Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for.
Keep on seeking, and you will find.
Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.
Matthew 7:7

Read: Luke 18:1-8, Matthew 7:7-11
Pilgrim’s Progress Stage 2 Part 1

Relate: Christian was focused and determined and in haste and probably a little bit breathless by the time he arrived at the Gate. He has earned that breathlessness. He has come through the Slough. He has nearly been crushed by the hill of the law. He has wept at the feet of Evangelist and turned back toward the right road. Now, finally, he stands before the wicket gate. The narrow door he was told to find at the very beginning is before him. This is the destination that has been the whole point of everything since he left home. You might expect some grand ceremony. A flourish. Some acknowledgment of the distance traveled. But Bunyan gives us something far more honest than ceremony. Christian knocks. Then he waits. He knocks again. And for a moment, nobody comes.

That moment of waiting at the gate is something every pilgrim knows, and Bunyan is wise to include it. It is the moment between the decision and the answer, between the knock and the opened door, between the prayer that goes up and the response that comes back down. We have been told, explicitly, that the gate will open. Jesus himself said so, in words so plain they almost sound too simple to be true: Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened. Yet the waiting is real. The silence between the knock and the answer is real. What happens in that silence, whether we keep standing at the door or drift back toward the road, reveals something important about the nature of our seeking.

React: What Christian does in that waiting moment is knock again. And then, Bunyan tells us, he knocks more earnestly still. The text says he knocks more than once or twice. The feeling is a persistence that he kept knocking, and calling out until he received his answer. He didn’t have a theological argument to make. He didn’t have a credentials portfolio to present. He simply would not stop knocking, because he had come too far and through too much to turn around now. And this, I think, is as close to a definition of genuine faith as you will find outside the pages of Scripture itself. Not the faith that knocks once and walks away if the answer doesn’t come immediately. The faith that keeps standing at the door, convinced, against all evidence to the contrary in the waiting, that Someone on the other side has heard the knock and is already moving toward it.

Respond:

Dear God,
I am so grateful that You hear. I know when I ask, You will answer. But sometimes I am too impatient for that answer. Forgive me for this. Give me the patience to wait for Your timing and give me the persistence to keep on knocking until that time arrives.
Amen