Do not pad your prayers.

Matthew 6.7-8.

Right after Jesus taught his followers, in his Sermon on the Mount, to keep our prayers private, he added,

Matthew 6.7-8 KWL

7“You who pray, ought not babble like the pagans,

for they think they will be listened to

because of their many words.

8So you ought not be like them!

For your Father knew what need you have

before your asking of him.”

“Babble” comes from the verb βαττολογέω/vattoloyéo, “to stammer [one’s] words.” It’s about padding one’s prayers by repeating ourselves too much.

I didn’t grow up Pentecostal; I became one as an adult. The first time I ever heard a Pentecostal pray, I was a teenager, and was not at all used to the way most of us pray. I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” ’Cause a whole lot of us have the embarrassingly bad habit of babbling.

Father God, LORD God, we thank you Lord Jesus, we thank you. Oh Abba Father, we just wanna thank you LORD God, and praise your name LORD God, because LORD God, Lord Jesus, your name is great LORD God Abba Father praise Jesus. Oh Lord God…

And so on. Most people when they’re at a loss for words, stammer a filler word like “uh” or “um.” We Pentecostals swapped that out for a “LORD God” or three. So let’s see… that’s eight LORD/Lords, seven Gods, three Fathers, three Jesuses, and two Abbas; and we haven’t even got to the request yet.

Yes this is what Jesus is talking about. I’ve heard plenty of Pentecostals try to claim it really isn’t; that Jesus is actually talking about hypocrisy. There’s a myth Ovid recorded in his Metamorphoses about the god Hermes and an old man named Váttos; Hermes swore him to secrecy, then approached him later in disguise and offered him a bribe to spill the secret. When Váttos ratted Hermes out, Hermes turned him into a rock. That’s a clear example of hypocrisy, isn’t it?

But we don’t derive the meaning of the Greek word βάττος/váttos from this myth; we get it from Hesychius of Alexandria and others, who say it means stammerer. Jesus is talking about stammering. If he meant hypocrisy he’d have said hypocrisy; Jesus is never shy about condemning hypocrisy!

The lesson therefore is do not pad your prayers. Get to the point. Jesus demonstrates in the very next passage with the Lord’s Prayer, which is not a long prayer, not a padded prayer, and gets to the point! Whereas we think, like the ancient pagans mistakenly did, that short prayers are not serious prayers; we gotta make ’em longer. And we do not. Jesus showed us we do not. Follow Jesus.

Babbling and maturity.

Babies babble.

They’re learning to talk, so of course they babble. They make sounds and try to duplicate what they hear the adults saying. If the adults foolishly babble back to the baby, or speak in baby talk, it’s gonna get in the way of the baby’s development; you’re gonna wind up with a baby who babbles longer, or grows up speaking baby talk. So don’t do that. Talk like you normally do. When kids hear normal adult speech, they speak like adults way sooner than you’d expect. Startles some adults.

And I have found Pentecostals tend to babble because we hear our fellow Pentecostals doing it too. We hear Christians we respect stammer, and sprinkle “Lord Jesus Lord God hallelujah amen” all over our prayers, and we think it sounds holy and righteous, and imagine it’s how we oughta pray too.

But when you hear someone who babbles in their prayers, it means one of two things:

• This person is persisting in this behavior in order to show off how Pentecostal they are.
• This person does not pray on a regular basis, so they’re mimicking how others pray.

One’s hypocrisy; the other’s immaturity.

I’m not gonna be all that gracious towards the hypocrites. They know better, but they’re doing it anyway, and ignoring Jesus’s teaching so they can receive approval from shallow Christians. That’s gonna have consequences. But that’s between them and Jesus. The Lord rebuke them. Jd 1.9

I am gonna be a bit more gracious to the immature, because they don’t know any better, and because they might still lack the backbone to reject the behavior of older Christians who still babble. I wanna encourage them to do better, not smack ’em down for being spiritual babies. Like I said, babies babble. But we who are spiritual adults, need to speak like adults, and offer ’em gentle correction. Show people how to pray properly. Point to the Lord’s Prayer.

And remember babbling is what people do when they’re nervous. When prayer is new to us, and we don’t know quite what to tell God, and wrongly think our prayers have to be longer than one or two lines: Babbling’s gonna happen. We’ll stammer, and fill in all the blank spots of our prayers with junk. Sometimes they’ll be the more common filler words you hear in someone who’s bad at public speaking (“uh,” “um,” “er,” “eh”), and sometimes they’ll borrow the holy-sounding filler words they’ve heard Pentecostals use.

Fortunately, we grow out of immaturity. If you wanna get rid of those filler words in public speaking, you just gotta speak in public more often; you practice. Same thing with getting rid of those filler words in prayer: You gotta pray more often. No that doesn’t mean longer prayers. Keep praying short prayers, but more often. Don’t just pray at bedtime and over meals; throw up a short prayer whenever you have a spare minute. “Thank you Jesus” is a really short prayer, and there are dozens of appropriate occasions to pray that in a day.

Keep your prayers simple and regular, and you’ll quickly find you won’t need filler words.

