My in-laws have a picture in their house of Jesus standing at a door knocking. It is a very old painting on a wood burl. I love that image, and so when I found the same picture framed at Christian Supply a few years ago I had to buy it. My copy, which hangs in my living room, includes the verse the picture is based on – Revelation 3:20 – “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”
The interesting thing about this picture is that there is no doorknob on the outside of the door. Jesus knocks on the door, but we must let Him in. God does not force Himself on those who do not wish to believe, but will gladly come into the life of any person who wants.
Jeremiah 29:13 says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” A mere intellectual pursuit of God is insufficient. The search for a God that conforms to what we already believe and want will not do. We must seek Him with all our heart if we truly want to know Him.
I was reading a blog this morning that I found on my WordPress dashboard, and it had this quote by Emil Brunner that I really liked:
If you really enquire about God, not with mere curiosity, not, as it were, like a spiritual stamp collector, but as an anxious seeker, distressed in heart, anguished by the possibility that God might not exist and hence all life be vanity and one great madness — if you ask in such a mood as the man who asks the doctor, “Tell me, will my wife live or will she die?”– if you ask thus about God, then you know already that God exists; the anguished question bears witness that you know.
The thought that God might not exist, that this mortal life is all there is, brings me great anguish. That there are people who believe He does not exist makes me terribly sad. There are those who will never hear His knock at the door, and still others who will hear the knock but refuse to answer it. To think they will miss out on dinner with the King and the abundant life of fellowship with Him!
There’s a knock at the door. Do you hear it?