WHEN ye pray enter into your closed chamber, and there pray to your God who seeth in secret. I have been thinking about this today, having had for my morning portion Matthew 6:5, 6, etc. It is not any use to attend a public prayer meeting unless we can carry with us the savor of our secret communion with God, by which our public prayer will produce effect. Effectual fervent prayer comes from effectual fervent I will not let thee go “communion with our God in Christ in secret. The old-time hypocrites prayed at the top of the streets to be seen of men, and, as our Lord says, they were rewarded, men saw them. Did God see and hear? No reward from Him for of all sinners I think God hates the hypocrites most; they are abomination unto Him. “The hypocrite’s hope shall perish” (Job 8:13). “The hypocrites in heart heap up wrath” (Job 36:13).
What is an hypocrite? One who pretends to be what he is not. When our missionaries were translating the Bible into Malagasy, they could find no word for “hypocrite,” and knew not how to translate it. At last one of the natives said “I will tell you the word,” saying a long, strange word that I cannot spell, but it means a transaction that is perpetually going on in Madagascar, as our missionaries know to their intense discomfort. When a guest arrives the Malagasy at once welcomes him and offers hospitality as well as sleeping accommodation. He at once unhangs a clean mat and spreads it over the dirty, unswept, verminous floor, and the guest has to sleep on it, if he can. So that word the man said will convey the word “hypocrite” to our minds, for the man knows it is dirty, but covers it up.
Let us, dear readers, beware of covering up sin and thus “add sin to sin” (Isa. 30:1). Let us be willing to confess our sin and forsake it.
E. P. Leakey.