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The Song in Our Determined Purpose
Episode #609
8-5-2018
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
This is the continuation of a series of Podcasts started in Episode #605.
When you make it your determined purpose to know God, He will put a song in your heart even in the midst of sickness and great difficulty. That’s who He is!
Martha:
There’s a song on YouTube, “In Christ Alone.” If you go there, it’ll bring up – and put that in – it will bring up a number of people doing it. There’s a young man in a gray shirt performing that, that is outstanding. I don’t remember his name. He’s performing it at some place. It wasn’t a famous man at all but the way he sings it is… And the words of it are just absolutely wonderful.
John:
I’ll try to put a link in the transcript here.
Martha:
Ok, good! I’ll just share this. I have been spending my time with the Lord in a lot of worship music and it is restoring my soul. I find that no matter what I’m doing, those songs are playing in my heart as if it was a recorder. And I hear it but I’m not doing it. I’m not aware of it. I’m doing, living my life but that worship has sustained me in this and it’s just been an incredible experience. Because the thing you do when you’re sick is you don’t do anything to help yourself. You just, you feel too bad (laughs).
John:
Yeah.
Martha:
And you don’t take…I don’t take vitamins when I don’t feel good…
John:
You don’t drink.
Martha:
…when I need them desperately. Yeah, I don’t drink water. All the things that you could do to feel better, you don’t have the energy to. But this one thing the Lord is given me to connect me with Him and it has been so incredible and so ongoing. It’s put a song in my heart in the middle of all this sickness. And that song plays. And I’ve said to the Lord, “Lord, I can’t sing to You very much. You sing to me.”
John:
Wow!
Martha:
“I need You to sing to me about You.” And He’s doing it. Literally, John, I wake up in the morning and there’s a song playing; one of in about four or five songs. And it’s, it’s… There’s a song in my heart that He has put there just by making the feeblest effort to listen to the music, and the words are just so impacting me.
John:
It’s beautiful! But it’s because you have a determined purpose to know Him.
Martha:
Is it really? Oh, goody! It’s happening then.
John:
Well, that is your determined purpose. That’s why you’re doing it.
Martha:
Oh, wow!
John:
Are you not?
Martha:
Oh, wow! So though I should be very, very weak, I’m not. He is… That is His, that is the way. I just listen and it captures me to worship. It captures me to join. I just turn it on. I just keep the little teeny iPod with me and it’s transforming. It’s, in any situation we are in. I wish I had known this years ago how powerful it was and, to just worship Him and hear music and listen to the words that people write who are inspired by the Holy Spirit. Ah, it’s just lovely. I could just do that the rest of my life. And we have such free access to wonderful, wonderful music, too.
John:
You are listening to some serious depth things, some wonderful, you know, songs that have a message behind it. It’s not just three words and then a chorus and a chorus and a chorus and a chorus and three words and a chorus and a chorus and a chorus, which for me is just blech!
Martha:
And I’m not even listening altogether to hymns. I’m listening to what’s being, what’s been written in the last twenty years.
John:
Wow!
Martha:
And the hymns I grew up on in the Methodist Church. Oh, the hymns are just dear to me. And I do listen to them. But this, this is new revelation, new music that’s come and some of it’s back in the seventies but to me it’s brand new.
John:
That one that you were mentioning earlier that we read the…
Martha:
The Love of God.
John:
Is that new?
Martha:
No! That one is not new.
John:
That’s old.
Martha:
I don’t think… I think that’s older but Fernando sings it and so does Kelly Minter, I believe. A number of people sing that. I happen to like Ortega because he’s quiet.
John:
Um hmm, um hmm.
Martha:
He calms you with it. There’s one that I don’t have on my iPod but I go listen to her—Audrey Assad. And she has several beautiful songs she’s written. And one of them is “How Can I Keep from Singing” and she talks about the troubles on earth.
John:
Hmm!
Martha:
And in spite of that how can I keep from singing? And just beautiful words. And she does some classics, too, like “Abide With Me.” That was… In early childhood, I must have been less than 10, I would hear that song and I understood what it meant. It really, it really ministered to me that God would abide with me. I was asking God to abide with me. And, and I had many… In the hymns, that is part of my earliest knowledge of God was the hymns that affected me and I didn’t know it was the Holy Spirit. This has been such fun, John. This has been rich and revelatory.
John:
And resurrection from the dead!
(Laughter)
Martha:
Absolutely! How can anybody but you comprehend that’s what just happened!
John:
Good grief, this was, this has been between a CD of the Month and several podcasts. This is amazing.
Martha:
He is faithful. And I wasn’t even aware of it changing in me. I didn’t even notice that I had energy. I love it! He’s forcing me to live in weakness so that His power can manifest. And I’m going to accept it one day and then He’ll have to… Then it will be just be a way of life.
John:
And He’s doing it because you have determined.
Martha:
I have determined. Oh, my goodness, that’s powerful!
John:
It’s your determined purpose and that’s why He’s doing it.
