April 28

“As Christians, we talk about God ‘opening doors’ to us as a means of His revealing His will.  What we are asking God to do is engineer our circumstances to match what we think would be best.”  H. Blackaby, Experiencing God Day-By-Day, 4/28

It was hard to choose which devotional to write about concerning God’s will.  Hannah Whitall Smith’s concerned not relying on your emotions as an indication of whether or not you were doing God’s will.  Another spoke indirectly concerning it by stating the two conditions that must be fulfilled in order to have an intimate and blessed communion with God:  everything is to be taken as His language and to be willing to face all pain as His discipline.  Blackaby’s “door” example, though, spoke to my heart not only because it’s scriptural (Jesus said He is the door) but also because doors are a very practical means to get from where you are to where you want to go.  When I was a child I loved to lie on the floor and look up at the ceiling and pretend it was the floor.  In those rooms I always had to mentally step over the threshold because the doorways never came down to the “floor”.  I think I liked to do this because it gave me a different perspective on my world.  Perhaps that’s what we need in our daily world.  We’ve become so accustomed to moving freely through all the doorways of our lives we take everything for granted.  We need to see Jesus as our doorway to life.  Perhaps if every door we encountered required us to stop in order to step over the threshold we’d be much more conscious of which doors we walked through, and choose Jesus.

“I am the door; if any one enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.”  John 10:9