For several weeks we looked at how the modern professing Church is under the spiritual judgment of God. The last two weeks we have looked at taking steps to seek the Lord for Himself. We did this by looking at prayer and by the kind of heart that it takes to truly pray. Very few people would deny that we need prayer and a lot of it. What is not so generally recognized and understood is the heart that it takes for true prayer. Prayer is not just the uttering of words; it is lifting the desires of the heart to God. Prayer is not just a religious activity; it is communion with the living God. Prayer must be from the broken and humble heart and God is sovereign over the heart. Scripture tells us that God “is far from the wicked, but He hears the prayer of the righteous” (Prov 15:29). It also tells us that “He who turns away his ear from listening to the law, Even his prayer is an abomination” (Proverbs 28:9). We are also told that ” you ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasure” (James 4:3). Without question, then, the real problem in terms of prayer is the heart. There is no returning to the Lord and no seeking of the Lord apart from returning to Him with the whole heart.
The Pharisees were quite well known for their many prayers, but we should not make them our example. Instead we should look at them and understand that our hearts must be changed in order to pray. Matthew 6:5 gives us one example from the Pharisees: “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.” When those men prayed they prayed in the synagogues and even on the street corners. It seems as if they prayed a lot. They were not ashamed to pray in public and even before the watching world. But they were not seeking God in prayer, they were seeking honor for themselves. This text along with James 4:3 (given in the previous paragraph) sets out to us one of the real problems in the modern professing Church. When we pray it is for reasons of self rather than for God and His glory. A selfish heart’s deepest desire is always self in some way.
Love is the deepest language of prayer and when looked at in the depths of the soul it will tell us what our real prayer is. The Pharisees prayed and prayed but Jesus saw that their motives were for themselves in the sense that they wanted to be honored by others. In other words, they prayed to be seen and wanted the honor from others. This is the same thing as saying that they were praying to themselves and were praying for themselves. This is why Jesus said that they had their reward in full. They prayed while the deepest desire of their hearts (their true love) was that they themselves would be honored. They actually received what they really prayed for and that was the honor of men. In much the same way, then, our prayers come from motives in the heart that reflect our deepest desires. The Pharisees deepest love was for self (themselves) and that was seen in their self-centered motives when they prayed. Jesus understood that and set out their sin for all to see. We are born with the same hearts of the Pharisees. We also desire honor for others in many ways when we pray unless God has truly changed our hearts and unless He is the One working the prayer in our hearts. We pray in order that others will think we are religious and perhaps draw an “amen” from the others. We pray so that others will admire our fervency or that others would admire our deep theology and biblical knowledge. Our prayers are like the Pharisees in that we are not truly praying to God. As long as we pray out of love for self and desire the honor of men, our prayers will be answered. The problem, however, is that we would not be praying to God and He will not shine His face upon us until our hearts are turned from seeking ourselves to seeking Him in prayer. Our prayers are answered in that we obtain what our hearts desire. Despite our pious words, like the Pharisees it may be nothing but the honor of men.
The Greatest Commandment continues to stand against all of our prayers that have motives for self, even if we continue to deceive ourselves about the motives of our hearts. When we pray what we love the most is in fact what we are truly praying for. If I stand and praise God for the beauties and glories of who He is it may be that the real desire of my heart is to be thought spiritual or for people to think highly of me as I pray. In that case I would be using God and that which is to be used to exalt and know Him is really an effort to exalt myself. My deepest desire and my greatest love would be for self and my prayer would be for me to be exalted. To put this in yet another way, the person that prays like I just described is a person that loves self more than God and uses religion as a way to obtain honor and to manipulate God to his or her own will. This is a horrible thing, but unless we are truly seeking the glory and honor of God from our hearts we are in fact doing something like that with each prayer. It is not enough to pray if by that we mean offering up words with the name of God on our lips, but it is only prayer to God when our hearts love God and our prayers are moved by that love to seek Him and His glory.
