And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matt 6:5–6)

As a young seminary professor, I wrestled with this passage frequently. I am not certain that the match is over, but I am certain that this is one of the many things said by our Lord that was intended to be provocative, difficult, and even painful. I do not remember opening my undergraduate classes with prayer, but when I became a seminary professor there was an expectation that we open classes with prayer.¹ After all, that is what Mr. Murray did, and the piety of his prayers was the stuff of legend. What could be the problem? In April Brad Isbell hit on some of the issues with public prayer at General Assembly, but even as he did he had to defend himself against the inevitable criticism that any such consideration might be interpreted as opposition to prayer: “Editor’s Note: The author is not anti-prayer, nor does he contend that the many prayers included in Reformed liturgies are excessive. The point of what follows is simply this: the dozens of prayers at General Assembly can become repetitious and seem perfunctory.”² These concerns get to the underlying issue of motive.

When our Lord warned against praying like the hypocrites, for example, the Pharisees, he was getting to the motive for prayer. Why did the hypocrites pray as they did? Jesus was crystal clear: “That they may be seen by others.” They prayed as they did, where they did, so that others would think that they were pious. Their interest and intent was not in communing with God, calling out to him earnestly, adoring him, confessing their sins, thanking him, and making their requests known to him.³ Their intent, their motive, their goal was to be seen by others as pious. They were, as our Lord said, “whitewashed tombs” (Matt 23:27). Their outward appearance was one thing, but inwardly they were nothing but the bones of the dead. They needed the grace of new life, true faith, union with Christ, and communion with God. They lacked the spiritual reality corresponding to the outward demonstration.

Doing religious things, good things, divinely ordained things, for the wrong reasons has always been a problem. In the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) our Lord instituted feasts, sacrifices, and solemn assemblies; but he also said, “I hate, I despise your feasts and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21). It was not the feasts, sacrifices, and assemblies themselves that he hated, but rather it was the unbelief in which the Old Testament church had come to perform them. The Lord instituted circumcision (Gen 17), but Israel’s spiritual problem was that they needed to “remove the foreskin” of their hearts (Jer 4:4; cf. Deut 10:16). Ultimately, as God had said through Moses long ago for the elect in the visible church: “And Yahweh your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring so that you will love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deut 30:6). The problem was never the ritual but the lack of the corresponding reality.

So it can be with prayer. I struggled with opening every class with prayer not because I am opposed to prayer but because I worried that I was praying in order to be approved by people and not out of gratitude to God and for his grace to us in Christ. I was praying, at least at times, because if I did not, some students might think that I was not pious enough. That, I judged, was the very thing about which Jesus warned. So, I stopped praying before every class session. Sometimes I opened class with prayer and sometimes I did not. After all, in the smaller seminars we did not always begin with prayer; or if we did begin the first hour with prayer, why not the second hour? If we prayed at the beginning of both hours, why did we not stop partway through to pray? If the first class of the day began with prayer, had we not committed the whole day of study to the Lord? In short, what are the rules, who set them, and on what basis? As you can see, our customs for prayer can be a little arbitrary.

Sure as shootin’, as my grandfather might have said, in those semesters, when I did not open every lecture class with prayer, I was severely criticized by some students in their anonymous student evaluations. For a time, I resisted, but the social pressure was rather strong. The incentive is to satisfy the complainers regardless of the merits of the case. The perceptive reader will observe that the most important evaluator is missing from this calculous: our thrice holy triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In succumbing to the social pressure to open class with prayer I became guilty of the very thing about which I had feared from the beginning: I was praying in order to earn the approval of mere creatures. Indeed, I resented being pressured to open class with prayer and my heart truly was not in the right place. We might even say that it was something of a crisis. After all, our Lord’s words are rather clear, “But when you pray, go into your room. . . .” That was his alternative to praying in public in order to be approved by mere creatures. The question here is not whether to pray but 1) why one is praying and 2) where one is praying.

