To our regret and shame there seems to always be some sort of scandous besmudging on the movement of evangelicalism. Somewhere a pastor or professing Christian’s secret life of rampant sin gets revealed. And we all lose our collective breaths and our stomaches ache and turn.
The questions come. Why? How did this happen?
I remember hearing John MacArthur say,
“Nobody just falls out of a tree. They climb up in it, move around a bit, and then fall out.”
His point is obvious: this doesn’t happen overnight.
As a pastor who wants to be diligent in these things, I have wondered if there is not a common trait among these guys. I am sure there are more things in common, but I am willing to bet that where a secret life is present a secrete prayer life is absent.
In other words, I cannot see how a guy can be regularly pouring out his heart in praise, confession and petition to the God of heaven with a ton of dirt from his secret life under his fingernails.
This is very instructive to me. Even if I ‘feel’ like I’m doing good I need regular appointments in the closet of prayer. In fact, it is probably those times of particular blessing that believers are most susceptible to falling out of the tree. I most often bump my head on something when I am happily engaged in some type of thought. If I am not being personally alert and bending my heart in prayer then I am probably bounding ahead unaware of trouble. Prayer makes the heart ready to see sin by making it hate it. This is because prayer syncs up the believer’s mind with the will of God. It bends us low so that we may hear.
There a probably a million ways in which you could talk through how to prevent having a secret life of sin, but at least once on that list is having a secret prayer life.
(a book I’m enjoying on the topic of secret prayer is, The Hidden Life of Prayer by David McIntyre. I highly recommend it)