Podcast: Download (47.5KB)
Subscribe: RSS
with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) If at any time in your life, believer or unbeliever I believe, you reject the love of the truth, the great passion and adventure of the truth, then you have chosen death. And this is sort of a mystery to me; God sends a strong delusion to believe the lie. He supports your choice. That’s not the God that we would like to create ourselves, but that is how stark it is John, between life and death, truth and the lie. And what is the lie? The lie is "I’m good but God isn’t"; that’s darkness. I will not be the sinner that I am; I will not let it be known that I am a sinner, common, ordinary, ugly. I am going to be better than that. I will be better than that. And so there’s great evil that comes from that delusion.
(J) I think it’s amazing that there was a love for the lie. There’s a love for the darkness of the lie. That’s just you know, and He disagrees with it and gives you the strong delusion, but it’s in order to go after what you love; that’s just, it’s amazing.
(M) See, you love what you think serves you well. And if you want to escape pain, if you want to escape guilt, if you want to escape sin, then you’ll love the darkness. Because you think in the darkness you can escape all that. Actually what you go into is a madness of torment. That’s one phrase I wrote in the book is, when you do what Satan wants you to he will accuse you of it, and torment you for it.
(J) Yeah. It’s like ‘go eat the cookie, eat the cookie, eat the cookie. Oh, you dirty sinner for eating the cookie!’
(M) That’s it. So back to the point, the point is, sin is hideous, much more hideous than we have known. But the abnormality is that you’re good and God isn’t; you’re better than God, you know better than God, you do better than God, you can do a better job of it than God. And so that’s the lie. The lie really goes back to Roman’s one; God is good. In fact Ro. 1:28, part of the downward spiral is “even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind.” In each of these passages in Roman’s 1, He gives them over to the next level of sin, hoping to bring them to repentance. If we’re comfortable with a level of sin, and we can be, we can be comfortable even if tormented. Then God will give us over to the next level to hopefully shock our conscience into being alive. So I really let it all out to God, John. I’m really, really, brutally honest with Him. I’m so honest with Him a couple months ago and I just told Him exactly how I felt. And I said I hope You can take me like this. Can You still tolerate me? And He graciously, He graciously did; of course my whole view of it changed. But it’s not letting your heart be completely open to Him that is the lie. It’s lying about what I feel that is so dangerous; you lose your life over it; you welcome death over it. God can take us exactly as we are. The only thing He requires is that we be truthful. It’s when we lie that He cannot fellowship with us. He will not support the lie, He will never compromise and lower Himself to our delusions and our lies and our love of the darkness. He waits for us to want to come out, ok, and then He will meet us. He pushes, I won’t say pushes, but He orchestrates life to make you hate the darkness and come out of it and want to be free. And it is the truth, the Truth is a Person; so when He brings you a love of the truth, He’s bringing you Himself. There’s a place in your life when God comes with the Truth, being Him. That’s the most crucial choice constantly of our life. There’s so many things God has revealed to me and shown me and spoken to me, that have been utterly shocking and absolutely devastating, about life; the tragedy of humanity, the heinousness of sin, and the hatred of man and woman, mankind. And those things have been excruciatingly painful to me to realize. I was very sheltered as a child and I didn’t know there was evil out there. I didn’t know there was evil. So evil is always shocking to me in its reality. Facing the truth is where grace is. So, what are you thinking over there?
(J) (John laughs)
(M) Jean, my friend said to me recently, Martha you are always so, I think she said clean. What she meant was that I’m in touch with my heart. There’s nothing special about me. I just know what’s in my heart. I’m in touch with it. And I deal with where I’m beginning, not where I ‘ought to be’. I think that’s the lie too. We feel like we’ve got to be somewhere before we can talk to God; before we can go to Him, we’ve got to ‘clean up the act’. It’s real, I’ll say immature, the word that comes to mind is immature; it’s not knowing Him. I begin with my truth, and sometimes my truth is not pretty, but He will always bring me to His truth, which is always peace and beauty.
(J) I was reading in Nee’s devotional "The Lord My Portion" how the abundant life is only found when we’re in maturity. It’s not about growth. Growth is one thing, maturity is quite a different thing; and that we only have the abundant life when we are in maturity.
(M) What is maturity then? What does Nee say maturity is?
(J) I don’t know right now what he says, but I would think that it would be being current, being honest and being clean with Him. You know, dealing with it as it is.
