By Michaela Gordoni
When Great American Family star Jen Lilley was just 9, she knew that she wanted to have a relationship with God.
The former Movieguide® Awards Gala host recalled learning about Elijah and the widow in 1 Kings 17 in Sunday school. That day, she went home, grabbed her Bible and a crayon and began to read.
“I can tell you exactly where I was in my parents’ house when I was reading,” she remembered on a recent episode of CBN’s “Faith vs. Culture.” “I would go down in this basement, sit in this black chair with my little crayon, and, every time I read a line, I would highlight it so that was like my bookmark of where I had read.”
“I just remember being so awestruck that Elijah in the Old Testament had the Holy Spirit,” she told Crosswalk Headlines last year. “Because I never realized as a young child that outside of Moses and Jesus and the 12 disciples, I didn’t know that people had the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, and how much more so can you have the Holy Spirit in the New Testament?”
After she made this revelation, she started to spend a lot of time in prayer.
“I try to do it every morning or remember when I’m reading my Bible,” she said. “Invite the Holy Spirit to teach you, because that’s His role: He’s a counselor, He’s a teacher. And if you ask Him for understanding, He’ll give it to you.”
“The Holy Spirit is my very best friend,” Lilley said. “It really breaks my heart that so many Christians don’t know that God is still moving.”
On an episode of the “Jesus Calling” podcast, Lilley shared an encounter she had with the Holy Spirit. As a young actress, she was asked to audition for DAYS OF OUR LIVES. The role involved playing someone who has one night stands and does cocaine. She said no at first, but her agent encouraged her to pray about it.
“I was driving, and I knew this was God. I heard the Holy Spirit say, ‘This is your role’ before I even started praying,” Jen Lilley said.
“And I was like, ‘That doesn’t make sense. Why is this my role?’ And this is the part that always makes me cry, because it was such a holy moment, and God is so kind. And He said, ‘Because Theresa is the exact condition that the world was in when I sent my Son to die for them, and the audience needs to know there is no pit so deep that my love cannot find them still.’”
She believed she heard God say He needed a believer to fill that role, and no one at any point in their life is beyond redemption.
Related: Actress Jen Lilley Shares Why She Moved to GAC Family Channel
“Because they do this funny thing in soap operas where they hold the camera on you at the end, and any other actress, after the one night stand or after the drugs, is going to play that moment as if she’s truly satisfied and as if she is so cool, but [God said], ‘You’re going to play the truth of how that girl really feels, but it did not fill her, and it did not satisfy her, because what she was truly looking for is Jesus,’” she shared.
“I was like, Shoot! So I called up my manager and I was like, ‘Alright, let’s go in’,” she said.
Jen Lilley is co-hosting CBN’s “Into the Supernatural” podcast with Billy Hallowell, where they will explore topics like this. In their debut episode, which came out Friday, they talk with Lee Strobel, author of The Case for Christ, about near death experiences and reports of seeing angels, heaven, hell and other things.
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