“Do not therefore be like them,
For your Father knows what things you have need of, before you ask him.
After this manner therefore pray you.”
So they need not think that they should wear down God's resistance, or try to ensure that He really did know what they wanted by their constant repetition, as though there were any doubt about the situation. Rather they should recognise that even before they begin to pray their Father knows precisely what they need before they ask Him. They are coming to One Who is fully aware of all their circumstances. Their praying should therefore be for the purpose of enjoying being in their Father's presence, in order to bring glory to Him, and in order to pray for the establishing of His Kingly Rule, the Kingly Rule of Heaven.
The truth is that our aim should not be for personal benefit at all (apart from spiritual benefit, and that kept until the end), for we should be recognising that, if we are walking with Him our Father already knows our personal needs, and has not forgotten them. Our concern therefore should be for His glory, in the happy confidence that He will certainly not neglect our interests. These words very much link up with and parallel Matthew 6:32, indicating that this passage is not just a later insertion, but an essential part of the whole narrative.
This idea of God's personal care for His own people occurs in a similar way in the Old Testament. The hapless know that they can commit themselves to Him, and He is the helper of the fatherless (Psalms 10:14). In a context of want and hunger, those who seek the Lord will lack no good thing (Psalms 34:10). No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly (Psalms 84:11). For He satisfies the longing soul, and fills the hungry soul with good (Psalms 107:9). Thus they can look to the Lord as their Shepherd, so that they will lack nothing (Psalms 23). And Mary could therefore cry, ‘He fills the hungry with good things, and the rich He sends empty away' (Luke 1:53). And this is because they seek the Lord, and love Him, not because of the urgency of their prayers for the things in question.
The question here is not whether they pray a set prayer, or whether they pray freely from the heart. What matters is that in either case it is genuinely from the heart. And He now goes on to emphasise this fact by giving them what might be seen as a set pattern of prayer. It was a prayer of such simplicity that it outshone all other prayers of the time, which had a tendency to be rather verbose and complicated. We are so used to the spiritual simplicity of Jesus' words and teaching, and of this prayer, that we fail to recognise how remarkable it all was. Jesus basically thrust aside all the waffling, and the ostentation, and the complicated theology, and made things available to the common man. That was not to say that there was no profundity behind it. Indeed the full depths of the Lord's Prayer have yet to be fathomed. But His remarkable ability was to be able to be profound and simple at the same time. Even a child could understand Him, and yet men would grow old in seeking to do so.
But we should note what its emphasis is. It is the prayer of a disciple. Its whole concentration is on the fulfilling and carrying forward of the purposes of God and on the desire to be fitted for that purpose. It does not include a prayer for ‘things' for the basis of it was that their Father was well aware of their needs for those, and would provide them without their needing to ask (Matthew 6:8; Matthew 6:25; Matthew 6:31). It concentrates on what is most important, the fulfilling of God's will and purpose.
‘After this manner therefore pray you.' We note here that the prayer is a pattern to follow and not just a prayer to be prayed. Jesus was certainly not saying, ‘just repeat this and you have prayed enough'. He was saying, this is the pattern that you should keep in mind when you pray. And there can be a danger that by simply being repeated by rote it might lose something of its power. On the other hand as long as it is understood it is in fact vibrant with significance.