The One Who Was Watching Anyway

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from doing a right thing nobody can see.

It is not the tiredness of hard work. Hard work has an end and something to show for it. This is quieter than that. It is the tiredness of holding a line for the fourth year running in a house, an office or a family where not one person knows the line exists, and where nobody would applaud if they did, and where you have started to wonder, privately and without saying it to anybody, whether a thing that unwitnessed actually counts for anything at all.

I think of a man who has not touched a drink in eleven years and has never told anybody why. I think of a woman who keeps her mouth shut every single time her sister-in-law starts, and goes home, and says nothing to her husband about it either. I think of the person who could take the money and does not, and there is no one to tell, because telling would be the point at which it stopped being what it was.

None of these people feel heroic. That is what I want you to hear. They mostly feel invisible, and a little bit foolish, and they are so used to it now that they have stopped expecting anything else.

He assumed the room would be empty

There is a line in the Sermon on the Mount that I do not think we hear properly, because we have heard it so often.

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. (Matthew 6:6, King James Version)

We usually read that as an instruction about privacy. Do not show off. Keep it between you and God.

But read it again and notice the assumption underneath it. Jesus is not warning that God might miss it. He is saying the opposite, and He is saying it as though it were the most ordinary fact in the world: your Father is in the secret place already. He was not summoned by the door closing. He was in there.

That is a different thing altogether from being told your good deeds are recorded somewhere. It is being told that the room you thought was empty was occupied the whole time.

You have not been performing to an empty room, and the secret place has never once been unattended. Matthew 6:6 says the Father is in secret and sees in secret, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that from a sentence about prayer and makes it true about a Tuesday nobody watched.

The problem with an audience

Here is what I have noticed in myself and in almost everybody I have ever ministered to.

We do not actually want a reward. What we want is a witness.

There is a difference. A reward is something given to you later. A witness is somebody who was there at the time, who saw you do the hard thing, and who can say out loud that it happened. And the reason unwitnessed obedience wears a person down is not greed. It is loneliness. You are not asking to be paid. You are asking to be accompanied.

And I think that is why Matthew 6:6 does not say your Father will find out. It says your Father seeth. Present tense, in the room, at the time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to believe it.

You were accompanied while you were doing it, and you were never the only one in that room. Matthew 6:6 puts the Father inside the shut door rather than outside it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person feel the difference between being recorded and being kept company.

The reward is not the point, and it is also real

I want to be careful with the second half of that verse, because it gets misused.

Shall reward thee openly. People have taken that and built a whole expectation out of it: hold the line and God will eventually make it public, vindicate you, show them all. And then the years go by and nothing is made public, and now the person has two problems instead of one.

So let me say plainly what I believe and what I do not.

I do not know when or how God rewards what is done in secret, and I am not going to promise you a scene in which everybody finally understands. That scene may not come in this life, and I have watched people wait for it in a way that made them bitter.

What I do know is that the verse puts the seeing before the reward, and the seeing is the part that is happening right now.

You are seen while it is still hidden, and the seeing is not a payment that has been delayed. The written word says thy Father which seeth in secret, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that present tense rather than a promissory note.