Authentic Christianity

Outside the Door
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come into him, and will dine with him, and he with Me.” (Revelation 3:20)

The next statement the Lord Jesus makes is unbelievable and defies comprehension. The church had locked Him out and the believers had excluded Him from their midst.
We have probably all had the experience of being locked out of our car at one time or another. It’s more frustrating to be locked out of one’s house. My wife and I have experienced that on more than one occasion. We always enter our home through our garage, and on the rare occasion when there has been a power failure, we are stuck in the driveway unable to use our automatic door opener, and to make matters worse we left our keys on the inside. Short of breaking a window, we have to wait for the power to return. Some people have been locked out of their homes by an angry spouse.
We are, however, considering a far worse scenario than any of these situations so the question must be asked: how can a group of professing Christians that call themselves a local church lock the Lord of the Church out of their gatherings? How can people who claim to be saved do that to their Savior? How could they fail to reciprocate the divine love so lavishly extended to them? How could they be so callous as to leave Him on the outside? How could they be so indifferent as not to notice His absence?
This begs the next question, is it possible for a church to neglect or even reject the Savior? Not openly, of course; no outright rejection, just exclusion. As it was, Christ was seldom consulted and His advice generally rejected; His Word was openly disregarded, His sacrifice hardly valued and His absence went unnoticed.
The church was ordered to repent, but this raises a further question. How can a lukewarm, half-hearted church, a church that had excluded the Lord Jesus Christ from its midst, repent? What had to happen before repentance became a reality?
The issue in Laodicea was that Christ was crowded out of their lives by a busy schedule, excluded from their gatherings and forgotten in their pursuit of material gain and social compromise. The Lord Jesus promised his disciples that where two or three were gathered together in His name, He would be in their midst (Matt. 18:20), but He wasn’t in the midst of this church. Had the church failed to gather in His name? Whose name did they invoke? In reality His presence could never be acknowledged because He wasn’t among them – He was standing outside the door, excluded from their fellowship. They may have mouthed the words, “we are gathered today in Jesus’ name” never realizing He was absent from their midst.
Without Jesus in their midst, the church was probably more like a social club, valued because of the business contacts that were made. They came together because it was the fashionable thing to do. They came to meet each other rather than the Lord. His Word wasn’t valued and His name was seldom mentioned. The preaching was probably more oriented toward moral, social and political issues than to Christ-honoring biblical exposition, exhortation and comfort. The church met without Him. The professing believers were unaware that the Lord had been excluded from their fellowship – they met as if everything was normal. At first they had probably unconsciously shut Him out of their lives, but then slammed the door in His face. Could that ever happen? It did! What a lack of gratitude!
Is this situation not graphically depicted today throughout Christendom? It’s true of some mainline denominations, so-called evangelical churches and Christian assemblies. How could this happen? The tragedy is that it happened once and continues to happen. Too many churches fail to exalt Christ in their preaching or in their worship and seldom invoke His name in service; it’s in His name we go. Christ told His disciples that He would build the Church upon the rock of Peter’s confession acknowledging Him as the Christ, the Son of the Living God (Matt 16:16, 18), but too many churches try to do it on their own.
Let’s note three things as we proceed with our study:
Christ occupied an outside place!
“Behold I stand at the door and knock,” Christ said. Can you believe it? The Lord Jesus Christ, the Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Author of creation, the One who loved them so much that He died for them on the cross had been shut out from their midst. Not consciously perhaps, but by a slow degenerative process. The Lord’s presence could never be felt or realized, because He wasn’t there – He was “excommunicated” from their midst. Unbelievable!
Patiently, Christ stood outside the door of the Laodicean church, waiting. He knocked, and knocked and knocked. But no one heard or bothered to respond. How long had He been standing there; for days, weeks, months or years? Who knows? The Laodecean church had become indifferent, cold and callous. What a pitiable response to the Creator of the universe and Savior of the world to leave Him standing on the outside of the church!
In Holman Hunt’s famous painting of Christ standing outside the door (which has hung in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, England for over one hundred years) he intentionally didn’t show a handle on the outside – the only handle was on the inside. It was up to those in the church to open the door and let the Lord Jesus in; He wasn’t going to make a forced entry if they didn’t want Him.
The Laodicean church no doubt routinely followed an order of service with the singing of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, reading of the Word and a short homily, but the congregants weren’t in the least perturbed at the lack of the Lord’s presence for they too had shut the Lord Jesus out of their lives. The professing Christians weren’t used to daily seeking and experiencing the Lord’s presence in their individual lives. They weren’t accustomed to making Christ feel at home in their hearts (Eph. 3:17); little wonder they never focused on Christ when they met together as a church.
On the night He was betrayed, the Lord Jesus celebrated the Passover with His disciples in an upper room. On that occasion He took some bread, gave thanks and passed it to His disciples. He then did the same thing in regard to the cup. The bread represented His body which was soon to be broken and hung on a cross as atonement for sins; the ‘wine” represented His precious blood shed for our redemption (Matt. 26:26-28; Mk.14:22-24; Lk.14-20). The Lord Jesus told His disciples they were to do this in remembrance of Him. This Passover celebration is known as the “Last Supper” and initiated what now is variously called the Lord’s Supper, Communion, Breaking of Bread, or Eucharist. Writing to the Corinthian church, the Apostle Paul reiterated the purpose of the Lord’s Supper was the remembrance of the Lord Jesus – it was all about Him (1 Cor. 11:23-26). Some have called this the “forget-me-not” service. Today, churches ‘remember” Christ with different frequency – some on a weekly basis and make it the main meeting of the church. Others celebrate communion monthly, quarterly and even annually with little or no transition from the sermon to the actual remembrance of the Lord Jesus. The danger is that regardless of frequency the remembrance can become formal, ritualistic or routinely meaningless as it is tagged on to the end of the service with only a passing recognition of the redemptive work of Christ.