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Command Me to Come
July 20, 2014
Episode #398
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guests: Jim Pierce, Carole Nelson, Aaron, and Jennifer Wentzel
(Jim) That scripture in Matthew about Jesus walking on the sea, and Peter walking on the water has always been intriguing to me. The other gospels don’t talk about Peter, but Matthew does. In the other gospels it actually says too, that Jesus was coming on the water as if he was going to go past them. And that’s interesting to me. I’m not sure all that that means, but in Matthew, you know, it says that they thought He was a… They did see Him and they thought He was a ghost and they were afraid. They cried out in fear, for fear. And then, of course, Jesus spoke to them and said, “Be of good cheer. It is I. Do not be afraid.” And then the really cool thing is what I witnessed, what I witness here, and it’s become a challenge to me. And it’s, because I witness these, I’m able, I’m blessed to witness these people that I’m sitting around right now in this group, and we’re having church. They, like Peter, are asking the Lord to call them out, and that’s everything. It’s what they… Every person that spoke this morning said that. They described it actually in their own life and existence in talking about having church, and even, even in solitude. And it’s the desire of my heart to always ask Him to “Call me out, Lord,” to come. Ask me to come. I want to come. I need your hand. I don’t know if you want this on there or not, but it has just been all, since we started taking about this, that’s been the key for me, and it’s what I witnessed in you all. And it’s what has kept me moving forward in the direction I’m going. I remember months ago in a group of men that I get to be a part of sometimes, and the discussion was about stepping out of the boat and having faith, and it came around at the end of the discussion that that happened because Peter asked for it. I mean that became the crucial point of the discussion. And that’s what it was all about. And it’s kind of stuck with me for a long, long time
(Martha) I’ve never heard that focus quite that way, Jim. That’s rich. It just makes me want to say, “Call me, Lord. Call me.” I can barely stand what He does call me to, for me to say, “Call me.” But it’s the angry seas. I wish I had the words to that song, “Walking on the Water.”
(Carole) I thought about the tsunami, because the tsunami is angry, powerful, all powerful, all powerful. You have no strength against that, and you either yield to that or you fight it and die.
(Martha) At some point on an airplane we watched the movie, “Impossible,” about the miraculous story of a family in the tsunami. Where was it?
(Carole) Indonesia.
(Martha) Indonesia some years ago. Incredible story. A God story, really.
(Aaron) The thing that so struck me about what Carole shared in reading Oswald was where he says, “We step right out with recognition of God in some things, then self-consideration enters our lives and down we go.” And this morning during worship I was just realized that for me the seas aren’t always external. It’s not always the world. It’s internal. It’s self-consciousness. And it’s like Peter asked and Jesus called him and went, and then he became self-aware of everything that was going on around him. And so I sit on the floor and I just realized, and I shared this with John, I have wrestled with this fear of meeting expectations, and if not meeting them, being a disappointment, probably since the womb. But how I have so limited Him through myself, through my own inability to meet my own expectations because I channeled it all through self-consciousness. And when we were listening to that song, I was repenting really for limiting Him through my own internal seas, you know? Through my own self-conscious fears, and how I even projected my fear of myself onto Him, so that if He didn’t meet my pre-conceived expectation, I was disappointed in Him, instead of just being nothing. I know I’m nothing. I’m just like that post. I remember asking Him. I said, “How do You know nothing?” Like you can’t know nothing. You’re always knowing something. And He said, “Just fall in love with Me.” And that, for me, has been ‘it.’ “Just fall in love with Me.” And even with this, the fear I had is the same thing. “Just fall in love with Me. Just jump, and fall in love and with no consideration for yourself or your own issues. Just fall in love.”
(Martha) In that song it’s “join the fool’s parade.” I love that. And there is nothing that would make you jump into the raging, angry sea but loving Him. Nothing that we need but that… Wonderful.
(Jim) I just read it again. When Peter asked, “Lord, if it’s You, command me to come to You on the water.” All Jesus said was, “Come.” That’s it, in one word, “Come.”
(Martha) Jim, what does it mean when he said, “Lord, if that’s you?” See, he wasn’t even, he wasn’t confident. He wasn’t convinced mentally. He just was convinced in his heart.
(Jim) He was starting to reach his hand out and maybe not stretching it out, but like…ok. But for the Lord to tell us to come, he did.
(Carole) Well, thank you, Jim, because I see what that means is, for me, is He looks so beyond and above my inability, my self-consciousness, and He overrides all that with His word, “Come!”
(Jim) All-inclusive. It’s an all-inclusive word. “Come.”
(Carole) Yes!
(Jim) That’s it.
(Carole) It’s like He goes, “I didn’t hear that. I don’t see that. Just come!”
(Martha) And it’s the truth, Carole. It’s the truth. He doesn’t need… He just needs a vessel. That’s all He needs, a vessel that will let Him be Himself.
(Carole) I’m just, I’m trying to mull this over. I’m just, what you’ve opened up… “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.” And Jesus spoke the word, and Peter heard it, and he obeyed it, because he could. The word gave him the power to do.
