The Everlasting Love Of God
Episode #197

With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow

(J) Ok, well this podcast is coming out a little late. We’ve just gotten out of the conference, and we’re kind of doing a debriefing after the conference. And we wanted to just talk about it and talk about what transpired and what the Lord did.

(M) There’s one thing I left out that was about, the last session about love. There’s this wonderful thing I read from Austin Sparks. He’s quoting Eph.2:4 “His great love wherewith He loved us.” And then he went back to Jeremiah and he quoted Jer.31:3 “The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yeah, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.” And he talked about the setting of that was one of Israel’s most terrible dark time. And really, I remember in that end of Jeremiah, he’s talking about the captivity into Babylon. He’s telling them it’s over, you’ve gone too far, you’re now under judgment, and you will go into Babylon. And then he makes this statement, “I’ve loved thee with an everlasting love” and he makes the setting of where God said that. He said, “We try to comprehend this reference to God’s love.” And he said… he goes down into the meaning of the word ‘everlasting’. And this was after we watched that fabulous film of Louis Giglio, called “Indescribable”. And John, I’ll get you to give the website for that. It’s about the heavens that declare the glory of God. And in that viewing of it with the conference, I saw, I heard him say it is an expression of the love of God, that He loves us that huge. And that’s what I got out of this viewing. It was about love for me. And he says that the word ‘everlasting’… this, maybe, I have to trust God, because He didn’t, this was right before me on my computer, but I couldn’t ‘get it’. So I’m going to trust God that it’s for the people at the conference and others who couldn’t come. He said, “You can never translate that word “everlasting” into English. It means that you go into the spaceless, boundless realm; you have fallen out of time to where time is no more. You have gone out into that mysterious something where nothing can be taken hold of as tangible, it is all beyond you, beyond your grasp, beyond your calculation, beyond your power to cope with it and bring it into some kind of dimension. That is the word everlasting, beyond you, beyond your time, beyond your world, beyond all your ways of thinking. I have loved thee with an everlasting, timeless, spaceless love, outside of our world altogether. He says I have loved you with a love altogether outside your dimensions of time and space.” Wow! Doesn’t that describe… that I just, I want you to give the website of that if you remember it, because that film astonishes anybody. But it would in particular astonish believers, born-again believers. And then he goes on and says, “Strangely, the repetition of that word ‘love’ adds an extra feature or factor. It is in the feminine, it means mother-love.”

(J) Oh, wow.

(M) “I have loved thee with an everlasting mother-love. Now,” I’m quoting Sparks all along here. “Now, mother-love is one of the most mysterious things with which in ordinary human [life] we have to deal. We cannot always understand mother-love. You can look at a baby and you may see how much it is not lovely, (Martha laughs), but the mother of that child simply adores him. That is the mother-love. That is the word the Lord is using here. I have loved thee with an everlasting mother-love.” And then he goes on to promise the new covenant right there, that His love is, His love will be bigger than any, any ‘mar’ we can make on ourselves, and on the world. His love so covers that He’s planning it, a new covenant to cover it all, to swallow it all. And to able… the new covenant is what He established to make us capable of needing and receiving such a vast love. And I’m struggling because I feel like I missed it at the conference, that I didn’t touch that. He didn’t lead me there. He… Because I had no notes of that last session, and I just had to trust Him and go, but He didn’t take me, so this is for our audience whoever that is, which we don’t ever know. But His love is that huge, and that film takes you into the vastness of the glory of the heavens, that tell of the glory of God and of the love of God. So isn’t that, isn’t that wonderful?

