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THE BIBLE AND YOU
KNOCK, KNOCK! Will You Answer?
Will you answer the knock at the door of your heart? An early disciple took a momentous step in responding to who’s there. by Robin Webber
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n hearing someone say “Knock, knock,” we know to reply, “Who’s there?” as the setup for a joke. While all in fun, the interchange reflects social expectation of answering the door when someone knocks. But there’s a far more profound knocking on a door that calls for utmost response. I speak of a life-changing knock on the door of our hearts, which can only be opened by our inner awareness and willingness to allow God to enter when He comes knocking—and He will! This is an essential step forward if we are to, as the apostle Peter admonished, “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18). Peter himself had learned that growing in grace and knowledge is not an event, but an ongoing developmental experience in our ability to respond to Christ’s great invitation of “Follow Me.” Many of you as readers of Beyond Today magazine believe there is an intervening God who not only acted as Creator or First Cause but has interrupted time and space repeatedly through history in working out His plan to ultimately establish His coming Kingdom on earth. You trust that this same God interrupts our personal lives in calling us to a saving relationship with Him. But with all this understood, are you ready today or tomorrow for God to interrupt your life yet again? The two-way knocking in Scripture Many a sincere follower of Jesus Christ is familiar with His promising, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). We are further assured by Him, “Whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13). So we take up the invitation to “knock” on God’s door, expectant of His response. But what happens when Christ comes knocking at our door at unexpected times with previously
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unknown directives to take us through the next steps of “growing in grace and knowledge”? In His message to His followers through the ages He states: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me” (Revelation 3:20). Here is the key to progress on the narrow way less traveled (see Matthew 7:13-14)—to growing in our relationship with God through Christ. The knocking, we see, goes both ways. We knock on God’s door, and in turn He knocks on ours—on our hearts. The question in the latter case is not whether He will knock, as He certainly will. The real question, rather, is whether we will open the door and respond to Who’s there. Opening doors at Joppa Consider the illustrative event in Acts 10 with two men actively knocking on God’s door in prayer and God knocking on their doors. One was the Godfearing Roman centurion Cornelius, and the other was the apostle Peter. God gave each man a special vision, the divine knocking asking them to do the unthinkable. The man of conquering Rome was to seek out a member of a conquered people and learn about Jesus. And Peter, a Jewish man of that conquered people, was to accept invitation into the gentile’s home and share the fullness of the gospel with him and his household. Again, this was unimaginable in that day! Peter and his fellow Jewish Christians had a narrow read on Scripture declaring that through Abraham—ultimately through Abraham’s descendant Jesus—“all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Peter was about to find out the big meaning of the small words all and blessed. When reading the full story in Acts 10, we discover it took a little longer for him to respond to the knocking from above than Cornelius, but he did. And as God was with Peter, so is He persistent but patient
