The other day I was pondering the deep difference between our public and private lives – loving God in public versus loving God just because he is God. A couple of major ideas hit me around the same time.

The first was from Charles Spurgeon. He pointed out that Jesus taught his disciples not to preach but to pray, and it hit me that Jesus did this not once, but multiple times (Luke 11; John 13). That our call in life is not to be good preachers, but good pray-ers. This stopped me in my tracks and made me want to work on my prayer life more and more. Let it inspire you too.

The second set of ideas on this same topic hit me from another source. Tim Keller in his book on Prayer, points out that the seventeenth-century English theologian John Owen wrote a warning to popular and successful ministers:

“A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.”

To discover the real you, look at what you spend time thinking about when no one is looking, when nothing is forcing you to think about anything in particular. At such moments, do your thoughts go toward God? You may want to be seen as a humble, unassuming person, but do you take the initiative to confess your sins before God? You wish to be perceived as a positive, cheerful person, but do you habitually thank God for everything you have and praise him for who he is? You may speak a great deal about what a “blessing” your faith is and how you “just really love the Lord,” but if you are prayerless—is that really true? If you aren’t joyful, humble, and faithful in private before God, then what you want to appear to be on the outside won’t match what you truly are.

Just prior to giving his disciples the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus offered some preliminary ideas, including this one: “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. . . . But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen . . . in secret” (Matt 6:5–6).

The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life.