I am so grateful for all the extraordinary encounters I’ve had with Jesus, some of them while I was alone with the Lord, but many as I positioned myself before proven men and women of God who spoke into my life, or laid hands on me and prayed for me. The gift of spiritual hunger is something that the Holy Spirit uses to motivate us to seek and to “be found”. As have many of you, I’ve traveled long distances, and laid aside busy schedules to posture myself for fresh impartation. I get frustrated sometimes with conference addicts, but I also get frustrated with those who because of indifference or insecurity, have no passion go out of the way to be stretched, and to position themselves for personal mighty expansion.
Having said all that, I believe that the most significant encounters that I have, that represent the foundation of my walk of faith with the Lord, are those accumulative Encounters that I experience day-to-day in the secret place at His footstool. It is there, like John, that I get to lay my head on the breast of Jesus, and again and again become reacquainted, with greater expansion every time, His heartbeat for me and for the world he gave his life for. Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice,” and He said to his disciples the night before his crucifixion, “After little while the world will behold Me no more; but you will behold Me;” In the secret place of the steep pathway I get to behold His face again and again.
Every time I sit at the feet of Jesus and behold His beauty, the Holy Spirit always leads me into a new “revealing,” and “seeing,” which takes the roots of my faith ever deeper, and fascinates my heart ever broader.
On the first night after the resurrection Jesus walked through the locked door in the upper room and revealed himself to the disciples; minus Thomas. He showed them his scars and asked them to touch his hands and a touch His side, to help them to believe that what they were hoping, was actually true. Eight days later, he showed up again to the same room and revealed himself to Thomas in the same way that he did the others, by showing Thomas his hands and his side, and when He did, He told him “be not unbelieving, but believing.” At that point Thomas cried out, “My Lord and my God!,” and Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see and yet believed.”
There was only one among all the followers, including Mary Magdalene and all the disciples who could say that they believed without having to see the risen Christ personally, and that was John. In John 20, when the disciple whom Jesus was always loving, stepped into the empty tomb it says that he saw and he believed. What did he see? Not the risen Christ, but just some simple evidence that could have been easily explained away, yet John believed.
How blessed he was, because after going to the tomb, he spent the whole day celebrating and rejoicing in his heart the fact that Jesus had risen. It is easy to believe when we can see physical evidence of the activity of the favor of God; but what about those times when we can’t see with the eyes in our head; then we must see with the eyes of our heart, but those set of eyes are only nurtured under the sound of the heartbeat of Jesus. Learners are often skeptics, but lovesick lovers are childlike believers. There is a greater measure of blessing according to Jesus in John 20:29 for those who have so come into union with the heartbeat of Jesus, because they have spent countless hours leaning on their beloved in the secret place, that they are able to believe even when they can’t see. The Scripture says we walk by faith and not by sight, and I am so grateful that I can tell stories of all the times when I’ve seen tangibly the evidence of the activity of the risen Christ in my life, and those times when I’ve had extravagant encounters with him in different settings, which I’m able to reference back to as real markers of my life, but what I will never trade is the fact that behind the veil, in the secret place, accumulating encounters on His breast day after day I have cultivated “Dove eyes,” that can see even in the darkness.