A newspaper reporter once wrote about visiting a church to hear a famous Boston preacher. Later he reported in his column about the pastoral prayer. “It was the most eloquent prayer ever offered to a Boston audience,” but is it not true that prayer is to be offered to God, and to God alone?

Jesus once told a parable about two men who went to worship to pray.

If we had a helicopter in those days, we could have followed these two men as they left their respective homes. From our vantage point in the sky we would observe that the two men started out from different parts of the city but they seem to be going in the same direction. It would seem that the two men had the same destination in mind, the temple, seated high on a hill in the sacred city of Jerusalem. The two men meet at the temple …