Doors

Revelations 3:20
Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.

Doors

As I close my eyes I could envision rows and rows of doors in different colors and appearances. As I read the Word concerning doors it became apparent that doors are a place of entrance and exit, not just physically, but spiritually as well. Doors represent the decision making “yes” and “no’s” of our thinking and being. Through our door things come in and go out of our life. When Christ knocked on the door of our heart and understanding, he revealed Himself to us there. Our soul stood at that door and we made a decision to allow Him to come in or we shut Him out. We make that same kind of decision concerning many things that knock at our door, but none so crucial as that decision we made for or against Christ.
Behind every door is a different story, because behind every door is a different life. Each life is made up of many doors that we use to compartmentalize our lives. Jesus isn’t welcomed into every life, but to those lives that He is invited into we bring Him into our living room, the main room of our home. If the Lord is now truly a resident and not just a guest then He will knock on the various other doors within our house as well. Many of us tend to allow Jesus into only certain parts of our house, while we conveniently exclude Him from the others. We compartmentalize our home into categories and it is often this type of thinking that allows us to sin in one area while we tend to be very spiritual in another. This apparent paradox is often do to these closed doors where we don’t allow the Lord to come in.
In order for us to have the most intimate and full relationship with Christ we can have, we must open all of the doors to Him. This is often a process we go through as we mature in faith, because He keeps walking through the house of our life and knocking on all of these individual doors. He knocks on the door of our study for us to invite Him into our business and the financial part of our lives. He knocks at the kitchen for us to invite Him into what we take into our bodies in what eat and drink. He knocks at our bedroom to be invited into the intimate part of our lives and relationships. He even knocks at the door of our closets where we often store our hidden things. He is asking us to open every door to Him that He may come and live in every part of our house. This includes all of the dynamics and dimensions of our lives. At every door there is a decision to be made to open or close that door. Just because we opened the door one time doesn’t mean that we can’t or won’t change our minds and close it to the Lord at another. Every day Christ is knocking at doors and it is not just the door of salvation, it is doors that lead to every dimension of our hearts and lives. What we must realize is that as we open our doors to Jesus we are, in turn, walking through spiritual doors that lead us into greater dimensions of relationship with Him. As we allow Him into the most intimate places of our heart and life, He, in turn, allows us into the intimate places of relationship with Him.
Be careful what doors you and I may be shutting, because we want to hold on to that former life. We must resolve that there will be no locked doors to Him concerning our life. As we unlock our doors to Him we will find Him to be an open door to us. Is your life an open door to Him?

Blessings,
#kent

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When God Doesn’t Seem to Come Through

Isaiah 55:6-9
Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near.
7Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts.
Let him turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
8“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
9“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

