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A New Quiet
Episode #193
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enlsow
(M) This is a new morning, John, about the quiet in the land. I ran across a Psalm today, 131, and suddenly I realized another aspect of being quiet. It’s David, he says, “Lord, my heart is not haughty nor my eyes lofty; neither do I exercise myself in matters too great, or things too wonderful for me. Surely I have quieted and calmed my soul, like a weaned child with his mother. Like a weaned child is my soul within me.” And the Amplified says, “Ceased from fretting.” And… (John is laughing, and Martha joins him.) And I got real excited because this is, this is where you come to quiet. It’s… And so it’s the soul is the place of fretting.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) If I fret I can say I’m in my soul. And I’m going to talk about this in the conference, that there is a wrong interpretation of union with Christ out there. We always have the choice whether to go to the soul or the spirit. But there is a work you do to calm your soul. And that work is the work of the Spirit on you. The Holy Spirit comes to bring you to the humility to say I don’t know; I don’t need to know; I have God. I don’t understand the wonderful things, they’re too big for me; I just enjoy them in God. And that… that work of weaning your soul away from your spirit, and quieting your soul is work of the Holy Spirit’s chastening, and building your spirit and walking in the Spirit, which I’ll go into later. But the issue is… and I can put it in the term of ‘an adult’. What the Lord is after is to get rid of ‘the adult’ in us.
(J) Hmmm.
(M) And the adult is that self-sufficiency that is independence that is rebellion. You’re nodding like you really understand.
(J) I really understand. (Martha laughs) I really, really understand.
(M) And so the quiet comes from not living in your soul, but living in your spirit. And you got this week… I’ll let you tell about it. You got the definition of the soul and the flesh from Roman’s eight in the Amplified.
(J) Hmm-hmm, absolutely. It was Roman’s eight, six, “Now the mind of the flesh, which is sense and reason without the Holy Spirit, is death that comprises all the miseries arising from sin, both here and hereafter.”
(M) So see, so much of Christianity is in the soul, and it gives no rest and not quiet. It’s, it’s the lust of the soul worked up ‘to do for God’, ‘to know God’. It’s the soul. And the cross comes to bring the death of the soul. The Lord solved it on Calvary. But we have to come into it by willingness. And the willingness comes when the cross comes to strike our soul. And that’ll take place until our last breath or the rapture.
(J) Yeah.
(M) And I think in many ways this last year for me has been a further annihilation of the soul which is independence or self-reliance, and to come to the place of utter dependence. Ooo! I’m going to talk about that too in the, (Martha laughs) in the conference. “If you live according to the dictates of the flesh, you will die.” That’s verse thirteen of Roman’s eight. We’re not obligated to our carnal nature to live a life ruled by its standards of the flesh. We’re not obligated… We don’t have to do that.
(J) Umhmm.
(M) It can be subdued. David had been through many wars and sufferings and failures, until he could come to the place where he understood that the humility of not defining, re-naming everything, thinking you understand, is to be quieted in his soul because the spirit rises in ascendance. Nee talks a lot about that, Watchman Nee does.
(J) I was just hit this week by the whole thing on reasoning and how our soul does reason, and the whole process of working it out in our own head, figuring it out, reasoning, judging, giving our opinion, it’s all that. And it is the soul. It’s all trying to be God and figure out as God. And basically it says that, you know, in Roman’s eight, six, it says that it’s sense and reason without the Holy Spirit. Reason, reason it a, a power position. It’s a position of deciding; it’s a position of dictating and of knowing. You reason because you think you know. And I think probably the thing that has been the most detrimental in my life is, and probably everyone’s life, is reasoning. It’s how we reason ‘oh I’m not this’, or ‘oh they’re not that’ or ‘I’m not in the right place’. Well who are you to say? Who are you to say anything? Do you know? You know, it says, “The heart is desperately wicked, who can know it?” How do I know where I am at any given moment? How do I know where anyone is at any given moment? I can see someone doing something that I say, oh well that, that’s wrong. Really? Ok. How do you know that that’s not the process that they have to go through in order to find God?
(M) You know, John, it says, “Bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” And we really don’t believe that’s possible, but it is. It is possible to have a quiet soul that is not actively leading you and advising you and judging. The issue is to lay… to let your reason be killed, and agree that your reason is really always off the mark. And this definition of the soul says sense and reason.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) Sense means feelings.
