Prayer— Battle in "The
When you pray, go into your room,
and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place;
and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly —Matthew 6:6
Jesus did not say, "Dream about
your Father who is in the secret place," but He said, ". . . pray
to your Father who is in the secret place. . . ." Prayer is an effort of
the will. After we have entered our secret place and shut the door, the most
difficult thing to do is to pray. We cannot seem to get our minds into good
working order, and the first thing we have to fight is wandering thoughts. The
great battle in private prayer is overcoming this problem of our idle and
wandering thinking. We have to learn to discipline our minds and concentrate on
willful, deliberate prayer.
We must have a specially selected
place for prayer, but once we get there this plague of wandering thoughts begins,
as we begin to think to ourselves, "This needs to be done, and I have to
do that today." Jesus says to "shut your door." Having a secret
stillness before God means deliberately shutting the door on our emotions and
remembering Him. God is in secret, and He sees us from "the secret
place"— He does not see us as other people do, or as we see ourselves.
When we truly live in "the secret place," it becomes impossible for
us to doubt God. We become more sure of Him than of
anyone or anything else. Enter into "the secret place," and you will
find that God was right in the middle of your everyday circumstances all the
time. Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless you learn
to open the door of your life completely and let God in from your first waking
moment of each new day, you will be working on the wrong level throughout the
day. But if you will swing the door of your life fully open and "pray to
your Father who is in the secret place," every public thing in your life
will be marked with the lasting imprint of the presence of God.
(Taken from Oswald Chambers
– “My Utmost for His Highest” August 23)