Your Doubt Is Not The Door

First light on a stone beach, and the water is so flat it looks solid.

He is throwing stones. He is good at it, in the way a man is good at a thing he has done since he was seven: pick flat, thumb along the edge, low and hard and almost sideways. Six skips. Eight. One goes eleven and he does not even smile, because his mind is somewhere else and has been since about four in the morning.

He has a doubt.

Not a dramatic one. He has not been reading anything, nobody hurt him, there was no crisis. It is just that some mornings, and this is one of them, the whole thing looks to him like a story people tell, and he cannot make the feeling go away by arguing with it, and he has been unable to make it go away for eleven years. It never gets bigger. It never leaves either. It sits in him like a stone in a boot.

And a long time ago he made a decision about it that he has never once revisited. He decided that the doubt is a door, and that it is shut, and that people who are actually in are the ones who do not have it.

So he throws stones at first light on his own, and he does not pray very much, and he would tell you he is fine.

You know this. Maybe your version is whether God likes you as opposed to tolerates you. Maybe it is a question about suffering you have never got a clean answer to. Maybe it is simply that you cannot always feel that any of it is real, and you have watched people who clearly can, and you have drawn the obvious conclusion about yourself.

And here is the thing you have never said to anybody: you have stopped asking for anything much, because it seems dishonest to ask while the question is still sitting there.

Now come and look at a room.

There is a throne room in an old kingdom, and there is a rule about it that everybody in the country knows before they can read. You do not walk in. Not the ministers, not the household, not the queen. You are called, or you do not come, and coming uncalled is not a gamble anybody takes twice.

And then, in a temple in a different country and a different century, at three in the afternoon on a Friday, there is a heavy woven curtain hanging in front of the one room nobody goes into, and it tears.

Not at the bottom, where a person could reach.

From the top.

It comes down the whole height of it in one movement, and what is on the other side is standing open, in daylight, in front of everybody. Nobody negotiated that. Nobody qualified for it. The room was opened from the inside, by the One inside, while the people outside were doing nothing at all except being outside.

The word is boldly, and it is not a mood

Here is the sentence, and it was written for exactly the person you happen to be this morning.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

Boldly. Not confidently in the sense of feeling confident. The word is about the standing you have to come in, not the temperature of your certainty when you do it, and there is a lifetime of difference between those two.

You have been treating a feeling as a credential. That is a completely reasonable mistake and nobody ever corrected it for you: Hebrews 4:16 puts the boldness in the open door and not in the visitor's nerves, and the Holy Spirit is reading it over you now with the door still open behind Him.

Nobody in there is sure of themselves

Look again at who this was written to. Not to spiritual athletes. It says come and obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need, which is a sentence about people who are short of something and know it.

A throne of grace is not a room you enter having sorted yourself out. Grace is the whole reason it is called that. If certainty were the entry requirement, the verse would say so, and it would be the only mention of it in the book.

So the doubt in your pocket is not the disqualifier you took it for. You are not standing outside a door that your uncertainty closed; the tearing came down from the top and nothing on your side of it was ever load bearing. That is what the word says, and the Spirit is not offering it as a technique for feeling better. He is telling you where you already are.

What was actually torn, and from which side

This is the part that puts the last question to bed.

The curtain came down from the top. Everything about the direction matters. If it had been opened from the outside it would be a story about human effort, and every one of us would spend our lives wondering whether we had pulled hard enough. It was opened from the inside, by the One who had every right to keep it shut, on a Friday afternoon, before anybody had asked.

So the direction settles the question you have been putting to yourself on the beach every morning. You were let in from His side, before you had the question and long before you had an answer for it, and nothing you have carried since has been holding the way open or holding it shut. Hebrews 4:16 was written into that opening rather than into anybody's certainty, and His Spirit is the one keeping it open while you read.

By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil.Hebrews 10:20

A new and living way. Not a way you build. A way that was opened and is described as living, which means it does not close behind you on a bad morning.

You are inside the covenant already, and you were inside it before this article turned up. Nothing in the last five minutes moved you an inch closer; it moved the question. Scripture opened the way, the Holy Spirit is the one standing you in it, and what you do next is walk rather than qualify.