Well, today we're going to be looking some more at the Matthew commentary, the Historic Faith Commentary series. And today we're going to be looking at Matthew chapter 6, which is right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, which makes it one of the most important chapters of all of Scripture. There's so many important teachings in it, and we're not going to try to look at all of them this afternoon. I'm going to let you dig for yourself using the commentary, the insights that the early Christians give on it.
But I'm going to just hit maybe a few highlights, maybe some things you haven't thought about or that a number of Christians haven't. At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus talks about us not being hypocrites by doing things to be seen by others, whether it's alms giving or praying or fasting. No matter what we do, we should do it for God to see, not to impress other people. And a lot of you probably know that the Greek word that's translated hypocrites actually literally means actor.
And I mean, that was its normal usage at the time. And so when we do things to impress others, we're really just putting on an act. We don't really care about the person, the poor person that we're helping. We don't really care about praying to God. We're not interested in communicating with him. We're interested in impressing others with how spiritual we are or how loving we are because we gave money to a poor person or something like that. So Jesus ' message is, yeah, don't put on acts.
Now, again, we're all familiar with that. What's been lost so much in today's church is the importance of alms giving. In fact, that word itself, you really don't hear very much alms giving. It's something you associate maybe with Roman Catholics or something like that. In some circles, he would even have a bad term, I would say, if you said, well, not that you would want to advertise, but you were saying, yeah, someone was out giving alms and is like, " Huh? What would they be doing that for?
" It's something like I said, you think of Catholics, particularly maybe medieval Catholics doing that, but it's a perfectly good word that's used in the Bible. And Jesus didn't say if you give alms to do it secretly. He said when you do it, indicating that this should be part of our normal life, just like praying is part of a Christian life, fasting is none of those things. He didn't say if you do it, he said when you do it, in the same way with alms giving.
Now, when he talks in Matthew 25 on Judgment Day, how we're going to be judged, he mainly talks about things that would fall in the realm of almsgiving, like clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, providing drink for the thirsty, visiting someone in prison. Et cetera. So almsgiving is actually tied in with salvation. Now, we don't try to earn our salvation by I can buy my way to heaven by giving money to people, something like that. If it's not coming from the heart, then it's a total waste of time.
You know, Paul said, " If I give all that I have to the poor but don't have love, it profits me nothing at all. " Now I want to read to you, this is actually from Luke, not in Matthew, but it's a scripture to give us all pause. Jesus, this is his denunciation of the Pharisees. And he said this: " Now you Pharisees make the outside of the cup and dish clean, but your inward part is full of greed and wickedness. " Foolish ones did not he who made the outside make the inside also.
Okay, now listen to the next part, but rather give alms of such things as you have, then indeed all things are clean to you. So he said, " Give alms, and then everything will be clean to you. " I mean, that's the importance that Jesus put on giving alms and the early Christians, they emphasize it a lot, so much so that sometimes people criticize them for it, but they're just following the teachings of Jesus.
In his apology to the Romans, Tertullian said this, " Our compassion spends more in the streets than yours does in the temples. " In other words, Christians spend more money helping the poor, the beggars in the street, than you pagan, wealthy Romans spend on the gods in your temples or in making sacrifices. Now, they didn't give money to build or ornate church buildings or to provide handsome salaries to ministers and things like that. Tertullian gives a description of things that they did with their alms.
I'm going to just read this. He said they use them to support and bury poor people, to supply the needs of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons who are confined to their houses. These gifts also help those who have suffered shipwreck. And if there happens to be any of us in the mines, banished to penal islands or shut up in the prisons, for no reason other than their faithfulness to the cause of God's church, they are supported because of their confession.
So their alms went to practical things, helping orphans, shipwreck people, not necessarily Christians. Probably most of them weren't. But just, yeah, a total stranger who was shipwrecked had no means whatsoever. Christians would come to their aid. They would bury the poor who did not have the means to be buried.
