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My Work to be Loved
Episode #499
June 26, 2016
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special Guest: Carole Nelson
(Martha) Well, we called a podcast here in the office because we’ve got something on our plate that the Holy Spirit is stirring the pot and filling our plate with, and it’s good stuff. What it has to do with is work, and how you can get so lost in working for the Lord and focusing on work that your life becomes out of balance and worse. But Carole had such an anointing this morning, such a revelation that I started typing what she was saying. I’m going to give you a few words that you said, Carole, and see if you, if the Lord will bring it all back. You said, “All He wants to do in this fellowship is to love me, and then my response spontaneously is to love Him.” But before you said, “All He wants is for me to love Him.” And here’s your quote, a quote, “To love Him in the doing and not love the doing.” Because we work hard, all of us do here. We work hard. And I love to work, and right now I can’t work as much as I want to. And I’m having to bow and put work on the altar, because it can become a god. We live to work and not to love sometimes. So that’s what you said. You made it, “the issue of what I’m to do is,” you said, “to love Him right here where I am to be loved first and love Him back.” And you said, “Believing Him in this, if I believe God has everything in control, I’ll be content.” We got into unbelief if you remember, but I want to stay with this issue of love right now.
(Carole) I woke up this morning, and I would love to say I just bound out of bed and everything is wonderful. I don’t. It takes me, it takes me a long, long time. But this morning I was just sitting there before the Lord and I felt like… I’d read something, but what I read, I felt like the Lord very clearly was speaking to me. “Will you just let Me love you where you are?” And the truth of the matter is I haven’t, because I have believed that I needed ‘to do’ something to have fruit, to have something to bring Him for Him to love me. And it’s backwards. It’s just… I saw it this morning in a way I’ve never seen it before. It’s so backwards. “Will you just let Me love you where you are, and love Me back?” And it’s just so simple. It’s so simple, but it is so difficult.
(Martha) I just want to say, Frances Frangipane had this very same thing said to Him. He was in a dark, really dark wilderness. Do you remember?
(Carole) Yes. That’s what I read.
(Martha) Oh, is that what you read?
(Carole) That’s what I read this morning.
(Martha) Oh, wow. Well, you remember the circumstances he was in then. They were terrible. Well, you tell it then.
(Carole) Yes, and I feel like it was timely, and it was from the Lord. But he had left a church because of their new age, they had gotten so into new age. He had four children. He moved to Iowa. They had absolutely no money. They bought – I don’t know how they did this – No, they didn’t buy, they rented a house that was a hundred years old and he said it looked older than a hundred years. And it was so cold, it would go to… The wind chill was down to below 60 below zero with his children, and the only thing he did; they had made a deal, he and the owner, that he would do cosmetic restorations on the house in exchange for the rent. But he did have, he brought in a wood burning stove, and they would all sleep on the same mattress, cuddled together for warmth, like 12 feet from the wood burning stove. This is what he did. This is after he left the church that really dismissed him because of his stance about the way that it was going. And for years, several years this is how he lived. And he would keep saying, “Lord, what am I to do?” I think that was the question. “Lord, what am I do? And he didn’t get an answer, at least he didn’t feel like he got an answer. And one day the Lord answered, and He said – and I don’t remember the exact. It was very much what I just said, which was, “Will you just let Me love you in this place?” Was that it, Martha?
(Martha) It was either that or “Will you love Me in this place.”
(Carole) Ok, that may be it. And it so struck me. And I knew the Lord was asking me the very same thing. I am very alone. The Lord has put me in a very alone, solitude place. I have failed miserably in that place of just accepting that that is where I am, and that that is enough. Not only is it enough, it’s a privilege. It’s a privilege to be in that place. It is a privilege to be called to be alone in that place with the Lord. But as I sat there and just kind of drank that in, I thought for Him to love me, for Him to just love me for no reason… Martha has taught, “He’s going to love you, He loves you unequivocally, and you’re never going to give Him a reason why, ever.” Well, that’s fine. You can hear that, but it’s another thing to believe it. And that’s the truth. I know in my heart that He’s called me to ecstasy with Him, and I want that so much, but to believe that I have to work to have that idle of worship is a barrier, an absolute barrier to the ecstasy and the relationship that He is calling me to. It is keeping me from Him.
