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 may 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 My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers.
copyright 1935 by Dodd Mead &
“Prayer is not conquering God’s reluctance, but taking hold of
God’s willingness.”
Phillips Brooks