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Listen And Say Yes
Episode #163
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guests: Julie and Jacquelyn
(M) Ok, let me talk about John One. Again John One, and it says, ‘Jesus came to His own, and His own received Him not. But to whoever…’ Let me read the actual scripture. “He came…” John 1:10, “He came into the world. The world did not know Him. He came to that which belonged to Him, to His own, His domain, His creation. And they who were His own, His people, did not receive Him, and did not welcome Him. But as many as did receive and welcome Him, He gave the right to become the children of God, that is, to those who believe in Him.” So, it was clear to me that you believe, and then you receive. And I started searching that word receive, and it means… it has some roots to it. One of them is lambano, which is seize, take hold of, grasp. And both receive, and believe have an element of intimacy in them that we don’t transfer in the words. The Amplified says receive and welcome Him. That means if He comes to the door, I receive Him. But if I let Him in the house, I have welcomed Him. And it’s… to receive and believe is intimacy of Christ, Christ within. And you believe in the complete intactness of the new creation.
(Julie) One of the scriptures that’s been really central for me, as the Lord has taken me through this is Jeremiah 10. And it says, in Jeremiah 10, starting at verse 14, it says, “Every man has become like a brute, irrational and stupid, without knowledge of God; for his molten images are frauds. They are devoid of worth, usefulness or truth, a work of delusion and mockery.” And then verse 16 says, “The portion of Jacob, the true God on Whom Israel has a claim, is not like these.” And God began to show me how I’d always seen ‘molten image’ as an idol ‘out there”. But that in reality, the molten image was something, an image I had created of myself, and believed in very intimately. And it was something, and I loved the word molten there because it shows me that it’s, it’s, it’s how, it’s the whole old way, old system, for me, by which I lived. Which was fundamentally on the belief, and this is like Jacob, that I don’t have an identity, I don’t have a place, and so because of that I have to create one. And so, I would see qualities in other people, or I would see things in life that I wanted, or whatever, and that incredible drive ‘to have’, or drive ‘to be’, caused me to put all this stuff together. And it says in there that it is a work of delusion and mockery. And I just began to see that, at least for me, it was an enormous system, and even a systematic delusion that I had come into about ‘who I was’, to even believe that that had any reality. But the promise here in verse 16 is that “The Portion of Jacob”, I have a portion, “the true God on Whom Israel has a claim is not like these.” And to be able to come to know Him, I had to be willing to let Him dismantle the whole system of the molten image and the striving and the… that whole entire way of life.
(M) One of the things you did, Julie, was so related to Jacob. And I think I wrote in “All And Only”, he was broken on the beam of his own striving. What you said to me was that He is destroying your belief in effort. I thought that was a brilliant statement, because that’s the old man. And one of the things you said was, “I turned the Word into a law, and killed the Word and myself.” And the old man has such complete unbelief, and such a void of identity. And it’s always amazed me that Jacob had from the womb the promise of the inheritance, but he stole it. And he was then supplanted by a thief, Laban. It’s interesting Jacquelyn is on the same thing in a different story. But it’s another picture that He’s working among us in this subject.
(Jacquelyn) I was reading John 11. And I started reading about Lazarus and Jesus raising him from the dead. And I suddenly saw that that’s what the Lord has done, and is doing in me. And it’s John 11:38-44. “And Jesus groaning”, and He groans and travails over me, and over us. And in 43 He says, “Lazarus, come forth!” And He has said that to me. Jacquelyn, come forth! I have been dead. And in some ways still am. And then that is not all, he came forth, but he had to be loosed. And He has said, loose Jacquelyn, and let her go. But 45 really is the most important part to me. Why, why has He done that for me? That many would believe in Him. Then in verse 52 it’s still a part of that ‘many’, “Gather together the children of God who are scattered abroad.” And I was talking to Martha the other day, yesterday, and she had the revelation that I am not abandoned. And I saw through this scripture about Lazarus, I saw that I had to choose to be abandoned, and I did, but then the Lord caught me, because I saw that I was pacing literally, and wringing my hands, ‘what can I do, what can I do, what can I do?’ And He caught me. That is my old man thinking in my arrogance, and my delusion, and my insanity, that I can ‘do it’. That I can call myself… I think I actually thought that I could call myself forth from the dead. (Laughter) And I cannot do anything. And previously the Lord had given me Is.47, and it says, “Come and sit in the dust oh virgin daughter of Babylon.” And I would read that and say, “ok, I get it, but I don’t get it.” I don’t have any problem coming and sitting in the dust. But I don’t get it. And I was reading it in the Amplified. And I kept reading it and I kept saying over and over again, “I get it and I don’t get it.” But I happened to read it in another version, and the footnote said, “He calls the daughter of Babylon a virgin because her walls have not been breached.” And the walls of my old man had not been breached. And then, and I may be taking this out of context, but as I read Is. 47, and he’s talking about Babylon, I feel like that is the old man. Babylon is the old man, and He comes to breach the walls in me, as Babylon.
