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with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(J) Well as a Body we’re still very much focused on the issue of fear. We’re dealing with the repercussions of fear, in our Body, around our Body. So we’d like to commit this podcast and probably the CD of the month to fear, and dealing with fear. And you have a particular revelation today about that, and we’d like to hear that. So what’s the Lord telling you today, about fear?
(M) You gave me a transcript from the tape “Fear Not” that you’re working to edit, and so I went through it and highlighted it. But I did see the beginning statement on that tape. It says, “I’m seeing the effects upon me of being with people who have fear”. That was some years ago, I don’t know how long ago.
(J) It was 1999.
(M) I’ve always said the Christian walk is learning the same thing over and over again. But it’s always to new depths, and it’s always fresh. But I have just been much before the Lord, just listening and meditating, and with a very questioning heart, to see how to help folks to see what the roots are. And I’ve come to the most astounding root of fear. I don’t think I’ve ever had this before, on my other insights on fear. And it happens to be the secret to the Cain and Able story. That book was supposed to have been published last summer, and I knew it wasn’t finished. I also always know that that means that I’m not finished, because I have to live through the manuscript. It’s not something I can send out, if you really don’t know it, I can’t send it out as knowledge, because I really don’t know it until I live it. But I knew… I had questions to ask, I had many questions about the New Testament references to Cain, but I did not know the secret of the whole story. So then, in pondering and praying, and then in much need before God, to understand how we get to such a level of fear that it becomes utterly demonic, utterly destructive to the Lord’s work, all of a sudden I knew how that happened. One of my favorite verses that God gave me in the beginning of my walk, and He has brought me back to it over and over again to a deep understanding of it. Jesus said, “To what shall I liken these people”, it begins in Matt.11:16, and Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear”, this is something we need to hear. “But to what shall I compare this generation, it is like children sitting in the market place, who call out to the other children, and say, we played the flute for you and you did not dance, we sang a dirge and you did not mourn. For John came, neither eating or drinking, and they say he has a demon; the Son of Man came eating and drinking and they say, behold a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners”. So that thinking and non-response that He mentioned, is ‘adult’. Adults don’t respond from the heart, only children do. And someone I know has this statement, someone who struggles with responsibility. He says, response-ability. So we have the ability as human beings to respond, we have the capacity to respond to the move of God. When we don’t respond, then when God comes through and we do not respond, we live our lives in irresponsibility.
(J) Oh wow, can you put your finger on the blockade that causes us not to respond as children? What is the key that causes us to not?
(M) I can tell you clearly. Now let me go on and I’ll see if we collide against that block. You see when God comes into a life, He has to intervene before you’ll ever follow, He has to appear. If He appears in any form in life, He appears in the form of life that you need, but it’s always Love. It might be correction, it might be encouragement, or it might be repentance, but when He comes, He comes with Love. And if we respond to Him in the way in which He came; He came to me first in my teenage years as love, but then in my adult years He came as Light on my wickedness. And I responded deeply; I didn’t know that it was Him, but I responded deeply. And because I responded to repentance, then He responded to me with Love.
(J) Ok, here’s another one. Why do we respond often to criticism or correction more easily than the positive end of it, the love and encouragement?
(M) Well John, not all of us respond like that.
(J) Oh. (laughter)
(M) In any event the lack of response is due to pride.
(J) Ok.
(M) Some people respond to criticism only, and not affirmation. Other people resist criticism and would respond only to affirmation. But both extremes are pride. Some people only want to be praised; and some people only will hear correction. Am I making it clear?
(J) Yeah, unfortunately. (laughter)
(M) Why are you looking that way, with your hand over your mouth?
(J) Pride.
(M) And pride is this, saving your life. But that’s not really where I’m going. I’m going to the place to show you that if you don’t respond, see, the Lord comes, ‘as a flute or a dirge’, so your question was, what is the block? The block is the pride of saving your life. You have to be vulnerable to God when He comes, whether correction or what. You know John, past food and shelter, one great drive of human beings is love, and one great need, the cavern of need is love. The great beloved disciple wrote First, Second and Third John, and it’s all about love, meaning how love manifests, what it means and how it manifests. But he also deals with fear, and he says, “If we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us.” And then 1 John 4:17 says, “By this love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the Day of Judgment. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love”.
(J) There’s the climax of the whole key. There’s the hidden key in the haystack of First John, Second John, and Third John. (M) Yes, there’s the key.
(J) That’s the key; the pinnacle, here’s the answer, it’s hidden, but here’s the answer. Isn’t it?
(M) And I think recently I saw that fear was connected to love, or the absence of love. Al right, so, when, and this is what I’ve seen in several lives over the years. The love of God comes, and it is rejected. And when it is rejected, there is a tremendous knowledge of the wrath of God. And so there is fear, and the fear is legitimate.
(J) Is it guilt?
(M) Its guilt. But when you offend the love of the Son, when He makes himself vulnerable to you, you incur the wrath of God. And when I develop this I’ll have scriptures to show that.
(J) And we know it in our hearts.
(M) We know it in our hearts, and so we live trying to save our lives. But the real issue is that we have refused to respond to God as He comes to us. And so we go into fear, by the absence of love. If you respond to God’s love, however it comes, whether it’s through the scriptures, through life, through another person, through a prophet, through a book, through some experience, if you reject that love, because you will not be that vulnerable, or that needy, or that humble, then you’re going to live a life of terrifying fear, and there will be no remedy but LOVE.
(J) So read that scripture again.
(M) “If we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us. By this love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the Day of Judgment, because as He is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. Because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.”
(J) Well you just opened that up to me, now I can see that; so clearly.
(M) Alright, this is the perfect verse 19 of chapter 4, this is the key, “We love because He first loved us”.
(J) And responded.
(M) And responded, yes. We allowed ourselves to be the child who responded to His love.
(J) To the ‘flute’ and the ‘dirge’.
(M) Yes, He came to me in both songs. He came to me with the death of my life as it was, even though there was no problem and no outward failure. Internally, I knew I was wretched, and He came to play that dirge for me and I heard the song, and I mourned and I wept and I wept, and I cried out to God. And because I heard Him He began to speak to me, and then He began to pour out His love to me. So I don’t know the Christian life, apart from that experience. That is the foundation of love. But if you don’t build on the foundation of love, you have nothing.
