She noticed it in her own opening sentence, and then she could not stop hearing it.
Every prayer she prays begins the same way. Some version of: if it is all right. If You have a minute. I know You are busy. She would never write it down like that, and she would be embarrassed to see it typed out, but that is the register, and it has been for as long as she can remember.
It is the way a person speaks at a door where they are not certain their name is on the list.
And she is not new at this. Nineteen years. She teaches a class. If somebody asked her whether she has access to God she would say yes without hesitating, because she does believe it, in the part of her that answers questions.
The part of her that opens her mouth to pray did not get the memo.
If your praying starts at a door, come and sit down in this kitchen. Nothing about your nineteen years is going to be assessed here.
The knocking is a posture, not a doctrine
Let us look at where it lives, because that is why it has survived nineteen years of correct teaching.
It is not in your beliefs. It sits in your manners. And manners are learned young, in houses and schools and rooms where a person worked out how to approach somebody more important than themselves, and they run automatically long after the beliefs have changed.
So the class you teach is not hypocrisy and the knock is not unbelief. They are simply two different systems, and only one of them ever got taught.
You are not standing outside. Nothing about that opening sentence reflects your actual position, and no habit of manners has ever set the terms of your access. I am not saying it to be encouraging. The written word says through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father (Ephesians 2:18), where access is a settled noun rather than a request being processed, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hold in a kitchen at eight in the morning.
What the curtain did on its way down
Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a way of praying more confidently.
There was a curtain in the temple whose entire purpose was to keep people out of the holiest place. It was enormous and it was heavy and it had been doing that job for centuries.
Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.Hebrews 4:16 and Hebrews 10:19
When Jesus died it tore, and the account is careful to say from the top to the bottom, which is the direction a thing tears when nobody standing on the floor is doing the tearing.
Read what the boldness rests on in that sentence: the blood of Jesus. Not the reader's confidence, not their record, not their manners. The writer names the ground on purpose because he knew exactly which question would be in the room.
You have that boldness now, on grounds that have nothing to do with your nerve. That is written down with the ground named explicitly, and the Holy Spirit sets that down in front of a woman who has been apologizing at a door for nineteen years.
Boldness is not a volume
Something has to be said before Sunday, because the obvious next move is to pray more assertively and grade yourself on it.
That would turn access into a performance, which is exactly the machinery this article is taking apart. A person praying loudly at a door is still at the door.
You have a position rather than a technique, and it does not improve when you sound more certain. Scripture says let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16), where the whole point is what is obtained rather than how it is asked for, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has walked a woman in nineteen years of mornings while she was still knocking.
And if this has cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the mornings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
So this is where it turns, and it is not a technique and it is not a promise about answers.
The way to God is standing open and it was opened for you. You come in as somebody who belongs here, not as somebody hoping to be let in. The written word says we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him (Ephesians 3:12), where the confidence is located in Him rather than manufactured by you, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds it true about your actual kitchen tomorrow morning rather than about believers in general.
I cannot tell you what God does about anything you bring in. Nobody honest can, and this page is not going to promise that praying differently produces different results. What I can tell you is that the knocking was manners rather than doctrine, and that the curtain came down from the top.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in the kitchen, in your own voice. You speak these standing in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how confident you sound. What it rests on is the written word, and what makes it living is the Holy Spirit rather than merely polite, and what God does with what you bring in, and when, is His, in His own way, and nothing written here knows what that is.
- Habit of knocking, you are something my hands do at a door that is already open. Hebrews 10 rests the boldness to enter on the blood of Jesus and never on the nerve of the one entering, and the Holy Spirit tore that curtain from the top down. In the name of Jesus I stop asking at a door I am already through.
- Suspicion that everybody else has a different arrangement than I do, you were never spoken over me by God, and you are not standing in this kitchen tomorrow. Ephesians 2 says that through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father, where access is a settled thing and not a request being processed, and His Spirit has walked me in for nineteen years while I knocked. I am walking through the doorway today and praying on the other side of it.
- Father, I have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him, and Ephesians 3 puts the confidence in Christ rather than in my own manner. I thank You that Your Spirit never once treated my apologizing as the terms of entry. Here is my first sentence, out loud, from inside the room.
Hebrews 4:16
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
