There is a small test you can run on yourself, quietly, in the middle of any ordinary week.
You do a good thing: a favour, a piece of work, a prayer, a gift, an extra hour no one asked for. And then something happens next. Maybe someone thanks you. Maybe no one does. Maybe someone else gets the credit. Maybe the moment passes and nobody notices at all.
Watch what happens inside you in the seconds after. That small movement in your chest is telling you something you may not have wanted to know. The warmth if you were seen. The sting if you were not. The flicker of “did they notice?” It is telling you who you were actually working for.
Because the most important question about your work is not who is watching. It is who you are working for. And it is a question only you and God can answer honestly, because the audience of the heart is invisible to everyone but Him.
Here is where we usually get this wrong. We have quietly decided that visibility equals pride and hiddenness equals humility.
I saw a post recently comparing a popular pastor with the pastor of a small church in a village, and its whole argument rested on the assumption that the villager was automatically the more consecrated of the two—because he was less seen.
I understood the point the writer was trying to make. But the logic underneath it is faulty, and it is faulty in a way that has quietly discipled a lot of Christians. It assumes that a visible worker must be working for visibility, and a hidden worker must be working for God.
Neither is necessarily true. The visible pastor may be pouring out his life for an audience of One. The hidden pastor may be nursing a very quiet resentment that no one has yet discovered him. You cannot tell from the outside. Nobody can—except God. Because Jesus, in Matthew 6, is not policing visibility. He is policing motive.
Read it carefully:
“Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven… And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men… But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.” (Matthew 6:1, 5–6)
Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say public prayer is wrong. He does not say charitable deeds must be invisible. The Pharisees He is critiquing did the right actions—they gave, they prayed, they fasted. His problem is not with what they did. It is with the small clause hiding inside it: “that they may be seen by men.”
That is the whole diagnosis. Not the deed, not the visibility, but the motive nested inside the doing. Jesus is naming an audience problem, not a platform problem.
And the audience of the heart is invisible to everyone but God. “For the LORD does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).
Two workers standing side by side can be doing the same task for entirely different reasons, and no one in the room can tell—but the Father can. The “secret place” Jesus is talking about is not a location. It is the interior room where your motive actually lives. You can preach to ten thousand people from that room. You can cook a family meal from that room. You can lead an organisation from that room. The room does not care about the size of the audience outside it. The room only cares who you are working for.
Which is why the hot, quiet feeling—the sting when someone else gets the credit—is not really a jealousy problem. It is a diagnostic. It is your heart quietly telling you what audience you have secretly been working for.
If you were working for God alone, someone else being praised would land as a neutral event, or even a happy one. The fact that it burns is not a moral failure to hide. It is information. It is telling you that a portion of your work has been quietly on lease to an audience of people, and the invoice has just come due.
This is why Joseph is such a piercing picture. His job kept changing—favoured son, slave in Potiphar’s house, prisoner in a dungeon, second only to Pharaoh—but the way he worked did not. In Potiphar’s house, Scripture says “the LORD was with Joseph, and he was a successful man” (Genesis 39:2). In prison, Scripture says “the LORD was with him; and whatever he did, the LORD made it prosper” (Genesis 39:23). And in the palace, Joseph’s first words to Pharaoh, at the greatest moment of visibility in his life, were “It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh an answer of peace” (Genesis 41:16). Same man, same audience, three settings. He was not made small by prison and he was not made vain by the palace, because his audience never changed. The visibility outside did not touch the room inside.
That is the mark of clean motive.
It is not that you refuse the platform. It is that the platform does not own you. You can walk on stage and off it with the same heart, because the seeing you were working for was never located in the room.
So the honest question, the one that costs something to sit with, is this: if God removed every human witness to your work tomorrow—no team, no boss, no audience, no thank-you, no post to acknowledge you—would you still do it, and would you still do it well?
If yes, your audience is settled. If not, that is not a scandal. It is information. It is the Father who sees in secret gently showing you which room your heart has been working in—and inviting you to move.
A prayer:
Father, You who see the motive under every action—cleanse the audience of my heart. When my work is visible, keep me from performing.
When my work is hidden, keep me from keeping score.
Let me do the same work in secret and in public, in the prison and in the palace, because my eyes are on You and Your seeing is enough.
Amen.
This week:
Take one act of work or service you are already doing, and ask the harder question about it—who am I doing this for? Not the surface answer. The real one.
And if the honest answer is for the applause I have not received yet, do not shame yourself. Simply move the work to a new room. Redo it with your audience of One. See what changes inside you when the seeing you were waiting for is no longer the point.
With love,
Bisola.
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