Again, I am sharing the devotional that I read this morning that really encouraged me.
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My Utmost for His Highest (by Oswald Chambers)
August 23
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 must 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.
