The Secret Place

 The Secret Place

 

Matthew 6:6 But you, 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.

 

Today this aspect of the secret hit me out from this verse.  I believe that there is more here than just Jesus telling us to not be like those who pray out to draw attention to themselves.  I believe that He is giving us an invitation.  An invitation to something very special, the secret place. 

When I think of the word secret other words pop to my mind, private, intimate, special, hidden, protected.  If I take these words and put them with the invitation that Jesus is giving, I get the following, pray to your Father who is in the secret (private, intimate, special, hidden, protected) place. 

I believe that there is a connection here between us meeting with the Father in the secret place and all the way back to the beginning of creation.  In Genesis 3 we read of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, the implication being that He came to spend time with man.  God desires relationship with us so much so that He wants to meet us in a secret place just us and Him.  

In the modern, western, Pentecostal/Charismatic church we have fallen into a trap of elevating the cooperate gathering, and the bigger the better, to the place where we meet God.  I believe that is because of the emotional feelings that we experience in these meetings.  I am not saying that God isn’t there and that people don’t experience God in those times because He is there and He can be experienced there.  What I am saying is that we miss so much more of what God wants to have with us and we will never experience the depth of relationship if that is what we limit ourselves to.  

I would, for a moment, like to use a romantic relationship for an example.  Many people have found their romantic partner in a crowd place and through out the relationship had many good times in public, places around a lot of people.  The question I would pose is this, did the relationship grow in the crowds in public or in the places away from the crowds?  

It is kind of hard, actually impossible, to develop a really close, intimate, special relationship with someone in the crowds.  From my own experiences when I found a girl I liked and who liked me I would do everything I could to find time to spend time with them just the two of us.  When I was in college there was this girl, I liked so much that I would cut class to spend time with her.  I actually cut my science lab so many times that I forgot what time it actually met and didn’t go to that lab for the last half of the semester.  I didn’t care because my focus was on being with this girl. Spending that time getting to know her meant more to me than actually doing what I was supposed to be doing in college. Many a marriage has fallen to divorce because the husband and wife got busy with raising a family and life and stop spending time together by themselves. They saw each other and spoke to each other every day but they lost the intimacy because they stopped finding those times apart from everything else just to be in each other’s presence. Sadly this happens far too often in our lives as believers with our relationship with God.   

One last question; Ever wondered why you have felt God so powerful in cooperate gatherings on a Sunday and then feel like you are walking through a desert Monday through Saturday? 

Let us take Jesus’s invitation to heart and come to the secret place daily.