The deepest and most meaningful communion we have with God is when we enter into the fellowship of solitary prayer in the secret place. I call it the inner chamber. Jesus understood the importance of solitude. “Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed” (Mark 1:35).

When you enter your own inner chamber, notice that Jesus suggests you “shut your door,” (Matthew 6:6). How good are you at shutting doors? It’s a very effective, yet little practiced method to leave the rest of the world outside. I know young parents who mistakenly think they have to let their little ones barge in on them whenever and wherever they like, without restriction. That’s a sure path to insanity.

Shut your door and it will fulfill its purpose, which is to prevent any interference and to enforce strict privacy. Along with the plain old door to our inner chamber, other “doors” we must shut include the power buttons on the television, computer, phone, iPod…you get the picture. That means turning them off, not merely letting them hibernate only to wake up and elbow their way into our private sessions with the Master.

It may be that we can measure the depth of our love for Christ by how “interruptable” our time with Him is. I often wonder if Christ looks at the array of techie devices sprawling across our desks and asks, “Do you love Me more than these?”

Your time in the inner chamber is the most precious time you have on earth. It is all that will prepare and qualify you for doing business in the public place. If you do not serve Christ behind closed doors in the inner chamber, you seriously stunt your ability to serve Him in the public marketplace, whether your marketplace is your family at home, or work outside the home, or even service to the church.

Jesus practiced solitude, apparently quite frequently. Are you capable of withdrawing into the absolute solitude of the inner chamber? Can you do it? Many believers cannot, because they have never really tried. It seems unthinkable to “go all solitary.” It’s as if they always need to be in the presence of other human beings in order to be a real person, or to be validated. On their own, they are bewildered, having lost their sense of self. It’s unfamiliar territory, and scary.

Jesus, who had the most amazing sense of “self” of anyone in history, withdrew into the wilderness, alone. A wilderness place is somewhere that is wild, desolate, sometimes barren, but really just untamed or uncultivated. For those who are inexperienced in personally relating with Christ, even their own inner chamber may seem like a wilderness place. There is a promise resting over the wilderness, though, a promise just for you. The wilderness will blossom. It will become a place of beauty, a fruitful, growing place. I’m sure that Jesus, having often trod the solitary path of prayer, experienced the wilderness environment in an entirely different way than some of us may at this point. Instead of finding it untamed and uncultivated, I’m quite certain it was His beloved inner chamber, a place of safety, fellowship, counsel, affirmation and productivity.

There is something to that idea. Can you see it? How vital it is for us to experience the potentially frightening and lonely wilderness parts of our lives from the perspective of the inner chamber. When we do this, we will see these areas tamed. We will experience them as exciting venues, filled with the beauty of God’s holiness, places that He holds in His hand, showcases for His glory. We will see them as places and times of opportunity for the Father to fulfill His eternal promise, “I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19b).  Go ahead. Give it a try. Give Him the opportunity to shine through your life. Be brave. Shut your door.

I am sometimes dumbfounded at the number of Christians who feel the need to post it on facebook whenever they give a gift or pray a prayer or serve someone in need. Don’t do that. The deepest secrets of your heart should be the secret acts of kindness, mercy, forgiveness, service and intercession that occur in the inner chamber. These are things you do for others that are intended to be known only by God, in order that all praise and honor may go to Him. This is the highest service you can offer. Your most powerful prayer is also the most secretive. Even the smallest groups bring out the public, role-playing side of you, and tend to deflect the focus of your prayers away from reaching the heart of God, toward making sure the group approves.

So much of what we do “for the church” is done because we want to gain recognition from others. Few of us know how to stand alone spiritually. We depend on the recognition of others for our motivation and our reward. We love standing in front of an audience, getting “likes” for our every thought, building a platform and getting lots of fans.

My wife, Makki, and I have resided for a number of years in a poor and depressed community where God called us to do a particular work of ministry. One of the first and most enduring impressions we got from our neighbors is that many of them have a tendency to live their lives as theatre. If there is a fight, it's going to be held in the main ring, as the participants burst out of their homes and go at it against each other on the front porch or out on the street. It’s something of a shared community experience, and is greatly enjoyed by most. Get your bets down and pass the popcorn.

Many people see the church as their theatre, just as a lot of our neighbors see their front porch, but crumble if ever they are called to stand alone “out there.” These folks attend church in order to impress the pastor, or people from their own social circle, or others from the social circle they would like to break into. They want to be recognized, get their strokes, make their performances, get their applause, climb their ladder, or whatever else they get out of it. In my experience the thing we used to call special music has mostly been eliminated from our worship. I’m glad for it. It is tiresome and distracting watching people perform with the obvious attitude, “Just wait’ll they hear this.” Many who pray in public pray with that same attitude, or with a false humility so contrived as to be, well, obvious. Whose prayer is going to break heaven loose today? Get your bets down and pass the popcorn.

