Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Abiding in God’s Presence

“Look!
I stand at the door and knock.
If you hear My voice and open the door,
I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends.
Revelation 3:20 (NLT)

Revelation 3:20 is often used as a picture of salvation offered by Jesus, but, in context, He is talking to believers. His words come at the end of His message to the Laodiceans, a spiritually impoverished church that Jesus described as “lukewarm.”

He’s offering them the richness of His presence: table fellowship, which is a biblical image of intimacy and love. He is welcoming them into the divine fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He wants to share a meal together.

How about you? Have you invited Jesus to dinner? What’s on the menu?

From Leftovers to Feast

For a long time, I served Jesus leftovers.

Leftover time.

Leftover energy.

Leftover attention.

Leftover affection.

It wasn’t until I desperately needed God—when my days became too hard, when I was stretched beyond capacity, with no margin and no rest—that I started inviting Jesus to dinner.

And breakfast and lunch.

Everything changed.

As I regularly sought out God, He showed up. Big time. Not only did I experience new power for living and unshakable faith, but I gained a loving awareness of God’s presence throughout the day.

There’s no formula for dining with Jesus, but I will share how I approach our time together, which is not a ritual but a relational rhythm, a turning of my mind and heart toward God. I’ll call it “Pray and Stay—Read and Heed.”

Pray and Stay—Read and Heed

Pray. I start with prayer. If you’d like one to get you started, here’s one:
“Father, I invite You to come and sit with me. Thank You for treasuring me and delighting in me. I know that You love me and that Your love can transform me to be the person You want me to be. I plead the blood of Jesus over this time of prayer and command that only Your Spirit shall come close and prosper, that all other voices be silenced, including my own thoughts that are not of You. As I read Your Word, I pray that You speak to my heart and fill me with Your Spirit so that I can hear Your voice and know You better. Strengthen me to joyously surrender to Your perfect will. Help me to grow in my faith.”

Stay. Our minds love to wander, and mine wants to go straight to my daily to-do list. Instead, I’ve learned to stay in the moment with God by thinking about resting in God’s loving arms. I think about being immersed in His wonderful light. I often sit in silence, calming my spirit and preparing to worship. Sometimes I listen first to my favorite worship songs, especially “Holy Forever” by Chris Tomlin. Then I visualize ridding myself of concerns as I take deep breaths and blow them away.

Read. Jesus told His disciples in the book of John: “The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life” (6:63). You can read expectantly, knowing that your heavenly Father wants to spend time with you.
How long do you read God’s Word? Until you see the blinking neon words. Just kidding! Sometimes I read just a paragraph or so. Sometimes I read much more before something stands out. And sometimes God speaks to my heart about something that’s not even connected to my Bible reading. But I hear Him because I’ve positioned myself to listen.
There’s no certain number of chapters or verses that I read. I almost read from one of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) or one of the New Testament letters. I also enjoy reading Psalms and Proverbs regularly in the morning. Sometimes I read silently, and sometimes I read the text aloud like a prayer.

Heed. I keep a journal in which I write the verse or the part of it that God has highlighted for me. Then I write the personal application of the verse to my life. My journal is full of thanks, questions, concerns, experiences, insights, and epiphanies. Basically, I record the conversations between God and me. I’ve got 10 years of journals—and what a faith-builder they are as I reread them.

Then be sure to heed what God has said—perhaps it’s something you need to do—or change—or embrace. There’s not much point in listening if you don’t trust God and do what He has said! Also, God may have little more to say until you heed what He’s already said.

Moving from Sacrifice to Sacred

What began as the sacrifice of my specific, consistent times and places to be alone with God has become the most important times in my life, resulting in my greatest spiritual growth.

It’s one thing to reminisce about how you are loved by someone; it is another thing altogether to be caught up and alive in the relationship in time and place.

Worship brings me alive as God’s truths saturate my soul, and love resurrects me. I am left breathless with wonder and weak in humility as I encounter the presence of the living God.

Do you know this sacred time and space that Jesus bought for us with His own life? He took on a temporal body that He sacrificed for us, a body that will forever be a reminder of the magnitude of God’s love. Through that love, Jesus bridged time and space so that we could be made holy by His indwelling. The omnipresent, eternal God entered into our time and space to reconcile us to Him! How can we not enter into it for fellowship with Him?