And then, of course, any of their brothers or sisters who were suffering, either having been sentenced to work in the mines or to prison or to some penal island somewhere, then the church would support them and their families for that. I think the strongest testimony regarding the church's dedication to alms in the days of the early church comes actually from a pagan. This was Julian the Apostate. This was, oh, he was some relative of Constantine who took the throne some years after Constantine died.
And he tried to turn the pagan Roman Empire or rather the Roman Empire, which had become Christianized. He tried to turn it back to paganism. He was unsuccessful and he wrote to one of his friends and just his frustration of trying to get people to go back and worship the old gods, and it wasn't working at all. And he gave one of the reasons. He said, " Why then do we think our meagerness is sufficient?
Do we not observe the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead, and the seriousness of their lifestyle? " Again, he's writing this to a fellow pagan, not to Christians. Do we not see how this is done the most to advance their cause? The godless Galileans, talking about Christians, not only take care of their own poor, but ours as well. And like I said, he's saying this out of frustration, you know, and he failed.
He was not able to get the Roman people to go back to pagan Christianity. I mean, to pagan worship. But unfortunately, a lot of paganism did get into the church, and so you did end up sometimes with a kind of pagan Christianity was the downside of what happened after Constantine. Now, why almsgiving fell into disfavor? Why? Like I say, you don't hardly hear the term very much in church nowadays, is because during the Middle Ages, it did become somewhat mechanical.
You had wicked people, primarily the wealthy, I mean, who murdered, who robbed and stole and did all kinds of things. But then they would take this wealth. Some of it was stolen money and they would give some huge donation to the church, or they would go out and give money to the poor in the streets, and they might get an actual indulgence from the church saying this, you know, remitted them so many years from purgatory or whatever. So you got this idea, oh, you could buy your way into heaven by by giving alms.
Go out and sin, but yeah, just go give alms and that'll make everything okay. And that was very wrong. But Luther then overreacted and said, well, giving alms has nothing to do with salvation. It affects your salvation in, you know, no way at all. And it actually, like I said, giving alms almost had a negative connotation to it. And so, like I say, it's a term you don't hear, but we should be hearing because Jesus talked about it and it's one of his commandments.
He said, " If you want to be clean, give alms, and then you will be clean. " Again, not mechanically, he's going to have to be out of love. Let's move on to what Jesus said about prayer in Matthew 6. In verse 6, He said, " When you pray, enter into your closet and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. " Now, I've been asked a number of times, does that mean it's wrong then to pray out loud in church?
If we're to pray in secret where others are not to see us, well, then when we pray in church, people do hear us and see us. Well, I was curious what the early Christians had to say on that, and they definitely prayed out loud in church. It was part of Christian worship, and you do see that in a number of places in Acts where Christians pray with other Christians in groups. So, it's not wrong, but we still have to take into account what Jesus said.
And we are, I think, very prone when we pray in church, or at least some people are, that their prayer is affected because they are being heard. And it's easy to, you know, make it real long to be impressive or maybe real loud. I'm going to read to you what some of the early Christians said. Cyprian said this: " When we pray, we should let our speech and petition be under discipline, observing quietness and modesty. We should remember that we are standing in God's presence.
We must please the divine eyes with both the posture of our body and the volume of our voice. For it is characteristic of a shameless man to be noisy with his cries. On the other hand, it is fitting for the modest man to pray with moderated petitions. In fact, in his teaching, the Lord has told us to pray in secret, in hidden in remote places in our very storage closets, which is best suited to faith.
And John Chrysostom said this, " Let us then not make our prayer through the gestures of our body or by the loudness of our voice, but by the earnestness of our mind. Let us not do it with noise and clamor and for display, such that we even disturb those who are near us. Rather, let us pray with all modesty, with contrition of the heart and with inward tears. So I know in some circles today, it is considered really spiritual that when you pray to shout, to be extra boisterous and that sort of thing.