(J) Right, ok, that makes sense.
(M) And you think sometimes from what you feel, instead of from the truth of the Word…
(J) Well don’t they always pair together?
(M) Yes.
(J) That you basically feel something so then you reason something?
(M) Exactly. I discovered a long time ago that human beings don’t have a faculty of logic that is apart from feelings. Why are you laughing?
(J) Oh, well……augh, augh, augh.
(M) We don’t, we think we’re so smart that we can reason a thing out apart from what we feel. And so we are only to be the vessel of God’s thoughts. We are to have the mind of Christ, and we are to think only with Him. It’s wonderful to just let Him tell you His view. For some He’s fierce and deadly, because He knows their heart. And others He gives mercy to. When I might judge it.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) If I got in my reason I might judge it all equal.
(J) Absolutely.
(M) But, but to ah…
(J) Is reasoning… is that not just being the parent to yourself?
(M) It’s being… you said it earlier, it’s being God, yes. But when we are independent, we are ‘the adult’. And that took me to another delightful place, which I’ve talked about for years, and it’s Matthew eighteen. “The disciples said, who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?” And in their human soul, (Martha laughs), they would have assumed He would tell them all the strengths. (John laughs) Yeah, are you? Uh-huh, ok. “And He called a little child to Himself and put him in the midst.” And many people believe that that was Peter’s own child.
(J) Really?
(M) Because He was in Capernaum.
(J) Well, you know that he had done something particularly well right before he asked this. You never stumble before you ask that kind of question. This is something.. I’ve done something really well and something nice, ‘so who’s the greatest, God”?
(M) How did you know that? Then He said, “Truly I say to you, unless you repent, change, turn about and become like little children, trusting, lowly, loving, forgiving, you can never enter the kingdom of heaven at all.”
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) Unless you become a child you cannot even get in the kingdom of heaven. So the more that God takes away your adultness… And it’s scary, isn’t it?
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) Its frightening because we have the illusion we have the control of events, or should, and that we have the ability to reason a thing out, and we don’t.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) We cannot trust our feelings, although we begin there with God.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) We can’t trust them. Ok, “whoever will humble himself.” It’s humility. That’s Psalm 131. David said, “My eyes are not haughty, my heart is not lifted up.” He is saying through humility, and humiliation I am sure, I have come to be a weaned child without fretting. That’s who can enter the kingdom. Then, “Whoever will humble himself therefore and become like this little child”, not child, little child, “trusting, lowly, loving, forgiving, is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives and accepts and welcomes one little child like this for My sake and in My name receives and accepts and welcomes Me.” So the spirit is a little child, the soul is adult.
(J) And working with children’s ministry I realize how, how much the uhmm, how much adults discount any validity to anything with children. They’re to be taken care of, but they have nothing to offer. And this kind of goes in the face of that and says, oh, ok, really? This is the one who enters.
(M) And see John. Oh, John, I’ll be real honest here. A lot of times I think people don’t expect me to be a ‘little child’ when they meet me.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) They want me to be some grand…
(J) ‘Adult’.
(M) Adult, powerful, and so forth. And I’m not. I am, after forty-four years I should be somewhat of a child.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) But it’s not only about a literal child; it’s don’t despise the child in us.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) The one we are to despise is the adult in us.
(J) Golly.
(M) And so, I think the spontaneity of a child, a person who’s been brought back to the child, the simplicity and weakness and vulnerability, the religious despise. And I wrote something on the website, I haven’t read it in a long, long time, but it’s about Jesus as He was as a child. He lived in this child-like way Himself.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) I would have… Oh, I can’t wait to just meet Him in person. Not only is He King, but He demonstrated to these disciples, and to the world, and in the scriptures, that He lived completely dependent, completely not with reason, and not with sense. People came to Him all the time with reason, and He never was moved by the reason, even though His disciples… When they said, ok, You ‘gotta’ go to Lazarus, he’s your friend, that’s reason.
(J) Oh it’s family too, think about what you said the other day about His, His brothers, and His, you know, they were reasoning oh well, ah, you know, who do You think You are, You’re just some stupid carpenter, and then, hey well, if You’re who You think You are, then You better go up to, you know, Jerusalem.
