Three Doors, Two Promises. Part 1 – A Correction

I am in the process of writing a 3-part series on doors and promises. I introduced this series in the first post of the series: ‘Three Doors, Two Promises. Part 1. Jesus is the Door’. In Part 1 I wrote about what Jesus meant when He said He was the door. In Part 2 I am going to write about Matthewe 6 and 7, focusing on Matthew 7: 7 — ask, seek, and knock and the door will be opened to you. And in Part 3, I will examine what Jesus means when He tells the Church in Laodicea, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him” (Revelation 3: 20 NIV).

Only Part 1 has been written and published. But on my walk the other day I realized that I had mislabeled this series. It should not be ‘Three doors and Two Promises’. At the least, it should be titled ‘Three Doors and Three Promises’, assuming that I lump the several promises Jesus made in John 10 into one.

In John 10: 7 — 10 Jesus calls Himself the door. As I argued in the post, I believe Jesus is telling us that He is the door into the Kingdom of God. I explained why I believe that and what “Jesus is the door” means to me. However, I somehow missed the promises in that passage. I discussed them in the post, but I didn’t explicitly identify them as promises and so left them out of the title.

In John 10: 7 — 10, Jesus promises that when we pass through Him into the sheepfold we: 1) will be saved. We will receive salvation, including the abundant and eternal life; 2) we will find pasture; which means to me all that we need for abundant and eternal life; and 3) we will find protection from the thief, who is a robber. I believe the thief is satan, who comes to steal from, kill, and destroy God’s people and His creation.

I don’t think that life in the Kingdom of God means we are free from all temptations of the flesh or attacks by the enemy. But in the Kingdom of God we have the indwelling Holy Spirit and the power and presence of Jesus to walk one day at a time, even minute-by-minute, in the Spirit.

“The Christian will never be the person that he or she wishes to be — free from temptation, struggle, tension. The old self is ever present: only by a constant walking after the Spirit can the dominance of flesh be broken” (A Theology of the New Testament, George Eldon Ladd, pg. 537).

And this is the other gift of Kingdom life — freedom. But this freedom depends upon having and walking in the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is part of the promise given to the Kingdom man or woman and is at the heart of all the promises Jesus gives us when we pass through Him into the KIngdom of God.

There is much more to this ‘Good News’. Look for Part 2 in the series, “Three Doors, Three Promises. Part 2 — Ask, Seek, Knock and the Door Will Open.” Door to what? Who opens it? Are there conditions to the promise?

John