Day 05

“Prayer—Engaging in “The Unseen”

“But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6:6 NIV)

Jesus did not say, “Dream about your Father who is unseen,” but He said, “Pray to your Father who is unseen.”

PRAYER IS EVIDENCE we’ve engaged our will. After we have entered our secret place and shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. Gathering our thoughts is a battle of our will. The first thing we must fight is wandering thoughts. Overcoming our idle and wandering thinking is the real challenge we face when we pray privately. Developing our minds and concentration on willful, deliberate prayer is a key discipline. Having a selected place for prayer is a priority, but once we get there the constant pest 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 “close the door.” Choosing to shut everything out in our personal world before Jesus means deliberately shutting the door on our emotions and remembering Him. He is in secret, and He sees us from “His unseen realm”—He does not see us as other people do, or as we see ourselves. When we truly live in “the unseen,” it becomes impossible for us to doubt Jesus. We become more sure of Him than of anyone or anything else. Enter into “the unseen,” and you will find that the Holy Spirit will be in the middle of your everyday circumstances every time. Get into the habit of engaging with God about everything. Unless we learn to open the door of our lives completely and let God in from our first waking moment of each new day, we will be engaging on the wrong level throughout our day. But if we will swing the door of our lives fully open and “pray to our Father who is unseen,” every public thing in our lives will be marked with the lasting imprint of the presence of God.