“Opened Up”
Revelation 3:7c
“What he opens, no one can shut…”
Lent is that time in the Christian year when we intentionally invite Jesus Christ to open us up and take a look around our hearts. We invite him, as the psalmist did in Psalm 139, to search us and know us and see if there is any offensive way in us (anything in us that keeps us from walking more closely with him). Though we should always invite God to have this kind of access to us, during lent we are challenged once again to open ourselves to God.
I was reading in Revelation 3 the other day and a phrase jumped off the page at me as I was reading. Near the end of verse 7 I read these words, “What he opens no one can shut.” There is something spiritually powerful about what Jesus is saying here. Jesus wants to open us up (but we must allow him to do so). We might hear that and think, “Oh, that’s great! My heart is kind of like a window and God wants to open the window of my heart and look around.” Trouble is a window only gives God a glance at our lives; it doesn’t give him a picture of everything. It’s safe, doesn’t require much risk, and is relatively painless. This gets at the idea of being opened up, but not fully.
Okay, if not a window then I am a patient on God’s operating table and he is performing open heart surgery on me. Now we are getting closer. As we lay on the table, vulnerable in the hands of our loving surgeon, he sees our hearts more clearly. But the surgeon’s technique is clean and sterile; we are adequately anesthetized so as not to feel the pain of the surgeon’s knife, so even this is still not an adequate picture of how open God wants our lives to be with him.
In reality, the process of God opening us up is more like a hunter dressing a deer before processing. It’s messy, time consuming, and not a pretty process. But for God to get at our hearts and at our stuff he’s got to be able to open us up at our core. Dressing a deer is a process of stripping away everything that isn’t good so what’s left can be processed for food. The deer is laid open, cleaned up, and prepared for processing. Our spiritual lives are a lot like this. God has to lay us open in order to identify and clear out everything that keeps us from growing in him.
Once we have opened our lives, all that we are and have, to God in this way we won’t want to be closed (shut) to him again, and according to Revelation 3:7c we can’t be. In releasing (surrendering and letting go of) the things in our hearts keeping us from growing in Christ, we are permitting God to release us (liberate us) from those things. God cannot release us from things that bind us (i.e.: hurts, fears, sins, darkness, anger, and secrets) if we are not willing to let go of those things. In releasing them to him we are released from them (in other words, we release those things as an act of surrender; permitting God’s Spirit to release us from the things that bind us; setting us free to be alive in him).
What results is an intimacy and openness with God we never before imagined possible. So the intimacy we share with him and the vulnerability of soul we know in his presence will keep us open before him; resulting in a more trusting relationship with him. Trusting God is essential to growing in God, but we won’t trust him if we don’t feel safe being totally vulnerable with him. This Lent, God wants to open our lives up so that who we really are is laid before him in naked vulnerability of soul. We must invite, even urge, God to look into our lives; to inspect us from head to toe revealing those things in our hearts that keep us from growing in God’s grace and likeness. Remember: “What he opens no one can shut.”
Pastor Eli
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