“Pray to your Father, who is unseen.” (Matt. 6:6)
Expanded Passage: Matthew 6:5-6
I closed my Bible and flopped over to say my nightly prayers. My little niece, barely more than a toddler at the time, curled up beside me. She scribbled in her lock-and-key diary, mimicking my journaling from moments before. I didn’t ask her to stop and pray with me; I just offered my thanks and petitions aloud, as I’d always done.
Later, my brother-in-law told me he’d seen a difference in his daughter. “She prays differently,” he said. “When I pray with her before bed, I can tell she’s heard someone else pray. She’s learning to talk to the Lord from her heart, and that’s good.”
I hadn’t prayed to impress. I simply prayed to my unseen Father. The fact that I had a tiny eavesdropper beside me didn’t change my motive or delivery. That she observed a new approach to offering genuine, heartfelt prayers was simply the way God chose to work in her heart that day.
We aren’t called to pray to impress or even teach others. In fact, we’re called to do quite the opposite. God desires that we offer sincere conversations that travel from our heart to his. What a relief! It doesn’t matter what those who happen to hear us think of our delivery. It only matters that we pray with honesty and transparency to him. He may be unseen, but he always hears.
Pray transparently and earnestly to your audience of one.
Bekah Shaffer lives in Kokomo, Indiana, and enjoys endless coffee, scrapbooking, speaking, and planning adventures with her husband, Ryan.
© 2025 Wesleyan Publishing House. Reprinted from Light from the Word. Used by permission. Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®.