Unnecessary length.

Pentecostal or not, plenty of Christians are in the bad habit of making our prayers unnecessarily long. We have this false idea in our heads that if we’re any good at prayer, we should be able to pray at length. That short prayers are for kids and the immature. That we should have a lot to tell God—even when we don’t.

I’ve even heard fellow Christians try to guilt us about this. “Y’know, if you can talk to your friends for hours about all kinds of stupid stuff, why can’t you speak to God, your loving Father, for at least as long?” Um… you kinda said why in your question; we talk to our friends about stupid stuff. I might spend 15 minutes describing this really funny movie I’ve just seen to a friend, but not to God—because he’s omniscient, remember? He’s seen it. He even knows all the lines I’m misquoting. Any jokes which went over my head, he caught.

I don’t have to explain stuff to God; more often he’s gotta do the explaining. I don’t have to inform him about stuff he already knows about. I don’t have to tell him how to answer my prayers, because his solutions are always gonna be better and bigger than mine. There’s a lot of conversational things which God’s divine nature kinda renders completely unnecessary, and therefore eliminates from our talks with him. And that’s okay. In fact isn’t it awesome how we don’t have to brief God about every little thing?

So I won’t have hours of stuff to tell God. Maybe 10 minutes. More often less.

But again, Christians feel that’s not enough prayer time, so we stretch ’em out. How? Repetition. And we have a really useful, holy-looking sourcebook which shows us how to be repetitive: The Psalms. Remember, Hebrew poetry works by repeating concepts instead of sounds, so all you gotta do is repeat the same idea in different words. And not just once, like we find in the bible: Many, many times. It’s in the bible! So Christians figure it must be okay.

God, please be with us.

Be present among us.

Have your presence be in this place today.

Go before and behind us.

Make your face shine upon us.

Comfort us with your Spirit.

And…

And yeah, God got the idea the first time. But notice I just went through six different ways of asking the very same thing—for God to come here. As if he’s not always here. And I could keep going! In my five decades of being Christian, I’ve learned an awful lot of synonyms for “God, come here please!”

Talk to anyone else this way, and they’d think you were senile. So why do we inflict it upon God? ’Cause fellow Christians do it too. Their behavior gives us the idea we’re supposed to pray this way too. That’s why we overload our prayers with poetry, metaphor, babbling, and repetition. If ever anyone brings up “vain repetition,” we object it’s not vain: We’re talking to God! We’re not babbling like pagans (or Pentecostals).

But we are wasting time. Including God’s time.

So stop it. Stop comparing the length of your prayer time, with the length of your other conversations with other people. Don’t compare God with your friends. We don’t have the same kind of relationship. Your friends can’t see into your heart: They don’t know what’s in there unless you tell them, or your behavior, good or bad, reveals it. Whereas God sees directly into us, and already knows what’s in our hearts.

We can actually spend hours talking with friends about everything but what’s in our hearts. We can talk sports, politics, movies, food, fashion… and not one word about our struggles with temptation, with spiritual discipline, with problems at home or work. If our friends ask about areas we’d rather avoid, we can change the subject—and if they won’t let us, we can lie and get away with it. We can have “friends” who don’t know us at all. Many of us do.

Can’t pull that off with God. We tell him nothing he doesn’t already know. What he wants, is to hear us say it. He wants our prayers to match everything in our hearts. When it doesn’t, that’s the very definition of hypocrisy. God wants us to be real with him—in a way we’re never real enough with anyone else. We’re not hanging out with him; we’re not killing time, nor talking about weather or trivia. We’re revealing ourselves to him. This way he can reveal himself to us.

So our prayers don’t, and shouldn’t, produce hours-long conversations like we have with our friends. By their very nature, God-talks are gonna be shorter. Don’t overcompensate, badly, under some delusion that time equals intimacy. It does not. Our struggles to stretch out our prayers aren’t growing us any closer with God. If anything, they’re just getting in our way.

Stick to the point!

When you pray, or when you’re called upon to pray in public, say what you need to say. Then stop.

“What if I need to say more?” Fine; say more. Then stop.

Yeah, this’ll make you uncomfortable at first. Because nobody else prays that way, and it’s more comfortable to conform to what everyone else is doing. But remember, you’re not mimicking them; you’re trying to be authentic with God. Resist the urge.

This may make your prayer leader uncomfortable. I’ve been in some prayer groups where my prayers were short, and my prayer leader tried to encourage me by telling everyone (but really me), “Remember people, don’t hold back. Say whatever God wants you to.” Well I did. But they were used to long prayers, and my brevity weirded ’em out. They couldn’t handle quiet. And I had to resist the pressure to stretch things out for their comfort.

But when I did this, people began to compliment me: “Your prayers sound so real.” Good; they were! But what these compliments also say is the padded stuff, the repetition we’re all used to, doesn’t sound real. Not even to the Christians who pray that way. It’s putting on a show, and we know it—even when we won’t admit that to ourselves.

Dropping the repetition also means our public prayers are no longer emotionally manipulative… but I’ll get into that in the next article.