Your Body Is Not A Lock On Anything

It was a good talk, and she came home with one picture out of it, and the picture is the problem.

The picture was a door. He drew it well. There is a door, and behind the door is the thing you have been asking for, and there is a key, and the key is this practice. He did not say it crudely and he did not say anything he could not defend, and she has thought about it every day since, and she can still see the door.

Her body cannot use that key. Her doctor has been clear for six years.

So she went home with a completed image: a door, a key she is not allowed to hold, and herself on the outside of it. Nobody in that room built that picture for her deliberately. It assembled itself in the car.

She is not naive about teaching. She reads. She would spot a genuinely bad sentence at forty paces and she did not hear one that night, which is exactly why this has been so hard to shake: it was not wrong in any of its parts, and the shape it left behind is wrong.

And a woman she loves said afterwards, meaning nothing but good: powerful, was it not.

She said it really was. And she drove home with a door in her head.

If you came away from a good talk holding a locked door, come and sit down at the end of this table.

Where the picture went wrong

Let us take it apart properly, because you will not be talked out of an image by warmth, and you should not be.

A metaphor can be built entirely from true materials and still put a reader in the wrong place. That is what happened. Every sentence in that talk about prayer and about the body and about seriousness may well have been sound. The trouble is what the picture implies about access, and access is doctrine, not illustration.

You are not standing outside anything, and the arrangement was never a lock and a key. That is not this page being kind about a colleague's sermon. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who was in that car with you while the image finished assembling itself, and He has never once treated your body as a barrier between you and God.

Who the door actually is

There is a sentence where Jesus names Himself as the very thing that talk turned into a mechanism, and it settles the question.

I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.John 10:9

Read what He calls Himself. Not the keeper of the door. The door.

There is no separate object in that sentence for anybody to hold. Access is a Person, and the Person is the one who opened Himself, and the phrase that follows is worth dwelling on: he shall go in and out. That is not a description of somebody negotiating an entrance. It is a description of somebody who lives there and moves freely.

You go in and out, and that was settled by Him and not by anything a body can do. I am not saying it to smooth over a Sunday: it is what Jesus says about His own function (John 10:9), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who takes it from doctrine you could teach into a picture that replaces the one you drove home with.

So the door in your head is not the arrangement God made. There is no key on a hook somewhere that your medical notes keep you from reaching, because the whole apparatus was never there.

And nobody here is handing you a spare key

Here is the trap that a page like this falls into, so let it be said out loud.

Nobody is going to offer you a smaller practice as a way in. That would keep the entire picture standing and simply give you a side entrance, and a side entrance still means a wall.

You are not being let in through anything, because there is nothing you were outside of. Scripture says God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), and it is His Spirit who makes that a fact about your own Sunday rather than a doctrine you could preach on a Wednesday.

Now the rule this site says everywhere and means. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. Any medical condition, medication, pregnancy, a history of a hard relationship with eating, being underweight, unwell, elderly or simply unsure: speak to your doctor and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.