Don’t Use God
Is God useful to you or beautiful to you? Do you seek him because he is a means to the good life or because knowing him is the good life? This really matters.
If I pray to get something from God, then Jesus says—and we need to feel the force of this—that I’m a hypocrite. When he uses that word, Jesus doesn’t have in mind what we usually think of when we think of a hypocrite—someone who is living a sordid double life: for example, in church on Sunday but running prostitutes throughout the week. Jesus here is speaking of someone who is super-religious but who does not seek God for God’s sake. Someone who treats God as the way to get something else: a better life now, going to heaven when they die, a solid family, and so on.
In Matthew 6 Jesus specifically warns against using prayer as a way to gain respect from others, but we can broaden the application of this principle to any number of things. Anytime we are more interested in what we can get from God than we are in God himself, we become a hypocrite.
This really challenges me. I know, for example, that I pray most fervently on Saturday nights. I confess my sin and make sure my life is clean. I avoid fights with my wife and try to be really nice to my kids. Why? Because I’m only hours away from preaching, and I really need God’s help when I preach.
Is it bad to pray before I preach? Of course not. Should I feel a level of desperation for his help when I preach? Very much. But the fact that my prayer life takes such a dramatic step forward on that night of the week shows that my motivations are partially hypocritical: I pray mainly because God is useful to me as I preach. God is a means to the end of a good sermon. That’s what I’m really after.
Every single one of us is susceptible to this. Maybe you find yourself mainly praying before big decisions. “God, please just show me your will.” That sounds spiritual, but it’s possible we’re more concerned with God’s will than with God himself. Maybe you find yourself praying before meetings, pitches, or taking tests—not so much because you want to know God and live out his will better, but because you want to land the order, win the project, or ace the exam. Or you pray for your kids’ behavior. Again, that’s a good thing. But is your motivation one of glorifying God or to make yourself look like a good, godly parent in church this Sunday?
“Is God useful to me or is he beautiful? Is my prayer a means to an end, or is a relationship with God an end in itself? ”
So the question we need to pose to ourselves is this: is God useful to me or is he beautiful? Do I spend time with him because I have to or because I get to? Is my prayer a means to an end, or is a relationship with God an end in itself?
Jesus drives this point home by giving us an acid test. He asks, Do you pray in secret?
“When you pray,” he says to his followers, “go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret” (Matt. 6:6). You see, the way to know your real motivation in prayer is to ask how much you pray when no one is watching—when you have nothing to gain from praying but greater fellowship with God. When what drives you to pray is mainly a desire to be close to God.
Augustine, writing in the 5th century, pointed out that nearly everything else that we do for God can be done for some reason other than love for God—to be seen by others, to be respected by others, to be praised by others, to fit in and belong with our family or our church, and so on. But the only motivation that will lead us to pray in secret is that we love God.
Prayer that no one else sees or finds out about is the one thing that you will do consistently if you simply want to know more of God because you love him.
This article is an excerpt from Just Ask by J.D. Greear (The Good Book Company, 2021). In the book, Greear helps Christians to pray so that it’s a delight, not a duty.
J.D. Greear is the pastor of The Summit Church, in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. He is the author of several books, including What Are You Going to Do with Your Life? (2020), Searching for Christmas (2020), Above All (2019), and Gaining by Losing (2015). He served as the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention.