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The Essential Vision
Episode #305
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guest: Julie
(M) But I’m also excited. I’m more excited after this sober meeting, really than I have been at all, because it is going to be a time where believers… I feel like sort of it’s our family will come together from all over the place. And I think it’s going to be a very special visitation of God. And we’re being trained in preparation for it.
(Julie) I think one of the things that struck me about these episodes on the Green Berets is their emphasis on your mind being your own worst enemy. And in listening to what the candidates said that dropped out, because they make it clear at the beginning that unless you violate a major safety rule, your only way out is to quit. So it is completely up to individual choice. And the ones that quit, if you listen to what they say, they quit based on the reality they had decided for themselves. One said, well, I did my best. Or you know, this or that, I got injured, or whatever. But I just saw such a picture in that about it’s so critical in following Christ. I mean it’s just essential to discipleship that you, you take up the vision of another. And, and you give yourself to it even when you that you can’t, you can’t perform it, you can’t do it, but in simply the surrender you receive, you end up receiving the power that holds you and carries you to that end. That’s what the command, all of the people in the selection process that were leading them through it were experienced Green Berets. They had been in combat and they knew, so they knew what those candidates were capable of, that they didn’t know that they were capable of. So they weren’t putting them in danger just to do it, they were putting them in realistic situations to prepare them. And they knew by experience that if they would give themselves to the vision of it, then they would make it by a power that was greater than themselves. I think that’s just so important, because there’s been a lot of times along this road of discipleship when I knew I couldn’t do it.
(J) Right.
(Julie) But that was never the disqualifier. It was whether or not I would surrender to something much bigger than me and believe in it. I was thinking about that just the other day, that when they asked Jesus what is the work, and He said the work is to believe in the Son.
(J) And the cool thing with how it’s all tied in to this is that you really do have to leave and trust Him in what He says about this world, about yourself, about His life, about everything. You have to literally abandon and jettison your concepts of this world and of your limits, and your boundaries that have, you know, held you in and held you safe, really. It’s the limits that my brain communicates back and forth with my heart and says, you’re safe in these boundaries, don’t go any further. And if I will jettison those off when the Father says, this is not the true boundary, your boundary. I tell you what your limits are. And if I will go with His limits, rather than, which is unlimited, but if I go with His limits rather than my limitations, then I experience, I believe I experience glory. I experience a glorious life, if I don’t experience the direct glory.
(M) Ahh.
(J) And because I’m experiencing something… See these guys went into this and after these two weeks of hell they are prepared to go through the training to become Berets.
(M) They begin.
(J) Right. They can just begin. This is just to get them to the starting gate of, of ah, of being a Green Beret, and then only twenty-five percent of those that make it to the starting gate actually make it to be Green Berets. So that, that floored me, but I really see that if you will follow faithfully His faithful leading and His guidance, that you will have the glorious life, and you will be able to endure things that you never thought you would endure. I can tell you that in the last two weeks I’ve had an injury that would have normally set me off to super freak-out zone. Uhhh! I would have been completely leveled and annihilated and fearful. And I can’t say that I haven’t hit moments of, well, panic and fear, but the fact is that there was a supernatural impartation of grace and love that was put in me. And I’ve had strength and endurance and a faith in the process that I don’t possess.
(M) Well, we’ll tell the whole story at the conference, but, and it’s a phenomenal story. It’s gripping. But Jim said this morning, “Has he been this happy the whole two weeks?” And I said, “He has, from the first minute of the injury he’s had a phenomenal power.” And it’s been amazing to watch. And I’ll quote what you said during that time, later. But it is… Julie said this, made this statement after we watched. She watched it a second time. We watched it the first. Here’s what you said Julie. Would you read it?
(Julie) Oh, I was telling you what it meant to me when I said to you that you train officers. That the difference I see is that is an officer, versus just a foot soldier, is that an officer is responsible for carrying the vision.
(J) Ooooo.
(Julie) And that it is an impartation. It is, I know. I testify, it is an impartation I have received from you. And then what the Lord gave me in that moment is the vision will give it’s own leadership, if I will receive it. The vision commands me. So even then, as an officer, you’re still one under authority. You’re under the authority of that vision.
(M) Hmhmm.
(Julie) And the vision itself has so much power. I don’t know if this fits but I’ve gone back to contemplating at times “The Hiding Place” about Corrie Ten-Boone. I love that movie. And, and I have been in a certain sense over the last several years, just sort of fascinated. We’re not the first era that will go through difficulty, by any means. We’re not even, I mean, we’re kind of, uhmm, ‘the last ones hired’ a little bit in the United States. You know, we’ve had comfort for a long time, and we’ve had a lot of grace. So for us to come into what the rest of the world has been in is not that big of a thing if you can get out from under it. But I realize, I’ve just kind of had an instinctive leading by the Holy Spirit, even from that movie “The Hiding Place.” It’s all about your vision. It’s all about what you can see beyond your current circumstances. Her sister, Betsy, was able to just go into bliss over seeing a bird fly overhead. She was that much into the Kingdom of Heaven. And she was that much living in that Kingdom, so that she was immune almost, to the conditions of the Nazi concentration camp. And I don’t know that we’ll ever be in conditions that difficult, but it comes down to my today. How I live my today is still none-the-less governed by my vision.
