"Further Up and Further In!"

Our Christian life is like a hallway. God leads us down the hallway and sometimes He opens doors for us along that hallway. We think that when He opens a door, He wants us to go through the door into the room and spend the rest of our lives there. But in actuality He opens the door for just a short period of time, long enough for us to stick our heads through and take a peek inside and learn what we can from the experience. And then He closes the door and pulls us back into the hallway and leads us further on.

Now, the problem is, sometimes we don't want to leave the room and go back into the hallway. He's opened the door for us and we've caught a glimpse of a cozy chair and a warm fire inside, and in the flames of the fire we see all our dreams manifesting before us. We'd just like to enter the room and stay there for good, thank you very much, but we feel a constant, annoying tug at our arm pulling us back into the hallway. And sometimes we waste so much of our lives struggling with God at the door of that room, repenting our sins and heading back to the hallway, then losing our resolve and turning around and walking towards that oh-so-enticing fire.

Imagine how much happier we would have been had we just listened in the first place, closed our eyes to the room, followed Him back into the hallway, trusting Him to lead us to greater riches further on.

Sometimes we don't understand why He opened the door if He didn't want us to stay in the room, but we have to trust that as long as He's leading us from door to door, He is leading us from glory to glory, and we will eventually reach the end of the hallway and go into the room that has no walls, that stretches on forever, that always goes "further up and further in." And like the Unicorn in CS Lewis's The Last Battle, in that room we will cry out, "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here! This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. Come further up, come further in!"

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The title of this post, "Further Up and Further In," is taken from The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis, and if you haven't read this book yet, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?