I Will Not Sign In Anywhere Again

It happened once and it was enough.

You had a thing you needed to get into. You could not get in. You tried what you knew, and it did not work, and then you tried it again more carefully, and it did not work again.

And then the thing stopped letting you try.

You do not remember how long you sat there. You remember the feeling of the door being shut with you on the wrong side of it, and the particular loneliness of a machine that has stopped answering, and the fact that there was nobody to explain yourself to.

You got it sorted eventually. Somebody helped, or it came back on its own, or you gave up and went a different way round.

But you made a rule that afternoon. You did not write it down and you did not announce it and you may never have said it out loud to a single person.

The rule was this: never again begin anything that has the power to shut on me.

And that rule has been running quietly ever since. It has decided things you did not know it was deciding. And it is the actual subject of this piece, and not the door.

An open door, and no man can shut it

There is a promise made to a small, tired congregation, and the wording is precise about who has the last say over a door.

I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name. (Revelation 3:8, King James Version)

Read who does the setting and who cannot do the shutting.

He sets it open. And the shutting is taken off the table entirely, and not by adding a lock, but by naming who has the authority, and it turns out that no man has it.

You are standing in front of something that was set open by somebody with the final word on doors, and no afternoon in a front room has ever once outranked Him. Revelation 3:8 says I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that solid for somebody who has been shut out and has not got over it.

Notice the reason given, which is the part most people skip. For thou hast a little strength.

Not great strength. Little. The door was set open in front of people who were nearly out of what they had, and their smallness is offered as the reason rather than as an obstacle.

You have a little strength, and a little strength has never once been the wrong amount for the door God set open in front of somebody. The Holy Spirit is the one who reads a person's tiredness as the reason rather than the disqualification, and it is written that the open door came with the little strength named in the same breath.

And there is one more thing worth taking. He says I know thy works. Before the door, before the strength, before anything else, He says He has already looked.

Nobody has to explain themselves first. The explaining has already been received.

You were never going to have to account for that afternoon to anybody, and one hour of being shut out has never once been something a person had to justify. The Spirit of God is the one who has already read the whole account before a person opens their mouth, and Scripture puts the I know thy works before the promise rather than after it.

The rule you made in one hour

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance does not repeal a rule.

A rule made in a bad hour is made by a frightened man doing his best with no information, and it is usually a good rule for that one hour and a poor rule for the next eleven years. Nobody ever told him what had actually happened, and a gap in the teaching is not a gap in the man.

Think about what that particular rule has actually decided since. Things not begun. Things gone around. Useful things quietly abandoned, each one for a sensible reason at the time, and never once weighed against what the rule was costing overall.

And nobody ever knew, because a rule like that does not announce itself. It presents as a preference.

You are looking at a preference that was never a preference, and a decision made in one frightened hour has never once had the standing of a considered choice. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a person the difference between what they chose and what they flinched into, and Revelation 3:8 puts the authority over doors well above anybody's bad afternoon.

Here is the other half, and it is the part nobody has told you. Being shut out of one of those things is common, ordinary and expected. It happens to everybody, constantly. The whole business is built with a way back precisely because everybody gets locked out.

That is why the way back exists at all. Not as a favor to people who are struggling. As the normal, expected, routine path, used by everybody, all the time.

You were doing the ordinary thing that everybody does, and being shut out of something has never once been a mark against a person's mind. The written word has the door set open in front of the ones with a little strength, and the Holy Spirit is the one who refuses to let an ordinary event be read as a verdict.

Say the rule out loud

Now the small thing, and it does not involve a screen at all.

I am not going to send you to sign in anywhere. That would be the wrong order, and this is not the day for it.

What I am going to ask is that you say the rule out loud. The actual rule. The one made that afternoon, in the words you would use.

Something like this. After that day I decided I would never start anything that could lock me out again.

You are able to say a true sentence about your own life out loud, and hearing a rule in a person's own voice has never once made them smaller. Revelation 3:8 names the little strength as the reason, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a room with a man saying something out loud for the first time.

And then say the second sentence, which is the one that does the work. I am the one who wrote that rule.

Because a rule you did not know you had made feels like a fact about the world. A rule you can hear yourself having written is a different kind of object entirely. It becomes something with an author, and a date, and a reason, and therefore something that can be reconsidered.

Not repealed today. Reconsidered. That is all this is for.

You are the author of that rule and not its subject, and a sentence written by a man in one bad hour has never once had authority over the rest of his years. The Spirit of God is the one who hands a person back the pen, and it is written that no man can shut what God has set open.