John 20:19-29 tells the story of Jesus’ followers fearfully hiding inside a locked room after His crucifixion, when Jesus suddenly joined them. Locked doors were no barrier to Him. This story is symbolic as well as factual.

The point is that Jesus is still capable of getting through locked doors, and He still does pass through locked doors. People in the Muslim world are forbidden to read the Bible or receive Christian missionaries, but there are many stories of Jesus bypassing the usual methods of transmitting the gospel and appearing to people in dreams. In 1949, the communist government of China slammed the doors to Christian missionaries. Over the next thirty or forty years before the border restrictions began to lift slightly, the tiny Chinese Christian church grew from a million believers to an estimated fifty million believers.

There are many kinds of locked doors and other barriers that Satan tries to erect to keep Jesus out. It was not the Jewish authorities but Jesus’ followers who locked the doors to the upper room. Besides persecution, the barriers to the good news of Jesus include the fear and doubt mentioned in John 20. The list of barriers is even longer than this, including anger, racial prejudice, guilt, feelings of unworthiness, traumatic experiences, and many more. The hopeful thing to remember is that Jesus can pass through these barriers as easily as He passed through the locked doors of the upper room.