Let us look at this from another view. Let us imagine a person standing in the pew leading the local church in prayer. Imagine that the person praying begins to warm to the task and his prayer begins to be fervent. An amen is heard and then more and more are heard. The one praying seems to get more fervent in the prayer. The one praying raises his voice and utters glowing and exalted works about God. The prayer then pleads with God to do certain things on earth. There is now a chorus with amen after amen ringing through the sanctuary. Let us then move a few thousand miles to a jungle where a tribe of natives are praying to their many gods. They are even more fervent and they gash themselves to show their devotion and the louder and more animated they get the more excited others get and they end up shouting praise and prayer to their gods with great excitement. It could be that there is more in common with these two services than we would care to see. But which one is worse?
The object of prayer in both of the services is self. The one praying in a local congregation desires to fulfill his religious duty and along the way to obtain honor from others. It might also increase the offering. But the real motive and intent of the prayer is self. It is an act of self-love and it is self that is the object of that love and so using the name of God is a violation of the third commandment as much if not more than a callous and worldly person using God’s name in cursing. Using God’s name in a church service to gain honor for self is worse than cursing (personal opinion) because it is using His name directly in a vain way for self. The group in the jungle is not using the name of the true God in the way that those in the local churches do. They are indeed praying for self in that they want their gods to act for them, but that is all that the people in the local church are doing if the deepest desire of their hearts is not for God Himself and out of love for God and His glory.
We can also note that both groups were fervent and grew in fervency and earnestness during their prayers. But if the love they had was not for God but instead was for self, then the fervency and earnestness that grew during the time in prayer was really the display of a greater and warmer love for self. When the fervency of prayer is increased based on an amen chorus from the people, it might be nothing more than an increased fervency based on the honor of men. Our very fervency can be nothing more than an increased idolatry of self and be nothing more than self-love warming at the giving of honor toward self. Our fervency may indeed use the name of the Lord and so our deceptive hearts may deceive us into thinking that we are really praying, but the eyes of the Lord know what the real love of our heart really is. When our love is for ourselves in our prayers we do nothing but offer incense of the heart to our true love and idol which is self. Our prayers are nothing more than acts of love to self which is the self-god in that case and so our very prayers are acts of enmity with the true God we claim to pray to.
God has turned His face from the professing Church and we will not see His face again unless we seek His face in prayer. It is not just that we need to pray more, it is that we need to really pray. We will not truly pray and seek the face of God until we are broken from self as our god and from seeking the honor of men. We will not truly pray until we love God more than self and so desire Him in prayer rather than self. We will not truly pray until our hearts are broken from using His name as an excuse to pray for stuff we want and we truly desire His face more than the things of the world. Regardless of our excuses and religious activities, if we love the world the love of God is not in us (I John 2:15-16). Seeking God is not seeking Him to get us the things of the world that self loves; it is to seek Him to deliver us from love for self. The professing Church will never know the presence of God and of what it means to truly love His glory until it is broken in heart and crying out for God Himself.
Seeking the Lord in prayer is the only kind of prayer to God that there is. Self-seeking prayer is words that seek self even if it is trying to use God to do so. Ministers can pray with great fervency that God would bless the church while their hearts desire their own honor rather than the honor of God. It is so easy to pray for God’s blessing on self and the plans of self, but it is harder when the will of God crosses our selfish hearts. Yet seeking God’s will in prayer is an important part of true prayer in seeking God Himself. But until our hearts are broken from self, we will do nothing but pray for self and we will not see the face of God. Until our hearts are given love for God, our love and therefore our prayers will be for self and we will not see the face of God. We must learn to ask God for broken and contrite hearts in order to seek His face. Even then we can desire those for selfish reasons. We need to seek the Lord for grace in order that our hearts would be broken and we could plead with Him for Himself. The Church is on earth to manifest the glory of God and it is to that end that it must pray with desire and love for that.
God Loves... Himself 
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