I Stopped Seeing That Door

There is a door in your house that you have not seen in about two years.

I do not mean you have not opened it. I mean you have not seen it. Your eye goes past it the way it goes past a light switch. It is not a door any more. It has become part of the wall.

That is a real thing your mind does, and it does it to be kind. A door you cannot open is a small ache every time you register it, and after enough repetitions the mind stops registering it, because the ache was not producing anything.

So the pain went away, which sounds like good news.

Here is what came with it. The house got smaller and nobody was told. You now live in a home with one fewer room in it, and there was no day you decided that, and there was no conversation about it, and if somebody asked you how many rooms you had you might not even count it.

That is what I want to talk about tonight. Not the mess. The quiet loss of a room from the map.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock

There is a line in Revelation that gets put on a lot of walls and I want to take it off the wall for a minute.

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. (Revelation 3:20, King James Version)

Everybody knows the picture. Very few people notice who it is written to.

It is written to a church. Not to outsiders. To people already inside, who had gone lukewarm, who had a great deal of stuff and had stopped noticing what was missing. And into that, the door in the picture is a door in their own house, and the one knocking is already right up against it.

The thing being asked for is not effort. It is hearing. If any man hear my voice. The whole condition is noticing.

You are not being asked to clear a room tonight, and Revelation 3:20 has never once made the opening of a door about what is behind it. It is written that the condition is hearing a voice and opening, and the Holy Spirit is the one who restores the hearing in a person whose ears have gone quiet on purpose.

You have a door in this house that stopped existing to you, and it has never once stopped existing to the one standing at it. The word puts Him against the door already, waiting on nothing but a hand, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that presence real to somebody who has been walking past for two years.

A house that got smaller by consent nobody gave

Now let me name what has actually been taken, because I think naming it matters more than any cleaning would.

You did not lose a room to mess. You lost it to a habit of not looking. The mess is in there and the mess is real, and it is a record of what a hard stretch cost rather than a verdict on the person who lives here, but the mess is not what took the room out of your house. What took it was two years of eyes sliding past a door.

And here is the part that stings and then stops stinging. That not looking has been extending. It started with one door. Now there is a shelf you do not look at. Now there is a corner of the kitchen that has gone the same way. The eye learns a trick and then it uses it.

You were never shrinking your own life on purpose, and two years of not looking has never once been a choice you actually made. Revelation 3:20 asks only that a voice be heard, which puts the whole matter in noticing rather than in effort, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a person their eyes back for a thing they trained themselves to skip.

So tonight is about looking, and only about looking. Not about the room. The room can wait. What cannot keep waiting is a house that keeps quietly getting smaller.

You are permitted to look at that door tonight and require nothing of yourself afterward. It is written that He stands and knocks and waits on the hearing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is already at a door that stopped being a door in somebody's mind.

Two minutes, and the room goes back on the map

So here is the whole of what I am asking.

Go and stand in front of that door. Look at it for a moment first. Actually look at it, the handle, the paint, the way the light sits on it. That part takes ten seconds and it is not decoration, it is the point.

Then open it. Put the light on. Stand there for two minutes.

Touch nothing. Move nothing. Begin nothing. Let your eyes go round the room the way they would go round a room in somebody else's house.

Then close the door and stop.

You are able to put a room back on the map of your own house tonight, and doing that has never once required a single thing in it to change. Revelation 3:20 makes the hearing the whole condition, and the Spirit of God is present in two minutes of honest looking exactly as He is in a day of work.