Convicted by My Lack of Convictions

"There before me was a door standing open in heaven." (Rev 4:1)

I need to remember that John wrote these words while on the island of Patmos. He was there "because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus" (Rev 1:9). He had been banished to the island, an isolated, rocky, inhospitable prison.

Yet it was there, under difficult circumstances - separated from all of his loved ones in Ephasus, excluded from worshiping with the church, and condemned to only the companionship of unpleasant fellow captives - that he was granted the special privilege of a vision of heaven. It was as a prisoner that he saw "a door standing open in heaven."

I should also remember Jacob, who laid down in the desert to sleep after leaving his fathers house. "He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and... above it stood the Lord." (Gen 28:12-13)

The doors of heaven have been opened for many others and in the word's estimation it seems as if their circumstances were utterly unlikely to merit such revelations. Yet how often do we hear of "a door standing open in heaven" for prisoners and captives? Many who suffer from chronic illness, or who are bound with chains of pain to a bed of suffering report immense joys received in their lives. Many who wander the earth in lonely isolation, or who are kept from the Lord's house by demands placed on them by others receive a glimpse of paradise.

But there are conditions to seeing the open door. I must first learn what it is to be "in the spirit" (Rev 1:10). I must be "pure in heart" (Matt 5:8) and obedient in faith. I must be willing to "consider everything a loss compared t the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus. (Phil 3:8) Then, once God is everything to me, so that "in Him [I] live and move and have [my] being" (Acts 17:28), the door to heaven will stand open to me as well.