When God Doesn’t Seem to Come Through

Most all of us that have been believers for some time have experienced times when we prayed or believed for things that ended with a “no” from God. We were under the impressions that if we just prayed in faith everything would go our way. Many have given up on their faith and turned away because they felt God disappointed them and let them down. They may have succumb to a sickness or disease, lost a romance or marriage, lost a loved one or experienced financial ruin. No matter what the tragedy was to you, you felt God let you down. Isn’t God faithful?
We need to be clear that God’s faithfulness doesn’t hinge on our circumstances and perception of answered prayer. We see through the tunnel vision of such finite understanding. We see only our perspective and we feel that should be God’s perspective as well. Like the scripture says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.” God is not a puppet or celestial Santa Claus. It doesn’t mean that every time we ask or pray we get what we want. He is the Creator and operates out of His wisdom and not ours. Do we love and trust God for who He is and who we believe Him to be or is our faith and love conditional upon God’s performance to us? Is God’s love and faithfulness to you conditional upon your goodness and faithfulness or does He love you unconditionally? Why are we so conditional of our love and commitment to God when His is unconditional towards us? Usually, it is because we are reacting out of the emotional pain of a loss or disappointment. “God’s in charge, let’s blame Him.” Many times we don’t stop to even consider if our lives were lining up with all of God’s principles and ways. Even if they were let’s look for a moment at the example of Job.
Job was a righteous man in God’s eyes. He was abundantly and supernaturally blessed. That coincided with the belief of the day that if you walked upright and in favor with God you would experience good things in your life. Then God steps out of Job and his friends paradigm box and does something totally contrary to their way of thinking. He allows satan to come in and lets everything to go south for Job. His friends were convinced Job must have some sin in his life because that is what their perspective had taught them. In the end when God reveals His ways and grandeur to Job, Job is undone and sees even his righteousness in the light of such a majestic God is but filthy rags. God took away all that Job had to put something greater back in His hand. Sometimes, even in our lives, God has to destroy our old box of thinking so that He can increase and expand us into His.
Let me give you a “Reader’s Digest” version of a personal story that illustrates this. I took Sharon, my wife, out house shopping one day and it must have been under the unction of the Holy Spirit, because it is certainly not in my nature to house shop. I took her across town and we went through this newly custom built home that was beautiful in a lovely area of town at the base of the mountains. It was only five hundred thousand, which in our budget might as well have been five million, but you know, we began to believe that what we couldn’t do, God could. God seemed to be adding fuel to the fire of our faith by providing outside encouragement and confirmation from various sources until we became fully confident that this was the house that God wanted to give us. We continued standing in faith until one day the house sold. The rug just go pulled out from under our faith. Sharon even had us to go up to the new owners and ask how long they intended on being there, because she was still seeing it as hers. Needless to say my enthusiasm for house hunting was gone. Had God let us down?
Over the next year or two the Lord directed Sharon to plant a seed and she did it totally in obedience to what she felt God was directing her to do not because she necessarily believed in the way it was being done. Some months later we were gifted with thirty thousand dollars that allowed us to pay off our current house and have no debts. A little more time goes by and we’re driving home from a delivery when Sharon spots a house that again seems way out of our league and I am not even wanting to go there. So she arranges to go look at it and I won’t even go with her. Perhaps I am still nursing that disappointment. She is so impressed that she gets me to go and look.
Now before all of this house hunting I had told Sharon to write a list of everything she would want in a house. She did, and this house had everyone of those things. It was perfect for my photography business and was really better suited to our needs and wants than the original house we had believed for. We put a bid on it and two other parties were also interested, but we got the house and it is where we live today. We have loved it and have not ceased to thank God for His goodness since. You see, God said no to the lesser to give us the better. He truly is able to give us abundantly more than we can ask or think. Our perspective and earthly understanding didn’t allow us to see God’s highest for us at the time, but that faith we had for the first house positioned us for the better.
1 Peter 1:3-9 says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, 5who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”
It is not the blessings and all the “yes” answers to prayer that builds our faith. It is what our faith is made of through the fires of trials and testing that make it much more precious than gold. Does our faith stand the fire of trials, disappointments, losses, persecution and failed expectations? Are we going to still trust God when He doesn’t fit in the box of our understanding and reasoning? Like Job, God is bringing us up into something higher that far supercedes any loss in the earthly realm. If we are only naturally minded then we won’t comprehend that. We will only see our immediate circumstances and judge God based on that.
Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” I always remember the verse to a song that says, “when you don’t understand His hand, trust His heart.” God is love and you are the object of that love. If your faith has been shaken, then know that it is to grow you stronger and even more faithful. Even through every trial Father remains with you, for you and will only allow it to burn up the things that hinder you from coming up higher into Him. Like Andre Crouch used to sing, “Through it all, through it all, I’ve learned trust in Jesus, I’ve learned to trust in God. Through it all, through it all I’ve learned to depend upon His Word.” Don’t give up, don’t give in, keep your faith, continue to trust in Him!

Blessings,
kent

Tips for Teens

Exodus 20:12
“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.”

Tips for Teens

Those parents that you are diss’in right now, the ones you don’t think know anything about you
and are just trying to keep you from becoming your own person. Those people are you in another 15 to 25 years. Guess who you are going to be the most like then?

That’s right, those ones you may be carrying such a ‘tude with now.

Guess what you are going to draw most from when you are dealing with your kids that are just like you now?

That’s right, how your parents raised you. If you can learn from their mistakes and be better parents, all the better, but right now, cut them some slack, they are probably doing the best they can from how their parents raised them.

The love that says, “no” is to protect you from what you
don’t see coming, even when you think you see everything.

Blessings,
kent