“I Have Set Before You an Open Door” | Rev. Derek P. Elphick

Good morning and welcome to our 930 Family Service and welcome to those of you joining us online.

The subject for today's service is about doors and the Lord being the door or entrance to eternal life.

We begin with a portion of Revelation chapter 3, verses 7 through 13.

Revelation 3:7–13

And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia, right, these things he says he who is holy, he who is true, he who has the key of David, he who opens and no one shuts, and shuts and no one opens.

I know your works.

See, I have set before you an open door, and no one can shut it.

For you have a little strength, you have kept my word, and have not denied my name.

Because you have kept my command to persevere, I also will keep you from the hour of trial, which shall come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell on the earth.

Behold, I am coming quickly, hold fast what you have, that no one may take your crown.

He who overcomes, I will make up him a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go out no more.

And I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down out of heaven from my God, and I will write on him my new name.

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come to them and dine with them, and they with me.

Turning now to the book Apocalypse Revealed, with the explanation that we are given of the open door.

See, I have set before you an open door.

An open door clearly symbolizes an entryway.

In the spiritual world, there are actually paths that lead to heaven, and here and there one finds gates or doors.

People who are being led by the Lord to heaven go along paths that lead to it, and they enter through the gates.

Since the Lord alone leads a person to heaven and opens the door, therefore he calls himself the way and also the door.

Because the door symbolizes an entryway and the new Jerusalem symbolizes a church formed of people governed by the Lord's truth and goodness, therefore the New Jerusalem is described as having gates, and they are said to not be shut.

And no one can shut it.

The Lord alone opens and closes the doors to heaven, and because it is the Lord alone who does the opening and closing, it follows that hell cannot prevail against these doors.

And lastly, from the book Divine Providence 33, speaking about how we have a role to play in the opening of the doors in our mind.

Surely anyone can see, simply on the basis of reason, that the lusts of evil with their delights obstruct and close the doors to the Lord, and that the Lord cannot cast these lusts out as long as we ourselves keep that door closed and throw our weight against it from the other side to keep it from opening.

That we ourselves have to do the opening is evident from the Lord's words in the book of Revelation.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come to them.

Amen.

And may the Lord add his blessing to the reading and hearing of his word.

So I invite you to think for a moment about doors in your life.

Doors.

You may not have thought about it, but by the time you arrived here today, you may have opened and closed ten doors, twenty doors without even thinking about it.

Lots and lots of doors.

In this cathedral, I am pretty sure that every single door is different.

It's been handcrafted is unique to that particular entryway.

And if you think about all these incredible doors, which we're getting to in a moment, each door represents a particular truth from the Lord's Word.

Every truth that we get from the Lord's Word has something different to tell us.

One of the reasons for wanting to talk about doors today is that there are other ways that we can think of doors.

And one way to start thinking about it is at this time of year, there are graduation ceremonies that have been happening and will continue to happen, where people graduate, they go from one phase of life into another.

And you can think of it as going from one door into another door, closing one door behind you, opening a new door.

And even if you're not graduating this year, if you're moving from first grade to second grade, or from third grade to fourth grade, or from fifth to sixth, you are going through this transition.

You're going through movement.

You might as well, if you had your spiritual eyes opened, you would be opening a door, going into this new phase of your life, and you'd be closing the other door behind you.

Now we might not like that idea of closing the door behind us.

Well, why would we do that?

But if you think about it, if you're in fifth grade, you could go back and do kindergarten again.

But do you really need to?

Not really.

You might have lots of wonderful memories about kindergarten, but we are in a forward motion.

We're going forward.

And so we don't necessarily need to go back.

So sometimes there are doors that shut, and it's good that they shut because we're going into a new phase of life.

In the new church, we talk about these phases of life as states, states of mind, states of thoughts and feelings.

And sometimes we think of these states as sort of not really having any boundaries.

But I invite you today to think about the states that we go through, whatever stage of life we're in, we're graduating and going from elementary school to high school, or from high school to college, or from college to a new job, or retirement, or many other phases of life.

Those are all states.

And they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

So this is one of the more interior reasons why we have doors.

One of the things about doors is that there's uses for them in terms of them being open, and there's uses for them for being closed.

We close the doors in this sanctuary so that we can focus on the Lord, focus on the teachings of his word.

And at the end we open them up.

And there are in the scriptures places where we're encouraged to close the door.

