Podcast 2.03 The Courage that Stays at the Feet of Jesus

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You can find the song I shared in today’s episode here.

 

Transcript:

Episode 2.03 The Courage that Stays at the Feet of 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 we have been talking about my favorite Bible character, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who always shows up at Jesus’ feet. And today I want to talk about her courage.

In the church where I grew up, there was a big, beautiful stained glass window across the front of the building, and so I spent many hours of my childhood staring at it. It showed four virtues personified as humans, with their names written under them. Three of them were women in long flowy robes: “Patience” who had a lamb, “Purity” who had an oil lamp and lilies, and “Truthfulness” who had a mirror. And then the fourth figure was a man in armor with a sword, and his name was “Courage.” And the message I picked up, unconsciously but deeply, was that patience, purity, and truthfulness could be feminine virtues, but courage was a masculine virtue that involved physical strength and physical fighting and warfare. Courage was for men and boys only. Or maybe for a tomboy type of girl who wanted to do wrestling and boxing. But not for me. So whenever anyone talked about courage, I tuned out, because I deeply believed the lie that courage could never be for me.

And then the Lord started to show me that one of the most courageous people in the Bible was this Mary. That the picture of courage in the Bible didn’t just include David wrestling a lion and killing a bear and killing Philistine warriors, it also included this Mary kneeling at the feet of Jesus, pouring out her vulnerable precious heart in the face of the criticism of the disciples and waiting silently for Jesus Himself to defend her, caring more about loving Jesus than what anybody else thought of her. God’s picture of courage wasn’t a bunch of guys with weapons and bulging muscles looking for a fight, it was this Mary with her long feminine hair wiping the feet of Jesus with her hair in front of all the other people who thought she was nuts and not caring about anything except Jesus. It was her courage on multiple occasions not to defend herself when others criticized her but to just keep her eyes on Jesus, stay kneeling at His feet, and wait for Him to defend her, wait for Him to tell the other people that He approved of what she had done. And most of all, it was her courage, over and over again, to let Jesus’ verdict of approval be enough for her.

I then went to a conference to hear one of my favorite speakers, Katie Luse of Connect Up ministries, and her topic was courage. She said the word courage comes from the Latin word “heart” and that courage means doing things with your heart and daring to share your heart and speak from your heart and speak out and bring out what is really in your heart, and she said that courage is also about consistency, being the same no matter who is in the room. And she gave the example of this courageous Mary, who dared to pour out her precious jar on Jesus’ feet even when she was surrounded by other people who wouldn’t understand and would even criticize and mock her way of loving Him.

And so the picture of courage from the stained glass windows began to dislodge from my mind and be replaced by the picture of this Mary, which whispered to me, “you too can be courageous, any of us can be courageous, courage is daring to let what Jesus Himself thinks and says about you be enough for you.”

(Musical transition)

Prayer: Lord, I pray for each person listening to this and for me too, that we would be able to get down at the feet of Jesus with the true courage of Mary to be ourselves, no matter what, to worship You the way You created us to, no matter what, and to let Your approval be enough for us. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

(Musical transition)

Content: The story of this Mary first opened to me when I was living in a very difficult situation. I was studying and working overseas and living with a woman who ended up being verbally and emotionally abusive. Before I tell more of that story I just want to say if there is another human being who is trying to control you with anger and fear, please reach out and get help. Having those kind of secrets is a dark and lonely place to be, and the works of the enemy grow in the darkness of secrecy, while the works of the Lord flourish in the light of openness and truth.

The enemy started to trap me in the darkness on the day my housemate came home and started screaming belittling insults at me because it was my day to clean the house and I was still cleaning the house and she said I should have finished before she got home from work. At the time, I didn’t realize that I could and should have set and enforced a boundary that I would not live with a person who screamed at me, I had only tried to think what could I have done differently so she, my first and only friend so far in a new country and culture, my friend that I trusted and cared about, wouldn’t have been upset with me. I replayed the day in my mind. I had gone to the university, I had done my job, I had spent one hour praying, one of the most beautiful and memorable hours with Jesus in my life, hearing His voice and communing l with Him, and then I had started cleaning the house. And I couldn’t change my responsibility to go to university or to do my job. So the only thing I could have done differently, I thought, to prevent her screaming at me, was to have not spent that time in prayer.

I knew that God didn’t think that I had done anything wrong, that He approved of me praying before cleaning the house. And I thought, now I know what it feels like when God is pleased with me and another human is furious with me. And knowing God is pleased doesn’t make it stop hurting. It doesn’t feel like enough. Now I know that pleasing God but not pleasing people hurts too much to bear, it isn’t enough for me.