(Aaron) So the power wasn’t limited. The power, that all-inclusive come, and the power of it, the compelling power of that “come” was limitless, but Peter limited it by being self-conscious. He limited it through his fear.
(Martha) There’s no question that’s the revelation. (Laughing)
(Jennifer) Aaron, that just, the self-consciousness, I just saw a connection between the clean slate that Martha was talking about and your talking about expectations of yourself. And I just realized if I can’t give myself a clean slate, and if I have expectations of myself, then I’m tied to some past failure that I’m determined to do better than, or to erase with some glorificous day. But it’s not a clean slate, you know? And I never saw before that that’s coming in with a slate fully loaded. I’m not clean even for myself, and if I can’t have a clean slate for myself, I’ll never have one for somebody else. I won’t be able to. I won’t, and that includes God. If I can’t let go of my failures of the bad, I will never let go of what I consider to be good, which is to say what I believe I know of Him. I won’t. I won’t have a clean slate for Him to move in my life, to come in a different way. I can’t. I’ve never seen that before. So, thank you. This gives me a lot to think about.
(Martha) Ok. I keep losing this thought and it’s important. Oh, it’s simple. “Put off the old self, put on the new man.” It’s not that we’ve put off self-consciousness. We’ve put off the old man. We abandon that old life, self, that old… We’re continually throwing that off and putting Him on. It’s a big, huge thing. It’s full of self-consciousness, yes. It is the self-worship and self-consciousness. But it’s to get rid of the old man and believe that old man is dead. That old Martha is gone, gone, gone. And I can put on His life, and He in me will not only jump into the angry sea, He in me will walk on that water in what I’m not capable of doing nor does He even expect me to be capable. He is my capability. He is my ability. He is my courage. He is everything, and I love Peter because He adored Jesus. He’s the only one that threw off his clothes and jumped in the sea swam to Him when He was on the shore cooking fish for them. He is abandoned. And so Jesus took this foolish man with Him everywhere He went right up to the Mount of Transfiguration. And that’s what He wants us to be; that, that human and that abandoned and that much in love as Aaron said. That’s the secret, Aaron.
(Jim) What you said about putting off, Martha, what you said about putting off the old and putting on the new is ‘it.’ Just dealing with my… I’m already tangled up in my self-consciousness that Aaron was speaking about and Carole. And I just want to get tangled up in that because that’s where… I gotta a lot to deal with there. Well, Jesus already dealt with it. I have a new man. I don’t need any of that. It’s all gone. So, thank You, Lord! I don’t want to see Peter ‘dancing on his fears.’ That’s what he started when he stepped out of the boat in the line of that song where it says, ‘dancing on his fears.’ He started dancing.
(Carole) Question. So did the new man hear that call to come and respond with absolute abandon in Peter?
(Martha) No, because Peter wasn’t a new man then.
(Carole) Ok.
(Martha) It was the old man trying to do what only the new man can do. It was to prove that for all of his love and his fervor and his abandon, he still couldn’t remain walking on the water, because the old man is, is self-consciousness. And the difference between Peter then and the one at Pentacost and beyond is proof of the new man. Thanks for the question.
(Aaron) So, even having expectations is wrong for myself, independent old man because the only expectation I can have is of Him. So even the issue of expectations is not the issue.
(Martha) And He has to let us fail and fail and fail. That’s the fool’s parade? Yes, yes, Jim, reach out and pull us out. Until we understand and will live in the fact that I can expect nothing of myself; that one dies hard. I was reared to be re-spon-sible. And my consciousness is always of my failure in responsibility, and yet it’s hopeless. You have to come to see you are hopeless, and you can’t do anything and don’t know anything. And that’s what’s so brilliant about Paul’s writing in First Corinthians, that his determined purpose, I mean, his purpose to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified.
(Jim) Well, I guess it’s just that we have that scripture to explain first to see what that looks like. I’m just reading in Matthew 14:30 after all that happened. Jesus said come and “when Peter had come down out of the boat. He walked on the water to go to Jesus, but when he saw that the wind was boisterous, he was afraid. In beginning to sink, he cried out saying, ‘Lord, save me. Lord, help me.’” That’s our prayer. You know? “And immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and caught him and said to him, “O, you of little faith. Why do you doubt?”
Esa es mi batalla creer y dudar hasta que le creea totalmente, y Viva Victorioso en Jesús, mi Dios Eterno.
TRANSLATION:
“Without the intimacy as between husband and his wife, there is NOT communion. That’s how I believe it is with my Lord. We give God thanks for your lives, and for the Church Life He has given us. Only by living it you may understand it. We love you.”
So much to chew on… thank you people.
What an amazing exchange. I have always so related to Peter. So this lifted my heart in that even though he was impulsive and selfish and self-serving, he was also the one that the Lord asked to come. And he tried. How wonderful to realize that today, as our Lord bids us to come, we are empowered with the Holy Spirit to do so. Loved this exchange!