(Martha) You said that He wanted you to ‘let’ Him love you, and then you said you would respond back with love.
(Carole) Yes. I saw so clearly if I would just let, just let go, relax – I think that was the word – relax and let Him love me, my spontaneous response would be love. It wouldn’t be a work. “Thou shalt love the Lord they God with all of thy heart and all of thy mind and all of thy soul and all of thy strength,” and that can be a work. I can make that a work, that I have to tell you, I fail at all the time. Because it’s never enough for me. It’s never, in my view, it’s never enough.
(Martha) Never enough work?
(Carole) It’s never enough. My attempt, my attempt, the work.
(Martha) Never enough to get the love that you… Yeah, Ok.
(Carole) Yeah, to love Him with. And He wants me to relax and let Him initiate it, capture me so that I am just in love. It’s not a work. It is a response to Him. So, when Martha and I were talking and I was seeing some of this, I said what I want so badly is that whatever I do to originate out of His love. That that is the place where anything that I do is originated is out of His love. Not love for Him, love from Him. The love for Him can be a work. It can even be an idle. It can be a false worship, but to do out of love from Him is a whole other realm.
(Martha) But here’s what you said on the phone and I wrote down. “It’s got to originate out of the love of Christ and not from anything else, then it is love, not anything else. He wants it to originate out of love. That is the eternal perspective.” And what you said, you talked about Dr. Denmark who said, “I’ve never worked a day in my life,” and she worked terribly hard. That’s a pediatrician. And you said, “That’s the secret.” Do you remember?
(Carole) I said I don’t know where she was with the Lord. I have no idea what her life was really. It really doesn’t matter. She was living out an eternal principle. And the principle was she was living out of love. She was not living out from work. She was living out from love, so it was never work. And my perspective,… And it’s God’s perspective. That is the issue. It is all God’s perspective, and I can veer off of that perspective without even thinking, but what I believe He’s doing is He is setting the parameters around each one of us. He is. The Holy Spirit is. Martha brought us a scripture yesterday and the day before. It’s not a scripture you don’t know. It’s a fabulous scripture. Ephesians 3:20 and 21. (Amplified Version) “Now to Him who by (in consequence of) the action of His power that is at work within us is able to carry out His purpose and do superabundantly far over and beyond all that we dare to ask or think, infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes or dreams, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever.” It is the power of the Holy Spirit, Himself, that is accomplishing His own desire to love us, to have relationship where He initiates. He does everything, and our response to Him is enough to love Him back. And I told Martha that two words have just been reverberating in me for I don’t know how long – weeks. And it’s, “Only believe. Only believe.” And I looked that up and it’s Mark 9:23, I believe, where Jesus says, “Anything is possible to those who believe. Only believe.” “Only believe.” That is all He’s calling me to do is to only believe Him, not to work, not to do, but to believe Him; believe what He says. And what He says in this scripture of Ephesians 3:20 and 21 is that He is going to do it all, “superabundantly above all our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes and dreams, far above what we dare to think and infinitely beyond our highest prayers desires, thoughts hopes or dreams.” If I believe that, I would live in absolute peace and rest and joy.
Such a good pod-cast today.He is stripping me of all my religious works. I’m learning the very same thing on how much He loves. I’ve asked the Lord for years what it means perfect love casts out all fear and I’m just getting a glimpse of it now. Like the old hymn “nothing in my hands I bring only to the cross I cling.” Love to ya’ll, inie
sometimes the hardest “work”of all is simply allowing ourselves to be loved…
Oh what a quieting, loving, uplifting my spirits message!!!!! I too have worshiped my work and I can no longer produce as I could when younger…..not as many hours of
work I guess I’m saying. I love HIS response to you Carole “Let me love you” ohhhhhh
what a blessed, heavenly word……the LOVE FROM HIM would reverberate in my
loving HIM back. “HE is going to do it all” in my ‘only believing’ HIM. HALLELUJAH
With not only the possible state of our lives but the reality of the state of all that is transpiring in the world around us God is sharing with us how to be victorious if we will just believe. And we don’t even have to DO that! The Holy Spirit does it for us…in us! How could there ever be any greater comfort!? How can we not be so in love with Him who is willing and longs to love us to life – if we would just surrender.
“…if I believe God has everything in control, I’ll be content.”
Yes!
What a beautiful timely message.
Love