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with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) Well, my intercessor said to me, “Your secret is not of mastery, your secrets are of surrender.” She said, “It looks like you’ve mastered Him and you’ve mastered truth, and you speak with a deep knowing of Him. But she said, “It’s only been through your surrender and relinquishment.” It’s He has mastered, He is mastering me, He is possessing me. And it’s… But the evidence of surrender is the fruit of what happens. And see instinctively I chose these two main verses, one for the ministry, one for my life. Roll your works upon the Lord, commit to Him entirely; that is surrender of your works to Him. If you can ever let it go, He will cause you to conform to His thoughts. He will give you the power, a nd He himself will accomplish; “So shall your plans succeed”. So it’s the relinquishment, even of your work. We don’t, we can’t divide our lives into my personal life, and my work life. (Laughter)
(J) (Laughing) Really? Really?
(M) That’s a big struggle really, for me it has been and still is. But to take His yoke upon you is to surrender to the dominion of another. It’s a yoke is like a prison. You come under the yoke and you are captured, but He is the only capturer who bears the burden that you go under. He bears it. So to master is to want the reward without the price, without the surrender. And most of Christianity is that. Would you agree?
(J) Most of Christianity isn’t what you’re saying at all. I don’t know if that…
(M) That’s what I was asking.
(J) I don’t find in Christianity surrender at all, I find mastery. I find the attempt to master.
(M) Umhum.
(J) Ah, looking under my shirt first you know. That’s what I have found. Your relationship, and your experience of God is abnormal from what I’ve seen.
(M) (Laughter) Well that’s like… I’m thinking of someone who knows the scriptures and knows the Old Testament and New Testament history, but doesn’t know Him, and doesn’t have the surrender to Him in every place. When you surrender yourself to Him completely He is everywhere. He is so present and over you that He is there in every, every crisis, every… He never fails if you’ve surrendered. If He owns you He’s responsible for you.
(J) Ok, if this is taking it off and you want to continue where you’re going then that’s fine, but I’d like to ask you this question. How does that incorporate your past? How does that incorporate previous times, pre-knowing Christ, pre-salvation; how does the mastery, how does the perfection, and how does that surrender and relinquishment of ‘B.C.’ happen?
(M) Oh, John, you’re in the Spirit. That is exactly where I was going. First of all, you can’t surrender without humility. Mastery is pride, and surrender is humility. It’s like, I came to Him through need, and that was my humility there. But I spoke to a wise, godly man recently. And I was toying with sharing this, and just to ask him some questions. And he said to me, “You have had some serious suffering in your life.” And he said, “You have a big question of God.” And he said, “Simple answers won’t do for you. You have to find the purpose for your life.” And so I really felt like it would be real complex. And he sort of put my whole life… Several things, including something my daughter said to me… put my whole life with God, without God, on the table for an answer from God. What is Your purpose in this whole ‘story’ that You have written on me? And so this wise man said you’ve got to find the answer. Well I assumed it’d be… You know I’d have to really wring it out, and I would have to fight and pray and get on my face, blah, blah, blah. I assumed it would be… Because it was a big answer, it would take a big effort. (Laughter)
(J) Umhum.
(M) And He gave it to me so quietly and simply. And I’m going to read from Zech. 13:9. It’s really about the remnant. “I will bring the third part through the fire and will refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested.” I’ll stop right there in the middle of the verse. But it means that God puts us in a fire. The purpose is to possess us. Silver refers to our humanity being refined. Gold is the test of Christ’s life in us. Gold is Christ. So I saw that my life was one blaze, one continuous blaze of suffering, one form or another intermixed with a whole lot of joy and blessing. But the fire, I realized then that the fire was Him.
(J) He is the fire.
(M) He is the fire. And it says, “They will call on My name and I will hear and answer them.” And I realized that… I realized what the fire is about. The fire of every life is to burn out of you your other gods. It says they will call on My name. And I always would interpreted that, which name, you know, Makkeh, Rapha, all those. No. No. When I know His name is God, that He’s God.