So I stopped spending time in prayer. I missed Jesus so bad I could cry, but I didn’t dare spend time with Him anymore.

After about two months of that torment, fear, and control increasing day by day, the Lord began to get through to me that I needed to tell others, and they were able to tell me that it wasn’t my fault and that I didn’t need to keep living with that and to help me take steps to get out of that situation. As the light began to shine in on the dark secrets that had been tormenting me, and my thinking became clearer again, the Lord also opened the story of Mary and Martha to me. In this story, I was Mary, praying, listening at Jesus’ feet, and my housemate was Martha, getting so mad about it that she blew up in anger, wanting Mary to stop spending time with Jesus and get back to work. And Jesus had spoken gently and lovingly to Martha and addressed her issues, her anxiety about many things that wasn’t Mary’s fault. But He had also spoken up for Mary and said that He approved of her choice, He said that the thing she’d chosen to do in being with Him was the ‘best portion,’ the most important thing she could ever choose, and it would not be taken from her.

And what I realized at that point in the story was that Mary now had a choice. Jesus wouldn’t let her ‘best portion’ be taken from her, but she could choose to stop choosing it. When Martha scolded and Jesus defended her, she could stay at Jesus’ feet no matter how Martha responded, letting Jesus’ approval be enough for her, or she could jump up and run back to the kitchen to try to please Martha, leaving Jesus behind. And the story doesn’t say what Mary chose, but I had chosen to jump up and leave Jesus and stay in the kitchen and try to keep Martha happy. And it wasn’t working. I had lost myself and lost my connection with Jesus, and the Martha in my life was still endlessly displeased and screaming anyway, because it was never about me. My housemate was responding out of her own trauma, the doors in her own heart that stood open to spirits of rage and control and needed deliverance, her own need to control the people around her to feel safe and her own instinctive response to attack anyone who had reminded her of an unsafe memory. She needed Jesus to call her name as tenderly as He called ‘Martha Martha’ and tell her what was really going on in her heart and that is wasn’t about other people like Mary and that He could help her with it. And as long as I was trying to control her back by pleasing her to make her not hurt me, and as long as I was keeping her behavior a secret and shielding her from the natural consequences of her choices, I was actually getting in the way of her coming face to face with Jesus and what He wanted to do for her.

So I had to go back to that moment that I had made the opposite of Mary’s choice and repent of saying, ‘from now on I know that pleasing God is not enough, I need to please people, too.’ And I made the courageous decision to stay at the feet of Jesus like Mary and I went back to having my time with Jesus after work for every day of the last month I lived with that woman before I could change into a healthier housing situation. I was able to feel more like myself again as I started to hear His voice again and feed on His word and His presence again, I was able to get what Jesus called the best portion back. I realized the enemy had been trying to use my housemate’s issues to scare me away from the thing that scared him the most, my time building connection with Jesus.

So as I spent time with Jesus in freedom again, I kept meditating on the story of this Mary and the way she overcame the fear of man at the feet of Jesus. I saw that she stood up to the fear of man and she chose again and again, to not be a people-pleaser, but just a Jesus-pleaser. When Martha criticized her, she just stayed at the feet of Jesus and let Jesus be the One to defend her, and He did. He said she’d chosen the best portion and it would not be taken from her. And then she did the exact same thing later when she poured her priceless perfume on Jesus’ feet. In Matthew’s account of the story (Matthew 26:6-13), not just Judas but all the disciples criticize her, and she again stays silently kneeling at Jesus’ feet, waiting for His verdict, and Jesus makes a long speech in her defense, saying, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me… When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

And guess what? He was right. I’m still talking about her 2000 years later, because she didn’t seek the affirmation of humans but she waited for the affirmation of Jesus. And all in all I was so moved and healed by her courage, that I wrote a song about it, which I’ll play for you now, with the help of my friend on the guitar.

Who could have guessed at the freedom I’ve found
When I’m here at Your feet with my heart on the ground
And I’m closing my eyes so I can’t look around and see
What their faces might tell me they think of me?
And I’m closing my mouth for the first and last time,
Not defending myself when it’s all on the line,
Because I want to hear what You’ll say if I leave that to you
So I do…
And who can stand against me when
You say, “Leave her alone,
I have seen her love for Me
And I call it beautiful!”
And whose raised eyebrows can hurt me now
That I have heard You say
That You have seen my love for You
And You call it beautiful?

Question:  Today I invite you to simply come to Jesus and ask Him for yourself, Lord Jesus, what does courage look like for me in my life right now?

(Musical Outro)