If you are the dad or grandfather of young children, you may have noticed that they love to have your attention. You may often hear the words, “Watch me.” and have them simply make a silly face of do a summersault. The purpose of these antics is to get you to offer words of affirmation or some other action of approval. Although children are quite direct in this attention getting activity, adults are not immune to the lure, they just may be a bit more subtle. Even for the most introverted personality, there is something satisfying when we are given the attention of others.
For the most part, this is a harmless characteristic. However, Jesus gives us a warning to avoid this when we are interacting with our Lord in prayer. In Luke 18:9-14, he gives us this parable. To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ 13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ 14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Unlike some of the parables we have discussed, this one does not need much explanation. It is about the sacredness of our communication with our Heavenly Father. Prayer is a conversation. It is an opportunity for us to tell God what is on our hearts. This includes our praise for who he is, our thanksgiving for what he has done, our confession and repentance when necessary, and asking him to meet the needs of our lives. Because we are offered this privilege based on our intimate relationship with Jesus through salvation, we are asked to keep it between us.
This is not an injunction against public prayer. We have occasions where Jesus prayed aloud. He offered prayers of blessing when feeding the 5000 and he publicly taught his disciples to pray. Some even see an admonition to pray corporately in the Lord’s Prayer because of its use of the plural pronoun, “Our Father”.
The location nor the method of prayer is being challenged by Jesus, but it is the content he is asking us to carefully guard. We must remember that we are praying to God and not to people. This requires us to avoid any hint of concern over what people think about us when we pray. It does not matter. When we are praying from our heart with humility, God accepts that. If people are not impressed, it is not our problem.
If we would fully grasp what Jesus is saying, it would remove the apprehension some have of praying in public. I have had people ask not to pray publicly because they did not know the right words to say. This point is, there are no right words. In fact, Scripture tells us there may be times that our prayer is nothing more than the groaning of our broken heart and God’s Holy Spirit interprets the prayer for us and delivers it to God.
This parable gives us the freedom to pray. It tells us that we can forget about the judgement of people and just focus on communicating with our Lord. This is a privilege offered us through the redemptive work of Jesus on the Cross.