Listen to how you start.
Not the words, the posture underneath them. Most people who have been at this a while do the same thing without hearing themselves do it: a small clearing of the throat, an apology for how long it has been, a quick tidy of the room before the actual asking, and a tone that belongs to somebody standing on a step in the rain hoping the door opens.
Twenty years of belonging to God and still knocking.
She noticed it at a funeral, of all places, when she was asked to pray out loud and heard herself say Lord, if it is all right, we just want to come to You for a minute. If it is all right. She has been His since she was nineteen. She has raised children in it. She has sat with dying people in it.
And she still opens like a caller at a door.
That is not a small habit. It is a whole doctrine, running underneath twenty years of prayer, and it has been quietly costing her something in every single conversation she has had with God.
Come in. Not to the step. In.
The door was dealt with, and it was not dealt with by you
Here is the thing that has to land before anything else on this page.
The question of whether you are allowed in was settled, publicly and violently, a long time ago, and the Holy Spirit saw it settled by somebody else. It is not a question that reopens each evening depending on the day you have had.
Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us.Hebrews 10:19 and 20
Read what kind of sentence that is. It is not encouragement. It is a statement about a legal situation. Boldness to enter. By the blood, not by the week you have had. A way that has already been consecrated, which is something done to a road before anybody walks on it.
You have access, and it is not reviewed at the door. That is not my warmth toward you, it is the written word saying that through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father (Ephesians 2:18), and the Holy Spirit is named right there in the sentence as the one who brings you in, which means the bringing in is not your job either.
Where the doorstep habit comes from
Let me be gentle about how you got here, because it was not laziness.
Most people learn to pray in rooms where reverence and distance got taught as the same thing. The teaching was right, that God is holy, and somewhere in the teaching the holiness got translated into a doorstep, and nobody ever came back and untranslated it.
Then life adds to it. A stretch of not praying much, and the next time it starts there is an apology in it. A season nobody is proud of, and the tone goes careful. Over twenty years the careful tone becomes the only tone left, and it feels like humility from the inside.
It is not humility. Humility is knowing exactly what it cost to open the door and walking through it because He opened it. Standing outside apologizing is not more reverent, it is simply less accurate.
You are not a caller here. You are a son or a daughter, and the address is your Father's house. The written word says ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15), and cry there is not a careful word, and the Holy Spirit is the very one in the verse doing it.
And this is not about praying with more confidence
I want to be careful, because there is a version of this teaching that does damage and you may have met it.
I am not telling you to pray louder, or to sound more certain, or to declare with more force, and I am absolutely not telling you that a bolder prayer gets more results. That is the same lever with better theology on it, and it ends with a tired person trying to generate a tone in order to move God.
Nothing on this page connects the volume or the confidence of your praying to what God does. Nothing here is a technique.
What I am telling you is narrower and it is solid: the door is open, and you are already through it, and you may as well pray like somebody who is in the room rather than somebody hoping to be admitted to it.
You are already inside, and speaking from inside is simply telling the truth about where you are. In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him (Ephesians 3:12), and by the faith of him is the phrase that keeps this off your shoulders, and the Spirit is the one who makes an accurate posture feel natural rather than presumptuous.
So here is the turn, and it requires nothing new from you at all.
The way to God is standing open, and it was opened for you, and it does not close overnight. The written word says he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25), ever being the word to notice, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings you in by the same access every single time, on your good weeks and on the ones you would rather not discuss.
I cannot tell you what God does about the things you have been bringing Him, or when. What I can tell you is that you have never once been on the step, and that the twenty years of knocking were spent at a door that was already open, and that not one of those prayers went unheard on the grounds of where you were standing.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, standing inside the room, in your own voice. You speak these standing in Christ and it is not issued on the strength of the week you have had. What it rests on is the written word, and what makes it living is the Holy Spirit rather than merely confident, and what God does about the things you carry to Him is His, in His own way, and nothing written here knows what that is.
- Doorstep I have prayed on for twenty years, you are finished and I am not standing on you tonight. Hebrews 10 gives boldness to enter by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He has consecrated, and the Holy Spirit had that road finished before anybody walked on it. In the name of Jesus I come in and I stop knocking.
- Habit of opening with an apology, you were never spoken over me by God, and you are not coming through this door with me. I have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear but the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father (Romans 8:15), and His Spirit is the one in that verse doing the crying while I stand here in my own hallway. I am not a caller, and I never was.
- Father, You opened the way Yourself and You have never once reviewed me at the door. I thank You that Hebrews 7 says He ever lives to make intercession for me, and that Your Spirit holds that on the good weeks and the ones I would rather not discuss. I am inside, and my first sentence starts here, without the preamble.
Hebrews 10:19
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.
