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Beneath the Surface
June 8, 2014
Episode #392
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guests: Jennifer Wentzel and Jacquelyn Nawrocki
(Jennifer) What your CD did, Martha, was gave not only me permission but showed me that to deny the honest feelings of my heart, however wicked they may be, however much they shame me, however much they torment me in what they are, to come to God in all honesty is to give Him permission as the other Party in my most intimate relationship, to move with me and say, “Now, now that you have given this to Me, this shameful place, this dark place, this place of torment that you can’t move, now I can come in.”
(Martha) That’s exactly the best description, Jennifer, and I’ve learned over the years on so many relationships, what you said and what Jacquelyn said, you become a liar, and when you become a liar, God cannot commune with you. It’s not only the issue of free will and God’s respect for it, it’s that He cannot commune with a liar. If you live in lies, you’re in darkness, you’re in Satan. So when you’re that gut-level truth and then God can commune with you even in your darkness, but there has to be truth. And I’ve learned so much that you can’t trust a person in a relationship if they’ll always do right. That’s not fair. But if you don’t have the trust that a person is truthful with you, there’s no relationship. I’ve seen the basis of a relationship is not necessarily love. The bottom line of any relationship is honesty, and if there’s someone who has been proven in your life to be an inveterate liar, there’s no reconciliation to that in a relationship. There’s forgiveness, but there’s no reconciliation until the issue of lying is resolved. Some of the… The problem with the most evil person is just as simple as the fact that they live in a lie. They live, cope, endure by lying, and there can be no intimacy between two people who where one is liar. It’s over. It’s absolutely over. There’s no, no way. Trust has to be earned again in truthfulness. So that’s one thing I wanted to say.
(Jacquelyn) I see what you do in relationships is that the first thing you do is you go in with love, and that establishes trust. When you go in with love, you give us permission to be truthful. But I wonder… I’m just going to hash this out… if my problem was that I didn’t believe God was a God of love? And until we believe God is a God of love, then can we be truthful with Him? I’ll use my view of repentance as an example. In the beginning I felt that repentance was rejection or His chastisement was rejection. And I would say in my heart, “Am I ever going to get it right?” And I endured chastisement, and I just waited. Ok, this is going to change someday. Then at some point He did a work in my heart, and I believed that chastisement, and I want to emphasize that word, believe. I believed that chastisement was love, but there came a day when I experienced that His chastisement was love. And that day I opened my arms and said, “Oh, chastisement…” And that experience came through John, and I’m working through this and asking God, “Did it have to be a man?” I don’t know the answer to all this, but I knew that when he came to me, and he was hot. You remember that, John? It was over instant messages. But I knew that he loved me. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that John Enslow loved me, and that just, it broke something wide open in me to say, “God, come and do whatever You need to do.”
(Martha) I know you remember that I walked, I had no church or other Christian in my life for several years, and the Lord taught me how to have relationship with Him. And He did it by simple, childlike insight. And I’ve told this before, but it’s so primal. He taught me that if you squelch your emotions, they do not go away. They have to be heard. If you swallow what you really feel, He said it’s like it goes into a room in your being and when that room begins to bulge from feelings that won’t be acknowledged, then you get sick. Many times sickness is just pent-up, bad emotions. And He showed me that your feelings will be heard. You may as well hear them, because they’ll be heard in crisis or illness or a sudden outbreak of rage or violence. And He showed me that’s why violence happens is people who suppress their rage. And He taught me with my children to say, “You can say to me whatever you want to say. You cannot be mean to me, but you can tell me anything. And if you’re angry, you can go to your room and bang on your pillow. You’re fine to feel everything you feel, but there are parameters. There’s boundaries that you cannot cross, but you are free to talk to me.” So He taught me this way. Your feelings are what you believe is the truth, so you bring that. It’s really a confession of what you believe to tell God how you feel. It’s not just being angry with Him. It’s much more significant than that. It’s a form of confession. You explained it that way, Jennifer. And it’s a form of… He’s your Counselor. That’s one of His names. So you go to your Counselor and you tell you Counselor how you really feel. He said you bring this to Me. This is your concept of truth. What you’re feelings are from what you believe. Your emotions come from what you believe. And so, when you bring to Me what you believe, then I can tell you the truth about it, and then you can get your emotions straightened out. I can tell you while this is what it really what is like, it’s not at all what you feel. It’s something entirely different, and I can explain it to you. And to me the quintessential story of this is Habakkuk, and it’s one of my favorite things in “All and Only.” Habakkuk looked at the coming enemy and said, “Where are you, God? Why aren’t You protecting us?” And then he said, “I’m going to set myself on the rampart to hear, and I know I will be corrected.” He knew he was wrong, but he was going to set it… He was saying to God, “You’re too pure to behold evil. What are You doing here? You’re letting evil rule.” So he set himself down to listen. This is the perfect illustration of how it’s done. So he said, “I know I’m wrong. Come on. Come on, tell me. But I feel this about You, God.” So then God comes to him and assures, gives him faith. “The just shall live by faith.” That is the most basic, Christian tenet. The just, the justified, shall live by faith, function, operate, live by faith. And that came to Habakkuk, and it’s repeated two places in the New Testament. So, I don’t mean to be teachy here. Is this ok, John? But God came to Habakkuk. First He said, “The vision will tarry. Your vision of victory is coming. Don’t despair.” He gave him faith and told him that tenet, that basic principal of living with God. And then He revealed Himself to Habakkuk. And I opened it yesterday in my anquish, I opened to exactly the end of Habakkuk where he said, “Though there’s no ox in the stall, though there’s no figs on the vine, yet I will exalt, rejoice in God, my Maker.” And so, he comes to the most exquisite intimacy with God, but he began by saying, “You’re purer than to behold evil. What are You doing. Account for Yourself to me.” And God did. So that’s, to me, the most beautiful example of being that honest with God and knowing you’re wrong. You sit down to listen, and he ended in worship no matter what the circumstances. That’s the most beautiful picture to me of being honest with God.
(J) I have a visual here of it. You’re really, you’re asking people to go to a fearful place. You’re asking people to admit a fearful place, because if you believe that you have that degree of hatred, anger and murder in your heart, how could you be accepted? So you’re asking people to drop below a floor that we literally build in for ourselves of safety. It’s a false safety, but it’s where we feel like we’re safe. If we have to drop below down into that crevice, in that deep cavern, you know, I’m fearful to go down there. What if you don’t pull me out of that? Or what if You punish me according to that? So I keep this nice little platform going, but what I’m seeing is that to the degree that you will go down into that cavern and allow the Spirit of the Living God to excavate your deepest heart’s feeling about Him, resistance of Him and hatred for Him, to that degree – this is the motivation – to that degree you’ll be shot into the heavens, and you will not go any higher than you will go down.
Reading–and rereading–Jennifer’s opening statement. The Truth, the reality of our true nature, exposed by the light, leading us to repentance–and relationship! ‘Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free’…’I AM the way, the TRUTH and the light’…
Oh, oh, oh…