This week we will focus on preparing our hearts for our 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting. Each day we will focus on an aspect of prayer. We will ask God to soften our hearts and our minds to meet with Him and hear from Him during the 21 days we will spend in prayer together as a church.
Read Matthew 6:6 NIV
“But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
This verse emphasizes intimacy with God in prayer. By instructing us to pray in private, Jesus contrasts the humble, personal act of prayer with the ridiculous and prideful displays of the hypocrites mentioned in Matthew 6:5. The act of entering a room and closing the door symbolizes leaving behind distractions, worldly recognition, and self-serving motives – with a reward!
Our “reward” is often interpreted as the peace, guidance, and spiritual growth that come from genuine communion with God.
In his article, “Augustine on Heaven and Rewards”, Kevin Offner offers some great thoughts on the theologian Augustine’s definition of “the reward”:
Many Christians struggle with robustly exulting in the notion of God giving His children rewards, thinking that this necessarily or inevitably contradicts a theology of grace. Doesn’t any mention of rewards automatically infer human pride? Augustine’s answer always is the same: no, not if one is convinced that the abilities one has for obeying the Lord are all God’s gifts from Him in the first place. In his debate with Pelagius, Augustine’s oft-quoted refrain was “God, command what You will, and then give what You command.” Augustine understands “crowns” as God’s “crowning His gifts.” He says,
You he crowns with compassion and mercy; and even if your merits have preceded you, God says to you, “Have a good look at your merits, sort them out carefully, and you will see that they are my gifts” … When you depart from here you will receive according to what you deserve, and you will rise again to receive what you have achieved. Then God will set the crown, not so much on your merits as on his gifts. Whatever he has given you, if you have kept and preserved it, he will recognize.
What does your distraction free prayer room look like (either literally or figuratively)? How can you better set yourself up, with God’s help, for realizing the reward that Jesus promised?
