He has read that verse maybe four hundred times and every single time he arrives at the same wall.
Enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door.
He is twenty-six. He shares a room. The room has a door but it is not his door, because there is another bed in there and the other bed has a person in it who works a different shift and sleeps at times that are not the times he is awake. Beyond that there is a kitchen, a bathroom, and a hallway with a boiler cupboard in it.
There is no square foot of that apartment that is his, and there has not been since he was nineteen, and there is no realistic version of the next few years in which there is.
So the verse, which is supposed to be the tender one, the one about the Father who sees in secret, arrives every time as a piece of information about the sort of life he does not have.
He has never said this to anybody. He would not know how to say it without it sounding like a complaint about money, which it is not.
If you have got nowhere to shut a door either, come and sit down up here. Nothing on this page needs a room.
The closet in that verse was not a room like ours
Here is the verse, and then here is what the word actually referred to, which changes the whole picture.
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
The word translated closet means a storeroom. A pantry, a cupboard, the small dark place at the back of an ordinary house where the grain and the oil were kept.
Now think about who Jesus was talking to. Ordinary people in a small town, in one-room and two-room houses, with extended families living in them. Almost nobody in that crowd had a private room. That was not a feature of the architecture and it was not a feature of the economy.
What He named was the least glamorous space in the house. The place with no window, where you would not go for comfort, which you go into to fetch something and come out of again.
He was not describing a study. He was describing a cupboard, on purpose, to people who did not have studies, and the point of it is not the room. The point is that it is the one place where nobody is watching, because the whole passage around it is about audiences.
You are not shut out by your floor plan, and you were never asked for a room you do not have. Matthew 6:6 is where that sits, in a word that means a storeroom rather than a study, and the same Spirit who kept that word in the text is the one who reaches a young man who has been reading himself as excluded for seven years.
The whole passage is about who is watching, not where you are
Read what surrounds that verse and the theme becomes impossible to miss.
Before it: do not be like the ones who pray on the street corners to be seen of men. After it: do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. The subject running through all of it is audience. Who is this for. Who is meant to know.
The closet is a device for removing spectators, and it was the cheapest such device available to a peasant in Galilee.
Which means the actual instruction is: take the audience out. And a man in a shared apartment can take the audience out without a door, because his roommate asleep on a different shift is not an audience. His roommate is a person who is asleep.
An audience is somebody you are performing for. That is the whole definition, and it is about your intention rather than about the number of people in the building. You can be alone in a locked house and have an audience of four hundred in your head, which is a thing everybody who has ever prayed knows about themselves.
You have full access to the secret place, and it was always about the watching rather than the walls. He promised it, in the words about worshiping in spirit and in truth rather than on any particular mountain (John 4:23), and His Spirit does not require an architectural feature.
The paragraph that outranks the teaching
Before we go further, this outranks everything above it.
Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one here.
And because this article is about privacy, the most important sentence of the lot. The privacy Jesus is describing is about audience and never about concealment. Telling your doctor is always right. Telling your roommate is right. Telling whoever cooks in that apartment is right and it is basic courtesy in a shared kitchen. None of that is a failure of Matthew 6, and anybody who tells you otherwise has read a passage about who you are doing it for as though it were a rule about hiding.
You have always been free to tell the people who look after you, and it was always allowed, and it costs you nothing here. It is written into the same chapter, where the whole weight falls on a Father who sees in secret rather than on anything being concealed from anybody (Matthew 6:6), and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to keep secrets from a doctor.
If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.
So here is the turn, and it costs you nothing at all.
You are already inside the secret place, and it is already yours, and it was never a room you have to acquire first. Scripture settled that in a word that means a storeroom, spoken to people in one-room houses (Matthew 6:6), and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on the far side of a lease.
Seven years of reading that verse as a description of a life you do not have is seven years of a real and specific loneliness, and I am not going to tell you the apartment is secretly fine. It is crowded, and that is hard, and you have been carrying it without complaining to anybody.
What comes off today is only the part that said God was on the other side of a door you cannot afford. He never was. He has been in the kitchen with you and in the hallway with the boiler cupboard, and the audience you needed to lose was never your roommate.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice, wherever you happen to be standing. The standing to speak like this is yours in Christ and it is not issued according to how many rooms anybody has. Scripture is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely willing, and what God does in a crowded apartment, and when, is His, however He answers.
- Room I have never once had, you are not the door and you never were. The word in that verse means a storeroom, and He said it to people living in houses with one room in them. In the name of Jesus I stop reading myself out of the tender verse.
- Loneliness of seven years of that reading, you are heard and you are not God's word about me. The whole passage is about audience rather than architecture, and His Spirit is settling that in me tonight, and my roommate asleep on nights was never a spectator.
- Father, I have been treating a floor plan as the thing between us. I thank You that You named the cupboard rather than the study, and that You named it to people who had neither. Here is one sentence, in the kitchen, with somebody in it.
Matthew 6:6
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
