At our house we generally enter through the garage door, as do friends and relatives who come by for a visit. The front door seems reserved for kids selling items for school fundraisers and the occasional package delivery guy.
When the front door-bell rings, there’s always a bit of apprehension and curiosity about who it might be. The fact that they’re using the front door indicates that it’s probably a stranger.
Now imagine Jesus having to knock on the door of the Laodicean church as recorded in Revelation chapter 3. How in the world did He end up outside the church, like a stranger, attempting to get in?
Yet Jesus patiently knocked on the door of their church seeking a reconnection with them. He just needed someone to “hear His voice and open the door.” We at Blessing Point still believe He knocks on the door of many churches.
The ways He knocks, how He seeks to get their attention about problems He sees in their church, we describe more fully in our upcoming book, The Eighth Letter (ChurchSmart, 2014).
But in this post I want to suggest that Jesus is also knocking on the door of the American Church as a whole, trying desperately to get our attention, calling us to respond to Him on a larger level. If we recognize how He knocks in what is happening in our wider culture and understand how to respond to Him, the result might just be the national spiritual renewal we so desperately need.
1. We hear Jesus knocking through our society’s increasing moral dysfunction. The ascendency of the homosexual movement, the travesty of legalized abortion, and widespread breakdown of the family reveal our national moral sickness. Yet do we—the American Church—hear Jesus knocking through these sad developments?
When Nehemiah heard of the sad condition of things in his homeland, Scripture tells us He sat down and wept. Is anyone weeping, grieving for us? We have learned instead to accept these signs of God’s judgment as He “gives us over” to such things (Romans 1:24ff) and fail to hear how loudly Jesus’ is now knocking.
2. We hear Jesus knocking through multiplied national crises. Whether internal episodes like Columbine, Newtown, and others, or the external multiplications of wars and rumors of wars, all rivet our nation’s attention—for a while. But the Church’s failure to discern what these things mean to us as a Church leaves us unaware that they also demand a response from us.
Most of us know 2 Chronicles 7:14, but what about verse 13? “If I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among My people . . .” Just as God intended drought, locusts and pestilence to capture Israel’s attention and call them to humility and prayer and the seeking of His face, the American Church should interpret such national crises as Jesus trying to call us to similar things.
3. Jesus knocks when the Church finds itself hampered by internal corruption. The Laodiceans had little awareness of their true condition. Their wealth lulled them into spiritually dull self-satisfaction. Jesus called several of the other churches of Revelation 2-3 to repent too—churches that were suffering moral problems, false teaching, dead orthodoxy, and cultural compromise to name a few.
Today, every time we learn of a further symptom of corruption in the American Church, we should hear it as Jesus knocking on our door. Such painful events in the larger Body of Christ reveal how badly we collectively need spiritual renewal.
How do we, as the larger Body of Christ in America, respond if we recognize that these things are indeed the sound of Christ’s knock on our national Church’s door?
We should dare to examine the state of our local assemblies, those “cells” that make up the larger spiritual organism we call the American Church. Do you know what Jesus would say to your church? What would He praise? What would he critique? Will your church respond in repentance if needed? Or will we stay insulated and unaffected by such national pains, whose increase we witness every day?
May God give us “ears to hear” His voice and “open the door” to Him once again.
What do you think the Lord is saying to the American Church today?
Rev. Mark Barnard serves as President of Blessing Point Ministries and is co-author of the upcoming book, The Eighth Letter – Jesus Still Speaks!