“And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” – Matthew 6:4, 6, 18
“Thou are not the holier though thou be praised nor the more vile though thou be blamed or dispraised. What thou art, that thou art; that God knoweth thee to be and thou canst be said to be no greater… For a man not to wish to be comforted by any creature is a token of great purity and inward trust. He that seeketh no outward witness for himself, it appeareth openly that he hath committed himself all wholly to God.” – Thomas a Kempis
“We are saved by grace, of course, and by it alone… But grace does not mean that sufficient strength and insight will be automatically ‘infused’ into our being in the moment of need. Abundant evidence for this claim is available precisely in the experience of any Christian. We only have to look at the facts. A baseball player who expects to excel in the game without adequate exercise of his body is no more ridiculous than the Christian who hopes to be able to act in the manner of Christ when put to the test without the appropriate exercise in godly living.” – Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines
As an enneagram type three, I tend to be motivated by acknowledgement from others and making a good impression. I tend to like others knowing about my accomplishments. Even if I know I shouldn’t, it creeps up on me almost subconsciously. “Being a Three and living in America is like being an alcoholic living above a saloon,” writes Cron and Stabile in The Road Back To You—and I would say that is particularly true of living in the Bay Area. But all of us have this tendency, to act better when we’re being observed by others. How many of us are kinder to strangers than we are at times to our own spouse?
Jesus says in Matthew 6:1, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” He isn’t saying, “don’t let anyone ever see you living rightly”—a city set on a hill cannot be hidden, after all—but he is saying, be careful if being seen by other people becomes too much of a reason you live rightly. It’s not that we oughtn’t care about rewards, but precisely because we ought to care about the right rewards, the rewards that matter.
Sometimes when God brings a particular sinful tendency to our attention, it’s helpful to practice a spiritual discipline that counters it, and one that can be helpful in this area is the discipline of secrecy. Quite simply, it’s when we abstain from causing our good deeds or qualities to be known. We do so with the intention of helping ourselves “lose or tame the hunger for fame, justification, or just the mere attention of others… we learn to love to be unknown and even to accept misunderstanding without the loss of our peace, joy, or purpose” (The Spirit of the Disciplines, p. 172). There are many ways to practice this: ask God to reveal areas where we tend to need acknowledgement or accolade; find places to serve that don’t require others knowing we’ve done it; be mindful to honor confidentiality; take a break from social media; discuss accomplishments of others rather than our own. I like how Willard puts it: “We allow him [God] to decide when our deeds will be known and when our light will be noticed.” As Kempis writes, it can bring a new kind of wholeness, intimacy, and purity in our relationship with God. It can reveal aspects of how we see our own worth. It can increase our trust in God to do the work in others or reveal things in his own time. It can bring us to experiences when we are actually more excited by the accomplishments of others than our own.
“And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” In the end, the longing of the performing heart is to be seen, truly seen, and this is part of the promise. Not only the reward, but the seeing of the Father. Sometimes, when Elijah gets upset, I hold him and say, “I see you, Elijah. I see you, I see you.” Your Father sees you. What is secret from others is in plain view before Him. That’s the secret of the whole thing.
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