And I'm not going to say that's always out of place. It would be better, I think, to be maybe somewhat boisterous than to pray in a dead manner. But I think because we don't have kings and rulers like that in society today, we don't appreciate what proper decorum would be before a king. If someone went before a king with a petition, it would have been a strange person who would have been shouting and screaming and gesticulating and doing all those sort of things. No, they would have come very modestly and contrite.
And that's how the early Christians generally approved of prayer to do it with modesty, showing respect that we are standing before the Almighty, our king. Instead of talking to him like he's the guy over the fence and we have the right to scream and yell at him or even pray in ways that we wouldn't want someone to talk to us, but we talk to God in that way because we've been taught in our churches, " Oh, that's spiritual. If you don't do it that way, well then you're not really praying.
" Well, that's not how the early Christians saw it at all. Now, in verses 7 and 8 of Matthew 6, Jesus talked about vain repetition. I'm going to just comment on this for a second. He said, " When you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the Gentiles do. " So the early Christians understood vain repetition to consist of two types of things. One was making vain or frivolous petitions, praying about things we shouldn't be praying about, and then using repetitive wordiness.
And that first one, praying about vain things, foolish things, again, is crept into our churches today. In a lot of churches, it's viewed that the more spiritual you are, the more frivolous things you pray about. I mean, you know, your dog, your cat, just little tiny things that's supposed to show that you have this intimate relationship with God. Well, the early Christians said, " No, that's how the Gentiles pray.
" They pray about all of these vain kind of frivolous things instead of praying about the deep, important, eternal things that Christ wants our focus to be on the kingdom of God. And he said, you know, put first the kingdom, seek first the kingdom, these other things shall be added. And so if our prayers are mainly about these other things, that that's what we're praying about all the time, it would seem like the kingdom is probably not the first thing in our hearts.
So don't imagine that that is a sign of being spiritual, that, oh, you have such a close relationship with God that you can pray about the most frivolous things. Again, I'm not trying to make a rule as to, you know, I'm not saying it's wrong to pray about a dog who's injured or something like that. That's not what I'm implying.
I'm just saying, yeah, let's be careful that we aren't being vain by putting before God things that are so trivial that when we're approaching the universal ruler, the king of the entire universe, that maybe our minds should be on higher things. And then as far as wordiness, yeah, the length of the prayer again doesn't make you spiritual, which so many people think that, wow, this man prayed for an hour and that means he's really spiritual. That is in public. In your prayer closet, sure.
When no one's listening, pray as long as you want. And that's a sign of what you're sincerely praying about. In public, like I say, it's a different thing when you go real long. Is this really because you have so much on your heart before God or are you praying to impress other people? One of the early Christians said, " We should indeed pray often, but in brief form.
" And so that's something that I've taken to heart of trying to pray often throughout the day, shorter petitions, but kind of keeping a short lead between me and God that I don't go very long during the course of the day without prayers. They may be short prayers, but where I'm constantly in touch with God rather than focusing just on long prayers. Again, it's very good to have a prayer hour, a devotional time where you do spend more time in prayer.
But continual prayer throughout the day, I would say, is even more important. And after saying that, Jesus said, " Therefore pray in this manner, " and He gave His disciples what we know today as the Lord's prayer. Now, it's interesting when he said pray in this manner, he then, you might think, oh, well, then he gave certain guidelines. Remember to do this, remember to do that. He did give guidelines before he gave the Lord's prayer about, you know, not using vain repetition, for example.
But then he gave us an actual prayer and he said to pray like this. It wasn't... I'm sorry, he didn't say pray like this. He said, " Pray in this manner. " That's a command, not a suggestion. And yet, so much of my life, I was taught that we should not pray the Lord's prayer. As most of you know, I grew up a Jehovah's Witness and they called it not the Lord's Prayer, but the model prayer. And they said, it's a model of the things that we should pray about.
