Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with me.
Revelation 3:20 (WEB)
in its setting: Revelation 3:14-22
1 Where we are
Yusof has three trainees on his shift, and he can get a silent nineteen-year-old talking in under a minute. Tonight he is at home, outside his own daughter's door, holding a plate with two cut mangoes on it. She is fifteen, and since May she has answered him in single syllables. He hears the chair shift. He does not knock again. He puts the plate down on the floor and goes to sit in the front room. What frightens him is not the silence. It is the thought that she has already made up her mind about the kind of father he is.
2 What the passage is doing
The line comes at the end of a letter to a church at Laodicea, and it is not addressed to strangers. These are people who had told themselves they were rich and needed nothing, and Christ tells them plainly that they are poor and do not know it. Then, having said the hardest thing, he does not force the door. He describes himself standing outside it, knocking, asking to be let in and eat with them — outside the door of his own people.
ἕστηκα
hestēka · I have taken my stand, and I am standing there still
Greek has a tense English does not: a perfect, for something done that goes on being true. Not "I stood", and not "I am standing now", but "I took up this position, and I have not left it." The knocking beside it is a present, continuous verb — knock after knock, not one visit. So the picture is not somebody who called by. It is somebody who arrived, and stayed.
3 Taking it with you
Start where the passage puts you, which is inside the room with the door shut. The people Christ was speaking to were not his enemies; they were his own, and they had gone quiet on him, and he did not break the lock. He stayed, and he knocked, and he offered to come in and eat. That patience is not weakness and it is not indifference — it is what it cost him to love people who had stopped answering. So whatever door you are waiting outside tonight, you are not doing something God has never done. You learned it from him. Keep leaving the plate.
A prayer you can pray
Father, I have been the one behind the door more often than I admit, and you did not break it down. Thank you for staying. Teach me to wait like that for the people who have gone quiet on me — without sulking, without forcing, without keeping score. Give me the patience that comes from having been waited for. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