Think about when we're taught in the Gospel of Matthew about the Lord's prayer.

The Lord says, and when you pray, go into your room and close the door.

Sometimes we need to close the door.

We need to close the door so we can focus on the things that we need to do.

It's in this sense praying to the Lord, asking the Lord for help.

There's a teaching in the book Conjugal Love that talks about in heaven how in the morning everyone closes their doors and closes their windows because they're engaged in their use.

They're engaged in the useful things that they're doing in the morning to benefit their neighbor.

So everything's closed up.

So there's a use to closing the doors.

And then at noon, the windows and the doors are flung wide open, and it's a totally different phase of the day.

So there's opened and closed doors.

It's interesting that the Lord himself has many names in the scriptures, many, many names, and one of them is door.

It was in one of our readings today, or in the recitation.

I am the door.

I am the door, the door to the sheepfold.

And that's very significant because if you think about the door that the Lord is, it's it's an opportunity.

It's the truth.

I was talking earlier about these doors, every single one of the doors in this in the cathedral being different, unique, representing how all these different truths in the Lord's word help us see things that we couldn't see before.

And this is why the Lord compares himself to a door.

It is an opportunity.

It is an opportunity for communication.

And in the reading that you heard today to the Church of Philadelphia, the Lord says, See, I have set before you an open door.

And the open door is the Lord's invitation to us to travel through our mind, to travel through our mind and say, what is this new, what's the new opportunity before me?

This door has closed, and sometimes we say, it seems like every door in my life is being slammed shut.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Where's the new door?

And so we get this teaching that is, in a way, it's kind of funny.

I don't know whether you noticed this.

I tried not to smile, I didn't want to, uh, in the reading, but it's talking about the Lord knocking on the door of our mind.

And in this particular case, the Lord is waiting for us to open the door.

Now, I don't know whether you've ever had the experience of going to a door and it's like, hey, it's locked, and then you realize it's a push one.

In our own spiritual lives, we can say, all the doors are shut.

I can't find a new door to open, a new opportunity where the Lord is leading me in a new direction.

And in this teaching from the book Divine Providence 33, it says it explains why the Lord is waiting.

It's because we don't even realize it.

We call it blind spots, we don't even realize it, but we're leaning against the door.

Our full weight is on the door, and the Lord is waiting for us to stop leaning on it so that we can open it.

And what is that weight?

It's grudges, it's annoyances, feelings of arrogance or superiority, the things that we need to be able to take on and ask the Lord for help.

And as soon as we ask the Lord for help, the weight from the door is removed and we can open it.

But let's get to that open door.

The open door in the book of Revelation is a picture of the new church, the teachings of the new church, this open invitation.

The doors always open.

And when I was working on this text, I think that kind of makes me nervous.

I like to have my doors closed.

You know, critters coming in the house or other things like that.

But in heaven, there's no need for the doors to be shut, especially the Lord's doors, the open door, which is also compared to the twelve gates of the holy city.

Those are open too.

They don't need to be shut.

There's no night.

And it's a picture of what happens when we turn to the Lord and we go to Him in His Word and we ask Him to help us open those doors that we've struggled to open.

Now there are doors that we shouldn't be opening, and those are all of the commandments: don't do this, don't do that.

Those are doors that we don't need to try opening because they will lead in a direction that will make us very sad and very unhappy.

But the doors that the Lord is inviting us to, especially the open door, are these opportunities that we have to be able to think about two things.

Think about the Lord and think about the neighbor.

There's a passage in the teachings of our church that says, when we love the Lord or find new ways to love the Lord or serve the Lord, and when we find new ways to serve our neighbor and love our neighbor, those will open any door that is shut and that we're trying to open.

What a powerful thing, the two great commandments.

Those will open the door to new opportunities.

So at this time of year, enjoy your school closing, enjoy whatever phase of life you're at, because we're all spiritual travelers.

If we were to have our spiritual eyes opened, we would see all these paths, and there'd be these beautiful gates, gates that need to be opened, or doors into beautiful gardens and palaces.

And what the Lord is doing is He's leading us gradually, ever so gently, toward heaven.

Everyone's path is different, but that's what's happening.

And so it's useful to think at this time of year with graduations and changes in people's lives, to remember that the Lord is that open door.

He's inviting us to take on new opportunities, new opportunities to serve Him and to serve each other.

Amen.