin,
By Satan sorely pressed,
By war without and fears within,
I come to thee for rest.”
Do you ever feel that way? Do you ever feel bowed down beneath a load of sin? Do you ever feel that you are pressed by war without and fears within? What do you do? You pray this:
“Be thou my Shield and hiding Place,
That, sheltered by thy side,
I may my fierce accuser face,
And tell him thou hast died!
“O wondrous love! to bleed and die,
To bear the cross and shame,
That guilty sinners, such as I,
Might plead thy gracious Name.”
Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is the great privilege of prayer. This is the great possibility of prayer, that you can have a relationship with God, that you can call God Father, because Jesus has opened the way into the most holy place.
Unlike that astronaut drifting alone in space, we are not left wondering how to pray. Jesus has taught us, and through the wondrous love of the cross he has opened the way for us. He’s opened the way to the Father. Therefore, let us pray.
Father, we thank you this morning for the awesome and amazing privilege it is to come to the throne of grace and to come with simple, childlike faith, with boldness and with confidence that you will hear us when we come, because of your great love for us and because of the all-sufficient work of Jesus Christ, who has borne our sins, who has paid our debts, who has taken the judgment that we deserve, so that we could be welcomed into your presence as children.
We ask you this morning to forgive us that we have not availed ourselves of this privilege as we should or as we could. We pray not only that you would forgive us but that you would renew our hearts this morning, that you would form within us a new desire for prayer, for prayer that follows the teaching of Jesus, that believes the promises of your word, prayer that at its very heart has this bold confidence and faith in your love as our Father.
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, we pray that the table would be for us a means of grace that would nourish us and would strengthen us in our faith. As we take the sacred emblems of the body and the blood of Jesus Christ, may it remind us of the real sacrifice that Christ has made for us, a sacrifice that is finished, that is complete, that is sufficient to cover all of our sins. May the Lord’s table also call us this morning into ongoing, daily fellowship with you, as we seek to live before your face. So draw near to us in these moments as we seek you. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
