Rev 3:20, 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me. 
We are currently looking at what is involved in the effective prayer of the church. What is it that is at the heart of God with regard to His Church? These are the overcomers about whom we read throughout this Book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ. The Lord desires His Church to be prayer warriors in the spiritual battles of this age. These are those warriors whose complete trust and efforts and focus is centered on His will being done on earth as it is in heaven. That can only be in place as the Church prays effectively unto Him, releasing Him to do His heart’s desire because His desire is the only desire of His Church. 
Last week, we looked at God’s purpose in the Church. It is by virtue of our union with Christ that we have any standing before God to pray. It is by virtue of our union with Christ that we represent God to this world. Just as Christ was God’s earthly representative of eternal love, so are we now. We are His ambassadors, His representatives of love and grace in this world. It is through His Church that Jesus Christ is proclaimed to the lost of this age. That means that we have a very grave and very high responsibility in the lives that we live.
This entire consideration requires a ground work completely centered in Jesus Christ, and that is the process of our deliberations. We are setting up the foundation and the framework of spiritual understanding, under the guidance and direction of the Holy Spirit, in order to come to the place of being able to comprehend the immensity and the effective value of true prayer. It is not at all centered in our ideas and our comprehension of what we think God wants. It must be completely out from the heart of Christ. That is why this morning’s passage is so crucial to our understanding of the reality of Christ in us, our hope of glory. 
There is no way that we, in our thoughts, minds, and hearts, can live those lives of utter holiness. We are not able to change ourselves into someone who pleases God. We are incapable of any good thing, this we know.  Rom 7:18+19, For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the wishing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I wish, I do not do; but I practice the very evil that I do not wish. Only Christ is the Holiness of God. He works that in us through the effective ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives. This is not a makeover of something old into something improved. It is an absolutely new life that we have in Him. He effects His witness in us through His Word as He livingly is our life. As God answers Christ’s prayer in our lives, as recorded in John 14:20, "In that day you shall know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you… so does our union with Christ manifest His very indwelling presence. This is one of several key aspects of our morning’s text. When we open the doors of our hearts to the Lord, He comes in and dwells within us. 
This is the reality that opens the door of effective prayer, the indwelling of the person of Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son. As we read in John 17:23, I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, that the world may know that Thou didst send Me, and didst love them, even as Thou didst love Me. It is because of Christ being in the members of His Church, that we are enabled to present to the world the truth of God’s love. It is by virtue of the person of Jesus Christ as head of the Body, that the whole Body is presented a living sacrifice of praise and worship unto God, visible to the eyes of those whom God chooses. 
The rest of this world will never see the truth of God at this time because they are blinded to the things of God. John 12:39+40, For this cause they could not believe, for Isaiah said again, "He has blinded their eyes, and He hardened their heart; lest they see with their eyes, and perceive with their heart, and be converted, and I heal them." But they will see the reality of God in Christ when Christ is revealed on the Day of Judgment. As well, they will see the truth of the Body of Christ because the Church will be revealed with Him in all His glory. It will be at the time of judgment, when the blinders will be removed and God’s glory in His Son and in His Church will be shown forth for all of eternity.
 In that light, it is imperative that we are settled in the place that God has ordained for us in Jesus Christ. What is the relationship that is opened when we respond to Christ’s voice in our hearts? 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me. As we read in Rom 8:10, And if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. First of all, we are made alive in His righteousness. It is no righteousness of our selves or of our abilities or our worthiness. It is His righteousness which is to be more and more purely evidenced in the testimony of His Church, of His People. We are to live in accordance with what is true of us in Him. 
This is nothing new to our ears. As we learn to live in His righteousness, our focal point becomes more and more centered on that which pleases the Father, just as Christ’s entire focus was on pleasing the Father. However, we often get so caught up in the idea of how our lives need to be brought into line with His righteousness, that our attention remains attuned to how things affect us. We begin desiring God to work according to our thoughts and our ideas of what would make us fit the pattern of righteousness as we understand it. Rather, we must give God the freedom to do that which is in His heart. We see the areas of our lives that need improvement, so we focus on them, while ignoring the reality that God’s focus is not our improvement. He has created a completely and wonderfully new life in us in Jesus Christ. His focus is to bring forth that new life of His Son.
We need to seek after the Holy Spirit to reveal all that the righteousness of Christ means in regard to His life, not ours. As we have often read and quoted and memorized, even last week, Gal 2:20. "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me. The sad thing is that we think we know how this applies to us, and we completely neglect how it applies to God. He has given Himself to be our life. He has indwelled us, in His awesome totality. It is not a matter of some small fragment of God being distributed abroad throughout His people. It is the mystery of His entire Essence of Being, all His Omniscience, all His Omnipotence, all His Omnipresence now indwelling each one of us who answer the call of Jesus’s voice in our heart. 