(M) Well, Carole was talking about it, that’s how I came to it. She was talking about what it was like for Jesus to have siblings. And if you have more than one child, you know that there’s sibling rivalry, yes, but there’s conflict, there’s judging, there’s difficulty among siblings. And I can’t imagine what He went through, He was, she said, ah, living quietly for thirty years, and all of a sudden He burst forth.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) And at one point they want to institutionalize Him, and at another point they wanted Him to go up to Jerusalem and show Himself. And He, He… They, when they wanted to… When they believed He was crazy, it was because of the miracles, but it was also because of His childlikeness I’m sure.
(J) Oh, I’m sure, sense and reason without the Holy Spirit.
(M) That’s how they viewed Him.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) And thankfully, I don’t know if all of them came, but probably so. And James of course came in, and His Mother was at Pentecost. So, the Holy Spirit comes to transcend, to slay and transcend our sense and reason. We cannot live by what we feel and what we think. And that is, in Roman’s it says its death.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) So that’s, that’s what I wanted to say about the child, is that… It is a process to turn around to repent of your adultness, and your independence, and your arrogance, to think you know. Some of the most dangerous people I’ve worked with are the people who always say, ‘I know, I know, I know; hu-huh, I already knew that’. And Jesus said to the Pharisee’s, “Because you say you see, your sin remains.” And when you say ‘I know’, it means you’re not listening, because I never know. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know really…
(J) Anything.
(M) Anything, until God tells me, I don’t know anything. And that is a child. All I do, all I am to do, is enjoy.
(J) Ahhhhhh. (Martha laughs)
(M) It’s a relief. But you know what John? You have to know that you are loved, as a child. And a lot of us don’t, didn’t know that. Somewhere strongly in my childhood I was loved and cherished. And there was strong authoritarianism, if that’s a word, but I was loved, and it has sustained me as foundation. Now other people… My whole, my ministry really is to very abused children. And sometimes it takes many years for them to be convinced that they are loved, so that from that they can relax and be a child.
(J) Leave their sense and reason about it.
(M) Yes, yes.
(J) How do you think I know? (Martha laughs)
(M) Yeah, it is, that’s right, it is sense and reason. And you become an adult because it’s natural to the old man, but also because you weren’t nurtured as a child, so you have to do it yourself, you have to parent yourself. And there’s a, there’s a tendency, especially to neglected or abused children to, “ok, I have to parent myself.” And some do it from a very early age.
(J) Absolutely, hmhmm.
(M) So, the quietness comes to the loved child. And that’s a process. The Holy Spirit will undertake it. He will undertake that whole process, it is too complicated. All we have to do is surrender to the Holly Spirit, and He will bring all the revelation and all the chastening and all the stripping and the, you know, that it takes.
(J) Remember in Russia in the orphanage, what was really kind of shocking to me was when we went into the baby room with the little infants, they were so restless. And why were they restless? Because there wasn’t love there. There was… They were provided for, cleaned, fed, however little, but they were fed. But ah, there wasn’t a love and nurture bonding there, and they were restless. Remember how restless they were?
(M) I don’t remember the nursery, but it’s funny you should mention the Russian orphanage, because it just came to my mind. I was thinking of Katja, the little girl. Her head was shaved, and we thought she was a boy for a while. But she was maybe ten?
(J) It was scary because Mesha was twelve, and he looked like he was nine. And so she could have been, she could have been fourteen and looked like she was ten.
(M) But she was the ‘mother’.
(J) She was, hmhmm.
(M) She was, as a child she was the adult among the little children.
(J) There was no doubt.
(M) And when I took the Polaroid pictures of them, they just had a fit and were so excited. And she would go and gather her children, and bring them to me to take their picture. She made sure that everybody had their Polaroid picture of themselves. So… It’s funny that I was thinking of that too, that such circumstances to force you to be an adult to survive. And there’s great grace for children like that, that the Lord will show them it’s not necessary to take care of yourself. God will take care of you. And it’s coming to that dependence. (Martha and John are moved at the memory of it.) Yeah, the memory of it is wrenching. So, God gives grace because some people have to survive by being an adult, and to lay down that sense and reason would be very frightening. But that too is possible; I’ve seen the Lord do it. I have seen it, I’m thinking of one person, my goodness, who lived by reason powerfully, and could do it well. And God is… she allowed God to take it completely away, absolutely away. And ah, quickly, in just a few years. And it’s just quite amazing.
