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Belonging To God
Episode #180
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(J) Martha asked me to look up the word ‘belong’. The definition is: have the right personal or social qualities, to be a member of a particular group, be a member or a part, be the property of, be the rightful possession of, be due to, be dominated by.
(M) This morning I am ‘auh’ (Martha is speaking here with great emotion), overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit. And the Lord is saying to me, “Feed My sheep”, so I have to do it from this position of a lot of weeping, and… For some time now I’ve been on the issue that we belong to Him. We can spout it that we’ve been bought with a price and we’re not our own. Some years ago He gave me this scripture in 1 John. 4:6. It actually starts really in four, and the chapter is about the antichrist, the presence and the coming of antichrist. And it reads in “The New Living” in a different way, actually it’s more accurate. It ends in a test of who is in God. It says, “You belong to God, my dear children. You’ve won a victory already over these people,” meaning the antichrist people, “because the Spirit Who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world.” Not because, let me interrupt and say, it’s not because they could fight so well, but because they belong to God. And because they belong to God, the word is belong, the Spirit of God in them, overcomes. “These people belong to this world, so they speak from the world’s viewpoint, and the world listens to them. But we belong to God, and those who know God listen to us. If they do not belong to God they do not listen to us, that is how we know if someone has the Spirit of Truth or the spirit of deception.” And so John read the definitions in the dictionary of ‘belong’. I’m going to get Jennifer to read a passage in Roman’s.
(Jennifer) Ok, this is Ro. 14:7-8 “None of us lives to himself, but to the Lord. And none of us dies to himself, but to the Lord. For if we live, we live to the Lord. And if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live, or we die, we belong to the Lord.”
(M) I have been on that issue: that we belong to the Lord. And in the end-times the overcoming of the antichrist and all the manifestations of it, all the many rising up of the antichrist spirit, our safety lies in the fact that we belong to the Lord. It’s that word belong. And somehow in the last days the Lord has taken that word to… shown me what He means by it. And I have copious notes about it, but I’ll have to put them in a tape. But just for this purpose, He’s shown me that ‘to belong’, is a huge definition, an attempt to encompass how much we are His; and how much He has come for us. And I’m seeing the enormous safety of that. If I belong to Him, I’m in a cocoon, a fortress of His protection. Ok, Carole look up ‘first lines’ “Now I belong to Jesus.” I really think it’s the secret of Daniel, that he was absolutely immune to the times, to the evil, to the tyranny. He was not only immune to it and not involved in it, not touchable by it, he was actually a transformer of it. Thank you. And I’ve been just reminded of a song from my childhood that was so filled with the Spirit for me. But I had no idea… I just had the feelings of it and the joy of it. But I had no idea of what it really meant to belong to Christ. And the, the chorus is “Now I belong to Jesus, Jesus belongs to me, not for the years of time alone, but for eternity.” (Martha is crying as she speaks this.) I’m sorry. And I sang that as a child in the Methodist church. And I remember singing it with gusto, because somehow it was real to me, and joyous. The verse that I’m on this morning is in the Amplified. It’s Psalm 65, verse 4, “Blessed, happy, fortunate, to be envied, is the man whom You choose, and cause to come near that he may dwell in your courts. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of Your house, Your holy temple.” And the definition, the dictionary definitions of ‘belong’ speak of being in a place, in a group, in a particular dwelling. It’s not just belonging, but you belong in a place. When the Corinthians fell into decadence, and Paul’s restoration of them, was to understand that they were not their own. The church, what is called the church, sort of universal, does not live in that. The church universal is in Corinthians these days. And the restoration of believers who are chosen must be the revelation that they were bought with a price, and we are not our own, we belong to Jesus. But Jesus belongs to us. And in this verse in Psalm 65, “He will cause to come near, those who are chosen.” We know so well the verse that says, “Many are called, few are chosen.” You know why? Few will be owned and dominated. Few will say yes to the fact that they were chosen. Corinthians is the proof that