A Certain Place
by John Sainsbury
14 October 2025
« Previous DayAccording to John Mark Comer’s wonderful book about following Jesus called, ‘Practicing the Way`, to become a disciple of Jesus we need to be with Jesus, become like Him, and do as He did.
When we come to Luke’s account of what Jesus did, we read: ‘One day Jesus was praying in a certain place’ (Luke 11:1). We also read in Mark 1:35: ‘Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.` Indeed Luke 5:16 tells us that Jesus ‘often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.’ In other places too we see a similar pattern to Jesus’ prayer life, as in Matthew 14:23 where we read that Jesus went up on the mountain by Himself to pray.
That is what Jesus did. He would regularly withdraw from the crowds, indeed even from His disciples, to isolated places where He could be alone with His Father. Jesus’ ‘certain place’ seemed to be wherever He could simply be with His Father without interruption. It was from this sort of setting that Jesus could pray with His Father, and seek His help in making the key decisions, such as whom to call to be His disciples (Luke 6:12-13).
As disciples learning from Jesus as our Rabbi, we are called to 'do as He did.' This raises the question: “Where is your ‘certain place’?” (Is there somewhere that you go to get away from every one else simply to be with God?) And if there is, are you going there?
I realised recently that my ‘certain place’ had always been first thing in the morning when I took our dog for a long walk before work. But she’s an old girl now, and not able to walk so far, and somehow that element of my own prayer life had simply been lost from my schedule.
Someone once said that praying is the easiest thing in the world to do and seemingly the hardest to actually do. We have so many distractions, and so many pressing priorities!
Yet, with all that Jesus had to do, He knew it was an absolute priority to carve out daily time in His ‘certain place’. And if He knew just how vital that time was, how much more should we?
John Sainsbury and his wife Sue are part of the leadership team at Ellel Grange. John has served as a church leader for many years, most recently as Lead Pastor of the Garstang Free Methodist Church. He has a passion for seeing many brought into the fulness of life that following Christ brings.
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