Podcast 2.02 What’s Your Special Place with Jesus?

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Transcript

Episode 2.02
What’s Your Special Place with Jesus?

(Musical intro)

Intro: Welcome to the Encounter Jesus podcast, also known as the ‘feel like Jesus is hugging you today’ podcast. I’m Elizabeth Ellynshaw, and today we will be talking about having a special place where you can always start from in seeing and hearing Jesus with your spirit. In my last episode I talked about my favorite Bible character, Mary of Bethany, who always appears in the same place at Jesus’ feet, whether she’s sitting at His feet listening to His word, falling at His feet weeping, or breaking her jar of precious perfume over His feet and wiping them with her hair. Whether she was coming to listen and learn from Him, to weep and lament to Him, or to worship and love Him, she always started her encounters with Jesus by going back to that same place, putting herself in that position down at His feet. And when she did, Jesus responded to her, and gave her these amazing encounters where He defended her, where He said she had chosen the best portion that would never be taken from her, and where He wept with her and revealed the depths of His emotional side to the whole world up to this very day with her.

One of the many reasons I identify with this Mary is that I too, have a special place that I return to to encounter Jesus. It was a long journey for me to realize that just like Mary physically met Jesus at His feet, I can spiritually meet Jesus in my heart by using my imagination to picture what is true. But once I finally learned that, my life was transformed by the discovery that I can meet Jesus in any moment of any day; whether I’m falling asleep, driving, washing dishes, waiting in line, or worshiping for hours, I can hear His voice, and I can feel Him holding me. That isn’t a once in a lifetime experience, as I used to believe, but a place that I can choose to return to all the time, because it’s true.

Today I want to share with you the testimony of my place, and I hope that hearing about Mary’s place at Jesus’ feet and hearing about my place will help you hear from God about what is your place to encounter Jesus, and then to return to it again and again.

(Musical transition)

Prayer: Lord, as we come before Your throne of grace, we kneel at Your feet, as Mary did. We kneel here to listen to Your voice. We kneel here to pour out our pain and our hearts. And we kneel here to worship You and love You and give our whole lives to You again. As we kneel at Your feet, invite each of us into the special place You have for us to meet with You, and help us return to it again and again and encounter You there as consistently as Mary of Bethany did. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Content: For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to sit on Jesus’ lap. When I was a little kid, I had all these children’s Bibles with pictures on the front of the story of Jesus blessing the children, and they usually showed a picture of Jesus sitting with one kid on His lap and a bunch of other kids standing around Him and beside Him. And I would look at those pictures and think that I wanted to be that one kid sitting on His lap, not just standing or sitting next to Him. I would look to see if this particular artist had painted a boy or a girl on Jesus’ lap; my favorite versions of the picture would be the ones where it was a girl and even a girl who sorta looked like me!

I was a Daddy’s girl and a snuggly kid, and I would usually start a conversation with my father by sitting on his lap. Even if there was another chair free beside him, I would rather sit on him than next to him if I had the choice. I’d climb up in his lap and he would stop what he was doing and listen to me, and listen to my heart.

Or I would come sit on his lap when he was on the computer writing sermons, and he would show me what he was working on and how he did it. He showed me things like his Greek interlinear New Testament and how to look for the English words in between the lines of Greek words to find which word was which. I’d climb in his lap and he’d show me what he was doing.

I wished I could climb up into Jesus’ lap the way I could sit on my dad’s lap any time I wanted to, to tell Jesus what was on my heart, or see what He was doing. But I believed the lie that I wouldn’t get to do that until heaven, and even then I thought there’d be such a long line of people waiting for their turn, maybe I wouldn’t get a chance for the first several million years or so!

But there came a season after I grew up that the Lord began to reveal to me the connection between faith and imagination, and that faith is imagining what is real and believing it’s true. So there came the fateful day that I write about in more detail in my book when I told Him, Lord, the deepest thing I know about myself is that I am the girl who has always wanted to sit in Your lap. I hurt myself when I try to find my identity in the kinds of things people ask about, like where are you from and what did you study and what is your job, what do you do, they always ask ‘what do you do?’ to find out who you are, like if I don’t have a job right now I don’t exist. But the deepest, truest thing I know about myself is that I have always wanted to sit in Your lap. I can’t imagine walking up to someone and saying, ‘Hi, my name is Elizabeth and I have always wanted to sit in Jesus’ lap!’ But that is the truest thing I know about me.”

