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Reflection
Episode #158
with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guests: Jacquelyn and Jennifer
(J) Well, Martha we are now post conference, and we are sitting here at our early morning prayer time, and we have a lot of reflection, afterglow so to speak, looking back at the conference, and we’re all sitting around here. And we’d just like to share the podcast that we were wanting to do at the conference, but the timing was now. This message that you gave, “The Body Of Christ”, transcendent believers in the end times, was one of the highest messages I’ve ever heard you speak. And it was absolutely awesome. The weightiness of the message was so evident; the weight of the glory in it, the weight of the challenge of it, the weight of the responsibility that you were giving, and I was real grateful for it. It was like you did “The Way” in Antioch, California. This was the clearest message I’ve heard about ‘Body Life’, and the new man, and the old man, and it was just so crisp. There was a real different feel. Though my prayer was that “The Coming One” conference would be connected somehow, so that it would just flow straight into this message, “The Coming One” was a tremendous message that came through, but then it made a…Is the word crescendo?
(M) Hmhmm.
(J) And this was the pinnacle so to speak, and the culmination of all of what you said at “The Coming One”, and brought it straight up. And I know that you personally paid quite a price with your body, so to speak. You know, I mean, really, you paid a price to bring that message forth by laying yourself aside and having the Lord lay you down. But He rose so strong in you, and it was so evident. And I’m just real grateful.
(M) I’m grateful too. There were times I was grateful to just get through it. That He would come in such might and clarity was a miracle. But I have a scripture this morning that seems to say the essence of what He was doing. It’s Isaiah 45; the whole chapter’s awesome, but verse five is, “I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God.” That there is no one besides me, I am the Lord, and there is no other. “The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well being and creating calamity, I am the Lord who does all these.” And then verse twenty one He says again, “And there is no other god bedsides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none except me.” And for me the essence of the message was that. And I didn’t have a handle on these scriptures, though I’ve had them for a long time. I think the essence of the message that He formed in me and brought out, was that the Tree, it was the Tree of Life. That we really want to believe there’s a second cause, there’s the power of man; there’s the power of Satan, and the power of me. And there’s no power but God. And to accept that God is God, we will not have it. So this word that’s going out, I really see that it’s going to be shredded and opposed and lifesaving at the same time. Someone told me, one of the people that came, that there’d been enormous reaction against “The Great Lie”. And I just kind of shook my head, because to me it’s so obvious in the scripture if nothing else, that He is good, and in nature, He is good. I might question it in my history, but I just couldn’t fathom a violent opposition to “The Great Lie”. To me it’s lifesaving, life-transforming. But we don’t want a God who is over it all. But that is the safety of this hour. Can you read your scripture you got?
(Jacquelyn) He took me to Ephesians this morning, and when I read Ephesians 1:8, “He lavished upon us in every kind of wisdom and understanding, practical insight and prudence, making known to us the mystery, the secret of His will.” I felt like that’s what He did in the conference. He lavished that upon us, and He summed up all things in Christ. “He planned for the maturity of the times and the climax of the ages to unify all things and head them up and consummate them in Christ, both things in heaven and things on the earth.” I just feel like He took us ‘up’; that we were there, but we were not there. When the conference ended and I was in the car with Carole, it was like I had been somewhere. He took us to the heavenlies.
(J) I think the message did take us to ‘a place’; we were in ‘a place’, and it was real evident that it was ‘a place’.
(M) It was Zion.
(J) You know, there’s only one thing that would counter and reject this message, and reject the message of “The Great Lie.” It would be the old man. The old man wants so badly to believe in self, really, the old man is what would come up and go, “God is not sovereign, there is not Zion, God is not the orchestrator of events.”
(M) Because I want to be in charge. I want to be in charge.
(J) Absolutely.
(Jacquelyn) Even though I don’t want to be responsible.
(M) Say some more about that, Jacquelyn.
(Jacquelyn) I want it to be Satan that’s the cause of my sin. I want it to be man that’s the cause of my sin. I don’t want to be responsible for every action, every sin, all my bitterness, unforgiveness, my thinking. I don’t want to be responsible for any of it. I want to blame somebody else, so I can do what I want to do.
