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Light Is Love
Episode #259
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guests: Don and Carole Nelson
(J) That light is love; that’s what we saw in the car.
(Carole) Yes, yes.
(J) We said, oh my gosh, the light is love; that is what the light is, because the Lord is love, and…
(M) In traveling with Don and Carole is always to have joy; it’s just joy. I love to travel with them. We were enjoying the food, we were enjoying the cabin, we were enjoying the day, we were enjoying each other, it was joy was at that table. And that in itself is rare. So… And see, I’m discovering that in both the occasions with the waitress we were one in the spirit.
(J) Uhmhmm.
(M) We didn’t talk about it, until this moment.
(J) That’s right. Hmhmm.
(Carole) Didn’t know it; didn’t know we all were feeling that.
(M) No.
(J) Because I was staring at her, just looking at her while she was taking the order, you know, just not like gawking, but I was just, I was looking at her, and I was just… I did the same thing; I was going ohhh. And it wasn’t pity, like oh, what a horrible. It was just oohhh.
(Carole) I didn’t think about giving her anything; I enjoyed being with her. (Martha chuckles.) You know, she, she, I enjoyed being with her; I enjoyed her being with us in the little bit that she…
(J) Are you talking about the “Mickey-D” (MacDonald’s) one?
(Carole) Oh yeah, definitely. (Carole laughs.) Yeah.
(Don) I was gonna say lets get those, let’s get two…
(J) Yeah.
(Don) Doesn’t that joy that we, we share, doesn’t that give the Holy Spirit the liberty and the freedom to move about where we go, and to impact where it wants to impact? And it impacted her. We didn’t have to say anything to her, didn’t have to do anything. It had a tremendous impact, and will continue. What we don’t know is it will continue to have an impact, because it opened a door.
(M) Well, I think the reason that you and Carole have such joy is that you love. The joy comes from the love. You love the Lord, you love us, you love life, you love your journey.
(Don) I was going to say loving the journey is… I love that, yeah.
(J) It’s all about the life, not the words. The words are cheap.
(M) Oh, I read this in…I read this and it was like… I read this from Sparks, “People don’t go to hear you teach, they go to see who you are.”
(Don) But John that was an awesome statement, it is not the words, and I think that’s important.
(J) Yeah, because our words are cheap, anybody can say anything. But if there’s a life stamp, seal on it, that’s undeniable.
(Don) And there were no words.
(J) Words would have been profane. It would have been awful. If we had just hammered that woman and said ‘let me tell you about Jesus’, it would have been awful for her probably.
(Don) Tied up and restricted the Holy Spirit from doing what it wanted to do.
(J) I completely agree. He, He needed to express love and light, He didn’t need to express the words of it. I think words, words should, I mean this is my personal belief, words should always be the secondary wave; the first should be the life. If you immediately impact with words, walls come up, ‘wait, wait, wait, don’t teach me’; ‘don’t, don’t invade my space’. But a life, a life is so, so, so smooth, and impacting. It’s truth, it’s life, it’s light.
(Carole) Martha said that the way of the Spirit is much more instinctive than it is deliberate. There was no deliberation there was a living out a life.
(M) Uhmmm.
(Carole) And uhmm the life that the four of us as an example in our little Body have, is, is a result of many years of journeying together, and many years of the Holy Spirit forming His bond of unity in this Body. It wasn’t something we decided, it was something that He performed, and is still in the process of performing and will continue to do that. And it seems to me that as that bond of unity that only the Holy Spirit can perform is there, then He is truly free to influence the atmosphere, every place that we go is influenced by what He has performed.