Martha:
Um hmm. It, I chose it. That’s what I wanted to say all along here. He’s not doing anything. It might be chastening. It might be punishment. It might be whatever. But He’s not doing it to get at me or to hurt me. He’s doing it because I gave Him permission. “I want to know You in Your suffering, in Your dying.” I want to fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ. That’s what I’ve chosen so I don’t… I can’t object and resent because I know I chose this. I want Him to get it all out of me. I want to be, my body to be illumined with no dark part, and He’s heard that.
John:
And He’s doing it.
Martha:
And He’s doing it. And I am not wronged. I am being carefully groomed to meet Him and I won’t be able to bear it if I don’t. But you linked it to saying giving thanks and that is fantastic.
John:
Well, this has been fun. Thank you!
Martha:
Fun and heavenly and glorious!
John:
Absolutely.
Martha:
Thank you! I was about to say, “Thank you, John, for being willing to share and enriching us.”
John:
And also stepping aside. (Laughing) Letting your fire…
Martha:
Well, you may remember you had taken me somewhere when Kenneth was in, my husband was in a nursing home, you had taken me to get out a minute, get something to eat.
John:
In the hospice, yeah.
Martha:
He was in the hospice. And I told you that God told me to step aside and let Him minister to Kenneth, that I was a priest unto the Lord. That’s what you’re doing and it solved it for me but it also grieved me, because it meant that I had to let God have Kenneth to the last breath and the last moment. And I, I wanted to help and I wanted to be there for Him. And I was, day and night.
John:
Absolutely, you were.
Martha:
But I wanted to do more for him and God said, “He’s Mine! And this time is Mine with him.”
John:
Wow!
Martha:
And He gave me permission to be helpless anyway. That was permission, to relive me of what I felt was my responsibility to comfort him, to whatever. And I did that, but essentially God had me step aside from the most, one of the most important moments of my life.
John:
And the most important moment of his life.
Martha:
Of his life, and because I knew it was for his good, Kenneth’s good, I grieved and begged Him, “Ok, get me…get me where You want me.”
John:
But see, there again you go back to what I said. It… You were not unaffected.
Martha:
And not it, not absent either.
John:
You weren’t absent. You weren’t cool. You weren’t… It completely impacted you.
Martha:
Yes, yes!
John:
The dichotomy and the paradox.
Martha:
I don’t know how to tell this or not. So you may want to take it off. But I slept on a cot in his room and the nurses would check in on him every night, through the night. And he was, by that time, in a coma or in a deep sleep and I was utterly exhausted. Because it had been a years and a half, two years that we’d been going through it and I was utterly exhausted. I would always wake up when they came in the room but I knew that they were just turning him or whatever. So the, this last night they came in the room, a little murmuring going on, very typical, and then the things they were doing to help him, and they came over to me and said, “He’s gone.” And I had not been there when he passed away. And so I leaped out of the bed and, you know, what… We had to start doing things then. But I was real grieved about that. “God, I wanted to be there when he, when he drew his last breath.” And the Lord said, “That was Mine, too.”
John:
You were there but you weren’t there.
Martha:
I wasn’t there. “That was Mine, too. That was not yours. I’m his God.”
John:
Wow!
Martha:
And so I came to peace with it because I didn’t know there was a difference in their movement in the room. And I was awake. They woke me up but I didn’t think anything different was going on. But then they came over and said, “He’s gone.” And I wasn’t, I wasn’t awake to it nor was it mine to be. So we, He’s brilliant. If we will let Him keep us where we shouldn’t be and be where we should be, then everything is perfect and my conscience was clear. I didn’t fail him and I didn’t fail God. It’s possible I could have failed them both. But I failed neither and so I had peace, much peace in my widowhood and in the days following. That’s a little personal item.
John:
It’s a precious story.
The Song in Our Determined Purpose – Episode #609 – Shulamite Podcast
When you make it your determined purpose to know God, He will put a song in your heart even in the midst of sickness and great difficulty. That’s who He is! This is God the glorious Father, and we need to know Him. What wonders do we miss when we don’t?
Martha, reading Psalm 103 tonight brought to mind Father’s song in your heart, that is restoring your soul, as a result of your determined purpose.
Doesn’t that sound a bit like David? He was so determined to worship that he preached to his soul; he commanded his soul to bless the Lord – 3 times just in the first two verses!
He was determined to be engrossed in overflowing gratitude “with all that is within [him]”: thoughts, feelings, understanding, will, memory, conscience, affections, passions; letting the Holy Spirit guide him in thanking God for all His favors on his behalf. How soon we sometimes forget the blessings, not only that He has given us, but the blessing that He IS to us.
Motivation: God’s forgiveness. And since every one of us has received His forgiveness, we can pray this psalm as our own.
I didn’t notice one request or one supplication in this whole psalm and I see that in your position, Martha. You made it so plain that when we are worshiping, there’s no awareness of self: “I wasn’t even aware of it changing in me. I didn’t even notice that I had energy.”
The commitment you made to your choice, your determined purpose to know Christ in His suffering, is resulting in ever-increasing light, for His glory and for our benefit.
Much love to you, Martha and John: you are just a gem, but can you PLEASE persuade her to take her vitamins!