There was a list. Somebody wrote it out for him on the back of an envelope in 1994, and he has been working on it for thirty two years.
Not a bad list either. Get right with the people you have wronged. Get the drinking sorted. Get honest about money. Get the temper under control. Get in the Word daily. Get to a meeting every week. And then, the man said, then you will see the heavens open over your life.
He has done most of it. Genuinely done it, over decades, with real cost.
But there is always something. He gets to number seven and remembers he has slipped on number three. He puts number three right and finds that number five has drifted. In thirty two years he has never once stood at the bottom of that page and looked back up at a clean column.
So he has never expected anything. Not because he doubts God. Because he has never qualified, and he is honest enough with himself to know it, and there is a particular flatness in a man who believes the door is real and believes he will never be ready to knock.
If somebody wrote you a list like that, come and sit on the step. The fellow who wrote yours is not going to be run down here, and neither are you.
The man who wrote it was trying to help
Let us start with him, because nothing else will go in until that is settled.
He was not selling anything. He had watched a life get straightened out, probably his own, and he could see the order it happened in, and he wrote the order down and handed it over because he wanted the same for you. That is love with a clipboard in its hand, and it is one of the commonest and kindest mistakes there is.
Every item on that list is a good thing. Not one of them is a lock.
You are not being held at a door by an unfinished page. Nothing on that envelope has ever decided how God is turned toward you. I am not saying that to let you off. The written word says for by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8), and a gift with conditions is a wage, and Scripture is careful to say which one this is, and the Holy Spirit is what carries it into a man who has been keeping score for three decades.
Look who the sky opens over
Here is what turned this for me, and it is not a better list.
Go through the openings in Scripture and look at the state of the person underneath.
And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.Genesis 28:12
That is Jacob. He is running. He has just cheated his brother and deceived his dying father and he is sleeping outdoors on a stone because he cannot go home, and there is nothing on any list that he has completed. The sky comes open over him in that condition, and he wakes and says surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.
Nobody consulted a page before that happened.
You are not further from that ladder than he was. The opening belongs to God and it always did, and it has never once been triggered by the man lying underneath it. That is written down plainly in the account, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a man who has spent thirty two years assuming he was the hold up.
Do not write a shorter list
Now, something has to go where that page was, or you will have a new one by Friday. A shorter one. A gentler one. Just be sincere, just really mean it, just get your heart right first.
That is the same page with better handwriting.
You are received as you are, mid list, on the terms Christ set and not on the terms of any page. Scripture says but God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8), which fixes the timing of His move at before ours, permanently, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who has been in the room for all thirty two years and never once checked the column.
And if these years have taken more out of a man than he has told anybody, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, 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 going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
Here is the turn. It is not a new page, because you have had enough pages and I am not going to hand you another one.
God is open toward you tonight, mid list, because that is who He is. You did not earn this and you cannot lose it, and there is no key in your hand that He has been waiting on. The written word says he hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities (Psalm 103:10), which is the whole arrangement stated in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it true about your actual porch this evening rather than about people in general.
I cannot tell you what God does next about the things you have been asking for. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that thirty two years of an unfinished column never once shut a door, and that the good work you did on that list was real work and it was never the fee.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud on the step, in your own voice. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how far down the page you got. The written word is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what keeps it living instead of just dutiful, and what God does next, and when, is His, in His own way and in His own time, and nothing on this page claims to know which.
- List I never got to the end of, you are a page of good intentions and you are not the lock on heaven. Ephesians 2 calls this the gift of God and not of works, and the Holy Spirit has kept it a gift for thirty two years while I treated it like a wage. In the name of Jesus I take you off the door.
- Certainty that I am the reason nothing has opened, God has never said you over me, and you are not sitting on this porch tonight. Genesis 28 opens the sky over a man asleep on a stone with nothing finished and nothing put right, and His Spirit sees to it that the account still reads the same way. I am coming to Him mid list tonight.
- Father, You have not dealt with me after my sins, and Psalm 103 says it plainly and leaves it there. I thank You that Your Spirit has been in this house for thirty two years and never once looked at the column. The paper is face down on the table, and the good work I did was never the fee.
Ephesians 2:8
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.
