“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.” (Rev. 3:20)
The door to God’s presence is always open, and He is there, right there and right now, waiting for us to open it from our own side, but the key to open the door is Truth and Love. But Truth is not impersonal and just a principle, for Truth is a person, and in this same way, so is Love. This living icon of God the Father is Jesus Christ, a real living person, and wants to meet us person to person, life to life, heart to heart as soon as we are ready. It is only our own timidity and unawareness, and our own lack of wanting to really encounter this Truth and Love that keeps the door shut.
What stands in the way? First of all we are distracted. We are so busy being drawn to everything else, almost hypnotized by the swirl and kaleidoscope of visual and mental stimuli bombarding us, that we don’t step back and look for and so find this door. That is, amazingly, our greatest problem to get to know and see God.
Second of all we don’t stop when we are finally just concentrated on Him and Heaven to then knock. Without focusing our action to go in with our mind and heart on Jesus Christ, and so wanting to change from the small room we live in of our limited self-awareness to His big world of true spiritual space (which is so unimaginatively big that we can’t really conceive it), we won’t even try. This change which is so necessary is the root of the word repent, for it means a radical change of heart and mind to Godliness.
Thirdly, and most importantly, we need to move through the door, through the change, through the process of leaving behind our small desires and our made-up fantasy realities to then become truly images of Jesus Christ by adoption. To be remade in His Image and Likeness. We were born for this, we were nurtured throughout our life for this, and we are destined for this if we will only let Him be our Light and Life, our Truth and our Love, and the gladness of our spiritual rebirth so we can really and fully sing all the time, “Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! Amen.”
The Monastics at St. Isaac of Syria Skete
and at the Convent of St. Silouan
and the Faithful at St. Nicholas Church
and the Staff at Orthodox Byzantine Icons and St. Isaac’s Bookstore