To Encourage You

2 Samuel 12:12 “For you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.”

So often it is the things done in secret that tell the true story about a person.  A humble person will not do things to bring attention to himself or herself. They will do what they do as to the Lord and not to men (Colossians 3:23), so it won’t matter to them if men see it.  Jesus described such people in His Sermon on the Mount where He commended things like prayer, giving, and fasting that is done in secret. He promised such people that “your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:4). Those rewards may be things of which only that person is fully aware, e.g., some answer to prayer, or some need that is met. Other rewards will only be realized fully in heaven, for heaven is where those who use their money, abilities, and gifts to honor Christ are storing their wealth up.  And since their eye is on eternity, that’s where their heart is anyway (Matthew 6:19-21).  Yet, God may also reward a person openly in this life, for how often have the generous received from the Lord a “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over (as they learn that) with the measure you use it will be measured back to you” (Luke 6:38).  

But there’s a flip side to all of this, a very sobering flip side.  While the humble and godly person may do many things in secret to honor the Lord, the unrighteous also do things in secret, but it’s for the opposite reason. It’s to hide their wickedness because they don’t want the truth about themselves to be known – not because they are humble, but because they are doing that which is shameful if anyone else knew. But it’s not just the unbelievers that do such things. As we can see above, it is even a person like David, who was known as a godly man, who did something shameful in secret as if he could hide what he did from God!  That “secret” thing was his adultery with Bathsheba and his deceptive murder of her husband Uriah by the hands of other men.  But the God Who sees what is good when done in secret also sees the bad. And as David found out, God would bring it all out into the open to be seen by all of Israel – and to be read about by you and me.  

It’s such a very hard lesson that David learned.  It is because David did his sin so secretly that God chose to “reward him” by allowing other men to sin in the very same way against him, but they would do it all brazenly, out in the open, for all the world to see.  But God did this as a warning to us all. Nobody is above the Law of God. No one does anything that is ever hidden from the eyes of this One Who sees what is done in secret.  And while the One Who so often rewards the secret things done to glorify Him in wonderful open ways, He may also “reward” our secret sins, by pulling the shades back for all to see. 

May God help us to examine the things we do in secret as to whether they glorify God or not, for so often the “reward” that will accompany the action will match that action in kind.