Behold, He Knocks
I saw a comic strip once – a Christian comic strip, if you can believe that. It opens with the protagonist standing at a fork in the road. To the right is Jesus, floating above the path as His radiance extends softly but evidently from Him. The other path is filled with neon lights, larger than life signs and all manners of worldly things. It’s evident that the choice is Jesus or sin, and the man chooses sin. The next few segments show the man getting deeper into ‘worldly things’ and further from Jesus, who continues floating back at the fork in the road. At some point the man decides to turn around and retrace the steps that led Him away from Jesus. The entire strip reminds me of the following excerpt of a devotional by Craig Dennison that I once read.
“I used to view my time spent in secret with my heavenly Father as something for which I needed to drum up desire. I pictured God waiting for me in a room, ready to bless me for sure, but I felt the weight of choosing him was all on my shoulders. The truth of God’s heart is far from my previous misconceptions.
We serve a God who constantly, sweetly, and powerfully pursues us. Revelation 3:20 says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” God is knocking on the door of your heart right now. With every gentle fall breeze that moves sweetly across your face, with every beautiful sunrise, with every breathtaking star in the sky, God is declaring His love for you.
God pursues us in any and every way He can. The greatest desire of His heart is for communion with his people. So it’s in knowing and receiving His overwhelming affections for us that our hearts will be stirred to meet with Him. It’s in taking time to notice His constant pursuit of us that we will naturally begin to center our lives around meeting with our heavenly Father.
You see, the reason we should center our lives around meeting with God is because at the center of His heart is a deep, insatiable longing to meet with us. The Creator of the universe deeply longs to continually, consistently meet with you. God, who is Almighty, all-knowing, filled with grace, and is the fulfillment of perfect love, longs to be known by you. We are created to be drawn by the desire of our Creator. We are made to be known and to know our heavenly Father. We are created to walk with him every moment of every day. It’s not that we “should” center our lives around meeting with God, it’s that we were created to and must.”
You see, the truths given from the Scriptures here show that Jesus is not just floating at some point in our lives waiting for us to return there. Of course, He desires repentance. However, He is not screaming that at us from afar. He is right with us, pounding on the doors of our hearts with each step we take. God’s desire for communion with you and me is so great that He gave Jesus to walk the same paths that we walk. The Holy Spirit is our constant companion, and God's promises to never leave us nor forsake us are something we can and should cling to. - Jason Simon