I've been learning a bit about the early Jews perspective on prayer and how it applied to Jesus' model prayer in Matthew 6. It's facinating to me. Sometimes I forget how important prayer is to the Christian in more than just asking for things and thanking God for things. I wanted to list a few perspectives the Jews had on prayer and how we can benefit from it.
Fist, they thought prayer should incorporate love and praise. When you go to God there should to be a sense of His worthiness and a loving adoration and praise, and they got this out of the Psalms. The Psalmist says in Psalm 34:2 , "I will bless the LORD at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. Unceasingly will I offer praise." The loving adoration of God. In Psalm 51:17 , "O Lord," it says, "open my lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise." They believed that love and praise was apart of their expression of prayer.
Secondly, they felt that prayer should incorporate gratitude or thanksgiving. Part of prayer was the offering of thanks, of deep gratitude. In fact there are many verses on this in the Old Testament, but the rabbis summed them up with an amazing thought. They said , "All prayers will someday be discontinued, except the prayers of thanksgiving." They were right! When the day comes that we have no more to ask for we will have everything to be thankful for. And so their prayers incorporated thanksgiving.
Thirdly, the Jewish people believed that their prayers should incorporate a sense of God's holiness, a sense of awe, a sense of reverence. They did not rush into the presence of God flippantly; they did not treat God as if He were a man. They went very reverently, they realized that when they entered into prayer they came face to face with God. Isaiah expressed this amazingly well in Isaiah chapter six when he said, " all he can say is, "I am a Man of unclean lips, and I dwell amidst a people of unclean lips; and I have seen the LORD." A sense of awe, a sense of holiness.
Another thing, the Jews felt that in their prayers there should be a patent desire to obey God, that you didn't pray unless your heart was really right. You didn't go to God in some ritualistic form, in some superficial shallow approach where you really weren't committed to respond to that communion with obedience. The whole of Psalm 119 affirms this over and over in all those verses it just keeps saying things like, "My tongue will sing of thy word, for thy commandments are right." In other words there was this affirmation that to respond to God was proper.
One of the best things that Jews had was a desire for prayer to be unselfish. The Jews had a sense of community that I don't think that we really understand, they had a sense of the national, they were a theocracy ruled by God, and the nation was essential. I think the very fact that Israel still exists as a nation and that there are still pure Jewish people today shows you how vitally they have clung to the preservation of that national identity. But they believed in the community, theirs were prayers that encompassed the whole, they were not isolated out to the individual. For example, the rabbis had a very interesting prayer, this is what they prayed, "Hear not 0 Lord the prayer of the traveler." What does that mean?
Now what is the one thing you pray for when you go on vacation? Good weather, right? The rabbis said, Lord don't hear that prayer, because that's one guy on one trip, he may be praying for a fair day and everybody in that part of the world knows their crops need rain. Lord, don't do something for somebody that messes up what needs to be done for the majority. Now that's a great perspective in prayer. Because most of us come to the Lord with a whole lot of personal pronouns, I, I, I, me, me, me, my, my, my. And we pray these isolated prayers, Lord, do this for me, Lord, I have to have this, Lord, my needs are such, Lord, I'm having this problem. And so when a Jew would go to prayer, a true believing Jew in the Old Testament he would say Lord, You do what advances Your cause among Your people, not what I want personally.
Finally, an element of their prayers was humility, humility. A true Jew was coming into prayer; watch this, to submit himself to the will of God. The greatest illustration of this from the heart of the truest Jew that ever lived is the very prayer of the Lord Jesus in the garden when He set aside what seemed to Him to be the most comfortable thing and said, "Nevertheless, not my will, but THY will, be done." That is the heart of the truest prayer. Lord, I'm here to do Your will, I want to line myself up with that. Prayer is not asking God to do my will it is bringing myself into conformity with His will. It is asking Him to do His will and give me the grace to enjoy it.
Sorry for the long post, I just thought that the jewish perspective of prayer was FASCINATING!