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May 20, 2022“I Stand at the Door and Knock”
It may well be said that all of Christ’s teachings and everything he did as well as all the teachings of the prophets, the Psalms and all of Scripture, finally, may be summed up in this passage from John 15 where the Lord gives his final “commandment.” “Love one another as I have loved you.” The operative word here is “as”. We are to love one another, yes, but not as the world knows love but as Jesus loved us. In the same way, with that same love. John reminds us again in 1Jn 4:8,10a that, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love… In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us.” And Jesus tells his apostles that it was not they who chose him, but that he chose them.
It cannot be stressed enough that the source of all our troubles, our anxieties and worries, our failures and our feelings of being incomplete, alone and frightened and the angers and resentments those feelings bring and our seemingly being unable to change, comes from our hesitation to believe fully in God’s love for us and that in that faith and trust in God’s total love for us, that we too can come to love one another in the same way, unconditionally and without limits.
To love as Jesus loves us requires that we abandon our old ideas of God. Have those ideas ever really helped you? Ideas such as a God who punishes or a God who becomes disappointed or even displeased with us. A God who will exact vengeance for our sins, who will send us sorrow or even pain and suffering because of our sins. A God who could very conceivably throw us into hell forever because we have not measured up to some rule, some law of behavior that we have been unable to keep. It is impossible to truly love a God based on these ideas because they are all based in fear, and there is no fear in perfect love (1Jn 4:18). Not our perfect love, but God’s.
Rather, let us attempt to see God as only loving us, only caring for us beyond anything we can imagine. A God who wants only goodness and kindness to follow us all the days of our lives and that we dwell in God’s house forever (Ps 93). The God of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, where, for the father, it was as if the prodigal had done nothing wrong. Rather, the father celebrated his mere return, much to the great dismay of the elder brother who was full of anger and resentment, wanting his wastrel brother to be punished and pay severely for his sins. But the father would have no part of that attitude.
To believe fully in this all loving God is to realize that it does not depend on us. We have nothing to offer this God of love. There is nothing we can do to either merit or earn this love. It is not that we have to somehow make ourselves clean first, somehow make ourselves holy first before God will come to us, as if there was anything we could possibly do to bring any of that about. It is the exact opposite. All we can bring to God is our poor selves, lost in sin and selfishness without much faith or hope in anything. All we can do is admit our emptiness before the God who loves us and then God will fill us with God’s love and grace that will change everything. We must cease trying to do it ourselves and simply let go of everything we so desperately keep trying to control and let God show us the way.
But for this true freedom to happen (“Free to worship God without fear, holy and righteous in God’s sight all the days of our lives.” Lk 1:74-75) means we must first admit that we know nothing. Only then do we become teachable and only God can teach us. It means to let go of all those other things we put our faith and trust in and put it only in God. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to eat with you and you with me.” (Rev 3:20)
Jesus will continue to stand at the door knocking gently and patiently. Finally, at last, decide to put everything down and leave it and go answer that knock. Only you can open that door. Your true and most loving friend stands waiting there to simply give you the Kingdom and the fullness of life. All we have to do is just open that door.
