if anyone hears My voice and opens the door,
I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.
Revelation 3:20
Although this famous verse has often been used to invite unbelievers to make a commitment to Jesus, it in fact appears at the end of a biting chastisement Christ directs to the church of Laodicea. He accuses them of being lukewarm and self-satisfied; they are useless to Him unless they repent. Part of the chastisement reads like this (verses 17 and 18):
Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed.
If we see ourselves as spiritually rich but are in fact spiritually impoverished, our words and actions will reveal that our own hearts have not been broken before Him and refined by fire. We'll get things backwards, because our real reference point will be ourselves. Our message will be about how sinful or inadequate others are. We may talk about Light, but our focus will be darkness.
Jesus asks us, when finally we see our need, to buy from Him white garments and gold refined by fire. "Buy from Me..." seem to be strange words. How can we buy anything from Christ? What can we give Him that would be enough to receive His spiritual wealth in return? Nothing. That's what we can give Him. We can give Him our nothingness, our emptiness, our awareness that we need Him to break and continue breaking our self-satisfied spirits. And then He offers this sweet invitation, to explain how we will find what He is offering us: "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."
His plan for us always comes back to this. As He said in John 17, knowing God is the definition of life itself. Everything He has to give us will flow out of our intimate fellowship with Him. There's no formula for this: the only requirement is "nothing" -- knowing what we're not, and letting Him shape us into what He is -- gold -- by means of whatever fire He chooses.