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The daughter of a Chicago millionaire was suffering. After a failed surgery, the family reached out to the Austrian doctor Adolf Lorenz, a world-renowned orthopedic surgeon. At great expense, he was brought to Chicago to perform the operation. Using a new technique, Dr. Lorenz operated and the girl recovered. During his stay in the United States, Dr. Lorenz offered his services free of charge to others who needed help. Of course, he only had time for very few, and this made one experience he had all the more tragic.

One day Dr. Lorenz craved a little solitude. Guards were always present to protect him, but now, late one afternoon, he managed to slip away to take a walk through the streets of the city alone. In the midst of his stroll he was overtaken by a sudden and violent thunderstorm. So fierce was the downpour, and no other shelter being near, he knocked on the door of a house. When a woman opened the door he asked if he could come in. But the woman, visibly upset and exasperated, cried out, “Go somewhere else. There is enough trouble in this house!” And with this she slammed the door shut.

Dr. Lorenz stood outside in the rain and soon he was discovered by the guards who had been searching for him. They hurried him to the hotel. When that inhospitable woman looked at a newspaper the next day, she recognized the front-page picture of the famous doctor and screamed with dismay. The sad fact was that her child was suffering from the same illness as the millionaire’s daughter, and she had written letters to Dr. Lorenz, entreating him to come to her house and make her child well. But now she had shut the door in his face.

This was extremely tragic, for she never had another opportunity to meet the doctor. But how much more tragic is the fate of those who close the door to the God of the universe? Listen to His words: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me” (Revelation 3:20). If the millionaire’s daughter and the child of this woman needed the services of Dr. Lorenz because no other physician was known who could help them, how much more do we need the “Great Physician” of whom alone it can be said that He: “loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood” (Revelation 1:5).

Just as Dr. Lorenz came to the very door of this woman’s house seeking entrance, so the Lord Jesus Christ has come and knocked at your heart’s door. As you are reading this, do you feel the Lord is speaking you and saying in a soft, gentle voice: “Behold, I stand at the door [your heart’s door] and knock”? He came to this earth, born as a babe in Bethlehem’s manger, in order that He might save us from our sins (Matthew 1:21). Sin is like an incurable disease—a disease no mere man can cure. But Christ, the Son of God, can and will if we but open our heart’s door to Him.

Let us not forget that even though they are beautiful and wonderful, His birth and holy life were not enough to save us. What enables the Lord to say “Your sins are forgiven” (Luke 7:48) to me, to you, and to anyone who will come to Him in true repentance and faith, is the fact that He took our place in judgment and death as He hung upon the Cross of Calvary. There he paid the debt which we never could pay—not even begin to pay. His death was not that of a mere martyr, it was the sacrificial death of one who died for another. The Bible says that Jesus “bore our sins in His own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). Thus He and He alone, being risen from the dead, has authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:10).

Reader, are your sins forgiven—forgiven eternally? To depart out of this world with our sins upon us is tragic beyond expression. Do not close the door on the Saviour. He is seeking entrance, not to judge, but to heal and to save your soul from eternal ruin. “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:17). —J.F.P.

“Behold Him standing at the door,
And hear Him pleading o’er and o’er,
With gentle voice, ‘O heart of sin,
May I come in? May I come in?’”

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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