Thankfully, there is no stage in the inner chamber (see Matthew 6:6). There is no mask for you to put on, no theatrical makeup. There is no playacting, no pretending. There are no facades, no stage sets in the inner chamber. You have no choice but to be solitary with God, absolutely real, in this place where you are fully known. Once you get over the initially troubling aspects of being so vulnerable, you will come to love it. Once you begin to see your secret prayers answered openly, though only you and God are the wiser, your inner chamber life will catapult into an amazing new dimension. You’ll never want to step onto the stage again.

Please cut me some slack on this. I know what grace is, but here’s a fact: Your public personna is how everyone else grades you. You earn these grades based on how well you do when you’re on stage. God gives His “grade” based upon who you are in private. Your coursework for His grade is done in the secret place, the inner chamber.

We cannot pray in order to receive recognition from anyone but God. It isn’t allowed. No matter what you think you might be doing, if you’re praying for recognition, or praying what I call a "performance prayer," it isn’t really prayer after all. It isn’t necessary for anyone to know about your secret labor for the Master except for the Master Himself, because it is a labor of intimate love and special communion. It is labor that He respects you for doing and joyfully receives from you, once you have learned to stand alone with Him in the inner chamber.

This blog post is based on an idea from the soon-to-be-released book, Secrets of the Inner Chamber: How to Experience the Phenomenal Power of Private Prayer.

When I mention the inner chamber, I am referencing Matthew 6:6, where Jesus shares the concept of the prayer closet with us.

If God’s Word is the anvil, and prayer is the hammer, then the inner chamber is the forge in which the bond of relationship with God is formed. When we talk about what it means to know Christ these days, we are quick to say, “It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship.” That idea is a fallacy. It is a shallow, easy-to-grab slogan that is mindlessly repeated everywhere.

The fact is, it is not either a relationship or a religion that defines our Christ-life, but both-and. Without the religious aspect of our faith, which includes the careful teaching of sound theology and doctrine, and our participation in public worship, whatever form it may take in our tradition, there would be no proper relationship with Christ or with His body, the Church. Conversely, without the personal relationship we enjoy with Christ, the rest of it would be nothing but law and dogma and dreadfully stifling obedience.

There is nothing whatsoever wrong with religion. We need more of it, better practiced. More and more. Of course, religion can be, and is, perverted, just as is the case with virtually anything else. Wherever the pure, genuine and true exists, there also will be the adulterated, inauthentic and false.

The biblical definition of religion has to do with the external form in which our faith expresses itself. It is devotion to God arising from a healthy and proper reverence for Him, inspiring us to engage in His worship, which results in practical piety, rightly directed.

James puts it so well when he says, “If anyone among you thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is useless. Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world” (James 1:26-27). The possibility of “pure and undefiled religion before God,” then, does exist, and is a thing to be desired and sought after.

Still, we do speak of this relationship business, and I love it as well as I love Christ and the pure religious pursuit of Him. I love my Lord. I love everything about Him, and everything, including religion, that is a part of knowing and honoring Him. Love, in fact, is the basis of my relationship with Him, as I certainly hope it is the basis of yours, too. His love for us is the introduction to our relationship with Him. It is the first thing that we encounter about Him, since it is the means He uses to reach out to us, attract us, and draw us to Himself.

You learn to love God in the inner chamber. Your “personal relationship” with Jesus Christ, something that most Christians tossing the phrase around so glibly still have trouble defining, acquires all of its true substance in the inner chamber, and nowhere else. It expresses itself, religiously, outside of the chamber, but it is formed in front of the fireplace, where the hearth is blazing and crackling with the fire of God’s truth. It is fashioned under the illumination of the classic lamp of understanding, in the secret place. It is formulated as you are seated, side-by-side with Christ, your heads bent over the open Word.

Jesus clearly leads us into the understanding that all religion, all righteousness, all knowledge of God and everything about serving Him, all these things are matters of the heart. If they are not rooted in and carried out in your heart first and always, if they do not serve to educate, purify and mature your heart, they have no effect or value in your life. In other words, what you make of your relationship with Christ in the inner chamber is all you have of it to carry out into the world. This is what ignites within you the light of the world. It is how God establishes you as a city set upon a hill, that cannot be hid. This is the fountainhead, the source, of pure religion, undefiled.

In a complete and amusing irony, your worship of the Father in spirit and truth, which is the only acceptable worship, since “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24), is your “religion.” Your religion is what gives you the equipping, motivation and confidence to go out and “be” the hands of Christ, His faithful steward, conducting His business in your daily activities.

So really, “It’s not about relationship, it’s first about religion. And it’s not only about religion, it’s also about a relationship.” Get it right and you’ll live it rightly. You will only get it right in the inner chamber, because “A good man [or woman] out of the good treasure of his [or her] heart brings forth good things, and an evil man [or woman] out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things” (Matthew 12:35). The Lord Christ does not compromise on this.

Your religion and your relationship both are to result in an ever-expanding love for God, based upon the ever-expanding understanding of His love that you receive by knowing Him better and better. The inner chamber is all about communion, fellowship and communication with God. It is all about deepening the bonds. This happens through prayer, which is the dialogue between you and Jesus Christ. Prayer is the exchange of communication that takes place as you listen and are instructed through God’s Word, and as you speak, through prayer conversation.