You shouldn't actually pray those exact words, but you should use those things as a model to base your prayers on. Well, at least they did use it as a model, and I did try to model my prayers after the Lord's prayer. Then in evangelical circles, where sometimes they will pray the Lord's prayer, I found very quickly that it was viewed as unspiritual. You're praying the Lord's prayer. In fact, often people would say, " That's not the Lord's Prayer, " and they would go to John 17.
We'll see, that's the Lord's prayer when he prayed. Well, yes, what we call the Lord's prayer isn't necessarily what he prayed. It might have been. It's what he told us to pray. It's called the Lord's Prayer because it's the prayer that the Lord Jesus Christ gave to us and said, " Pray in this manner, " or " Pray this way. " When His apostles, and it was a different occasion, recorded in Luke, they said, " Teach us to pray.
" Again, He gave them the Lord's prayer in just a little different words than what He gave in the Sermon on the Mount, but essentially the same thing. So he was serious to pray this way. And the early Christians would pray the Lord's prayer at least three times every day. I mean, the whole congregation, this was a general practice. So throughout that day, that petition would be being offered up by hundreds of thousands of Christians all over the world in different time zones at different times.
So it was continually being offered because they realized that this was a prayer inspired by the Holy Spirit. It's the only prayer when we pray this, we know every single word we are saying is what God wants to hear. It's things we should be praying about, and it's directly from Jesus ' own mouth. Our own prayers, and certainly we would not want to limit our prayer life to the Lord's prayer. That would be a shallow prayer life, or I would say an inadequate one.
But we should make sure, at least several times a day, we are praying the actual Lord's prayer because this has been my observation. And just think about this next time you're in church. Listen to the prayers that are given on Sunday morning. I don't usually sit and try to take note because I'm concentrating on the prayer. But the times that I have, I have noticed that I would say as a general rule, not even one of the things mentioned in the Lord's prayer is ever prayed about.
We don't pray about a single one of those things. And this is what Jesus said we should be praying about. And then we're afraid, like to say, to pray the actual Lord's prayer. And so those things don't get prayed about at all. I would say in a lot of churches, the things that he listed probably don't get prayed about at all by the average Christian. And they're praying about all of these things, often very trivial things, none of the things that Jesus told us we should pray about.
So don't imagine you're being spiritual by refusing to pray the Lord's prayer. You're actually being disobedient to Jesus Christ. But again, our prayer life should grow where we make requests other than what's in the Lord's Prayer. It's hard to make intercessory prayer for special needs, to pray for the sick, et cetera, if we don't pray beyond the Lord's prayer.
Now, in there, there are a number of petitions, and I'm not going to go through any of them, except the one that to me was maybe the most significant, something I had not known before reading the early Christian writings. And that is the petition, " Give us this day our daily bread. " Now what I didn't know, and I really wouldn't have had any way to know it, was Jesus actually did not say that. He did not say, " Give us this day our daily bread.
" Now, when I pray the Lord's prayer today, and I try to pray it several times a day, I'll be honest, I always say, " Give us this day, our daily bread, " because I have memorized it that way, and there's nothing wrong with that petition. There's nothing wrong whatsoever with it. But Jesus actually told us to pray about something a little bit more significant. Actually, Jesus did not say to pray for our daily bread. The word that he used in Greek was Epiousion.
I say in Greek, he probably gave the sermon on the Mount in Aramaic. It's possible he gave it in Greek. There were a lot of Greek-speaking Jews in the area of Galilee, but probably he gave it in Aramaic, but he may have used, he may have been the one who coined the Greek word as well, because like I say, he gave this prayer at least on one more occasion, and I'm guessing probably lots of occasions.
And it is a word that, like I say, was coined by Jesus or by the Holy Spirit because it doesn't exist anywhere else in Scripture. Origen, who was extremely learned, said he was not able to find the word anywhere in secular literature. It's not in the Septuagint. Now, when I said he coined it, he coined it by forming or putting together two Greek words. One is epi, which is a preposition it means over, above, on. It has quite a few meanings.
