Daily Manna · Day 352 · December 18
Prayer Behind a Shut Door
“But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”
You did something good last month, and nobody found out. If you are honest, that left a small ache, and you may have been tempted to slip it into a conversation so lightly that it would sound like an accident.
Jesus was speaking to people who had turned prayer into a show. They loved "to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men." So He tells them where to go instead, and the word He picks is an everyday one. "Closet" translates a Greek word for a storeroom, the inner room where a household kept its supplies, and Jesus Himself mentions its door: "when thou hast shut thy door." He is telling them to go and pray among the storage jars, in a room where nobody else can see. Then He gives the reason, which is about who is watching: "thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." The audience has not been taken away. It has been cut down to one, and He was the only One who mattered from the start.
The reward comes from Him, in His time, and that is exactly why you can never arrange it or hurry it. There is a quiet freedom in this. A life that nobody watches is still a life that God sees and remembers. The ache you feel when your good deed goes unnoticed comes from playing to the wrong audience, and a bigger audience would not fix it. Your Father has already seen it, and He has promised to reward it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 352 is When They Said (Psalm 122:1).