Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 6:8

"Be not therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him." — Matthew 6:8 (ASV)

Your Father knows — This truth is rightly made the ground of prayer in one of the noblest collects of the Book of Common Prayer of the English Church: “Almighty God, the Fountain of all wisdom, who knowest our necessities before we ask, and our ignorance in asking.” Compare Saint Paul’s statement, “We know not what we should pray for as we ought” (Romans 8:26).

But why then, one might ask, should we pray at all? Why “make our requests known unto God” (Philippians 4:6)? Logically, this question may never have been, and perhaps never can be, fully answered. As in the parallel question of foreknowledge and free will, we are brought into a realm where convictions, each of which seems self-evident, appear to contradict one another.

All that can be done is to suggest partial solutions to the problem. We bring our wants and desires to God for these reasons:

1. So that we may see them as He sees them, and judge how far they are selfish or capricious, and how far they are in harmony with His will.
2. So that we may, in the thought of that Presence and its infinite holiness, feel that all other prayers—those which are but the expression of wishes for earthly good or deliverance from earthly evil—are of infinitely little importance compared with deliverance from the penalty and power of the sin we have made our own.
3. So that, conscious of our weakness, we may gain strength for the work and conflict of life through communion with the Eternal, who is indeed a “Power that makes for righteousness.”

These are, so to speak, the principles upon which the Lord’s Prayer has been constructed, and all other prayers are excellent to the degree that they approach that pattern.

Partial deviations from it, as in prayers for fine weather, for plenty, and for victory, are yet legitimate (though they drift in a wrong direction) as the natural expression of natural wants. If repressed, these wants would find an outlet in superstition or despair. It is better for even these petitions, though not the highest form of prayer, to be purified by their association with the highest, than for them to remain unexpressed as passionate cravings or, perhaps, murmuring regrets.