Many people sincerely ask, How do I pray like Jesus did? It is an honest and beautiful enquiry. Yet it is worth pausing to recognize that the depth of this question may not be immediately apparent to the one who asks it. Most people mean: How did Jesus pray? What words did he use? What posture or practice did he follow? These are reasonable questions, and in fact, Jesus of Nazareth did leave clear instructions about prayer. You can learn the form of his prayer. You can repeat the words. You can imitate the outer shape of his devotion.

But the more searching question is whether we are willing to pray from the same awareness that Jesus prayed from. Jesus did not pray merely as a religious man addressing a distant God. He prayed as the Christ—out of a lived KNOWING of union, intimacy, and indwelling Presence. This is where the enquiry quietly becomes existential. To pray from that same ground of Being would not simply change how you pray; it would change how you live, how you see, and how you understand yourself in relation to the Divine. It is far easier to adopt a method of prayer than to undergo the inner transformation that makes such prayer natural.

While I cannot teach you to pray from the lived experience toward which the word Christ points, I can unfold what Jesus himself taught when he spoke directly about prayer. His instructions are simple, unadorned, and radically interior. They do not emphasize performance, repetition, or religious display. They point instead toward secrecy, intimacy, and a relationship that unfolds away from the eyes of others. His words remain as an open doorway—for anyone willing to step beyond technique and toward the hidden center from which true prayer arises.

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. Matthew 6:5–6 (KJV)

When Jesus begins, “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are…”, he is not primarily condemning bad behavior; he is exposing a mislocated center. The issue is not that prayer happens in public, but that the self has quietly taken the place of God. The word hypocrite points to someone acting from a divided interior—one thing is being enacted outwardly while another motivation governs inwardly. This stanza is about humility in the deepest sense: the refusal to use prayer to reinforce an image, a role, or a spiritual identity. What is being avoided here is prayer that subtly feeds the personal self—prayer as performance, prayer as reassurance of one’s righteousness, prayer as a way of being seen.

What Jesus is suggesting we avoid, then, is not visibility but self-reference. “That they may be seen of men” names the gravitational pull of the egoic self, the life that seeks validation, security, and meaning through recognition. Such prayer may look devout, even sincere, but it has already received its reward: it strengthens the very structure of selfhood that prayer is meant to soften, surrender, or pass through. In this sense, humility is not moral modesty; it is ontological alignment. True prayer arises when the center of gravity moves away from me praying and toward the Divine Presence in which prayer is already happening.

This brings us to communal prayer, which Jesus is not abolishing. He himself prayed in synagogues, attended communal worship, and taught his disciples to pray together. What he is dismantling is the assumption that public prayer is inherently higher or more powerful. Communal prayer only remains prayer when it flows from the same interior secrecy he describes—when each person stands before God without an audience, even while standing among others. In other words, the “closet” is not a physical location but a state of awareness. Without that inner hiddenness, communal prayer easily becomes collective performance. With it, communal prayer becomes a shared resting in Presence rather than a shared display of devotion.

When Jesus says, “enter into thy closet,” he is not giving architectural advice, nor is he merely recommending privacy as a spiritual courtesy. He is pointing to an interior movement—a deliberate withdrawal of attention from the outer world of roles, reactions, and self-concern into the hidden center of Being. The “closet” names the place where the constructed self is no longer required to perform, explain itself, or even sustain its own narrative. It is the inward turning where the habitual orientation toward appearance gives way to Presence. To enter this closet is to step out of the public world not just physically, but psychologically and spiritually.

This instruction presumes something radical: that the Father is already present before a word is spoken. The movement into the closet is not an attempt to reach God but a consent to stop projecting God elsewhere. The shutting of the door signals the closing down of inner noise—the rehearsing mind, the self-monitoring ego, the subtle hope of being impressive even to oneself. What remains is a naked attentiveness, a willingness to be seen without managing how one is seen. This is why the instruction is inseparable from humility. One cannot enter this space while still defending an identity. The closet is where the personal self loosens its grip and allows prayer to arise from a deeper ground than thought.

Importantly, the closet is not a place of isolation from life but a return to the source from which life is rightly lived. Prayer here is not primarily speech; it is alignment. It is the settling of awareness into the Divine Presence that “seeth in secret”—not as surveillance, but as intimate knowing. From this hidden place, action, speech, and even communal worship are purified of self-seeking because they no longer need to produce a reward. The paradox Jesus names is that what happens in secret is what makes life whole. The reward is not applause, reassurance, or spiritual achievement, but a reorientation of Being itself—one that quietly reshapes everything that follows.

If we are sincere in asking how to pray like Jesus did, this first instruction already reframes the question. Jesus does not begin by offering words to say or methods to master, but by calling us away from prayer as display and toward an interior humility where the self no longer seeks to be seen. To enter into thy closet is to allow prayer to arise from Presence rather than performance, from intimacy rather than image. This inward turning is not yet the fullness of Jesus’ teaching on prayer, but it is the necessary threshold. From here, the enquiry deepens: if prayer begins in hiddenness, then it must also be addressed to a God who is encountered in secret. Exploring what Jesus means when he says, “pray to thy Father which is in secret,” opens the next—and perhaps most transformative—dimension of learning how to pray as he did.

This reflection forms part of a wider prayer series that listens closely to the lived instruction of the Master Jesus, not as technique to be copied, but as an invitation into the interior ground from which true prayer arises. Each piece lingers with a different facet of this inward turning—away from performance, self-reference, and spiritual display, and toward secrecy, humility, and indwelling Presence—allowing the enquiry to unfold at the pace of recognition rather than mastery. If you are reading on a larger screen, you are invited to scroll back to the top of the page and explore the other reflections listed in the sidebar, following whatever draws you. If you are reading on a mobile device, simply continue scrolling to move through the series as it opens. There is no correct order and no destination to reach—only a quiet invitation to remain with the teaching long enough for prayer to shift from something you do into something that is already happening in the hidden center of Being.