Day 29: Closed Doors

Read: Matthew 26:1-13

Doors are a common metaphor used in Christian circles. I couldn’t even count on my fingers the times that I’ve heard the phrase, “God just shut all the doors.” I can’t even count the amount I’ve used the phrase. We use doors as a metaphor for opportunity. While God is sovereign and does at times keep us from going to places, I know that there have also been times when a situation has gotten hard and I’ve backed out under the pretenses that God was “closing the door.”

It’s always been a profound thought to me that Jesus knew where His life was headed and yet walked with so much confidence. The text emphasizes Jesus’ obedience. Knowing that he would soon be beaten, abandoned, and crucified, our Lord remains present.

Verse 6 tells us that Jesus spent some of his last days in the house of a leper. While reclining at a table, He let a woman anoint Him with oil. Jesus didn’t run away in fear. He didn’t distance himself in distress. Instead, He engaged with those He had been serving His entire time on earth. Jesus didn’t give in to apathy with the approach of his death.

There seems to me to be this undercurrent in American Christianity that says God’s highest value is our safety. I’ve heard it phrased, “The center of God’s will is the safest place to be.” As we enter into the narrative of the last few moments of Jesus’ life, I hope you will see the flaws in these ways of thinking. We serve a God who is so self-giving that he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” These things sound neither safe or comfortable to me, yet Paul calls us to imitate this exact mind. Maybe just maybe the uncomfortable, hard places we find ourselves in are not closed doors but open opportunities to image the Creator of all things.

Are there areas that you are choosing safety over what God is calling you to? If so, repent and ask that God may grant you the strength to choose Him instead.