I don't know why I feel like just jabbing the bear here recently, but here we go, bear. Have another stick to the ribs. Edward Snowden, have you heard of this guy? I know there's some of you who are listening or are like, yeah, we should probably sandblast off one of the four presidents and put him right on Mount Rushmore. And there are others of you who are like, that guy is a traitor because I heard that he put people in danger and he violated rules and stuff. I cannot possibly hide what I think. I think that if your government is misbehaving, it's the obligation of the person who sees the misbehavior to report it to the government's boss, which is the people. So there are things that Snowden did that I happen to like. Maybe I don't agree with everything he thinks. Who cares, right? We've learned to get along even in disagreement and agreement, whatever. What is significant though is that when Edward Snowden started to say, uh, heads up, everybody, your government's listening to your phone calls. That is totally happening. It's not like some paranoid tinfoil hat thing that's going on. This is a real deal. It's an actual practice. There's a name for the program. How do I know? I worked on the program, and here's all the data about it. A lot of people at first were like, that is crazy conspiracy stuff, and I don't like it. And then eventually the government was like, I mean, well, I mean, we said no for like the first 10 times you asked, but now that you have the actual paperwork, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, we listen to you guys. I mean, it's for your own safety, though. And I again understand that there are going to be people in this conversation who really value that feeling of safety you get from, you know, the government doing the things that the government does. And you know what? I like you. That's cool. Whatever's fine. I am definitely on the other side of the spectrum, or like, uh, yeah, personal responsibility and freedom and civil liberties and the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment. I think that stuff's really important. And I actually feel a little bit less security when the government tends to break its own rules and break the contract we have with the government in the name of keeping us safe. Again, you can think whatever you want, and guess what? There's going to be a likewise in just a minute. But in addition to some of the warnings that came about how this fundamentally alters the relationship between people and government when you have a surveillance state, there were other people who were just talking about how this fundamentally changes the relationship between people and other people, and frankly, between people and themselves, between people and their own ideas. And they started to trot out this sociological data saying that monitored people have a much smaller overton window, a much smaller amount of acceptable thought that they will engage in or articulate than unmonitored people. Unmonitored people will explore lots of ideas. They'll even game out ideas that they'll ultimately reject, but that are kind of scary and weird. And ultimately, you pick which kind of society, I guess, you want to live in. And what I found, and I'm wondering if you found this too, is that that is completely the real deal. And maybe some of you haven't changed your habits at all, but I know for me and all of my friends, who I think are very sane people, we get to wrestling through an idea on the phone or thinking things through with an always-on microphone sitting right next to us on our cellular device. And at some point we'll just feel the need to say, and uh, hey, just to the agent who's on the other end of this listening, or if this happens to get pulled up as something that flags the algorithm, we don't like violence. We don't think anyone should hurt anybody. We are kind of pacifistic in our mindset. And what we're talking about here are movements in history, not things we are advocating for or think would be good. Like we say stuff like this. I make announcements where I say things like, and that was a joke, person who monitors my phone calls. Now, is anybody specifically listening to me or not? I don't know, but they've declared that they're allowed to, and as a result, it changes how you talk. And likewise, even if you're just hanging out in the house and you're on a phone call and you know there's nobody in the house, you might talk a little differently than you do if there's somebody else in the other room that you want to impress and you want to say things just loud enough for them to hear it. Maybe I should have gone with that analogy to start with. It took 10 seconds, it was much more relatable and it wasn't politically loaded to make people mad at me or uncomfortable at the beginning of this. Whatever, we're committed to it now, my friends. Likewise, when we get to Matthew chapter six, Jesus is acknowledging this reality in how communication happens. You're either talking to who you're actually talking to, or you're talking at who you're talking to, but you're really speaking to everybody who's hanging out around you. Now, look, as a rhetorical device, clearly Jesus isn't saying, don't ever do that, because he's talking to his disciples and he intends for everyone around him to listen in and hear what he's saying. He's also pushing back on the religious leaders of the day here in Matthew chapter six as he's talking to the disciples. But when it goes the other way around, what Jesus seems to be saying is that when a religious person is trying to commune with God through the act of prayer and communication with God, they should just be communicating with God and not trying to impress other people. And so, continuing this thought that started in Matthew 6, 1 about God wanting your heart and what it looks like to have kingdom values that you bring with you to your spiritual disciplines like prayer and giving stuff, he says this, verse 5, and when you pray, don't be like the hypocrites, hypocrites again, catch that. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they've received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father who's unseen. Then your father, who sees what's done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, don't keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they'll be heard because of their many words. Don't be like them. For your father knows what you need before you ask him. Well, this all raises a lot of questions, and I think all we can do is go verse by verse and try to tackle each one. Okay, the hypocrite word again. Remember, we were talking about that yesterday? It's a thing that theoretically we don't want to be. Maybe it's a thing that's getting a little bit more popular culturally right now, but I think most of us want to be consistent. Jesus' opening charge is that if you go out and say you're talking to God, but all of your words and phraseology is framed with the intent of impressing people who might happen to listen in, you're doing it in a screwed up way. Did you keep a diary when you were a kid? Do you keep a diary now? When you write the diary, are you one of the people who writes to yourself, your future self, and all you have in mind is I just I want some documentation of where I've been and I want to reflect on this later and I just want it written down. Or are you the kind of person who