When Faith Goes Underground: The Revolutionary Secret of Matthew 6
What’s Matthew 6 about?
Jesus flips the script on religious performance, showing His followers how authentic spirituality happens in the hidden places—away from applause, free from anxiety, focused entirely on God’s kingdom rather than human approval.
The Full Context
Picture this: you’re sitting on a hillside in the first-century Holy Land, dust on your sandals, listening to a Rabbi who’s already turned your world upside down. In Matthew 5, Jesus redefined what it means to be blessed. Now in chapter 6, He’s about to challenge everything you thought you knew about being religious.
Jesus is speaking to people living under Roman occupation, where public displays of piety were often the only way to maintain Jewish identity and social standing. The Pharisees had developed an elaborate system of visible righteousness that helped preserve Jewish culture under foreign rule. But Jesus is proposing something radical: what if the most powerful spiritual acts happened where nobody could see them?
The literary structure of Matthew 6 forms a beautiful chiasm—a Hebrew literary device where ideas mirror each other around a central point. At the heart sits the Lord’s Prayer, surrounded by teachings on giving, prayer, and fasting, then bookended by warnings about spiritual authenticity and material anxiety. Matthew is showing us that when our relationship with God is right in secret, everything else—our resources, our relationships, our worries—falls into proper perspective.
What the Ancient Words Tell Us
The Greek word that unlocks this entire chapter is kryptos—hidden, secret, concealed. It appears six times in the first 18 verses, and it’s the same root we get “cryptography” from. Jesus isn’t just saying “be private about your faith.” He’s revealing that there’s a hidden dimension to spiritual reality where real power operates.
Grammar Geeks
The phrase “your Father who sees in secret” uses a present participle in Greek—ho blepōn en tō kryptō. This isn’t describing God occasionally glancing at hidden things; it’s saying God is constantly seeing what’s concealed. Your secret spiritual life isn’t secret from God—it’s secret from the performance-driven world.
When Jesus talks about the hypocrites (hypokritai), he’s using a theater term. These were actors who wore masks to play different characters. The piercing insight here is that authentic spirituality can’t be performed—the moment you’re acting spiritual for an audience, you’ve missed the point entirely.
But here’s what blew me away when I studied this: the word Jesus uses for “reward” (misthos) is the same word used for a day laborer’s wages. God isn’t giving gold stars for good behavior—He’s paying full wages for work done in secret. Your hidden acts of devotion aren’t small gestures; they’re serious Kingdom work that deserves serious Kingdom compensation.
This is something we don’t talk enough about in the church today out of fear that it somehow undermines salvation by grace alone. But the truth: Salvation is a separate matter to rewards in God’s Kingdom.
What Would the Original Audience Have Heard?
Imagine you’re a faithful Jew in the first-century. Your entire religious framework is built around community observance—public prayers, visible charity, communal fasting. These practices weren’t just personal; they were what held your people together under foreign occupation.
Then Jesus comes along and says, “When you give to the needy, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). This would have been shocking! Jewish charity (tzedakah) was traditionally a public act that reinforced community bonds and social responsibility.
Did You Know?
In ancient synagogues, there were literally trumpet-shaped offering receptacles. When someone dropped in coins, it made noise proportional to their gift. Jesus wasn’t exaggerating about people “sounding trumpets”—he was referencing actual religious practice!
The Lord’s Prayer would have sounded even more radical. While Jewish prayers were beautifully elaborate, Jesus gives them something startlingly simple and intimate. The opening word Abba (Father) was how small children addressed their dads—tender, trusting, completely unguarded. No first-century Jew would have dared address the Almighty with such casual intimacy.
And then there’s the anxiety teaching at the end of the chapter. For people living hand-to-mouth under Roman taxation, worrying about tomorrow wasn’t a spiritual problem—it was survival instinct. Jesus is essentially saying, “What if God’s Kingdom is so real, so present, so caring that you could actually stop performing and stop panicking?”
Wrestling with the Text
Here’s something to ponder: if secret spirituality is so important, why did Jesus pray and minister so publicly? Was He violating his own teaching?
I believe the answer lies in understanding motivation versus method. Jesus wasn’t against public spiritual acts; He was against performing spiritual acts for public approval. When Jesus prayed publicly, it was to serve others—teaching, healing, demonstrating the Father’s heart. When He withdrew to pray alone (Mark 1:35), it was to commune with God.
Wait, That’s Strange…
Jesus says “when you fast” (Matthew 6:16), not “if you fast.” He assumes His followers will fast, but gives zero instructions on how or when. Why? Because fasting isn’t about following rules—it’s about creating space for God to fill.
The most challenging part of this chapter might be verse 24: “No one can serve two masters.” The Greek word for “serve” here is douleuō—to be enslaved to. Jesus isn’t saying money is evil; He’s saying money is a hard taskmaster that demands total allegiance. You can use money, but you cannot serve both God and wealth without becoming spiritually schizophrenic.
And what about that terrifying phrase “if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness” (Matthew 6:23)? In Hebrew thought, having a “bad eye” meant being stingy, envious, focused on material accumulation. Jesus is warning that spiritual blindness starts with greed-distorted vision—when we see everything in terms of what we can get rather than what we can give.
How This Changes Everything
This chapter doesn’t just tweak how we practice religion—it completely reorients where we find our identity and security.
Most of us live as if the visible world is more real than the invisible world. We worry about our reputation more than our character. We invest more energy in what people can see than what God sees. Jesus is inviting us into a reality where the secret place with God is the most real place there is.
Think about it: when you give anonymously, you’re declaring that God’s approval matters more than human recognition. When you pray privately, you’re saying that intimate conversation with your Father is more valuable than public religious performance. When you fast secretly, you’re choosing spiritual hunger over physical comfort and social convention.
“The Kingdom of Heaven operates on an entirely different economy—one where secret generosity yields public blessing, where private prayer releases public power, and where hidden sacrifice produces visible transformation.”
The anxiety antidote Jesus offers is breathtaking in its simplicity: “Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33). This isn’t positive thinking—it’s Kingdom economics. When God’s rule becomes your primary concern, He takes responsibility for your secondary concerns.
But notice Jesus doesn’t promise ease—He promises sufficiency. “Give us today our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11) echoes the manna in the wilderness—just enough for today, requiring fresh dependence tomorrow. The goal isn’t stockpiling security; it’s learning to live on daily grace.
Key Takeaway
The most revolutionary thing you can do is build a secret life with God that’s so rich and real that you stop needing human applause and start trusting God’s provision.
Further Reading
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