Secret prayer is the mainspring of everything in the Christian’s life. We may make excuses and say we cannot find time. But the truth is, if we cannot find time for secret prayer, it matters little to the Lord whether we find time for public service or not. Is it not true that we can find time for practically everything except getting into our closet and shutting the door in order to be alone with God? We can find time to talk with our brethren, and the minutes fly past unheeded until they become hours; and we do not feel it a burden. Yet when we find we should be getting into our closet to be alone with God for a season, there are ever so many difficulties standing right in the way. It would seem that Satan does not care how we are employed, so long as we do not seek our Father’s face; well the great tempter knows that if he can but intercept the communications between us and our God he has us at his mercy. Yes, we can find time for everything but this slipping away to wrestle with God in prayer. We find time, it may be, even to preach the gospel and minister to the saints while our own souls are barren and sapless for lack of secret prayer and communion with God!
What saints we often appear before people! Oh, the subtlety of this Adam nature! But when we go into our closet and shut the door, no one sees, no one hears us, but God. It is not the place to make a fair show. No one is present before whom to make a little display of our devotion. No one is there to behold our zeal for the Lord. No one is there but God; and we know we dare not attempt to make Him believe we are different from what we really are. We feel that he is looking through us, that He sees us and knows us thoroughly. If evil is lurking within, we instinctively feel that God is searching us; for evil cannot dwell with Him (Psalm 5:4). It is certainly a searching spot_alone in the presence of God. Little wonder so many beg to be excused from it. But, beloved, it is the lack of it that is the secret of much of the lifelessness and carnality which abound. The prayer meeting will not suffice us, blessed privilege though it be. "Thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray" (Matt. 6:6). How many there may be who have gradually left off secret prayer until communion with God has been as effectively severed as if for them there were no God at all!
We believe_yea, we rejoice to know_that God has His praying ones. He is never without faithful ones who cry day and night unto Him. Yet the terrible downward current of these last days is carrying the many of God’s people before it; and the great enemy of souls could not have hit upon a more deadly device for making merchandise of the saints than by stopping their intercourse with the throne of grace.
The lack of secret prayer implies a positive absence of desire for the presence of God. Such persons fall an easy prey to temptation. Satan gets an advantage over them easily. If a brother is not at the prayer meeting for a time or two, you can speak to him about it and exhort him. His absence is a thing you can see. But if he is absenting himself from the closet, that is a thing beyond your observation. You only feel, when you come in contact with him, that something is sapping his spiritual life; and who can estimate the eternal loss that follows the neglect of secret prayer!
"I missed prayer for a time," said one who had tasted of heavenly joys, "and then I missed it oftener; and things went on this way until, somehow, everything slipped through my fingers and I found myself in the world again." How different it is with those who watch with jealous care that the Lord has always His portion, whoever else may have to lack theirs.
Their going out, their coming in, their whole manner of life, declare that they have been where the heavenly dew has been falling. Their Father, who saw them in secret, is rewarding them openly. They carry about with them, although unconscious of it, the serenity of the secret place where they have been communing with God as friend with friend. Where this is wanting, it is little wonder that saints get as worldly as the very worldling. Little wonder the plainest precepts of the Word of God are brought to bear on them in vain.
Men of communion are men of obedience. It is men delighting to be near the king who are ready to hazard their lives to fetch him a drink from Bethlehem’s well (1 Chron. 11:17). And it is men of prayer who have moved the arm of Omnipotence in all ages. Also it seems that they who seemed to have least need to pray have been the very ones to whom the closet has been dearest. Our great Example was a Man of prayer. We read of Him rising a great while before day and departing into a solitary place to pray (Mark 1:35). Let us follow Him whithersoever He goes. If He needed the aids of heavenly power to help Him in the evil hour, how much more do we? Let secret prayer, then, be urged upon God’s people as one of the great essentials of spiritual life, without which our highest service will be barren and fruitless in the eyes of Him who looks on the heart.
Beloved brethren, let each one of us ask himself the question, "Am I delighting in the secret place, to plead with the Lord, to renew my strength, to have power with God and prevail?" If not, let us confess our neglect. God will forgive, and renew our spiritual energy.
(From Help and Food, Volume 31.)