Keion Henderson - The Doors of The Church Are Open

Hezekiah assumes the throne and takes over where his father left off. His father closed the doors to the temple. Hezekiah actually preached this sermon before I wrote it, and the name of the subject is based on the actions that Hezekiah took when he received the throne. You’ve all heard this statement before, but I’m hoping to provide you with new revelation on it. Look at your neighbor and say, «Pastor wants to talk about the doors.» The doors of the church are open, and you may be seated in the presence of the Lord. The doors of the church are open. How many of you have been in church long enough to remember that this was how the pastor ended every sermon after he said he died on Friday? I’m going to test your church knowledge. He stayed in the grave all night Friday night, all day Saturday, and all night Saturday night. I’m about to find out how saved you are. Early Sunday morning… I’m not done testing you. He got out of the grave, not just with some power, but with power to make you walk right and power to make you talk right. Until now, I thought it was a church colloquialism that we just used at the end of the message to say, «The doors of the church are open,» and we would open the doors of the church. But what it really meant was that we had come to the part of the service where you could respond to the message and join the church. I’m testing your knowledge— you could come by letter, by Christian experience, or through baptism. I grew up in a time in church when if you left a church, you had to get a letter from the church you were at, and you needed to bring that letter to the church you were trying to join. We didn’t join church in the gym; no, they put chairs across the altar, and you had to sit in that chair. A secretary, who wasn’t allowed in the pulpit, would say, «We have Ella Jean Smith coming to us from the Bu Baptist Church of Georgia. She was the ministry leader at her church and comes through Christian experience.» At our church, we had other things to say. How do we treat her? Everybody would say, «We welcome you. We welcome you once, we welcome you twice, we welcome you.» That was our experience every Sunday. Not only was that our experience every Sunday, but back then, you didn’t just go to church at 10:00— no, no, no, no, no, no. We had to be there at 8:00 for Sunday School. We had this little wooden board on the wall that said, «This Sunday: $326, Last Sunday: $422.» There was a lady with a folder tabulating all the manila envelopes, and the women’s ministry would always win. That was the church I grew up in. That church and its practices don’t exist much anymore. The church has always been under attack; that’s why Jesus had to say, «Upon this rock, I’ll build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.» 2020 came, and it looked like the gates of hell were closing in because here Jesus was in antiquity saying that the gates of hell should not prevail against it, and yet for a season, it seemed like the doors of the church were closed. Whether you know it or not, every Sunday while all of you were at home, myself and a consortium of people were in this room, and I stood right here, preaching the word of God to the best of my ability as if this room were full because I knew that the church was still open. I only have one goal, maybe primarily, to let you know that this building is not the church. If Bush Airport decided that they needed this space for a runway, let me just tell you now— if they just so happened to decide that a runway needed to come right through here, we would find somewhere else to go. I’m going to sell them this building at high market value, and we will go build another one to the glory of God because this isn’t the church. The proof that it is not the church is that we could lose the building and still be the lighthouse. Watch history. David wanted to build a temple for God, but God told him, «Even though you are my favorite king, I can’t allow you to be my architect because I can’t have a man with blood on his hands build my building.» So he waited a generation and built it with his son. By the way, I didn’t even plan to say this— what some of you don’t know is you’re actually Solomon. What you’re getting ready to do is build what your parents tried to build, and God is going to use your anointing to do what your father could not do, and it wasn’t because he was weaker than you or incapable. It just meant that God reserved the temple for your time, which means that you won’t have to wait as long to do it because the temple has actually been waiting on you to grow up before it would go up. Touch somebody and say, «I’ve got a Solomon’s anointing.» So they tried to close the doors of the church, and we passed out more masks and hand sanitizer, and we practiced social distancing to the…