(M) Hmhmm.
(Julie) And like what John’s saying, it has to do with how much of God will I attain to in this life? Whether I’m under that kind of tyranny or not, I’m accountable. And there’s just so much more offered to us in Him of a glorious life that we will never attain to without the vision for it.
(J) We were talking about, earlier, about the fact that in Victor Frankel, that they literally could see, in his book “Men’s Search For Meaning”, they would talk about how they could literally look at people in the concentration camps and the… I’m talking about the other prisoners. They could look into the eyes of the other prisoners and they could literally see when the light went out and when they were gonna die. The Jewish gentleman that wrote the book, “Night’, he was talking about how they literally would kind of turn on them. That when they saw the light go out they would immediately distance themselves from that one, because it was probably contagious.
(M) Despair.
(Julie) Well, think about how in this training of the Green Beret’s, they separated them immediately. It said the moment you refuse to train you are immediately segregated? Is that the word?
(M) Separated.
(Julie) Separated?
(M) Hmhmm.
(Julie) Because that attitude would… And that’s what I noticed today in the comments of the ones that quit. They determined the end of what they could take. They determined the limits of their reality. And how frightening that is. So much of what you teach, says that. That’s what Adam and Eve did. They decided to decide for themselves.
(M) Hmhmm.
(Julie) And that independence is death.
(J) I wonder if vision is just that much light though, that when we don’t have vision, literally it is the dim. It makes a dimness in our eyes. But when we have vision, then there’s light there.
(M) I think you’re right, John, I never associated it with Victor Frankle’s… His name for it was ‘having meaning’, but he, really what he had was vision, because he envisioned himself speaking to huge crowds after the ordeal. You know, he just, he just had a vision of himself teaching what he learned. And he developed a whole new psychotherapy called spirituotherapy. And it had to do with acceptance of suffering and believing and meaning, but actually it was vision. He had a vision that sustained him.
(Julie) And that’s, that is fundamental to what you teach in a lot of different places about sovereignty. To me, what you teach of sovereignty is such a huge vision that I can put my, my suffering has a place inside of a much larger picture.
(M) Hmmmhm.
(Julie) And that is how, that is the only way I know to come to accept it and thrive through it. And that’s why I see the timeliness even of what you’re speaking now about the Kingdom. The Kingdom is the essential vision that’s big enough. I mean, that’s what the early church lived by. It’s what every successful Christian group of any kind…
(M) Movement.
(Julie) Movement, disciples, that’s what true disciples have always had to live by that vision. It’s the only thing that rights reality, like makes reality right side up. That’s what I feel like you did for me. You turned reality right side up. And then… I want to read a quote by Sparks. Is that okay?
(M) Sure.
(Julie) You can see if it fits. I found this the other day and it spoke to me so much of our group. He said, “Life is by unity, and unity can only adequately be found in Christ being in His place as the One for Whom we let go everything that is personal. We might not do it for the sake of anyone else. We might never do it for the sake of the person in view. We do it for His sake and the enemy is defeated.”
(M) Oh, wow. I was about to say, let’s qualify the vision. The vision is of Christ.
(Julie) Yes,
(M) And it, and the vision is that there will be a time when there’ll be a new heaven and a new earth, and Christ shall reign on that new earth, and that is the vision that sustains us through the preparation of the cross. I’m not even going to say the world difficulties. The world difficulties are simply God’s use of His government to prepare us to rule and reign. And so the vision… That’s awesome, Julie.
(J) Yeah. I don’t want to see it as a negative and speak it as a negative, because then that just brings it down to have more power than it really does.
(M) You mean what?
(J) Circumstances, the world events, and everything like that; if you give it more power than it actually has, that ensues even more fear about it, because you feel like it’s more powerful than it, you know, really is. And it’s scary.
(Julie) But I guess one of the things I see from this show is the reality is, if we can see from God’s perspective, this is all just so much training. It’s very controlled training. We are being watched over by the Lord Who knows. He knows us completely; He knows what we can handle and what we can’t. He’s looking for heart; He’s looking for commitment to Him. We don’t have to have any ability as such. It’s just… I was looking for the quote… One of the army psychologists’s said that they were looking for… They said that one thing they were looking for in the candidates were those who have the perseverance to deal with the unexpected. And see to me, I don’t know what it is for anyone else, but I know in my hard moment it’s only the strength of my vision that holds me on the course and keeps me in the training when the unexpected happens. That is going to happen. It happens continually.
(J) Well, all these events that happened to these guys, all these, these hardships that happened to these guys, were simply training. And it was sovereign training. It was sovereign by the military was sovereignly leading them through this training to make them who they could be and would be. And so I see it the same way. All the hardships that may be going on, they’re sovereignly used by God to make us who we would be and come into His Reality of Himself.