And then he combined that with Ousia, which means substance or nature or essence. So what that combination means above ordinary nature, more than nature, more than natural, supernatural. I'm not sure. Like I say, it's an especially coined word. So what would supernatural or epiousion bread mean? Well, most of the early Christians understood this to be talking about Jesus Himself. He is the bread of life. And Jesus said there in John that unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood, we have no life in ourselves.
He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. So they're assuming Epiousion bread would refer to Jesus Himself. That's who we need to feed on every day. And maybe he's also referring to communion as well in which we partake of Jesus in some kind of way when we partake of communion. So why do our Bible say daily bread? Well, it goes back really far to the days of the early church. And it goes back to when they translated the New Testament into Latin.
As I said, this is a word that the Holy Spirit coined, Epiousion. So when they were trying to translate it into Latin, they didn't know how to translate it. They didn't know the meaning of the word. And so somebody, I don't know who decided to put daily. Give us this day our daily bread. And that's how the old Latin Bibles read. And so both Tertullian and Cyprian who were using the old Latin, they say daily bread.
And so they talk about the bread that we eat each day when they discuss this, but then they also talk about the greater meaning of it referring to Jesus Christ. Because they would have been around Greek-speaking people as well and were aware of the other use there. Now, Jerome, when he translated the Latin Vulgate, he decided to split the difference. And so I think it's in Matthew. He translates it as super substantial, more than substantial, more than substance, basically epiousion.
And he created his own Latin word to translate that. And then, I believe in Luke, he used it, he just left it as daily the way people who use Latin were used to. But somehow it got used to being prayed the Lord's prayer with daily, and certainly in English, that's how it was prayed for. So, we've all come down to that. And when they translated the Bible freshly from Greek, and their whole thing was, yeah, instead of going to the Latin Vulgate and translating from Latin, we're going to go to the original Greek.
I'm talking about Tyndale and Luther and all of those people. Actually, I don't know how the Lutheran Bible reads here in the Lord's Prayer, but yeah, Tyndale and the others, they went with daily. That's what the King James has. And again, all these translators today, and I don't blame them. If I were doing a translation, I would put daily as well, because, well, there isn't an English word. You're going to have to make up something, and it would confuse everyone.
By now, everyone knows the Lord's prayer using, give us this day, our daily bread. But when you pray that, just remember that the bread he's probably talking about is himself that we need every day. Okay, what about lead us not into temptation? Would God actually lead us someplace to cause us to do wrong? I think most of us know, no, that can't be the meaning. And the early Christians, they all confirmed this, that he's not saying that God would lead us.
It's Satan who would lead us into temptation, but we pray this because Jesus wants us to be dependent and to be mindful of our dependence on God's protection, that Satan wants to stumble us. He wants to tempt us, that we are going to stumble and fail every day, unless we have God's protection. So we can think of it as Him leading us into temptation, I mean, if that helps. But the point is, without His help, we're going to be led into it by Satan and by humans and by demons and things like that.
Okay, at the end of the Lord's Prayer, He says it says, " Forgive us our sins as we forgive others, " telling us in the prayer itself that we don't have any right to ask for forgiveness of our sins if we haven't forgiven others their sins. And if we've only partially forgiven them, that's all we can ask for for our sins.
And at the end of it, just to make sure that that point didn't get overlooked, this is outside the prayer, but Jesus says, " For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. " Now, it pains me so much that today, so many Christians have absolutely no hesitation to just absolutely contradict Jesus Christ.
No, they say when you invite Jesus in your heart, when you get saved, every sin you've ever committed is forgiven, and that's true. And every sin you're going to commit in the future is forgiven at that moment. That is not true. If that were true, then what Jesus just said is not true. How can it be that our sins will not be forgiven if we don't forgive others if we've already been pre-forgiven?
If all of our future sins have already been forgiven, then it is not true that unless we forgive others, our Heavenly Father will not forgive us. So let's not contradict Jesus Christ. And this isn't me saying this. I mean, the early church clearly understood that this was a life and death matter. I'm talking about eternal life, eternal death, that if we do not forgive others, that God will not forgive us our sins.
