And He was saying to them, "A lamp is not brought to be put under a basket, is it, or under a bed? Is it not brought to be put on the lampstand? For nothing is hidden, except to be revealed; nor has anything been secret, but that it would come to light. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Jesus is talking about the nature of hidden things. All hidden things, Jesus says, will be revealed in the end—eventually, every secret will be revealed. In the context of the parable he just explained, Jesus is talking about the nature of people’s faith in the teaching of Jesus. No matter what they say, people’s real faith is hidden until it is tested. In the parable, people’s statements of faith in the gospel is tested by trials and by the concerns of this world, and then their true faith is revealed. And so Jesus says that it is the nature of a person’s faith in the gospel to be revealed—if a person really believes in the gospel, they should display it in their actions, or else their true unbelief will be revealed in the end. This is confirmed by the other contexts that this passage is found (Matthew 5:15; Luke 8:16; Luke 11:33). Jesus concludes the statement with an injunction to listen carefully.
People talk about their faith being a "personal thing", kept in one's heart until revealed by God. The fact is, every action we do shows what we really believe. If we think that our beliefs and our actions are contrary, in all honesty, they are not. Our actions show our true faith. Our speech sometimes can describe what goes on in our heads, but we have a harder time expressing our belief than we do living it out.
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