You've heard it said: “don't commit adultery”; but I say to you: “don't lust”. Wow! So He starts bringing it back to Inequity, which should give us a revelation of grace, because the Bible says: we all like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord has laid on him the Avon of us all (the inequity of us all).
In other words: Jesus doesn't just forgive you for what you've done; He forgives you all the way back to where your eye hooked to it. That's grace.
So you've got this concept of Faith: Tefillah; Teshuvah; Tzedakah. Tefillah, that's Prayer; and Teshuvah is Repentance. I'm going to define Tzedakah with the word itself, in just a moment.
Can anybody tell me: when was the first mention of the idea of prayer, in the whole Bible? Here is just basic Hebrew from Hermeneutic 101: It's called the Law of Firsts - so what's true the first mention, is true of every other part of it in the Bible. What's true of the firstborn is true of the whole family; what's true of the first fruit, is true of the whole crop; what's true of the first word, is true of the whole book; what's true of the first letter, is true of the whole word, okay?
For instance: Jesus came along by the fig tree, and He didn't see any fruit; He only saw fig leaves. Well, one of the first things you'd do, as a Hebrew Hermeneutic, is you would say: where's the first mention of fig leaves in the Bible? It's of course, all the way back in the Garden of Eden - so you can go look at those kinds of things.
So I started asking questions like: when is the first mention of Prayer in the whole Bible, and its much later than you would think. It's actually in Genesis 4:26; and it says this: “Finally the sons of Enosh called upon the name of the Lord”.
What the rabbi said about that, was that it took that many generations for people to overcome the shame of Adam and Eve, and to begin to address God again. So if you go look up that word 'called', this idea of prayer, this is what you see. You've got three pictures.
You've got three heads; three letters, three heads. First letter is the front of the head; second letter is the back of a head; and the third letter is an ox head, going into a yoke. This was the Hebrew idea of prayer, as found in Genesis 4. That word morphed into the word Tefillah; so you've got front of the head, you've got back of the head, and then you have an ox head going into a yoke. So that tells you a comic strip
What a Hebrew person sees is this (follow the pictures): that prayer is a “turning of the head, in order to face the one, who can bear the burden”.
Let's say it this way: prayer is being God-conscious. Prayer is being conscious of God, instead of conscious of myself. Prayer is any time I take my focus off of me, and put it onto Him.
In other words, the Hebrew idea of prayer had very little to do with words. As a matter of fact, Jesus was against long babbling prayers. Jesus said: when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the Pentecostals do, for they think they'll be heard because of their many words.
The longest prayer Jesus ever prayed takes like, 25 seconds to read; so it would have taken Him less to say it - yet Jesus could go off and pray for an hour. What was He doing for an hour? How could you pray for an hour, and not say anything? What was He doing? What would you do for an hour?
You would turn your head, in order to face the one, who could bear the burden; and then after that hour, where you were completely conscious of God, only then would you speak out loud, what the spirit of God had put on your heart to do. That takes a very short amount of time. We do it backwards. We speak, until we feel God. They would feel God, and then speak out of that - two totally different things. It's a turning of the head, in order to face the one, who can bear the burden.
Now Teshuvah/Repentance: it could mean a couple of things. It could mean ‘to change your mind’, or ‘to change your thinking’. It also was an ‘exile’ term. These were a group of people who were used to being enslaved by people; and the prophets would come to them, and they would say things like: Return - Teshuvah, Teshuvah, Teshuvah. In other words, there's a kingdom that's available to you, that has nothing to do with this. You can return to that.