“When one door closes, another opens.” The maxim is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell, with a slight variation about the door to happiness coming from Helen Keller. Because it has such a proverbial ring to it the Bible has also, incorrectly, been assumed a source of this popular piece of wisdom.
Closed doors are generally held to be secretive, open doors comforting. Back room politics, black markets, illicit affairs, the list of negative associations with what goes on behind closed doors would be easy to fill in with private sin. Jesus may be unique in suggesting that shutting the door to the outside world is a prerequisite for prayer.
“But you,when you pray, go to your room, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place: and your Father, who sees in secret ,will reward you openly.” Matthew 6:6
When the door to public opinion and conventional wisdom is closed He suggests, reveals, the supernatural, the heavenly is at hand. “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.” Revelation 3:20
Until the rapture, being ushered into the presence of the Lord is likely more of an intimate personal experience than a corporate sense of identity no matter how groovy the band or how white the robes. We are each of us the one lamb, lost in a hundred, “But He who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep…and the sheep hear his voice: and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” John 10:4
Jesus finds us individually. He may come through a secret door in the back of the closet as C.S.Lewis portends in The Chronicles of Narnia, or He may just pass through the walls as He did for the disciples in the upper room after the resurrection, but when our heavenly Father disciplines us, and sends us to our room, it is not to isolate us from Him. He comes to the door, listens for our sobbing prayer, knocks, and enters to lift us from our knees, to sit on His.