believer’s can refuse to be owned. And that is not only our personal safety in the days to come, it’s the way we will understand and recognize the Spirit of Truth and the spirit of deception. The other translations of 1 Jn.4:6, say “We are of God, and those who are of God hear us, and those who are not of God do not hear us. By this we know the Spirit of Truth and the spirit of error.” But that ‘of’, that ‘from’, in those translations means we are, we are God’s, and we originate from Him, we move out from Him, and we are in internal intimacy with Him. You could translate it accurately by saying: we are in intimate relationship with God, originating from Him, we are out from Him.” That would be the correct translation. “… and those who hear us are also in intimate relationship with Him, called and chosen out from Him, originating from Him. The fact that we are in Him is because, we are chosen by Him. He said to His disciples you didn’t choose Me, I chose you. I think also it can be that some who are chosen refuse to belong to Another, and belong to themselves, and they can’t hear. So they’re not ‘out from’ God. And first John is to believers. To belong to Jesus means that you are owned. And as I look back over my life, I am astonished at the warfare against the ‘belonging’. How much that has been tested and attacked, and claimed that I belong to this and that one, this and that place, and what a horrendous war it has been to say no, I belong to Jesus. I don’t even belong to myself. I don’t have the right. I’ve been sharing some things with another, and I have said you have no rights if you belong to Him. You do not have the right to speak as you please, to do as you want. And you have to decide to be chosen. It’s not that you give up your rights and live as a slave to whatever comes, whatever the world throws at you. You give your rights to God, and He will defend them, or not. (Martha laughs softly.) But you actually are owned, an owned being, and an owned being is both a slave and child. Those are the two New Testament definitions of being owned. It takes a long time to understand the terms of that ownership. I’m thinking of Joseph, and how his brothers wanted to own him to the extent of extinguishing him, of banishing him, of forgetting him, of erasing him. And that makes you feel like you’re owned by, in Joseph’s case, his family. Then he was imprisoned in Egypt. He was owned as a slave. He had been, actually, a prince in that culture. And he became a slave, and accepted that ownership. And then he was wrongly imprisoned, and he came to accept that ownership. But in the end he understood that he belonged to God, and that God alone had cast him out, made him a slave, put him in prison, only to teach him that he was owned. And he had to lose all of his rights and freedoms, and come to the acceptance of the loss of that rights and freedom. He couldn’t go where he pleased; he couldn’t go home if he pleased. He had no rights under Potipher, not the right to defend himself. And in prison he had no rights, less rights. And that’s the picture of ruling and reigning with Christ. When you accept that you are owned, you’re put in a corner, and who knows what our future holds? I don’t care because I know that God has prepared us to belong. And in that belonging is our safety. God alone owns you if He bought you. And if you will be willing to be owned, you will be fortressed and only God will move you. There’s a great, great destiny that awaits one who will live ‘as owned’, who will live in a place that God chooses, in a group that God ordains, in a condition of whatever God sets up, to show you that you belong to Him. You don’t belong to the world, you don’t belong to any person or any place, you don’t even belong to your ministry, you belong to Him. And He paid a great, incalculable, inestimable price to purchase you out from the slavery of Egypt, the slavery of Satan and tyranny. He paid a high price to save you from yourself, and you are ‘owned’. To grasp that, to accept that, to love that, is to enter a great and transcendent destiny of which Joseph is the picture; a place of ruling and reigning, perhaps even on this earth, as Daniel did in terrible times. In times of captivity Daniel was not captured. He had been captured by Another, and he lived as one ‘owned’. And he lived without fear, amazingly without fear of any power both of lion and king. The calm of Daniel just exudes from the story because he was owned. He accepted that he was placed where he was. He could be abased, and he could abound because he was owned. And the wonder of that has been on me for some days, because I see somehow what it means to be owned, and both the glory of belonging utterly, and being owned totally, so that Christ can have your body to do with it what He will. That is imprisonment, and it is liberty, the paradox of that I can’t explain.
