👑 4 Ways To Discern If An Open Door Is From God

Posted on January 15, 2016 by

How can you tell if God is opening a door for you and if it’s from God or only you trying to kick the door open?

1. The Open Door Points to God’s Glory

No door that God opens will ever contradict Scripture. For example, a man who thought he was supposed to divorce his Christian wife in order to spend the rest of his life in mission work overseas is not from God and not supported by Scripture. This man could easily go and do missionary work overseas and not have to divorce his wife, or he could see if she wanted to go with her. He would have none of either, got an unbiblical divorce, and now is supposed to witness for Christ when he is contradicting the Bible and disobeying Jesus’ command to not divorce except for sexual immorality. Clearly, that is not God’s will because loving God means obeying His commandments (2 John 1:6). If someone says they know Him but doesn’t keep His commandments, he is not of God (1 John 2:3) and God calls him or her a liar (1 John 2:4). Obedience to God glorifies Him.

2. Confirmation From Others

Jesus is the one “who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens” and sets before us “an open door, which no one is able to shut” (Revelation 3:8-9). If the door simply won’t open for you to do something, then that door is not supposed to be opened. Even jimmying the lock or trying to break the door down won’t work. Pray for God to reveal to you which door you are to walk through and make it obvious to you by opening a door that you can’t.

3. The Door Makes You Utterly Dependent on Him

If you can manage to go through a door and not need God’s help for anything, then you might be walking through a door in your own flesh, depending on the strength of your own arm, which isn’t a good indication of God opening a door for you. God wants us to be totally dependent upon Him because any work we do is for Him anyway. Jesus said we can’t do anything without Him (John 15:5), and we won’t be able to produce any fruit of God at all without Him (John 15:4).

4. The Door Opens by Itself

I touched on this briefly in the second paragraph, but this is a bit different. You know the automatic doors you find at the stores? These doors open because they have an electronic eye and they can sense when someone’s about to walk into the store. In the same way, we might have to simply try to go through a door that’s shut at the moment to see if God wants us to walk through it. There may be no reason for God to open a door until He sees you are going to walk through it. He may be waiting for you to “go” before you can “enter” and watching for you to take that first step of faith.

Conclusion

I am not saying that you must have all of these indications because God will make it clear to you in time but until then, pray to God, seek His will, counsel with others, petition their prayers for God’s will for your life, and trust Him. Start taking steps to go through a door that might seem closed now–perhaps God is waiting to see if you’ll trust Him to take the first step. source