(J) And I’m not.
(M) I’m not, you’re not, they were not, life was not, Satan was not. When I know from my fire that He is God, then I can call on my God, and He will answer me. All the fire is for Him to possess us, to bring us to surrender, that He’s God. And then we’ll come, knowing Him, that He’s God. Really John, we really think a whole lot of other things are God including ourselves. And He has to… He has to bring you to the fire to show you that you think you are god. Or you think, you think that family members are god, or your parents were god. So the answer to the question, ‘what is the purpose’, it is to know that He is God. It’s not the… The whole story of my life is not for a ministry, a message. That’s not the first thing. The story of my life and your life, which is suffering as well, is so you know He’s God. And when you know He’s God, there is, and He’s good, there is surrender.
(J) That is the most enormous thing that you could say, huge.
(M) What does that do to you? What does that say to you that makes you say that?
(J) Well, that swallows up everything. It makes everything in our life, everything, swallowed up in Him, and makes Him truly Lord. And that’s huge, because our inner-healing, our therapy, our this our that, everything … We can dissect it all day long. We can dissect our life all day long, but when you know that He was the Lord that set the fire, that allowed the fire to burn, and that brought you out of the fire, then He really is
God.
(M) He really is God. But He will not take… I don’t know. The question is, in your life is who is God?
(J) It’s huge.
(M) It is huge.
(J) I mean, is that not the human crisis? Isn’t it that the, the crisis is, who’s God? Who’s going to be God in your life? I mean isn’t that the only crisis?
(M) It really is the only crisis. And it’s the only um… Well, see everything is about God. Everything is for God; all things are for Him, from Him, through Him and to Him. And living that out is one thing. It’s another thing to know that it’s true. So what the purpose of my fire was that, to know that He, not just that He is, but that He is God.
(J) Umhum.
(M) And when I know that He’s God, really, above everything including me, then we have a relationship in which He completely answers everything for me; which He promises to believers. Ask whatever you wish in My Name. But you have to know He is God, and that you ask according to what He wants to give. Then He says, “And I will say it is My people, and they will say, the Lord is my God.” So the end of the suffering is that at last God possesses you, on His ground that He is God. We ever think that He should come to my ground. In other words, bow to me as god.
(J) Do you believe that a lot, if not all of human crisis and trauma is not… It flew right out of my head. No?
(M) No, you’re right.
(J) It flew right out of my head.
(M) Every… Were you going to say… Come here, were you going to say every crisis is for surrender? No? Let me say what I believe then. You were asking me what I believe. The Lord chooses. The Lord has a story for us to live. None of us likes our story. He has a story He wants us to live out in surrender to His Lordship. He wants us to manifest and know Him, according to our journey, and not someone else’s. I’m sorry, I have ‘my story’, you have yours. And I think you were going to ask is every crisis to bring us to Him as God, to show us that He is God. Yes, I truly believe that. And there’s another scripture He gave me one morning in connection with this. I said Lord, give me a, speak to me, and He said Psalm 50. So this one verse was what I got out of Psalm 50. This is where His Voice was. “Fire devours before Him, and it is very tempestuous around Him.” Again it’s back to the fire.
(J) Umhum.
(M) And it’s like… It’s like He sort of put my whole life in a blaze. And the whole purpose was for my whole life to be swallowed in Him by surrender to Him as God. He chose the fire, John. Fire goes with Him. Jesus said ‘I didn’t come to bring peace, I came to cast fire upon the earth, and I’m anxious to do it’. Fire is with God, and it’s very tempestuous around Him. You want to come close to Him? You surrender to Him and you’re going to come into the fire. But you will be like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. He’s with you in the fire and you come out not even smelling of smoke. You’re not devoured by the fire, if you allow your refining to take place by surrender.
