Who's at the Door?

I stumbled across a writng today from Mark Ashton in Cambridge, England and a story he shared shed a new light on a universal situation. Here is an excerpt of a sermon he shared in Feb. of 2000:

There was a Baptist minister once who went to the house of a poor and elderly lady in order to give her the money to pay for her rent. It had been granted to her from the church’s Poor Relief Fund. He knocked repeatedly at her door but he got no answer, and eventually he had to leave again. He discovered later that she had been in the house all the time. And when she’d heard that knock on the door she had refused to answer because she had been certain it was the rent man coming to demand the rent and who might even evict her from the house.
And when you and I hear, as it were, the knock of God on the door of our hearts, we think He has come to demand a moral payment, to ask how good I’ve been – and there’s a huge moral debt that I know I have to pay. And we feign deafness to that knock: I don’t want to face God, He’ll interfere with my life! He will condemn so much of it. I don’t want anything to do with Him. We pretend therefore that He isn’t there, and that that isn’t a knock. I remember it so vividly from my own life, that sort of a knock at the door of my heart was exactly how I felt when as an undergraduate student I first faced the demands of God on my life. But He does not come to demand a moral payment. He comes not to demand the payment, but to provide the payment: He comes to say, “It is finished. I’ve dealt with Mark Ashton’s sins once and for all. And Mark Ashton can now be a son of God as he was always meant to be.” And that is how He comes to you today. That’s what these seven verses of the New Testament are saying to you and to me at this moment. (Gal. 4:1-7)
I’m going to say no more about them now, but I want to invite you, if it would be appropriate (and I may just be talking to one person here at this moment) when the service ends I’m going to be sitting down over in that bottom left hand corner for a few minutes. And if you would like to come, I would like to try to explain to you how you can respond to God if you sense He’s knocking at the door of your life at the moment, and your instinct is to pretend He’s not there because you think He’s come to make moral demands of you. I want to share with you how very simply you can respond and, as it were, open the door and invite Him in into a real relationship – maybe for the first time in your life.

Have you heard the knocking? Are you afraid to answer the door? He has already made the payment, you just need to answer.