(M) Hmhmm. But you know, I want to put this plug in for the cross. Because what you, Don and Carole and John, have been willing to receive, was the work of the cross. You don’t get to unity or love or mission, unless you go through the cross. The problem that any… There are many, many people that could be here who aren’t, because the cross is the dividing line of whether you will lay down you life for the Lord, whether you will lose what He demands. And both of you have been through severe chastening and severe life experiences that are the cross. And only the cross will bring you to the love of Christ as its highest and best; only the cross will take you to even see what He showed you Carole. I read something to you, I think it was on the airplane, or somewhere, and I said Carole, you don’t realize what you have been through, an enormous journey of the cross. You ah, you think lightly of it in terms of God’s pleasure, but I have gone through it with you, and I know what you were willing to be… I think the phrase Sparks used was ground to dust. You both have been ground to dust. John… Don by the world and by the Body, and you by the Lord, and John as well. But you’ve been willing. Ok, yes Lord I will die to that; yes Lord I will let you have that; yes Lord I will let you break down the walls against Your love. But those walls that you’re talking about, ah, are the cross; the scripture says, “the power of the cross”. And I always wondered what that meant, but the power of the cross is the power to release you to your destiny. All three of you sitting here have embraced the cross with enormous willingness over and over again; that is the journey as well. And sometimes I leave that out, as the factor; it is THE factor, it is the cross-roads of choice, one way or the other, ‘self’ or God, as you say Don, it’s selfish. And God comes after that selfishness. And this morning I was reading Sparks again and he said the, I won’t be able to put it like he did, but the cross comes after everything that is self and flesh. Self-exaltation, self-serving, self-trust, self-everything, and that, that’s, you have to be rid of self, and we aren’t willing so God has to bring us ah, temptations of the devil. I, I see them ‘temptations of Jesus’ now, as the temptation to do it in the flesh, and He resisted. He would not do one thing apart from the Spirit. He overcame that as a human, and as the Son of God, He did not pick up the flesh; well we do, because we trust the flesh. And so the cross… I’m wanna make a… lift up the banner of the power of the cross in every life, that this, what you got Carole that your life is a mission journey is an expansion of your idea of yourself, your perspective of, of what He has for you; but it has come through enormous years of God crossing your path. (Martha quietly chuckles.) So…
(J) But then you can go back to that scripture and say, “No greater love does a man have than to lay down his life”, and the cross is ‘no greater love’.
(M) Yes.
(J) And so He’s inviting you into that ‘no greater love’.
(M) Ohhhh, I’ve got it.
(J) Because He laid down His life on the cross and we have to do the same, because of love. It’s just so… It’s simple, and it’s so obvious, but it’s so not. (John laughs.) It’s, it’s because we process it through our wounds and our ‘this’ and ‘that’ and whatever, we judge all that and don’t get the, the real impact of it. But ‘no greater love’, it was the cross, so yeah! I confirm the ad from the ‘Sponsor’, here’s… (John laughs.)
(Carole) And you know the word ‘panorama’ and uhm, ‘amplification’, from this side of the view, “I love the view form here”, there’s a song, “I love the view from here”. I can’t think of the name of it, but…
(M) That’s it.
(Carole) I love the view from here because even looking back, from the time that, that I belonged to Him, and probably since the time of the foundation of the earth when He wrote my name, I’ve been on the journey. My, my life has been a mission journey, and nothing has been out of that. Even all that preparation was that preparation to love.
(J) He, He was doing a mission trip ‘in you’ to prove His love for you as well.
(Carole) Uhmhmm.
(J) He was saying not only are you a missionary for love, but I’m going to witness and uhmm, ‘evangelize’ so to speak, your heart for that love for you. Isn’t that what we always have to go through is that continual, “You really, really do love me,” and He has to continually tell us and impact us with that. You’ve been ‘evangelized’.
(Carole) I have. (Carole laughs.) Woo, woo.
(J) Uhmhmm, it’s a, it is.
(M) I read a verse this morning, that one thing that astonished me, astonishes me about the Lords love is its humility. I’m gonna memorize it one day, but Oswald Chambers says you can kick Him, you can spit on Him, you can hate Him, but He is still the Lord and Master, and He still loves you, you can’t, you can’t stop His love; you can do all that. But the verse in, somewhere in the Psalms in the Holman Bible said, was speaking to God, “Your humility exalts me.” What a strange and wonderful statement. Your humility, Lord, exalts me, lifts me up, make’s me something when I’m nothing. And unless there is this enormous humility, unless we allow the humility of Christ, through the cross, to bring us down to be mere servants of love, we cannot, we cannot love with His love, because His love is utterly a Servant. One of the things I said in this meeting that, that meant the world to me was in John 13, when He goes to wash the feet of the disciples. We explain, and all the commentaries say oh, the humility of Christ. But the verse before that says, “He loved His own who were in the world, and He loved them to the end”, meaning the uttermost height. And I said, “It was not humility apart from love, it was the humility of love.” Christ’s love is so amazingly willing to serve and be lowly. Not because He does it intentionally, but because He loves, He serves. And so the cross brings us humiliation to form humility. And in that humility we’re able to receive and seek His love. It’s incredible how humbly He endures us; how humbly He serves and so I saw His love from a different perspective, that it was just natural. Love, if you love something more than yourself, and He loved the Father more than Himself, and the Father said ‘go love the world and give Your life for it because I love the world’, and He loved the Father more than Himself, so He, it was perfectly natural. Not a quality of character as such. Not something different from Him, but it was Him; His love, His love was the humility of God.