(M) Yeah, and I said on the CD of the month that you and I, the only reason we can travel together and be together in all kinds of situations, is that we allow each other to be human, natural. The truth as I see it has to begin with my humanity, and then it goes to divinity. But you just let me…. I got so frustrated with my computer the other day, and you just let me be frustrated. I said I’m five minutes from throwing it out the window! (Laughter) And then it went, you know; that’s not godly, but that was the truth for me. I was trying to write and the computer was broken actually. So thanks. (Laughter) It’s being natural, it’s being where you are, it’s being truthful; then you can go get out of the flesh, then you can meet God and let Him be your life and your response. My response is one thing, His is another; my view is one thing, His is another.
(J) Is maturity not the willingness to be who we really are, in our stark reality?
(M) You know even in, I’ll say psychiatry or psychology, I don’t much like that term; but in the study of the human soul, spontaneity is supposed to be the highest level of maturity. Just being. My ministry really, is a lot to the Pharisee. And so many times I’ll say, just ‘be’. And then they’ll say I have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s the truth. I’ve had people struggle for years, what do you mean ‘be’? And I would be as mystified as them, how can you not just ‘be’? Be where you are, be who you are. But they were so used to a life of lying and self-deception and trying to be what God wanted them to be, without needing God to do it, that they couldn’t fathom what is was just to be spontaneous.
(J) Because maturity really is just complete and utter reliance on God, it’s not like I’m ushering out of me some grandiose godliness; it’s reliance, He’s the godliness. So maturity is just being willing to be where you are, being who you are, and then be smart enough to lean on Him for it.
(M) Its knowing who you are, and knowing who He is.
(J) And knowing He’s the source of all your life.
(M) And knowing the difference. (Laughter) It took me awhile to know the difference between me and Jesus. But once it’s clear, it is clear. So I guess you could say, if you love truth, then truth is poured out on you. If you love darkness, then darkness is poured out on you. So that’s the choice as you live life practically. We don’t know that small choices to lie are the choices of death. I can say the choice is life of death, and we can say amen. But when you bring it down into life, into the daily facing of reality, then it’s the choice between a lie and the truth.
(J) That’s like when people say, I didn’t mean to be here, this is not where I wanted to be. No, you didn’t, maybe you didn’t make that choice ‘to the end’, but you made every choice and every step to lead you to that choice, and into that place. And you know you can say, oh, I didn’t do this one, this is not where I want to be. You know but you chose the lie here that made a step to here that made a step to here, and then eventually got you there.
(M) Yeah, you didn’t know that you’d end up at death. You just made six choices of the lie.
(J) But sometimes I think we get confused because we didn’t choose the end, death; we only choose the beginning ‘lie’, and then we get those mixed up, wait a minute, I didn’t choose this. How can I be here, I didn’t choose this.
(M) Yeah, you have a good handle on that John. I’ve heard you tell people that, that the consequence is a result, not something you didn’t deserve sometimes. And to know the truth you have to listen. What we don’t know is that the lie is a voice too. The lie is a voice of flattery, and then it becomes a voice of condemnation. The enemy is a flatterer. If he can get you that way through pride, he will get you. If he can get you through the lie of condemnation, he’ll get you there. I think your parents taught you to love the truth in a funny way, remember?
(J) Yeah, I was thinking about that and I decided I wasn’t going to bring it up.
(M) I think it’s neat. It instilled something in you.
(J) Well my parents, basically I knew that if I would tell the truth before they found out the truth, that I wouldn’t get in trouble, as much. I mean sometimes I’d still get in trouble, but it would never be the punishment that if they found out without me telling them. So they did instill that. And I would always go and I would say, oh I’m going to get in trouble for this, and I’d tell them as fast as I possibly could because I had to tell them before anyone else would. And you know that really did lay a foundation that God used in my life. But yeah, its funny way, it definitely is a funny way.
(M) Jean says that you can’t have both; you cannot believe that you’re good and then believe that God is good. You can’t have both. If you believe that you are really basically and inherently good, you believe God is bad. And if you believe God is the only good, as Jesus said, there’s only One good, and that your goodness as such, must somehow be derived from Him, then you’ll be sane. Jean also said possibly at the bottom of every dilemma is the lie that God is not good.
(J) We’re doing booklets from the transcriptions of your tape series. And the first one we’re doing is one that’s actually in the “Good Shepherd” CD series, as well as in the “Knowing God” CD series. And it’s both the first tapes on either of those. And it’s called “The Great Lie” and it is an awesome message, and I can’t wait for it to be in a booklet form. I am really looking forward to it. We’re having to bang it out and make sure the transcriptions were done right and everything like that. But once we get that done I am very much looking forward to releasing that because that’s basically what you say, that behind all of it all, that it’s all about the fact that God’s not good.
(M) Fear is that God is not good and God is not powerful, and that’s what’s on "The Great Lie." What year was it done? Do you remember?
(J) I think it’s ’86 or ’87.
(M) Its old and still true.
