The Stone Holding the Door
1 Corinthians 2:12 - “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.”
For three decades, a Grand Rapids-area man kept a heavy black rock as a doorstop. It had come with the farm he bought in Edmore, Michigan, in 1988. When he first toured the property, he saw it propping open a shed door. The previous owner mentioned, almost in passing, that the thing was a meteorite. According to the story he told, it had come down one night back in the 1930s with a tremendous noise, and the next morning he and his father dug it out of the crater still warm.
So the new owner kept it, and used it. A doorstop. His kids once hauled it in for school show-and-tell. Mostly it just sat there, doing the humble work of holding a door, for about thirty years.
In 2018 he finally grew curious about what it might be worth and carried it to a geologist at Central Michigan University. Her name was Mona Sirbescu. She had heard this same hope many times, and the rock in question was almost always an ordinary chunk of earth. This one was different: a genuine iron-nickel meteorite, around twenty-two pounds, later validated by the Smithsonian, one of the largest ever documented in Michigan, and potentially worth close to one hundred thousand dollars.
She said she could tell right away that it was something special. The treasure had been real the whole time, valuable while unnoticed, extraordinary while ordinary people stepped over it for thirty years.
Paul hands us a verse about precisely that kind of treasure. We’ve received the Spirit who is from God, he says, “that we might understand the things freely given us by God.” Not the things we might earn if we finally try hard enough. Not the things God is keeping in reserve, pending our improvement. The things freely given, already deposited, already signed over, already ours. And the reason the Spirit was given, Paul says, is so that we would understand them, recognize them, finally grasp what we’ve been holding all along.
Here’s the quiet tragedy. It’s entirely possible to own the treasure and still live as though we do not. It’s possible to have the Spirit of the living God inside us, every spiritual blessing in Christ already deeded to our name (Eph 1:3), and still spend our days propping doors with it. We pray like beggars at a table that was set for heirs. We strain after a sense of God’s acceptance that became ours the moment we believed. We keep asking God to give us what He has already given. See, the meteorite didn’t grow more valuable when the geologist finally named it; it became recognized. And so much of the Spirit’s work in us isn’t the adding of treasure but the opening of our eyes to the staggering weight of what is already in our hands.
So picture what changes the moment those eyes open. A Joyful Worshipper, at root, is simply someone who has woken up to what they already have and cannot stop giving thanks for it. Worship is recognition catching fire. When our eyes finally open to the grace already poured out on us, praise is just what comes off of us, the way heat comes off a thing that has caught flame. The heir stops begging at the door and starts enjoying the house; the table, it turns out, was set all along.
The Spirit was given so that you would know what you’re holding. Which means the most genuinely spiritual move available to us today may simply be to stop, look down at what is already in our hands, and thank Him for it.
Today: Take two minutes and make an actual list. Name three things you keep asking God to give you that Scripture says are already yours in Christ: His full acceptance, His abiding presence, His complete forgiveness, His indwelling Spirit, etc. Then go back and turn each request into thanks. Receive today, by gratitude, what was already deeded to you.
Prayer: “Father, thank You that the richest treasure in the universe is already in my hands, freely given, signed over to me in Christ before I ever thought to ask. I confess how long I’ve propped doors with it, begging for what was always mine. Open my eyes to the weight of what I hold, and turn my striving into worship. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK