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Pathway to His Presence
June 22, 2014
Episode #394
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guests: Jacquelyn Nawrocki, Carole Nelson, and Jennifer Wentzel
(Martha) The books that just say, ok, you want His presence, you gotta have His presence, how wonderful His presence, but gives you no pathway of what it takes to secure that from God, for God to give you that, for you to be able to receive that. And it’s Psalm 15 is real deep and wide and high for that reason. But for me, the most primal, basic way is honesty. And see, Satan doesn’t tempt us; he doesn’t say, “Don’t you hate God?” Oh, no, he’s far more subtle than that. He says, “Yea, hath God said? No, you will not die, and God has withheld something from you.” And you draw the conclusion that I hate Him, because He hasn’t given me what I need. It’s your conclusion, John is saying, “You own it.”
(J) When you make the conclusion, and you make the stake in the ground, you literally own it. That’s what Satan wants you to do. He doesn’t want to have you take his. He wants you to own your own, because then it’s all connected to your heart, and then you’ll defend it against God. He’s literally made you a anti-evangelist, you know?
(Martha) He’s made you anti-Christ.
(John) He’s made you anti-Christ, absolutely. You are against Christ in that place where you put that stake in the ground, and you say, “You have done me wrong. You wretched, wretched, God.”
(Jacquelyn) Satan tempts… I’m glad, I’m glad you brought that up, because my mind went back to Adam, “The woman You gave me.” He circled the wagon. He didn’t get to the wagon. So he, Satan tempts us to question God’s love and His care for us, because they were perfectly cared for. They had every evidence, as I have, and yet…
(John) That’s exactly what I was thinking! “I am nothing!” It reminds me of Jennifer’s post with the little boy in the shopping cart, “Now I have nothing!” The entire thing.
(Carole) That’s where he brings it, he brings it and it’s one more thing and you go, and you’re saying… It’s kind of like with death, really, when you’re honest about it. When He’s bringing you to a death, in your heart you’re going, “Well, now I have nothing!”
(J) Yep, yep.
(Carole) I mean, really!
(J) Yep, uhmm. I’m so grateful that that little boy did that in front of you, and that you put it in the blog. It’s just, it’s an amazing picture. Do what?
(Jacquelyn) I have nothing, and I am nothing. And at some point through my repentance, I felt like the Lord quoted this scripture to me, “You’re the foolish thing. You were supposed to be the fooling thing that confounded the wise and you refuse to be that foolish thing.” So instead of being that foolish thing, I went to death and nothingness and was that foolish thing.
(Martha) The most foolish of all.
(Jacquelyn) I laughed, but it is not funny.
(Martha) No, it’s not.
(Jennifer) I had a call from a woman who I’d never talked to before, and she had recently found out about Shulamite Ministries and she was looking at the booklets and the books, and I had enormous love for this woman, pretty much instantly. And it was kind of funny because she was a little challenging from the get-go, I’ll say. And within a few minutes it became clear. She said, “Well, I was looking at the Loving God Series of booklets, and I guess I just don’t understand what you could possibly have to say about loving God that would take six booklets.” She said, “I have loved God all my life. I’ve never not loved God.” And I loved her and was delighted over her and, you know, said, “Ah, I can’t wait to send you one of the booklets, and that will give you an idea of what there is to say about loving God.” I had no desire to say that what she had just claimed made the Bible a liar. I, you know, you don’t say that on the first go-round. That’s rude. “One simply doesn’t do that.” You know, but I had no desire to any of that. I had great compassion for her, and as we’re talking about this, these are the crowns we give ourselves. These are the rewards we give ourselves. This woman’s entire world and identity is tied up in what she said about herself for I don’t know how long, which is, “I have always loved the Lord. I am a woman who loves God and always has.” Period. That was it. Well, and that’s, you know, we all have things that we hang our identity on. I am known as blah, blah, blah. I, you know, we have things that we want people to say about us, but we’re missing what God would give us, the crown He would give us, the reward He would give us. And in the case of this woman, and the reason I say this because hers was so specific, and so specifically tied, and she was so angry, but she had been poked by the very existence of six booklets on the subject of loving God, “because what could one possibly say? One simply loved Him.” And the Lord had used Shulamite Ministries, Martha writing six booklets on loving God to pierce this woman’s carefully erected construct of who she was and the story of her life, because it just simply was that; a story. But He will do whatever He has to do because I look at this woman and I say, “You have held on to this, but because you have preferred this, and you are holding on to this thing and saying this is who I am. No one will touch this. No one will move this. Are you missing the opportunity to, in fact, be known as the woman who loves God? That that would be what people would say of you, not what you would say of you, but others would look at your life and say, shining self-evident. I may not believe in God. I may not even like Him, but this woman, she loves God. God is real. God is evident. She knows Him. She communes with Him. She talks with Him. This is a woman who loves God.” I don’t know. I just thought of that, Carole, with the binding and loosing and the things that; it’s not just death that we bind ourselves to. It’s identities. It’s our very worlds that we construct, and we bind them, and we stop heaven from loosing what He would, what He would make of us, His dream of us. And that sometimes they are literally the dreams we dream, and yet we are bound to the shell of the dream, the façade of the dream, missing out on what is real and full and fabulous.
(Jacquelyn) Jennifer, you mentioned identity and I had the thought, “Will my identity be the child of God or the adult? And at some point Martha said to me, “You are not sitting in front of God or you are not with God, you’re with yourself.” So I was with my adult self, and I think a lot of times I’ve had to really renounce and pray against self-pity in my life. And I think a lot of times don’t we confuse our love for God with our love for self in self-pity? Isn’t that a… Can you call that a parallel experience, that self-pity can feel like love? So I have a choice. Am I going to be the child of God and be nothing and be the foolish thing that confounds the wise, or am I going to be the adult, which is what I have wanted to be all my life since a young child? I wanted to be an adult.
(Jennifer) Or to hold to the analogy, will you be the foolish thing that confounds the wise? What is it the weak thing that undoes the strong? How’s that go? (laughing) I’m just butchering the scripture. We’ll stick with the foolish thing. You can either be the foolish thing that confounds the wise, or you can be just the foolish thing. I sometimes wonder about that, you know, without the added bonus of confounding those around you who say, “But you’re a fool,” because if you’re called to the Lord, then you are one of the foolish things. So either you can go all the way and become the foolish thing that confounds the wise or you stay just kind of foolish… (laughing!) …without the added bonus of, you know, confounding the wise beyond your means. OOoops!
(Jacquelyn) Does that not bring the question of salvation into view, because I’ve been thinking either… It’s either or two things. I’m either saved and gone to my old man, or I’m not saved and never really repented. And I don’t know the answer to this. If I never, if we’ve never repented of hating God and murdering God, can we be saved? We can. Ok, Martha says we can. Phew! I just thought I’d throw that in.
(Martha) Well, it’s like, what is sin? We have no idea what sin is. When I went down the alter at twelve, and I think I was probably born-again, I wept over sin and I had no sin in my life, except being a sinner. It was only after I was born-again that I began to see what sin really is. So I think you can, definitely. Good grief. We are saved when we need a savior and God comes to save us. But if you’ve never needed a savior, and you’ve never made Him Lord, that’s when I would question salvation.
(Jacquelyn) It’s like I would go back and forth. I’d be in Christ then I’d be in Adam. Then I’d be in Christ, then I’d be in Adam. And I’d think, “Oh, I’ve made it this time.” Then I’d go back to Adam. And I think until I saw my murder and hatred of God… I don’t know what I was going to say.
(Martha) Well, I can tell you what you were going to say. (laughing) It’s not so much an issue of salvation that you’re describing as it is an issue of the death of the old man. And I think I said on the CD of the Month that then you know why you had to die with Christ, because you are a murderer. And so that experience puts an end to any hope in the old man. Now he still can go back, of course, but to be forgiven for that means to accept your, that He bore your death sentence, and that’s how God feels about the old man, the Adamic nature. It has to die because it is a murderer. Cain demonstrated it, the very first generation after Adam and Eve. He demonstrated murder of your brother, who was close to God.
