How to Pray According to Jesus’ Instructions in Matthew 6

How To Pray According To Jesus’ Instructions In Matthew 6

You’ve probably read the Lord’s Prayer a dozen times without stopping to hear how strange it sounds when you say it aloud. It begins with family language — “Our Father” — and slides into petitions about daily bread and forgiveness as if Jesus has placed a map on your kitchen table and told you to follow it. In Matthew 6, part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives you a series of instructions about prayer that are less about ritual and more about posture: humility, sincerity, and direct communion with God. If you want to know how to pray according to Jesus’ guidance, this chapter is the place you start, because it strips prayer down to its essentials and then rebuilds it for the person who is actually trying to live a life of faith.

The setting: why Matthew 6 matters for your prayer life

You’re standing somewhere between the crowd and the mountain, and Jesus is talking to people who assume religion is performance. He’s correcting public life and private life at once, and in doing so, he’s shaping how you might approach prayer. The Sermon on the Mount gives you a moral imagination, but Matthew 6 zeroes in on practices — giving, praying, fasting — showing how they reveal the heart. When Jesus speaks here, he’s not inventing a new liturgy. He’s reorienting how you relate to God and to others. To see this clearly, read the whole chapter slowly, and notice how often Jesus returns you to the inner life rather than public display. See Matthew 6:1-4 for the opening move about giving, and you’ll catch the tone he uses throughout.

Jesus’ warning against performative piety (Matthew 6:1-4)

Jesus begins with a caution: don’t do good deeds so people will praise you. If your giving is mostly for applause, then your reward is the applause, not God’s pleasure. You can feel this, because you know how it feels to perform — an easy rush followed by a quiet emptiness. Jesus calls you to a deeper motive. The point isn’t that public acts are wrong, but that their spiritual value depends on your intent. The text says, read it with attention: “Matthew 6:1” and the verses that follow. Here, you get the first example of inwardness that will govern his instructions on prayer: the spiritual life isn’t something to advertise.

The place of solitude: pray in secret (Matthew 6:6)

There’s a sentence in Matthew that should make you pause: “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.” That’s Matthew 6:6. The image is deliberately domestic and private. Jesus isn’t romanticizing solitude as an aesthetic. He’s insisting that prayer is an encounter with God that, if it’s authentic, will not be staged. You’re not trying to model holiness for others; you’re cultivating a habit of listening and speaking to a God who knows you before you speak. If you’re looking for a technique, this is less about posture and more about place: the room, the closed door, the refusal to perform.

When you practice this, you’ll notice something subtle: prayer in secret changes your motives. The absence of an audience forces you to reckon with why you pray. You’ll either find yourself stripped of pretense or adapting your language to the silence. Both are revealing. Jesus assumes that you can bear the truth of your own heart and that honest prayer is more nourishing than polished prayer.

Words versus heart: avoid empty repetition (Matthew 6:7-8)

It’s very easy to believe that prayer is about formulas. People who heard Jesus were surrounded by religious practices that involved long, elaborate recitations, and he warned against that. Read Matthew 6:7-8 and you’ll find him telling you not to use “meaningless repetition” like pagan nations, because God already knows what you need. This is not an argument against memorized prayers — the Lord’s Prayer itself is given as a model — but a warning that recitation without engagement becomes superstition.

You’ll often be tempted to measure piety by verbosity. You think longer prayers mean more devotion. But Jesus reverses that. He wants you to speak honestly, even awkwardly. Saying the same words is fine if your heart is with them. Saying them to impress, to seem holy, to control outcomes, is not prayer at all. The requirement is sincerity. When you pray, make sure words are the servants of intention, not its substitutes.

The Lord’s Prayer: a model, not a script (Matthew 6:9-13)

When Jesus gives you a prayer, he does it sparingly and precisely. “This, then, is how you should pray,” he says, and offers what we call the Lord’s Prayer. See Matthew 6:9-13. It’s short. It’s communal — “Our Father.” It moves from God’s glory to human need, then to moral accountability, and finally to spiritual protection. The structure tells you something: prayer is not merely asking. It’s a reorientation of desire.

The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t tell you to mindlessly repeat these exact words in every moment. Rather, it gives you categories — praise, provision, forgiveness, guidance — that shape your petitions. If you pray only to request favors, you’ve missed that the prayer begins with the recognition of God’s character. Saying this prayer should rewire your thinking: you learn to place God’s name, kingdom, and will at the center of your petitions. It’s teaching you not only what to ask but how to order your heart.

