Your Father Knows What You Need Before You Ask Him

https://youtu.be/ufLqxWxcjiE

Gospel: Matthew 6:5-8

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Sermon: The Rev. Dr. Maryann Amor

“Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

At first, this sounds like a comforting phrase. God already knows what we need. God knows us so well that even before we find the words to ask, God knows. But there is another way to interpret Jesus’ statement: If God already knows what we need, then why do we pray? And maybe even more difficult: if God already knows what we need, then why don't we always receive what we ask for?

We have all had it happen. We pray for someone to be healed, and they aren't. We pray for peace, and the anxiety remains. We pray for a relationship to be restored, and it is still broken. We pray for relief from a financial burden, and the bills continue to pile up.

So what is the point of praying? God knows what we need, we often don't get the things we ask for, so why bother? Jesus gives us an answer in today's Gospel, but it is not the answer we might expect.

After Jesus tells the disciples that their Father knows what they need before they ask, he then teaches them how to pray, sharing the words of the Lord’s Prayer. And what is striking is that the prayer is full of requests: Give us our daily bread. Forgive us. Lead us. Deliver us.

Jesus is telling us that God knows what we need, but we are still invited to bring those needs to God.

And the reason is not because we need to inform God about what is happening in our lives. God already knows our needs, our hurts, and our struggles. Instead, prayer gives us a place to bring those things to God, to name what we are carrying, and to place it in God’s hands.

For Jesus, prayer is not a transaction. It isn't about finding the right words or saying enough words so that God will notice us and give us what we want. Prayer isn't a vending machine, and God isn't a genie in a bottle.

Instead, prayer is about relationship.

For me, it helps to think about prayer in terms of a close friend. When I am struggling, one of the things I find most helpful is being able to talk to a friend. I don't even need advice or for them to fix anything. I just need to say, “This is what is happening. This is what I'm afraid of. This is what is making me angry. This is what I don't understand. This is what I need.”

Often my friend already knows a lot of this, because they know me so well. I don't share these things with them because they need the information. I share them because I need the relationship. I need to be with someone who knows me.

There is something powerful about being able to sit with someone who doesn't need us to explain or justify ourselves. We don't have to have the right words. We can even ugly cry, swear, or say absolutely nothing.

Jesus is inviting us to understand prayer in this way. God already knows what is on our hearts. God knows our fears, our anger, our disappointment, our hopes and our deepest needs. God doesn't require us to provide that information. God simply invites us to bring all of it into the relationship.

And this matters because it is so easy to turn prayer into something stressful. We worry that we aren't doing it enough, or praying in the right way, or using the right words. But Jesus is telling us that God is not waiting for us to perform prayer correctly before God pays attention. God is already listening.

And this brings us back to the difficult question we started with. If God knows what we need, why doesn't God always give us what we ask for?

I don't think Jesus gives us a simple answer to that question in the Gospel, and I don't want to pretend that saying “prayer is about a relationship with God” makes the pain of unanswered prayer go away.

There are prayers that we desperately wish had been answered differently. There are people for whom we have prayed for years, and things we have placed before God again and again that remain unresolved.

Prayer does not give us a guarantee that everything will turn out the way we want.

But Jesus is offering us something different from a guarantee. He is telling us that when we pray, we are not speaking into an empty room. We are not trying to convince God to care about us. We are speaking to the God who already knows.

And maybe this is the point of today's Gospel. Jesus doesn't tell us to pray because God needs to be informed about the things in our lives. He tells us to pray because we need somewhere to bring what we are carrying. We need somewhere to bring our gratitude and our grief, our hope and our disappointment, our joy and our fear.

And when we pray, we discover that the God to whom we are bringing all of this already knows and that is truly a comforting thought.

So maybe prayer isn't about getting God to do something for us. Maybe, at its deepest level, prayer is simply refusing to carry our lives alone.

We come to God because God knows us. And because God knows us, we can come exactly as we are — in our brokenness, with our tears and our anger, with no performance, no perfect words, no pretending.

Just us, bringing whatever we have, to the God who already knows, who already listens, and who loves us deeply.

Amen.