David Diga Hernandez - The Secret Place

Are you feeling frustrated with where you are in your Christianity? Do you feel that there is a tedious, tiresome effort regarding your spirituality? If you’re struggling with holiness, worship, prayer, or devotion to the Word, then today on Spirit Church, I want to simplify the matter for you. I want to teach you the one thing that you need to do, the one thing that you need to guard, the one thing that you must have from which all things will flow. This will simplify your spirituality and lift the burdens of religious thinking off of you. I believe that today, as you hear this message on the secret place, God is going to speak to you, God is going to inspire you, and the Holy Spirit is going to breathe fresh upon your spiritual walk with the Lord. I’m excited for you because I know that you’re about to be refreshed, and you’re about to enter into a deeper place, a deeper walk, and a deeper knowledge of Christ Himself. Steven Moctezuma is here with me as usual. He’s going to lead you in some worship, and then we’re going to get right into this lesson.

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Go to Luke 10, verse 38, where the scripture says, «As Jesus and the disciples continued on their way to Jerusalem, they came to a village where a woman named Martha welcomed them into her home. Her sister, Mary, sat at the Lord’s feet, listening to what he taught. But Martha was worried about the big dinner she was preparing. She came to Jesus and said, ‘Lord, doesn’t it seem unfair to you that my sister just sits here while I do all the work? Tell her to come and help me.’ But the Lord said to her, ‘My dear Martha, you are so upset over all these details. There is really only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it, and I won’t take it away from her.’ What was this one thing that Mary had discovered that Martha had missed? Martha was busy with work, and it could be an analogy for ministry, for our service to the Lord. It could also be an analogy for all of the things we keep track of in our minds that make us feel we are lacking. You can become very discouraged when you look at the progress you’re making and find that it is not the kind of progress you want to achieve. Maybe you want to be a person of prayer and find that your prayer life is not quite where you want it to be. Perhaps you want to be someone who is devoted wholeheartedly to the Word of God and you find that your devotion is lacking. Maybe you want to be someone who is a worshiper by nature, who seeks the face of God and is aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit on a moment-by-moment basis. If we’re not careful, we can go down this checklist and become discouraged when we find ourselves not in keeping with it. We note this thing and criticize ourselves in one area and then another. Now, to be clear, I am not against growth. I am not against self-evaluation. David, the psalmist, wrote, „Search me, O God, ” and we need to have this type of openness with the Lord, where we allow the knowing eyes of the Lord to see, reveal, mend, and transform those things in us that need transforming. However, when the focus becomes those things—when the focus becomes our tasks, when the focus becomes this list of spiritual duties that we are to keep—we become like Martha. We are so busy that we miss the whole point. Mary had discovered fellowship with Jesus; she had discovered a connection with the Lord, a personal connection with Jesus, that Martha had missed. Now, what Martha was doing was not wrong in and of itself. She was preparing a meal for the Lord. Often, those things we do for the Lord, though they can distract us from Him, are not wrong in and of themselves. But if we’re not careful, we can become so consumed with our list and the standards we’re trying to keep— and it’s good to keep those standards—that we fail to connect with God. While I am all for holiness, discipline, and devotion to the Word—you’ve heard me teach on it countless times—I must stress to you that there is one thing and one thing only that you need to cultivate: that is the secret place. The secret place is your private time with the Lord; it is your devotion to Him that is free of ambition and earthly motives. The secret place is the place you go to connect with Jesus undistracted, without an agenda. It is the place where you find the depths of the Spirit; it is where you find safety and security. In my own life, I have found that whenever I enter seasons where my prayer life and my secret place begin to lack, I find myself reverting to old mindsets. Fear, anxiety, sadness, and heaviness try to overtake me, and I have realized that there is only one place I am free from those things. There is only one place I can truly go to find peace, joy, sustenance, and spiritual strength, and that is in the presence of the Lord—in the secret place. Psalm 80, verse 18 says, ‘So will we not go back from Thee? Quicken us, and we will call upon Thy name.’ What is powerful here is that the scripture shows that first the Lord must quicken us, and then we can call upon His name. Now when I talk about the secret place, I am not just talking about prayer because the truth is that you can, at any moment, offer a prayer to the Lord. You can, at any moment, begin to worship the Lord. You can, at any moment, seek His face in the Word. That’s the truth, and that fellowship never goes away. You are connected with the Lord 24/7. I taught on this last week—the abiding presence of God. The presence of God does not come and go in the life of the believer; when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, His presence is a constant in your life. However, what I am talking about are special moments when the Lord will send you an invitation to draw you into a deeper place.