Where does most of the living happen in a family home?
The kitchen.
Prepping and eating the meals, and simply hanging out around food. The highest traffic area in any house is the area around the fridge.
Our family often hangs out at our kitchen island. Late night nacho nibbling, popcorn prep, microwaved cheese buns, chocolate milk, cheese and crackers, leftovers, you name it, all in the kitchen at the island.
The kitchen is the heart of the family home.
The porch is where non-family wait to be invited in by the family. Family don’t have to be invited in, we have an open invitation to enter the heart of our home. Strangers can’t walk straight into our home. Stranger wait on the porch for an invitation to come inside.
Our relationship with the Lord is like that. We’ve been created to live as family in the heart of the family home. We’ve been created to have full access to all the rights and privileges of a beloved child in our Father’s family.
However, our sin – our insistence to do life our way – means we’re relegated to living outside of the family of God. And, the closest we can come is the porch.
But Jesus is at the front door to the house, to the family of God. He made a way for each of us to be born again into the family of God. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection we can move from the porch to the kitchen.
This week I had the pleasure and privilege of witnessing a friend of mine responding to Jesus’ invitation to move from the porch to the kitchen. He was born again into the family of God with full access to God’s kitchen!
Daniel has been a client of mine for close to 4 years now. We began talking about Jesus a number of months ago. It had become very apparent the Lord was calling him – he just didn’t recognize it yet. He was very open to learn more and he was very keen to have me close our coaching sessions by praying for him.
I was going to a Heaven in Business conference at Bethel Church in Redding California, and invited a number of my Christian friends to join me. None could make it. So, I invited Daniel. I figured if he came he would somehow have a profound encounter with Jesus.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Though a little apprehensive, he was game to come, and Jesus powerfully met with him in many different ways. We talked on a number of occasions about moving from the porch to the kitchen, but he wasn’t quite ready yet. Then, he experienced something that in 46 years of walking with Jesus I have never experienced…
Basically, Jesus visited him at the beginning of a session.
Daniel said it was like Jesus stepped inside him and sat down in a big comfy leather chair, and asked Daniel to sit down with him. Daniel sat with Jesus and said he had never felt such peace and love in his life.
We then, as part of the conference, got together in a small group to pray for each other. Daniel stepped in the circle and God, through the prayers and words of others, continued to do even more to woo Daniel.
That was it. He gave up resisting God and trying to do it on his own. He talked with Jesus on the porch and asked if He would forgive his sin. Daniel asked if he could become a beloved son in God’s family and move into God’s kitchen.
After heart-felt hugs he looked at me and said, “Am I allowed to be this happy?”
Absolutely! Welcome to the family!
God’s heart is for all of us to move from the porch to the kitchen. Jesus made a way for all of us to commune with our Father around His kitchen table. Don’t relegate yourself to the porch – gather round the kitchen table of our father and commune with Him and the rest of the family.
Jesus made the way for you to move from the porch to the kitchen.
1 John 3:1
“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.”
James 1:17
“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”
Romans 8: 15-17 (The Message)
“This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike ‘What’s next, Papa?’ God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!”
John 15:11
“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”