(M) Which is the grave clothes.
(Jacquelyn) Yes. By calling me from the dead, ‘Jacquelyn come forth’. And Is. 47 is awful if you’d read it, about who Babylon is. (Laughter)
(M) See the simplicity of this life is that you listen, and then you just say ‘yes’. And then pretty much you can go forget it, because He has to do it all. He only wants your ‘yes’. He only wants you to hear and say ‘yes’. And that really is faith. In order to say ‘yes’, you have to believe. In order to let your ‘yes’ be all that you can contribute, you have to believe that He does everything and has really already done everything. Listen and say ‘yes’, that’s it.
(Jacquelyn) Our old man wants to (John interjects, oh that’s it!) wring my hands, strive, say, ‘what can I do, what can I do, what can I do’? (John: uh-huh) (Jennifer: Impossible.) And I do what Julie said, take on ah, somebody else’s persona, or, or word, or song, and, and call it mine.
(J) I don’t think I believe in the ‘yes’. To say, oh yeah, ok, I don’t believe in it. So I believe that ‘abandon,’ ok, so say the words ‘abandon,’ ok, then I have to go ‘abandon’, I have to keep it in my head. I gotta write it down in my journal because I gotta look at it fourteen times a day because I gotta ‘do it’, I gotta abandon, I gotta abandon, I’m not going… I gotta abandon. (Laughter) (Jaquelyn: Or you’ll forget!)
(M) But you know the story of Jacob shows that the striving is its own purpose, because it leads you to the defeat! If you…the scripture says that first comes the natural, then the spiritual. The process is ‘to be defeated’. The process is not ‘to achieve’. And there is a process. Jacob went through it. He had to exhaust his efforts. He had to find the futility of his efforts. And he had to be broken by God. That’s the meaning of the cross. The cross is active in our Christian, born-again life, because the cross is the attack on the old man that I don’t… that I still believe in. And so the cross is the outright attack. The cross took out the old man, and the cross is ever after the death of the old man. So Jacob’s whole process was the discovery that he was fighting God by his striving. He was opposing his own identity and his own blessing. And only when he was broken in his thigh, he said bless me. He could receive after that. It’s, it’s an enormous… it’s the rest! It’s the complete knowledge that you cannot do anything, so you may as well not even try, and that all the striving is unnecessary. He’s not killing your effort. He’s killing your belief that your effort has value and can affect holiness. Sparks says that Christ cannot be manifest except in the corporate church. And I do believe that. But I so strongly was founded on the individual, the individuality that Christ has given each of us. We are unique. And we are…our new creation is not sameness. It takes; it’s going to take a vast multitude of new creations to begin to manifest Christ. Our Christ likeness lies in that new creation. And when I… one of the churches I was in early on, the women dressed a certain way, everything conformed to this ‘box’. And it was all ‘sameness’; you had to be the same as everyone else. And I would… God used that to show me… I never could fit into the box, and so I was deeply rejected. And I refused to fit in the ‘box’ of an identity that wasn’t what He had given me. He gave me to be some new creation. And so… but that taught me the Church can defeat the new man if the Church requires a standard…. There is a standard, there’s always a standard lifted up. Several people have written me about our diet, Julie. And I’m always saying, oh its just grace. I really don’t even want to talk about it that much. It’s what God’s called us to and given us the grace for. And sometimes I’m on it, and sometimes I’m not. Jacquelyn, tell your story of the brownie, ‘the law of the brownie’. (Laughter)
(Jacquelyn) It sparked a revelation in me. I was with my grandchildren, and they wanted a brownie, and I was fixing it for them. And I took a bite, and I felt the Lord’s anger. And I thought He was angry because I was eating sugar. And then I had the revelation, no! He was angry because I was making ‘a law’, ‘thou shalt not eat sugar’. And that’s not what the diet is about at all. We’re, we’re free! (Background: umhmm.) We’re not slaves. And just in making ‘a law,’ I was a slave to the law.
