A Door You Do Not Have to Book

He had forty minutes and nowhere on earth to put them.

That is a strange thing to discover about a town you have lived in for eleven years. He was between two appointments, one of which had gone badly, and he needed to sit down somewhere and be quiet for a bit, and it turned out there was no such place.

The library wants a card. He has one somewhere. Not on him.

The café is fine, obviously, and he can afford the coffee, but you have to order and then you have to be a person who is having a coffee, sitting upright, being seen, and he did not have that in him at half past two on a Tuesday.

The health center had a poster up about a listening service. Referral through your GP.

The community hub was open, and the woman on the desk was lovely, and she asked him what he was after, and he said, honestly, nothing, and she said, right, and he stood there for a second and then said thanks and went out.

So he walked back to the car park and sat in the car, which is where he had started, and which is where a great many people go to sit down in this country, and he put his hands on the wheel and did not turn the key.

Everywhere he could think of wanted something small from him first. A card. An order. A reason. A form. Nothing unreasonable. Nothing anybody was doing wrong.

It is only that a man who is at the end of something has nothing small to give.

Somebody else is holding the key

The word that got attached to the church very early on, long before it meant any institution anywhere, was a plain Greek word that means universal. Not universal as in large. Universal as in this is for everybody, everywhere, the same. It was a claim about the size of the welcome and nothing else.

That is the fire under this, and it has never gone out, whatever anybody has done with the building since.

Now listen to how it gets said to a small, tired congregation in a town nobody has heard of, in a letter from the One who holds the key:

Look, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have little strength, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.Revelation 3:8

Read the order of those two sentences, because the order is the whole gift.

The door is open first. The little strength is mentioned second, and it is not a condition, and it is not a rebuke. He does not say, when you are stronger there will be a door. He says the door is open and I know you have almost nothing left. The knowing of your weakness and the opening of the door are in the same breath, from the same mouth, and one is not waiting on the other. Revelation 3 puts the open door and the little strength in one sentence, and the Spirit was in both halves of it, so you are welcome at the strength you actually have.

And notice the one thing that is said about who can close it. No one is able to. Not the diary. Not the office hours. Not the desk. Not the woman who kindly asked what you were after. Not you, either, on your worst evening, which is the one you were actually worried about. Revelation 3 says no one is able to shut it, and the Spirit has never once written an exception for a bad night, so you are not the one who can close this.

So let me say the plain thing to you, since it is what you came for.

You do not have to be expected in order to be welcome.

Every other door in your town runs on expectation. Somebody has to know you are coming, or you have to give an account of yourself at the entrance, and that is not wickedness, that is just how a town works and how it has to work. But the arrangement teaches a man something, quietly, over years, and by half past two on that Tuesday he had learned it thoroughly: that arriving unannounced anywhere is an imposition, and that a person with nothing to offer at the door should probably stay in the car. Revelation 3 sets that door before a church with almost nothing left, and the Spirit put no entrance requirement anywhere in the line, so you have never owed an account of yourself at that one.

That is the thing that has to go tonight. Not the town. The lesson.

Here is a plainer thing, and I would rather tell you than have you find out on a hard day. The actual church down your road may well be locked. A great many are, and for reasons that are usually sad and practical and nobody's fault, and if you walk up and find a bolted door that is not a verdict on you and it is not God saying no. Buildings have keys and keyholders and insurers. The door in that verse is not made of oak.

But go anyway. Because the doorway is real even when the porch is cold, and a man who walks up and puts his hand on a locked door in the rain has still gone somewhere, and he was received on the way.