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with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) Ah, and this is what I wrote: “At the bottom of my wreckage, I am intact. My ruin is merely the shell cracked, and ‘I am’ when I am broken,” meaning I exist when I’m burned. “I am found when I am lost, seeing when I am blind, held when I am alone. When I am cast on You, with nothing left to fight You or survive You, there You are.” And this one in Zechariah was a revelation for me. But this was an experience of the Lord. This next one was an experience. It seemed I saw Him at, like through a mist. And He was absolutely still. He was not striving with me. He was in absolute love. And I understood the power of His love in a way I never have before. His love is greater than my resistance, than my weakness, than my stupidity, than my wanderings. His love is greater than my efforts, which is the effort to connect with Him. His love is the most powerful force in the universe and His love will win. The only thing we can contribute to it is surrender; is the relinquishment of ourself to His choices. He has chosen for each of us a path. He chose for us our parents. And until we surrender to His sovereign choice, we’re going to fight, we’re going to try, and we’re going to try to master our life and Him, and we’re going to try to change it into something it isn’t. He is building some things, some messages in me that I don’t really want. I don’t really… That’s not what I would have chosen. And I’m in a place of surrender. Ok, that’s Your choice, because His love is so quiet and so strong. I won’t say it’s determined. That word doesn’t describe it. His love is absolute. His love is… We think there are powers in the universe, powers in the nations, powers in our lives, evil powers or tyrannical powers. His love is so far beyond any power that’s at work in the world. His love is the greatest indescribable force of power, and that power, if I surrender to Him, what I surrender to is the power of His love to win my war with Him.
(J) Well this message shuts me up. That’s all it does. (Laughter)
(M) Well I’m waiting for you to jump in here and you keep shaking your head and groaning. But He… Oh, I don’t think we understand a thing about love. Somebody said, let’s see if I can get her quote. It was this week. She said, “Everything that comes to us is love. Everything that God allows is love.” She said, “The problem is we don’t know what love is.” But love heals your whole life, and solves your whole life, because Love owns your story. Love has bought your story, but if you don’t surrender to your story, don’t come to the Love… There’s only one thing He can ever commend me for, or you for, and that is you surrendered. You gave it to Me. Let me read this to you from Fred Pruitt, who I don’t know, don’t know who that is really, I just have a quote. “If you have received him”, and I’m going to say you only receive Him if you submit, surrender, and relinquish yourself to Him, “then whether you know it or not, your life is the out-flowing life of the Living God in your world, with no effort, planning, scheming etc. required on your part. He does hidden miracles every step you take because you are His temple, where He has taken up residence in liberty and love, by hiding the limitless fullness of Himself in your weak, frail, human frame.” And I think that’s fantastic. The ‘if’, it begins with an ‘if’, if you have received Him on His terms, as Lord, Master, King. If you have received Him on His terms by surrender, then He is moving in your life. And I know this. There is the life of Christ coming forth that is a fragrance of Christ to God. Some people hate it; call it nasty names, because they don’t want God. Others find it life and the fragrance of Christ. It’s very interesting that it is divided into two responses, and there are two responses.
(J) A ‘peuw stink’, or a fragrance of life.
(M) Umhum. There are two responses to the Lord, no and yes. Oh John, if I had words… I have some words written down. They’re poor compared to what I see. That love is so much the entire motive of God; personally, to you, to me, His motive is love. It’s just as this person said, we don’t know what love is. Ok, this is what I wrote: “I don’t need words, I need love. I don’t need knowledge or even understanding.” See we use, in this Laodicean age, wealth, knowledge, power and position, to master God; but we are naked, blind, wretched, poor, miserable. And we don’t have Him because He only comes in as Lord.
(J) And He will not be mastered. (Said in such quietness as hardly heard.)
(M) Humm?
(J) And He will not be mastered.
(M) Right. He cannot. He will serve, He will bow, He will wash feet, He will give His blood and His life, but He will not, He will not worship us on any ground. He worships His Father. So, “I don’t need knowledge or understanding. All of these are wrapped in love. And until love is unwrapped as a gift, all else is a whisper of the word, a vapor, not a rock.” See all our knowledge is, is futile, fruitless. It doesn’t help. The message on every ground is surrender. Knowledge is ignorance; it
was for Adam and Eve. Understanding is foolish, Romans 1. “Love alone makes all things clear, and known. Love is the source of and the hiding of everything, and only inside love’s quiet peace, love’s confident supremacy is there any survival of this human horror we live in.” So, what is the reason for our suffering? Love. What is the end of our suffering? Love. What is the way to that love? Surrender. Now we carry this book, “Absolute Surrender”. It’s wonderful, by Andrew Murray. Andrew Murray is just one of the greatest of the ‘greats’. I probably could spend my life just reading him. And he has this book “Absolute Surrender”, and he says that God alone must accomplish it. But I was telling you, and God does accomplish it, but I want to tell you how He accomplishes it. If you ever see that you are to surrender, you can know you have the grace to do it then. It takes the grace of God, the power of God moving on you to surrender. But you have that grace; it has been given to you.
(J) When you have a call to surrender, then you have the grace to do it.
(M) Yes, and you can believe that you have the grace. And it is choice, but you are endued with the power to surrender. I think that’s what Gethsemane was about. And I think that’s what my Gethsemane is about. It is coming to the place to surrender, not my will but Thine. I don’t believe, John, that there is any other crisis. I don’t think the crisis is the crisis. The crisis is will I surrender ‘to this’. Even the cross requires the choice to surrender and the grace of God to accept it. It takes the grace of God for each of us to accept our lives, our own failings, and our suffering. Ok. Let me read this from James. He’s talking in chapter four about the struggle and strife that is normal in human life. The jealousy, the greeds, that you ask, you don’t ask God, so you ask not so you have not. Or you ask to consume it for yourself.
(J) Humhum.
(M) And then he goes on. And this is an interesting way he puts it in verse four, “You are like unfaithful wives having illicit love affairs with the world, and breaking your marriage vow to God.” How? “Do you not know that being the world’s friend is to be an enemy of God?” And then he says in verse five, “The Spirit, whom He has caused to dwell in us, yearns over us. And He yearns for the Spirit to be welcome with a jealous love. But He gives more and more grace, power of the Holy Spirit, to meet this evil tendency, and all others fully.” There’s the grace. No matter what temptation to greed, jealousy, worldliness, covetousness, murder, all of that, He gives grace for that, “more and more grace, power of the Holy Spirit, to meet this evil tendency and all others fully.” It’s grace; it’s grace we need to believe in. This is why He says, “God sets Himself against the proud and haughty, but gives grace continually to the lowly; those who are humble enough to receive it.” You see surrender is impossible to pride. Mastery is about pride. Surrender is about humility. It says it here, you have the grace to surrender when you’re humble enough to surrender. If your pride wants you to master, you will have no grace. Ok, tell us what you’re thinking.
(J) Oh there’s, you know the big javelin spear centered in the middle of my chest right now, and I’m just laying on the floor going ….
(M) And I’m asking you to calmly tell it. (Laughter) But that’s where grace comes. You have grace and humility. Then verse seven, “so be subject to God.” Or another translation, “submit to God.” I looked up that word in the Greek, and it is a combination of two words. The first word means: to be subject to, to get in position, in order. The first half of that word is about order and position. And then the second word is hupo under, underneath. So you get, you come under the order. You come under God’s position. And there are a lot of things that pretend to be submission that are not.