imagines, and I know this from personal experience, that someday you might be very important. And maybe that person who you secretly really like is going to read your diary. Or maybe some historian someday will read it and be like, this is the most important, brilliant person ever. Or maybe some producer will discover your diary and be like, look at the brilliant things this person wrote in their diary. This is the most important diary in the history of diaries. Again, how you conceive of who's on the other end of the diary really affects the way you write the diary. So it's not just a question then of if you pray like this, your heart motives are bad. I think what we also see looking at the larger context is that Jesus is saying, if you pray with an external audience that you're trying to impress in mind, it actually will make your prayer worse. It won't, it won't make sense. You'll repeat dumb stuff again and again. We'll break that down more. And your prayer won't actually reflect the most basic fundamental aspects of your position before the king, which we'll break down maybe next time around or the time after that. So it's hypocritical to stand in front of people and say you're talking to God when in fact you're trying to impress other people. I tell you the truth, they've received their reward in full. Okay, just like the previous passage, if you're giving all of your money and you're doing your acts of righteousness in front of people, well, guess what? Uh, they're going to be impressed. If that's what you're trying to achieve, you are clever enough socially to achieve that. And all those sophisticated people are going to be terribly, terribly impressed. But that's it. If that's the reward you pursue, that's the only reward you get. So then Jesus gives a counterexample. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father who's unseen. Then your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. Ah, okay. Well, that sounds a whole lot like what we just saw in the previous one. When you give, don't let the one hand know what the other hand is doing. And they give like you're in Oceans 11, and you're trying to sneak money instead of out of the casino and into your pocket, out of your pocket and into the hands of a person who needs it more, or the church, or whatever. And also here, sneak away and pray. Why? Well, so you won't be tempted to pray for dumb reasons and pray dumb things that aren't in keeping with kingdom values. And when you pray, don't keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they'll be heard because of their many words. Okay, here's another pushback that apparently the original audience would have been tracking with. And frankly, we see religious expressions both inside and outside of Christianity today that still work like this, right? Where you just say stuff again and again and again and again. And the idea is that theoretically, the deity on the receiving end of that repetition just needs to be, I guess, worn down by hearing the thing enough or by knowing that you're really committed because you said it 10,000 times instead of only 1,000 times. And such a deity, I guess, would be unclear on how the future is going to work out. Whereas Jesus acknowledges the elephant in the room in the very next phrase, which is, well, if you pray one time or you pray a hundred times, why would either of those numbers move the needle for a God who theoretically already knows everything? I mean, if he's powerful enough to actually answer your prayer request, wouldn't he have to be powerful enough and sovereign enough to already know the prayer request is coming? Like, why would it matter if you did that once or a hundred times or 10,000 times? And I think what Jesus is saying here in verse eight is, yeah, you're anticipating the right next question. How does prayer even work? And I'll give you this much of an answer. You're probably asking the wrong question about prayer. The question that I think the people Jesus is pushing back on in this passage were asking is, how do I phrase this to get my thing? And then it's like working with insurance. If I say that it happened like this, even though it's true, they're not doing it. But if I describe the exact same event, but I use this one keyword, then they're like, our lawyers tell us we are now contractually obligated to pay for your thing. So congrats on using the secret insurance word. And I think a lot of the teaching on prayer and thinking about prayer must have been centered around that. How do I get the deity over a barrel so that the deity has to do my stuff? Do I say things a lot? Do I get a lot of people in my camp? So they're all like, that guy seems religious and he's praying the right way. Surely the deity must honor that. Look, we all vote for that prayer to be answered. Or maybe the thinking is just be incredibly righteous and then God is more likely to do your stuff. I mean, it could be you can come up with out-of-context Bible verses that could even support many of these positions. I'm thinking of them right now, and I bet you are too. But it seems like Jesus' point here is you don't get to have God over a barrel. You think with your many words and your hyperactivity and you're impressing people that somehow the sovereign God who called existence out of non-existence is suddenly like, oh, fine, I have to give you that job. Okay, well, since you said it 12 times and you used the secret insurance buzzword, I have to give you a good parking spot so you can get in and out of target quickly enough to make it to the kid's birthday party on time. You got me. It just doesn't make any sense. The whole logical universe just implodes if that is the relationship we have with God. And I'll tell you something that's exploding rather than imploding is the length of this conversation. I've gone too long. I'm just going to cut this thing in half because we had a lot more to break down about this passage. The question of how prayer works is good heavens, one of the deep water things that you just can't touch on this topic in this way without wrestling with. And it seems like the text is asking us to think about it by verse eight saying, don't be like them because your father already knows what you need before you ask him. How does that work? Let's try and game that out tomorrow. Some of you have made the decision in your brains to use your computers to go to the internet to go to patreon.com/slash the TMBH podcast and support this program. Thank you for doing that, all goofing around aside. Seriously, thank you. It's a complete game changer for my family and I, and it really does make all of this go. So you're awesome. And also, as always, if you are part of the vast majority of this audience who doesn't do things like that or who doesn't support this program, I super like you, and that is completely fine. You are under no compulsion to do anything like that. You can be here forever for free because it's meant to be free. Grateful if you're able to help out, grateful if you're not, grateful that you're here, grateful that you're up for letting me just shoot straight as best as I can and think it through in a way that hopefully feels honest to me and maybe to you too. All right. Big question tomorrow on the whole prayer thing, and what does it mean if God already knows that in advance? I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do it again soon.