Clearly there are times when public prayer is proper and necessary. It is an element of public worship. It is unthinkable to conduct a prayer-less public worship service. Indeed, prayer-less worship is oxymoronic. It is true that the minister may not always feel very spiritual, and it may be that morning has not been very spiritual—Lord’s Day mornings can be extraordinarily busy for a pastor and the devil does his best to disrupt worship and tarnish the glory of God—but it is his duty to pray during the service regardless of how his morning had gone thus far. It is also true that the Lord works in the hearts of his ministers and his people even as they pray so that the man praying is not the same fellow he was when he began.

A classroom, however, is not a worship service. That distinction was clearer at the Christian college in which I taught than it is in a theological seminary. In college I was not there in my capacity as a minister but as a scholar and teacher. In seminary things are a little less clear cut. I am there, in part, in my capacity as a minister. Indeed, I am called by my local consistory to this work. Nevertheless, the seminary is not the church, a point often made on campus. We hold chapel, we pray and preach, but we do not administer the holy sacraments; nor do we, as a seminary, exercise church discipline or send missionaries. We prepare men for pastoral ministry and we educate men and women for other avenues of service. With a few exceptions in our MDiv courses, our classes are typically populated by both ministerial and non-ministerial students, and a classroom lecture is not a worship service (even though, in them, students and professors sometimes break out into prayer and praise—the intense, prayerful study of the Word does that sometimes).

When I taught systematics (e.g., the Doctrine of God), where we were going to open the Word of God (often in the original languages), prayer seemed entirely natural. I do not think I ever wondered about opening class with prayer in those courses, but opening classes in church history with prayer sometimes seemed a little artificial.

Eventually I did find a modus vivendi. I realized that the students needed a little time of prayer between classes. I remembered that their experience as a student is different from mine as a teacher. I come from my study, where prayer and study go together like cookies and milk, into the classroom where it is time to get to work. The student, however, has been straining and struggling in class for some time before this class session convened. He is weary and needs the refreshment that prayer brings. I also realized that, even in church history courses, where the sacred and the secular are so intertwined, we need the Lord’s blessing. There is a lot to learn and sometimes some new or difficult concepts to grasp and some important and even powerful truths to consider and take to heart. We church history students need the Lord to help us to get to know our family history, to prepare us to be useful to God’s people. Without his blessing on our labors, our work is for nothing (Ps 127:1).

In Calvin’s prayer on going to school I found some help. Here is the first half of that prayer:

O LORD, who art the fountain of all wisdom and learning, since thou of thy special goodness hast granted that my youth is instructed in good arts which may assist me to honest and holy living, grant also, by enlightening my mind, which otherwise labours under blindness, that I may be fit to acquire knowledge; strengthen my memory faithfully to retain what I may have learned: and govern my heart, that I may be willing and even eager to profit, lest the opportunity which thou now givest me be lost through my sluggishness. Be pleased therefore to infuse thy Spirit into me, the Spirit of understanding, of truth, judgment, and prudence, lest my study be without success, and the labour of my teacher be in vain.⁴

For many years I have opened my classes with prayer. I pray for clarity, strength, and grace, that we might understand together what we study, that we might see how the church developed, why the church has confessed what she has, and that we might be able to give a good account to others of that history to the encouragement of God’s people, for the mission of the church and for the glory of Christ. I am glad to pray and blessed when I do. It is the chief part of thankfulness (Heidelberg Catechism 116); but the principal concern of our prayer must be the God who hears and answers prayer and his rule of prayer. There will always be those who favor the street corner display and the praise of men over the approval of God and the hidden prayer. So we leave them to the care and grace of God and go about our business serving Christ in the freedom of the Christian man.

Notes

1. This is a matter of custom, not policy.
2. Brad Isbell, “A Quixotic Joust at a Pious Practice,” Presbycast Pravda, June 10, 2025.
3. I’m following the well-known acronym prayer: ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication).
4. John Calvin, Tracts Relating to the Reformation, vol. 2, trans. and Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1849), 96.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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