The Road to Visitation
Jamie Ryan Galloway
One of my favorite stories from the gospels is the story of The Road to Emmaus found in Luke 24. Two followers of Jesus were overwhelmed with grief that Jesus had been delivered to death. Theresurrected Jesus met them on the road, but Luke 24:16 states, “But their eyes were restrained so that they did not know Him.”
To me this is one of the most frustrating accounts in the Bible concerning visitation. Here are two that have seemingly followed Jesus for quite some time. They are so close to their King, but they could not recognize Him throughout the entire seven-mile journey.
I have had experiences with the Lord where I have met Him either in a dream, vision, or somewhere in the heavens while having an out of body experience and often I do not immediately know it is him. In dreams He may appear as a best friend. In visions and visitations He may appear as an angel or someone meek and lowly. The strange thing is each time you kind of have a funny feeling going on inside of you that may be telling you this is someone more than an angel, a burning inside of your spirit that tells you something deeper is taking place.
When the two disciples’ eyes were opened to know that it was Jesus they were speaking with, they said to one another, “Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while he opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)
There is a burning in our hearts that begins as Jesus draws near. There is a magnetic attraction in our spirits to Him as He draws closer because our spirits recognize someone that we burn for is close.
An Interesting Visitation
Once while on a ministry trip with a good friend of mine, I had a visitation that may highlight what I am talking about. We were rooming together and I decided to stay back and minister to the Lord while he went to the meeting that night. Sometime throughout that evening I fell asleep and woke up to someone walking back and forth next to my bed. I was totally spiritually dull at that moment and began to wonder how my friend returned so early from the meeting. As I lay there puzzled, watching him walk back and forth I suddenly realized that this was not my friend, but it was a visitation. At that point the strange visitor from the Lord sat down on my bed. He was so heavy that my bed literally started to cave in on the side he was sitting on. Just when I thought the bed and myself were going to flip over he disappeared. You may think that whenever you have a visitation from the Lord that it is going to be so immediately apparent. Well, if we want that to be true we have to sharpen ourselves until we are so aware of the presence of God that we unmistakably know it is Him when He shows up.
The Magnetic Attraction
At times when I am waiting on God for a visitation I notice something very peculiar starts to happen. The way I have chosen to posture myself before the Lord is to sit up comfortably and cross my legs so that I do not fall asleep while I am waiting. At a certain point I will be overcome with the presence of God and slowly reposition myself to now lay down before him because I feel a visitation is at hand. It is at this time that I will find myself swept away by the Holy Spirit into trances (Acts 10:10), visions, visitations (2 Corinthians 12:1-2), and realms of glory such as levitations, ecstasies, and other manifestations. (Revelation 1:10) Something starting happening years ago that I recognized very slowly. Whenever I felt a concentrated presence of the Lord come into the room I could feel it externally somewhere specifically positioned in the room. It was at this time I noticed my body would slowly start to lean wherever His presence was. I was not doing this intentionally, but my spirit man was so attracted to Jesus’ presence that it was as if I would be seemingly magnetically drawn to the Light of His presence. This is how strong of a pull our Father has on our hearts. This same thing happened to Jesus as he ascended to the Father in Acts 1 as He was in a way magnetically being pulled up into the presence of His Father.
Listen, I am telling you that you are not just one who is pressing into God, but that you are literally being pressed into God by a force, a bond that is stronger than the laws of this world. This bond is love and that is who our Father is. “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in Him.” 1 John 4:16
The Key is to Break Bread
One of the key things that Jesus did on the road to Emmaus is found in Luke 24:27,
“And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.”
We know that when the Lord begins to unfold revelation to us from the scriptures He is literally breaking bread with us in the spirit. Jeremiah says of the Lords’ words in Jeremiah 15:16
“Your words were found and I ate them, and Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart;”
After Jesus expounded in detail the scriptures about Himself, a few verses later we find Him breaking bread with the two.
Luke 24:31
“Then their eyes were opened and they knew Him;”
We need to search the scriptures and learn what they speak of concerning the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the angels, the creatures in heaven, the glory, ecstasies, open heavens and any other heavenly encounter we are seeking the face of God for. This is so that we may recognize it when it begins to happen.
We should learn from Israel’s experience when Jesus prophesied of the Roman in invasion in Luke 19:44. He then gave them clear understanding as to the reasoning behind this invasion. It was because they,
“did not recognize the time of your visitation."
But I prophesy that this is a generation that will recognize the glory and the day of visitation. This is a generation that will walk in signs, wonders, miracles, and realms of glory that no man could imagine. The Lord is saying,
“Let that word which I spoke from the beginning come alive in you and all around you. Let that prophetic word which I spoke over you in the night seasons and the prophetic word that I gave to you from the beginning take root in you and begin to manifest the glory of God to a generation that has not seen it.”