Why Do Christians Lock Their Doors?

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I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire!  (Luke 24:32)

Why do Christians lock their doors?

That’s what someone emailed me, and it’s a great question.

Why do Christians lock their doors?  If you say you trust God, and you believe He will protect you and keep you safe, and His angels are watching over you, you surely don’t need to lock your doors, right?

Well, that’s the exact attitude I had as a young believer many years ago.  I was like, “Wow, God’s got me!  I don’t need to lock my apartment or my car.  I don’t even need to lock up this bicycle...which I just leave out here in the open, under the apartment stairs.”

I didn’t have a care in the world, trusting fully that God would take care of those things for me.

Then one day I came home and noticed that my bike was gone.  Now fortunately I had spent some time playing football with the boys in the apartment complex so I just went out and started asking around, “Have you seen my bike?”  Sure enough, they had.  One of them had taken it for a joy ride and dumped it in the weeds out back, and he fearfully went and retrieved it for me.

Thank God I had my bike back, and I had learned a good lesson:  lock my doors!

God has given people free will, and some of them will take your things if they get a chance, and God will let them.  Not always, I suppose, but often enough to know that we should be wise and take precautions.

I put this in the category of testing God.  For example, we don't sit here like baby birds with our mouth open for food, even though we trust God as our provider.  No, we go and earn our food, just like the Bible tells us to do.  "Those who don't work shouldn't eat."  It would be testing the Lord to ask Him to provide while we do nothing.

The same holds true when trusting Him for protection.  In this pandemic, I'm praying and trusting God for protection (which frees me from worry and anxiety), while I also practice social distancing and hand washing.  

When you read the Bible you will see over and over again, God has His part, and we have our part.  Even in the famous Psalm 91 about protection that so many people are quoting today, you can read God’s part and our part.

I think it would be testing God to ignore what I know to be wise practices, like hand washing, like working hard, like locking my doors.

In Matthew chapter 4, Jesus was tempted by the devil.  The New Living Translation says, “Then the devil took Him to the holy city, Jerusalem, to the highest point of the Temple, and said, 'If you are the Son of God, jump off!  For the Scriptures say, 'He will order his angels to protect you.  And they will hold you up with their hands so you won't even hurt your foot on a stone.'"

Then came Jesus' powerful reply in verse 7.  The Scriptures say, “You must not test the Lord your God.”

So that is why I lock my doors.  I believe that to do otherwise is to test the Lord which we are told not to do (except in the case of tithing in Malachi 3:10).

May God bless you today.

I’m Doug Apple.