5700 Rudnick Ave. Woodland Hills, CA 91367 (818) 346-6968 Home > Resources > Prayer Resources > When You Pray Go into a Room by Yourself PRAYER RESOURCES   WHEN YOU PRAY GO INTO A ROOM BY YOURSELF Maxie Dunnam Matthew 6:5-6, NEB   When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; they love to say their prayers standing up in the synagogue and at the street-corners, for everyone to see them. I tell you this: they have their reward already. But when you pray, go into your room by yourself, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is there in the secret place; and your Father who sees what is secret will reward you.   We began this adventure by saying that ultimately the Holy Spirit is the great teacher. God is the beginning and end of prayer. Since Jesus is the revelation of God, we can look to him as the revealer of a life of prayer and also as the teacher who has God’s unique instruction for us.   Because prayer was such an important part of Jesus’ life, it is no wonder that he had some strong directives about it in the Sermon on the Mount. He spoke about prayer on many occasions, but Matthew indicates the essential of his teachings were set forth at the beginning of his public ministry.   When you pray, go into a room by yourself, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is there in the secret place.   It is clear from this word of Jesus that prayer is a personal matter. It is the communication that goes on between God and me. The emphasis here is upon solitude.   Now there is a difference between being alone and being alone with God. Even in the hectic, crowded conditions in which many of us live, most of us are often alone. Jesus is urging us to choose aloneness, to find solitude for a purpose: to be alone with God.   If we are going to have a life of prayer, Jesus is insistent that we must go into our room, shut the door, and be alone with God. To be alone with God is creative, purposeful solitude. This doesn’t mean we have to be behind a physical door to meet this condition.   The emphasis is upon privacy and the deliberate effort on our part to be with the Father “who is there in the secret place.”   Jesus knew that the ultimate struggle takes place in the private recesses of the self. Our wrestling with “principalities” and “powers” (see Eph. 6:12, RSV) may indeed become a social or political battle. But we never get to the battle and stay with it unless we engage in the struggle within.   In our last insert we thought about prayer as relationship. We learned that we choose our name for God by what God means to us. In Jesus’ wisdom, he knew that our nature is such that when we are with others, with the exception of those we love and trust most, we are tempted to pretend to be less that honest, to play to our audience. When we are alone, we don’t need to pretend. So we must go further to say that not only do we name God as God is for us; we name ourselves as we are before God.   The American Baptist Evangelism Team has suggested a model that deals with personal decision for Jesus Christ, which also assists us in naming ourselves as we are before God.   In the illustration above, the person is the dotted line at the intersection of the private/group/institutional arenas. Personal decision for Jesus Christ, therefore, means accepting him in the totality of one’s private life, into one’s groups (particularly family), and into one’s institutional roles (as citizen or worker)   Our relationship with God is tremendously affected by the institutional and group realities of our existence. What we are as citizen or worker, what we are as mother and father, son or daughter, what we are as a member of a political party or civic club are powerful dimensions of the self we are as we come to God in prayer.   God cannot and does not relate to what we are not. I don’t mean that God can’t break in upon our lives in any fashion and at anytime God chooses. God does cut through our falseness, our counterfeit personalities, to bring us to judgement about our deceptions. Yet a living prayer relationship with God comes when we dare to level with God. When someone will not allow you beyond the very superficial levels of his or her life, there is little or nothing you can say. You only make “small talk”. Likewise, when we present only a fictitious personality to God, when we pretend something we aren’t, there is no real presence with which God can be truly present.