“Our Father”: the scandal of intimacy

The first clause of the Lord’s Prayer is quietly disruptive: “Our Father in heaven.” If you come from a context where God is a distant judge, this phrasing will feel inconveniently intimate. But the family language is deliberate; it reminds you that prayer is rooted in relationship. The “our” is communal, and it’s inclusive in a way you might not expect: you are not the lone supplicant but part of a broader household. Jesus invited you into familial access to God, not a contractual transaction.

This intimacy has ethical consequences. When you address God as Father, you’re compelled to see others as siblings. That’s why the prayer moves so quickly to forgiveness. The relationship you have with God shapes your relationship to others. When you practice this kind of address, your petitions become tied to a life that honors the family of faith.

Daily bread and dependence (Matthew 6:11)

There’s something almost fragile in the line “Give us today our daily bread.” Read it slowly at Matthew 6:11. It’s not a grocery list; it’s an embodied practice of dependence. To request your daily bread is to admit that you do not have ultimate control over sustenance. It’s a daily discipline of trust, one that refuses hoarding and insists on reliance.

This petition teaches you an ethic of the present: not asking for a decade’s worth of provision but for today’s needs. It makes prayer a rhythm of small trusts. You practice dependency day by day, and in that practice, you learn to live with less anxiety about the future because you are learning what it means to rely on God for ordinary necessities.

Forgiveness as social reality (Matthew 6:12, 14-15)

The line “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” shows how centrally ethics and prayer are married in Jesus’ teaching. See Matthew 6:12 and the following note on forgiveness in Matthew 6:14-15. You can’t ask God for mercy while withholding it from others. The reciprocity is not a bargaining chip; it’s a shaping force. Forgiveness in prayer forms a community that knows itself as forgiven and therefore compelled to forgive.

This is difficult, because being asked to forgive often feels like minimizing your hurt. Jesus doesn’t deny suffering. He insists, though, that prayer will stagnate if you treat forgiveness as optional. The act of forgiving others is not simply to make you feel moral; it is the sacramental way you live out the reality you petition for — that you, too, have been forgiven.

Deliverance and spiritual realignment (Matthew 6:13)

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” That is the closing plea of the Lord’s Prayer in many translations; see Matthew 6:13. This petition reveals that prayer is not only for daily needs but also for moral navigation. You ask not to be tested beyond endurance and to be kept from the forces that would unmake you. It is a recognition of vulnerability and a request for protection that is moral as well as spiritual.

If you treat this petition casually, you miss its function: it’s a practice of asking to be formed. Temptation is not a one-time event but a pattern of choices, and praying for deliverance is admitting that you need help to choose rightly. It’s the humble admission that you cannot steward your moral life alone.

Fasting and prayer: the companion practices (Matthew 6:16-18)

Immediately after instructing you about prayer, Jesus addresses fasting. It’s not an aside. He links fasting to the same ethic of inwardness you find in prayer. Read Matthew 6:16-18 and notice the parallel structure: don’t fast to be noticed; fast in secret. The goal of fasting is not self-punishment or spiritual posturing, but a way of creating space to hear God more clearly.

When you fast, you aren’t trying to manipulate God. You’re clearing the table. You create a hunger that makes other hungers visible. Combined with prayer, fasting becomes a discipline that reshapes desires. It makes you less reliant on comforts that obscure your real needs and more attentive to the depth of your dependence.

Practical steps: how to turn these instructions into a habit

You can read Matthew 6 and admire it, then go on living with the same private disorganization you had before. That’s normal. Change requires practice. If you’re asking how to pray according to Jesus, start small. Choose a room, a corner, a bench. Set a time that is realistic rather than aspirational. Begin with a model — the Lord’s Prayer can be your skeleton — but then speak it into the details of your life: the people you know, the work you do, the anxieties that wake you. Pair prayer with fasting from something that distracts you — social media, an extra coffee, whatever pulls you away from noticing God — and see how being denied something mundane clarifies your requests.

A small daily practice of private prayer, even five minutes, will begin to reorder your motives. Habit is the slow way by which desire is formed. So don’t expect dramatic returns overnight. Expect incremental honesty: you’ll begin to notice why you pray, not just what you say.

Common questions answered simply

You will have practical doubts. How long should you pray? Where? What if you don’t feel like praying? Matthew 6 answers many of these indirectly. For length: Jesus doesn’t tie devotion to verbosity, so quality over quantity matters. For place: he instructs you to go into your room and close the door — privacy is key. For feeling: prayer is often a discipline when feelings are absent; you continue because practice forms affection. See Matthew 6:6 and Matthew 6:7-8 as foundational texts that answer these concerns. The point you return to is this: authenticity trumps aesthetics. You can’t fake the interior.