In fact, the parable of the unforgiving servant, Jesus shows it goes even further that when the servant went before the king or his master, there's actually a couple of different parables and begs for forgiveness and the ruler or the master forgives him all of his debts. I think that would picture what happens at our baptism when we are first converted, when we first become a Christian. All of our past sins are forgiven.
All right, then that servant who was forgiven, he went out to a fellow servant who owed him just a little bit of change and had him dragged off to prison until he could pay it. Well, yeah, then his fellow servants went and told the master what he did. And the master then took him and threw him in prison until he paid back all that had been previously forgiven. So Jesus would indicate that even the forgiveness we get in our baptism is perhaps conditional.
I mean, if we are going to turn around and be unmerciful and unforgiving ourselves, that, yeah, future sins, we can't expect forgiveness, and God has the right to reinstate the past ones. So the message is, forgive, forgive, forgive. The last part of chapter six, Jesus talks about storing up heavenly, earthly treasures and about a right view of material things. A lot of this isn't new teaching. A lot of it, I'm going to just leave the commentary to share with you what the early Christian insights were on that.
I did want to mention this, that because there's a lot of misunderstanding today on what Jesus is talking about when he says, " Don't store up treasures, " because the English word " treasure " has changed meaning. The Greek word is actually thesaurus, and I may be mispronouncing that, which meant not what we think of as a treasure. It meant a storehouse. It could be where you stored grain. For example, it could be a barn, a storage closet. It's where things were stored.
And in English, originally, that's what treasure meant. It meant a place of storage, or what later would be known as a treasury, a place where you stored things. And eventually in English, then treasure came to mean the things that were actually stored there. So we now, in modern-day English, in the 21st century, we think of treasure as, you know, a bunch of gold or diamonds or jewels or money, whatever that is, where Jesus is talking about storehouses.
Now, the significance of that is that some Christians have the idea, oh, well, if I don't have any savings, if I don't have any bonds or anything like that, then I have fulfilled what Jesus said. Well, not necessarily at all. Do you have closets with things in it? Do you have attics? Do you have cellars? Do you have a mini barn out in your yard? Do you have storage buildings? Jesus isn't saying it's wrong to have any of those things. Otherwise, we could own nothing at all.
Now, some Christians, early Christians, you know, didn't own anything. I'd say the apostles probably had no kind of storehouse whatsoever, didn't own anything except the clothes on their back or maybe just a small parcel. And Jesus would certainly recommend that as a way of life. But the point he's trying to get across is he says, don't store up treasures on earth. Don't store up, you know, storehouses here on the earth. Don't accumulate a bunch of storehouses of things.
No matter what's in there, because the illustration he gives, he says where rust consumes. So he's talking about like equipment, machinery, where things rust. He says where moth consume. Again, he's talking about clothes there, you know, that moth can get into and that's that sort of thing. So it's, you know, just accumulating things here on the earth. He says, store up treasures in heaven. This goes back to alms giving.
That's how we store up treasures in heaven by giving to others from our material possessions, sharing with others, rather than just seeing accumulating goods for ourself. And so there isn't like a magical line, oh, if I don't have a bank account, then that means I'm okay. But no, I have all of this wealth, whether whatever it is, land, machinery, equipment, clothes, I mean, you name it. Jesus isn't giving us an absolute, we cannot own anything.
He's just saying, make sure where you're accumulating is in heaven, because that's eternal. Everything you put here on the earth will be gone the minute you die. And if you haven't been storing it up in heaven, then there's going to be eternal consequences to it. So again, alms giving is tied in with salvation. We can't mechanically earn salvation by giving to others. But if we don't share with others, then obviously we don't have love if we keep everything for ourselves.
So I'm going to stop right there with Matthew 6. I'll let you discover the other insights of the early Christians on your own by, again, going to the Matthew commentary.