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Heart Of A Warrior
Episode #196
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) Commitment boils down to, you will go for what you love or want to love.
(J) Hmhmm. Or want to love you.
(M) Hmhmm, yeah. So you will be committed. The question is will you be committed to you? Or committed to a cause? Or committed to the Person of Christ? And all the disciples that followed Him were absolutely abandoned. It’s Peter, throwing himself out of the boat.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) On the beach at Capernaum, when he saw it was Jesus. It’s that kind of… throwing himself to walk on water. Peter’s abandonment, and Paul’s abandonment to Christ are just so outstanding to me. It’s almost… It’s not reckless, just for the sake of being foolish.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) It is deliberate throwing yourself in utter abandonment to Him. You just whispered, “Wow”, so I’m going to say that’s what you said. What’s your comment?
(J) Ah, ahhhh, I don’t know what my comment is. I’m, I’m being challenged by this; just that I don’t know, just challenging me.
(M) Well, I really, really ask for prayer that I can, I can speak it better than I can write it. And even to speak it gets it into a form for me where I might be able to tell it.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) But I have to finish this booklet. And this is the issue that it’s gotta go to. Decision has to go to the ultimate abandonment of one decision, “Mary has chosen”. Mary of Bethany chose, and what she chose shall not be taken from her. Not only is Christ not taken from her, but neither can her commitment be taken from her. That commitment of Paul’s sustained him through enormous suffering, through prison. He continued to feed the Church regardless of prison, and rather indifference to where he was. And it’s not because he was so wonderful and unique, it was because of his abandonment and commitment, absolute, anywhere. It’s like; I think I said this on one other podcast. It’s not just ‘everything’ to Christ, ‘anything’.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) It’s got to be anywhere You want me to go, as Paul said. Anything You want me to be, anything You want me to do.
(J) I just think my understanding has been so unrealistic.
(M) Ok, talk about that.
(J) It’s just…
(M) You believed your commitment was measured by your performance, and it isn’t. Is that it?
(J) Yeah.
(M) (Martha laughs) Ok, your commitment is measured by that guy coming out of the pool, raising his hand, half drowned, and they were still trying to sit him up, and he was putting that arm up every time he could. And I’m sure that he came through. They didn’t, they didn’t seem to think that failure was any criterion. That was clear in both episodes. There are four episodes from the Discovery.
(J) Six.
(M) Six?
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) You found it for us. Where’d you find it?
(J) It’s at discoverychannel.com. I got it on iTunes, so you can buy it at iTunes and watch the episodes.
(M) Well, because the Kingdom is a warring Kingdom, and it is opposed as war, we have to understand how to war so that we win. Jumping around and spouting scripture does… just thinking there’s magic, it’s just not… I’m a passionate old warrior about how you do it. And so, I recommend it. It’s tough to watch. It made me cry. I don’t know if it would a man, but I’m just so, my heart is so with these warriors.
(J) They are the strength behind our military.
(M) Yeah. They are the strength that protects this nation. And we don’t even know. It’s probably very secret what we’ve conquered.
(J) And it should be.
(M) Oh, it absolutely should be. But, we’ve taken out enormous Taliban cells.
(J) And I, I don’t think that it needs to be on all the media. I don’t think it needs to be there.
(M) It doesn’t. It doesn’t. We don’t know. We just have to give them the power and the supplies and the right to do it. And ah… But the measure of commitment, John, is what you do when you’ve failed. It’s not that you failed it’s what you do with it. Is your commitment strong enough to get you to sit up like that boy and raise your hand? He was telling everybody, look at, I made it. I made it. (Martha laughs) I’m ok. I’m ok. He wasn’t ok, but he was going to be ok, because he wanted it. He was committed to it because that’s what he wanted.
(J) It reminds me of Rudy.
(M) Yeah, that’s your favorite movie. Ok, there you are.
(J) Well, he did not have ability, but he had will. He had commitment, and he had heart, and he had passion.
(M) Oh, that reminds me, there is a sign in the Marine story that said, “Not for the weak or faint hearted.” And we keep mentioning among ourselves that Gideon’s army was reduced from 10,000 to 300 wasn’t it? All the fearful, go home. And I’m going to tell this again in the conference. But we were in Honduras, and there were, I think there were four of us. And you and I were involved… it was that retreat for the women, and somehow we involved in enormous pressure to work through some opposition, and to make that thing go. And you told me later, someone behind me said something, and I didn’t pay any attention to it. It was ludicrous, so I didn’t even stop. But you said, when we got home you said, “If I’d been in a war, I would have turned around and shot her in the head.” Because she was no in it with us, she was dangerous to us. And she was dangerous to the victory of Christ. She was on herself. She was talking some ‘decorating something’ you said. I didn’t even, I didn’t even remember because it was so ludicrous. I couldn’t imagine her being there, and I didn’t even stop. But we, you and I were that intent, whatever it was that we were dealing with, the warfare to make sure that Christ was seen.
(J) I mean it seems really harsh for me to say that. But I realized that if I was in a battle, and I was in the middle of warfare with an enemy combatant that was coming against me, and someone was trying to tell me how to do my shoelaces or that my shoelaces weren’t tied, or whatever, that ah, I realized that they were such a liability that we were going to lose more people because of their liability, rather than just ‘take them out’, and let that liability end with them.
(M) Yeah, fewer people, but committed. That is God’s way too. The military’s harsh in that way, we see it from these documentaries; they’re absolutely harsh. Your life and death depends on the commitment of the person next to you. And if they don’t have it, they don’t want you in the battle, because you will kill people. You will, you will think of yourself. Again, you have to get beyond yourself, outside of yourself, into something greater than yourself, for which you are willing to lose your own life. And if you don’t have that, in the spiritual warfare, in the national warfare, you’re not fit to be in the midst of a viable campaign. It is harsh. I’ve seen the Lord be very harsh about it. But if you’re for yourself, that person who’s for himself will let you be killed without any help. So we… I’m going to be talking and sharing in the conference about this level of warfare mentality within the Body of Christ. And it could be startling, I don’t know. But we are… “Children it is the last hour.” And I, I told someone recently, there’s time to do the will of God, but there’s not time to not do the will of God.
(J) Well, when we watched the show, there was a lot of ‘I don’t want to do it’, in those. I mean they basically, you know, said this really stinks. In other words, you know, they just, they were just… And the lead sergeant said, yes, this isn’t fun, this does stink, but you push beyond that.
(M) And you know John, really remarkably the documentary recorded the complaining, a small amount, but remarkably there was not much. They knew it would be, as they said, hell. And one man said, “I’m so tired of everybody telling me what to do”. Sorry. There’s, there’s ah… It would be interesting to know if he made it, because the surrender of your will means you’re being told by the Lord what to do, and by who He delegates what to do. If a policeman says pull over, you pull over. So… I was astonished there wasn’t more complaining. They didn’t have sufficient food. They didn’t have rest. They didn’t have…they weren’t clean, they didn’t have showers, they didn’t have… And I watch a lot of the military. To me the military channel is one of the best ones there can be, and the rest of it’s a wasteland. But I’ve seen actual film of war, and it’s no different than that. And I’ve wondered how on earth men go through it. What is it that would cause them to endure? And I guess there’s something in a man that says I have to do it, and that in itself is commitment.