The ethics of prayer: how your prayers shape your life

A surprising thing about Matthew 6 is how moral it is. Prayer isn’t an escape from ethical responsibility; it’s a formation for it. If you pray “forgive us our debts,” you are invited to be a forgiving person. If you pray for daily bread, you’re nudged toward generosity rather than hoarding. Prayer becomes a classroom where character is learned. What you habitually ask for will eventually become what you habitually do.

This is why Jesus cares about motive. When you pray privately, your moral imagination is adjusted. Your petitions become habits of attention: you care for others, you notice injustice, you bear your own shortcomings without pretending they don’t exist. The moral life, then, is not separate from the spiritual life; for Jesus, they move together.

What Jesus refuses: showy spirituality and transactional bargains

Matthew 6 is full of “don’ts.” Don’t pray to be seen. Don’t use empty repetition. Don’t fast for applause. There’s also a subtler prohibition against thinking of prayer as a pros-and-cons list you present to a heavenly accountant. Jesus opposes a religion that equates visible performance with spiritual reality. He wants you to have an interior life that matches your exterior one. He wants coherence between you and the habits you cultivate.

This refusal is actually generous. It removes the theater of religion and replaces it with a demand for honesty. You are allowed to be unadorned in your conversation with God. You are also obliged to let that conversation change you in ways that make you more alive to others.

How to pray according to Jesus — a short, plain guide

You might be wondering for the third or seventh time: what does this look like in practice? Here’s a plain guide that puts Matthew 6 into steps you can try:

• Begin in a private place; close the door (see Matthew 6:6).
• Start with praise or an address to God’s name to reorient your desire (see Matthew 6:9).
• Be brief, honest, and specific rather than long and showy (see Matthew 6:7-8).
• Ask for daily provision and practice dependence (see Matthew 6:11).
• Confess and ask for the capacity to forgive others (see Matthew 6:12 and Matthew 6:14-15).
• Pray for moral wisdom and protection (see Matthew 6:13).
• Use fasting as a companion discipline to clear space and focus (see Matthew 6:16-18).

This list is not exhaustive, but it keeps you from turning prayer into either performance or a shopping list. It teaches you to be steady and small, which is how spiritual life often grows.

Common obstacles you’ll meet and how to work with them

You’ll meet resistance. Sometimes your prayers will feel empty. Sometimes the quiet will be oppressive. Sometimes you’ll discover that you pray mainly about yourself. Matthew 6 anticipates these obstacles by asking you to shift focus: from audience to intimacy, from words to heart, from spectacle to habit. When you meet a distraction, name it. When you notice self-centeredness, turn your prayers outward. When you find that private prayer is unfamiliar, return to short, honest sentences. The discipline is about showing up more often than feeling inspired. You can accept that and still be faithful.

How to pray according to Jesus — integrating prayer into the ordinary

Jesus places prayer not in an isolated spiritual realm but in the ordinariness of life. Prayer happens in your room and around your table. It’s integrated with daily needs and relationships. To learn how to pray according to Jesus’, practice short prayers between tasks, on commutes, before meals, and at thresholds. Use the Lord’s Prayer as the grammar of those moments. The goal is not constant verbalization but a continual orientation toward God. If you do this, prayer will become less of a performance and more a background posture that shapes how you meet the world.

When prayer feels like a failure: grace for the weak moments

You will fail at prayer. You will forget. You will pray selfishly. That’s part of the story. Matthew 6 doesn’t set you up to be perfect; it offers a way to return. The model Jesus gives is not a standard you must meet to earn God’s attention; it’s an invitation to a different way of living. When you fail, do not double down on shame. Instead, return to the simplicity of the Lord’s Prayer and begin again. The rhythm of repentance and petition is itself a kind of prayer.

How to pray according to Jesus — an invitation to steady practice

If you keep wondering what the right method is, remember that Jesus’s central demand is for honesty and intimacy. You are invited to a practice that is less theatrical and more domestic: speaking to your Father in secret, trusting for daily bread, forgiving as you have been forgiven, and asking to be kept from temptation. These repeated actions form you more than a single inspired hour ever could. This is, finally, the heart of the Sermon on the Mount’s contribution to prayer: it teaches you to live a life where your private conversation with God and your public behavior cohere.

Final thoughts: prayer as formation

Prayer, in Matthew 6, is not a checklist; it’s a formation. It’s how you come to desire rightly. If you want to know how to pray according to Jesus, let the chapter teach you to prefer simplicity to spectacle, honesty to performance, and daily dependence to frantic accumulation. Practice in secret. Use the Lord’s Prayer as a scaffold. Forgive. Be mindful of how your interior life leaks into your social life. If you do these things, prayer will become less of an exercise and more the climate in which your life grows.

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