“Knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7, NKJV).

We humans love to categorize ourselves. Depending upon what we deem important, we long to be part of one group, but exempt from another. This is why so many of us spent our high school years trying to snag a place with the cool crowd and maintain our distance from the not-so-cool crowd.

Too often, we hang onto the “us-versus-them” mentality as adults. But as believers, we have no right to think in these terms. For all the differences between one Christian and the next, we all knocked on the same door in order to be saved: “I am the door,” Jesus said in John 10:9—and a few chapters later, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (14:6).

The unsaved philanthropist is no less lost than the unsaved sex offender. No matter how “good” a life he’s living, when a person first knocks, he does so alongside the shoplifter, the gossip, and the prostitute.

Even after one or ten or sixty years of Christian living, we’re all still beggars, stumbling around in pitch darkness apart from grace. This is what makes a joke of our self-importance. We start out side by side, and although we might spend our lives in a way that’s more pleasing to God than the next person, at the end we’re once again side by side—at the door of heaven only because of the blood of Jesus.

Today, remember that “you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—not from works, so that no one can boast” (Eph. 2:8-9).