With that unfathomable truth comes the living faith of God’s interests and heart of love. Yes, we know that He loves us, each one, dearly and personally. Yes, we know that He has called us into Himself in Jesus Christ. Yes, we are the immediate benefactors of His so great and overwhelming love, but it is not for us and for our glory that God is so working. It is for the glory of Himself being spread abroad throughout creation in His perfect and magnificent plan and purpose of love. Our hearts and minds and actions are for Him to fill all in all, His fullness to His glory, alone. Eph 3:17-19 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fulness of God. 
This reality takes us and our poor, miserable considerations of what we want and what we hope to accomplish completely out of the picture. We no longer can pray for that which benefits us. We, individually and corporately are to pray for that which furthers God’s fulfilled plan and purpose on this earth. That is the place and function of the Church. That is the reason that we are now sojourning on this earth, rather than being immediately translated into heaven. If we were the object, there would be no reasonable grounds for us to stay here after our conversion. We could simply accept Christ and leave this earth and go to heaven. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Eph 2:4-10. 
God has a greater plan in place in Jesus Christ. He needs to express His selfless and perfect love. His chosen vessel is His Church whom He has redeemed unto Himself in His Son. Our lives are the living testimony of the life of Jesus Christ. We show forth, in living reality, the splendid manifestation of God’s love to His glory and His praise.
The Apostle Paul proclaims this truth so eloquently in another, so familiar passage. Col 1:25-28 Of this church I was made a minister according to the stewardship from God bestowed on me for your benefit, that I might fully carry out the preaching of the word of God, that is, the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations; but has now been manifested to His saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. And we proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, that we may present every man complete in Christ. We live, corporately and individually, in God’s completed purpose in Jesus Christ. He is our hope. He is our strength. He is our Righteousness. He is our Holiness. He is our life. He is our everything! 
As we work and interact on this earth, our lives are changed, not because we are becoming better human beings, but because He is the source of our new life. Where once we lived out from ourselves, in our old nature of sin, we now have a completely different fountainhead of life. We are now alive in Jesus Christ. Everything is now centered in His glory and His witness of true holiness and righteousness in the presence of God. 
This is sealed and accomplished by the Holy Spirit, as we read in 1 John 3:24. And the one who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. And we know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us. There is a oneness, an abiding fellowship that is in place because of the Holy Spirit’s guidance and direction, especially with regard to effective prayer. Rom 8:26+27, And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. 
As T. Austin-Sparks declares, Thus the law of effective and fruitful life, service, prayer, etc., is that there shall be such a oneness that we only do-but surely do-what He is doing. We must know in our spirit just what Christ is doing, how He is doing it, the means which He will use, and His time for it. Moreover, our prayers must be the prayers of the Lord Himself prayed in us and through us by the Holy Spirit. This is surely made very clear as being the realm in which the Church in apostolic times lived. This will demand considerable sifting of all undertakings in the name of Jesus, and will require that nothing is done until the mind of Jesus has been made known. But this will secure a hundred-per-cent effectiveness, and issues which will never perish. For the practical purposes of God in this age Christ is the One Body holding fast the Head, and the business of every member is to realize more and more fully the meaning of this incorporation and oneness of identity. End quote.
 The need for our unity in Christ extends far beyond our personal relationship with Him. It is a necessity that envelopes the entire circle of those gathered together in His name. We will be looking at this in greater detail in the progression of our considerations of prayer. What needs to be in place at this moment, however, is that our union in Him is very much set in our desire after Him. There will never be a true oneness until our hearts are set solely and singly upon Him. If we are distracted by our wants and our cravings for the things of this world, we will not find our hearts being united together in Him.
We each need to have the heart as expressed by the Psalmist in Ps 16:8 I have set the Lord continually before me; Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. This requires a continual and consistently focused heart, mind, and soul that is set on the Lord, Alone. That needs to be our prayer at this time, that we would each yearn for the Lord with every fabric of our being. If we want to pray effectively, if we want to be the overcomers recorded in this Book, we need to hear His voice clearly and respond immediately. Otherwise, this is all merely an academic lesson with no true bearing in our lives. We will continue to live for ourselves, ignoring the pleading of the Lord within us to move on into the greater depths of the knowledge of Him. 
We must call on Him to do everything necessary for His truth to take root in the heart of His people. We must earnestly beseech Him to make us completely focused on Him as our life. Remember that The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, To all who call upon Him in truth. Ps 145:18. But we need to call. We need to yearn for Him to draw us ever more fully into Himself. It is quite literally a matter of life and death: His life and our death. That is the only road to pleasing Him and to knowing His will in our life as His Church. So be it!
'Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me. Amen.

This morning’s benediction is Rev 3:21+22, 'He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne. 'He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.' " Amen.