Pleasant Stone Devotional Meditation: July 20

“Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the LORD God might dwell among them” ~ Psalm 68:18

Here is a “purple stone” verse which sweeps away all captivity! We have been speaking of prisons. Perhaps we have not named your particular prison as such. But you know it. You live in it. And you are a victim of the particular kind of rebellion which is characteristic of your prison.

God has done something for you. He has opened the door to that prison two thousand years ago! If you’ve been sitting there all this time, nursing your injury and complaining because of your confinement, I [Eugenia Price, the author] share your feeling of dismay. I’ve done it too. But now I see once and for all that the door has been open all the time! I have the word of the risen, glorified, ascended Son of God for this: “… Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it …”

“I am the door,” says Jesus, “by me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. Jesus Himself is the door. And it was torn open forever, when they tore His body on the Cross of Calvary. If we continue to sit huddled in our prisons, feeling ourselves to be victims, we are saying that the Cross of Christ was for nothing!

We are saying that ours is a special case. Too hard for the Son of God. We are claiming to be victims of circumstance. No-one who follows a risen Lord is a victim of anything. He has already become a victim for us on the Cross. The door is open. We can come out. If we do not, we are either too comfortable in prison, too lazy to walk our, or, like the old Prisoner of Chillon, we are afraid of freedom!

“…Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it ...”