November 03, 2009
Show Them the Door
I needed to drop off some papers at a local business and although I’d never been to the office, I’d seen the owner come and go, so I knew where the business was located. The first time I went to the office a quizzical look crossed the faces of a couple of the staff, but on my second visit a week or so later the secretary politely directed me to the waiting room reception area at the 'front' of the office building. I felt a little sheepish and embarrassed. Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber.” (John 10:1ESV) I know a few people who seem oblivious about the tactics and means they are using to get into the sheepfold…I’m thinking they’re in for a real surprise when they’re shown The Door.
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Gail;
-----For a short period of time The Door shared a physical nature with us in this world. Even then, the majority of the people who encountered Him failed to fully recognize Him. We are all steeped in our own illusions about every variety of matter we encounter in this life, especially matters of religion. Now that The Door is no longer with us physically, and since human nature is to know and understand on a sensory level, it is easy for illusion to progress to delusion. We then feel a need for some sort of physical nature to anchor our illusions, and that anchor has too much come to be the church.
-----Church is of paramount importance, but we have become deluded with all its physical aspects, its buildings and assets, its preachers and elders, its organization and doctrines. They are all things important to us because they provide the sensory connection to The Door our psyches need. But Christ is now with us in Spirit; in us, actually. And through His Spirit He gives us better and more clear physical connection to Him than does a building, leaders, and systematic doctrine. At the core of our sensorial experience is the physical book He developed for us. We can hold His written words in our hands and feel their weight. We read them with our eyes and appraise them with our minds. If we prize them with our humility we receive them with our actions. And those actions that we humbly allow to be shaped by what His Word simply says, the ways we treat other people, for the moment they happen and before they dissipate into our memories, physically exist and are sensorial experiences both for you and the one with whom you act. When those actions are gotten straight according to what the Author meant in the instruction book, anchor connects to solid rock, illusion dissolves somewhat more, and experience becomes a bit further clarified about the shape, placement, and nature of The Door. The perceptions then remaining from the well done actions weave into a wisdom that embraces humility which prizes more of the Word. Thus, all our directed actions amongst each other become the physical life and motion of the church having emerged in it from sincere desires to enter a Door known and understood only by our humble resignation to the straightforward message of a physical book. If one wishes not to humbly perceive that book, he wishes not to enter by The Door, and he has no physical experience of the actual church.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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