And then I heard Him speak back into my heart so clearly, ‘No, that is not the truest thing about you. The truest thing about you is not that are the girl who has always wanted to sit on My lap, but that You are the girl who always is sitting on My lap, the girl who is sitting on My lap right now!”

And then He began to bring to my mind the many, many scriptures that say we are in Christ and Christ is in us. Me being in Him and Him being in me all the time at the same time is an even closer relationship than me sitting on His lap—it’s so all encompassingly close that I don’t know how to picture that from my life experience. All the ways we might imagine closeness with Him, whether kneeling at His feet or sitting on His lap or walking beside Him or sitting next to Him or hugging Him or crying on His shoulder or leaning on His chest or anything else, those are less close than being in Him and Him being in us, and so all those close pictures are true and just part of the truth that is always true. So when we imagine those things, we are imagining what is true. Which is faith.

And for me, the most meaningful picture of closeness in my experience had been sitting on my father’s lap. But Jesus went further and reminded me of scriptures that said He and I had that in common. The deepest thing that was true about me was true about Him too. John 1:18 says that who Jesus is is the Son who was in the bosom of the Father. Not just sitting beside Him at His right hand of power, but held in front of Him, on His chest in His embrace of love. The experience that defined the Son was being loved by His Father, in His intimate embrace, like a child on His Father’s lap. And then Jesus left that place of being God with God in the bosom of the Father so that He could become a human like me and die for me and take me back up in Him and with Him, so Ephesians 2:5 says God raised me up with Christ and seated me with Him in the heavenly places in Christ. So the way Jesus is sitting right now in the bosom of His Father is where I am in Him. I can explain the whole gospel through this metaphor of sitting on God’s lap!

So now, I didn’t have to do anything to earn the experience of being on Jesus’ lap. I could just believe it was already true and step into it. So it became our meeting place and starting place whenever I wanted to draw near to Him, hear from Him, ask Him a question, listen to His voice, just like Mary of Bethany always started from her favorite place at Jesus’ feet. I used to wonder when I read James 4:8 “draw near to God and He will draw near to you,” HOW do I draw near to God when He’s not physically here with me to walk towards Him? After I discovered that the deepest true thing I knew about myself was a place, the place of being in Christ that I could picture as sitting on Jesus’ lap, I never wondered that again. I knew could always draw near to God by picturing myself on Jesus’ lap and picking up where we had left off in our last visionary conversation there. Nothing helped me more in learning to hear His voice than picturing being on His lap and listening to Him from my place. Almost everything I learned about hearing Him, experiencing Him, being healed by Him, started from and in and out of being in my place with Him.

Now, many people love to meet the Lord in a variety of visual pictures or meeting places. For me, for many years it was very important to always know what my starting place was so I could start meeting with Him by leaning into the reality that I am on His lap and from there He could take me on other adventures together, because having that consistent starting place made me feel safe and that I would never be unable to access the reality of Jesus with me with the eyes and ears of my heart. But whether or not you start with Him from one starting place or many, He has so much to show us and so many places to take us. My one friend testified to me that she starts her prayer time by thinking about and imagining where she’s meeting Jesus today and He gives her lots of variety, sometimes in a garden, on a mountaintop, or in a hot air balloon to name a few, and that the different locations can affect the kinds of things that they talk about together.

So I highly, highly recommend asking the Lord if there is a way or ways He has for you to picture the reality that you are in Christ. You can ask Him if there is a consistent meeting place that He wants to give you in your imagination so you can draw near to Him that way. From there, you can also ask Him to show you all His favorite meeting places with you and take you on lots of adventures!

(Musical transition)

Question: So today I invite you to ask Jesus, ‘Lord, how do You want me to picture the deepest, truest reality about myself that I am in You? What consistent picture of our relationship do You want me to return to again and again? Picture where you are in relationship to Jesus, right now, and draw near to Him there. What is He doing? What is He saying? What do you want to say and do in response to Him? And then be like Mary of Bethany, and whether you want to listen to Him, to cry your eyes out, or give Him everything, keep going back and meeting Him there.

(Musical Outro)