(J) It’s fascinating. I love how the everlasting love, the everlasting motherly-love, it’s, it is out of our realm, it is intangible. But the fact is, is that He pours that love into our ‘tangible’ and expresses it here, so it not only goes outside and beyond this time frame, this time plain, this millennial area that we are living in. But He will also pour it in and be like a mother, and touch us in our ‘moment’, bring it down to a ‘moment’ and touch us so that we can experience that now, and we can feel that now. So it’s intangible and tangible at the same time. It is the complete package. So…

(M) Oh, yeah, wow, John, you’re right. You’re making me think of… There’s a… this is so silly, ok? But it is His love reaching down into a visible form on a level that is so generous. Ok, this is a silly story. I have piece of luggage ‘discontinued’. And I knew there was a certain bag that was originally made for it, and it was discontinued, it was gone, couldn’t find it. And occasionally I would look for it. But one morning I just, I was, it was in my prayer time I just said, “Lord, I’d like, I still would like to get that bag.” It’s a bag to travel in the car. And He said, “Go to e-Bay”. And I went to e-Bay and it was there, and He said, “Ok buy it.” Well, I didn’t need it. Ah, I wanted it. And I’ve used it and it’s great. But it was an expression of love. It was an expression, ‘I know you, Martha, I know your wants, and I’m able to supply instantly’. Within ten minutes I had what I was simply thinking about with Him. Because something about we were going to go somewhere and I was thinking about packing, or whatever.

(J) But the thing that’s amazing to me is that that was the intangible love expressing itself in a tangible way in your ‘moment’.

(M) Exactly.

(J) So He connected the timelessness with the time, in that one bag.

(Carole) Well I’ve been in John 15 too, and this just reminds me. Is this what this means? Because this is where I’ve stopped; and this is where I’m just letting it ruminate in me. Where Jesus says, “As I… As the Father has loved Me, I have loved you. Abide in My love.” And I just said, “Lord, I want to.” Is that what that means?

(M) Yes. Oh, thank you Carole. I can’t even take that verse in.

(Carole) I can’t either. I, it’s just too… (Jen  giggles with joy.) I know it. It’s just too big, and I, I’ll look at it and I just puzzle over it, and I just say yes to it, but I want to know it in my, in the depths of my spirit.

(M) I sometimes wish you, I wish this moment we had a video of Carole saying that. Because in the softest voice she said, “As the Father has loved Me, I have loved you. Abide”, and she put her arms around herself…yeah, you did, you went like this…. And the moment she did that I felt that it was, it was like that abide in His love, it was like being held as an infant. It was a ‘place’. And I was going to give you a definition of abide, until she did that. (Martha laughs and all join in.) Now I know the definition is that we are like an infant in the arms of that mother-love. And we have to ‘be there’, that’s all. We have to ‘be there’, and to be there you, He has to convince us. We’re so, ah, resistant to His love. If people come up and say ‘you’re precious to Him’, I say really? (Martha laughs.) Tell me about it. (Martha is laughing while speaking.) Ah, but she defined it with her body language. She was wrapped in His love. And abide, that’s the hardest word. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a really good translation of it, because I’m sure it’s one of those Greek words that can’t be really translated. It means: live in, sink down in, remain in. When it says abide, it means we’re to stay there in His love. And to comprehend that, that His love is not conditional on anything in me, of me or from me. He doesn’t, He doesn’t respond to my love, as such. His love is, I don’t know, indifferent to anything, He only wants a way to make it possible for us to receive His love and experience His love. So, Carole, that was, that was neat; I hope I’ve have drawn a picture of you. And then Sparks goes on to say. He continues the second half of the statement in Jeremiah 33, “Therefore I have continued loving kindness unto thee.” (Sparks) “I have borne with you all this time and place because I love you; anything could have happened to you, but I have not let it, I have shown you infinite longsuffering and patience, I have kept you alive and brought you to this place; I have not let you go.” And I think what he’s trying to convey with these poor words, human language to say, “I’m with you always, even to the end of the age.” He says, Sparks says, “There’s nothing casual about it, there’s sovereign love here. ‘Because I have so loved you, because self-sufficient as I am, I cannot do without you.’ Oh, mystery of Divine love! ‘Because I so much wanted you I created you, and now at this moment I am drawing you.’ We cannot take it in.”

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