(J) What we did the other day when we got back from the conference, and sitting by the fire, and we were just kind of resting from coming back up the mountain and everything like that, we really saw the old man and the hostileness of the old man. One of the first statements that I wrote down was that the old man is bitter with God and cannot do otherwise. Rom. 8:7 says ‘that he is hostile’. Amplified really goes… Does anyone have the Amplified?
(M) Want me to read it?
(J) Yeah Martha, would you read Rom. 8:7 in the Amplified?
(M) “That is because the mind of the flesh with its carnal thoughts and purposes is hostile to God, for it does not submit itself to God’s Law; indeed it cannot.”
(J) So the bitterness, the old man is bitter with God. The old man is….
(M) Born.
(J) He was born that way. And really during the conference the calling was to lay down that old man, because of the fact that the old man cannot endure or bear this life, nor bear what is coming, nor bear the Coming One. You’re never going to bear the Coming One in the old man, because basically ‘The Coming One’, is laying you aside, laying that one aside, because the old man is hostile to God, cannot submit to God, refuses violently the bowing.
(M) We had something in this conference that was, that was unique. We had two skits.
(J) Umhmm.
(M) And they were based on Eph. 4:22, “Strip yourselves of your former nature”, the old man, “put off and discard your old unrenewed self which characterized your previous manner of life and becomes corrupt through lusts and desires that spring from delusion; and be constantly renewed in the spirit of your mind having a fresh mental and spiritual attitude, you put off the old man, and put on the new nature, the regenerate self created in God’s image, Godlike in true righteousness and holiness.” Suddenly after the conference that hit me just with incredible light, that that new man is Godlike.
(J) Well, you said that the old man, when we were sitting by the fire, you said the old man will never be renewed, never. It’s not the old man that’s renewed. The old man has to die, and there’s a big struggle to resurrect the old man, to renew the old man, to stay in the old man, make the old man better; but the old man will never be better, can never be better.
(M) So the, the skit was a visible illustration of what the old man really is like. I was trying to demonstrate the thoughts, the real thoughts. It was a lot of fun and funny, but very poignant.
(J) Umhmm.
(M) I think it made visibly clear what I, what we don’t get is who the old man is, and who the new man is, and the difference. And we need to understand when we touch the old man, and when we’ve gone back to it, and to recognize that all of those feelings that we have are in the old man, like malice, jealousy, dissatisfaction, distance from God. And you made a wonderful transition, because I was using the old man, and you called it the soul. And it’s the flesh, the soul, the carnal nature, all of that is the old man. The scripture uses all those words to describe the one thing, which is the old person, the old self. So, what did you all think about the skit?
(Jennifer) Well, on the surface level I thought, you know, it was very funny and kind of like one of those things that was very stark, visual, which is very helpful. But one of the things that it kind of planted in me, because one of the main things going into the conference that… you know, you addressed there was the warfare surrounding this conference, and that everybody that was there, on some level… I mean I heard a lot of different stories from people. Not just, and I obviously was (Jennifer laughs)…I got sick a couple days before the conference, and, you know, there were things like that. But you know for some people it was literally choices; the conference versus family in a very big way, and having a real kind of a starkness to that. And when you were doing the old man versus the new creation, and illustrating that using the clothing, one of the things that kind of struck me, and it hasn’t really boomed out, but was the idea that if it… you know, we are a new creation in Him, and the old soul… like we talk about it because it is that the old nature must be put in the grave. You said that over and over again. So to die, meaning that there is some sort of life, if nothing else, like some drive to live in that. And it kind of struck me that in a lot of ways our warfare comes from the fact that our soul doesn’t want to go in the grave. And it’s… right now it’s kind of bothering me because I can’t get past this weird, Halloween monster caricature, of we’re all schizophrenics running around, you know, battling ourselves sort of thing. But in a very real way, that’s there, and you know, science has talked about behaviors burning paths in the brain, and these things basically having to be rewired if you change habits or get over addictions, things like that. And I think that it is a battle, particularly, you know… I’m speaking being new to my walk. I mean some days it feels like I am schizophrenic in a way, because it can be every five minutes, all of a sudden, I can literally feel this, this rage rising up, and, and no, I will not, you know. And it’s, I don’t know. There was something about seeing you with the two different outfits, and the new creation versus the old man, that just kind of struck me that the old man is not just (she laughs), it’s not just an idea, it’s a very real thing, my soul, my flesh, and my flesh has no desire whatsoever to be sublimated.
(J and M) Hmmm.
(J) Good word.
