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with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) But the only way out of bad situations, problems, pressures, anguish, sin, the only way out of it is the grave. I had a long letter from a troubled lady today, and she’s had a very troubled life, and the only way out of for her is the altar of the cross. You see our altar is going to the cross. There’s only one altar now, and that is the cross. And the cross is simply, letting go. And to let go of ownership, power and dominion, is to die. And, I’ve had an experience of it last week. You saw me I was a zombie, for about three days. And I kept saying I’m waiting for the resurrection life because I know that God has struck me, with the blow of the cross, with the power of the cross. And He did, He rose in me. So it kills the anointing. But expectations are very subtle, we do not think of them as evil.
(J) Right.
(M) We don’t think of them as dominion and control.
(J) Displacing God.
(M) Right. It’s deadly. And this is just a further revelation that expectations are murder. I’ll just have to write about it in the book, God help me.
(J) What the Lord showed me yesterday is that if it doesn’t die it is death. And so if you’re not laying your expectations on the altar, of people, of self, of even God, if you’re not laying those expectations down and dying to those expectations, and dying to those opinions, it will produce death. And that’s what we had seen. And the death is the squelching of the true power that would bring life.
(M) See, expectation is what we operate in a lot of times and we call it faith, and it’s not faith. Faith comes from the word of God that He speaks. And expectations, if we think that what we expect is the same thing that God expects, no, the source is the issue. But faith is something different. Faith says I know what God is going to do because God has told me. He has promised, He has given me a specific and He’s spoken to me. And that is different, that is peace and rest. It is not control. It is faith in God himself. But it’s abandonment, its giving God the ownership of it, of the issue, the person, and generally it means of yourself, your wants and needs and desires. Andrew Murray wrote this, “The cross, which is the entire renunciation of self, is the only altar on which we can consecrate our lives to God.” And see, the wonderful thing is, the great man of faith is Abraham, and he is revered as righteous because he believed. But he got there through those altars. He was always building altars, especially at Bethel. So you can see from that visual picture that is actually of the New Testament principles, that visual picture is that the altar takes you to faith you do not have, before you go to the altar. You said it a different way earlier, you said on this side of the history I don’t know anything.
(J) I just know what I think, my opinion, my, you know, it’s a pattern, whatever has worked before maybe, or whatever I’ve seen before is what I know on this side.
(M) Right, and that’s what you project as your faith. It’s what you really believe, and it can really hinder God, because it displaces Him.
(J) And that’s why there has to be that relinquishment.
(M) Yes, there has to be the death of you before God will move in the situation you so desperately want Him to move in. I’m just excited, because to live a life of the altar, would be to live, always in resurrection life and faith.
(J) You know the funny thing is that when you have that expectation, not only does it kill that person, not only does it kill the Spirit’s movement, it also kills you. You leave guilty; you leave with just that stain of not having the peace. But it’s that awful feeling.
(M) Its frustration. Sometimes I think if we just would watch what we’re frustrated with we would find out where we’re trying to control. You said it, its guilt; it’s a vague guilt. I know this is not right, I don’t have peace, but I don’t know that its control.
(J) So you leave the situation and you feel wretched, you feel awful, it didn’t work out the way you thought it should work out. Then also you feel guilty because you probably had wrong thoughts towards the person, because they didn’t fill your expectations. And so the whole thing, it just like throws a big huge blanket of Satan over the whole thing, and covers it. And you said in a podcast a couple weeks ago, it was the whole New York trip, how God will set it up so that you have the ability to say ‘yes’ prior to the problem. So God sets up the place that you’re going to die, He already sets up where you’ll put that altar and gives you the ability to say yes, I’ll die to it, I’ll relinquish it, I’ll lay down my opinions of this. But if you refuse that, then that’s when you might as well just hand it to Satan. You are handing it to Satan.
(M) Yeah. It’s a pretty black and white deal. I have a friend that just had coffee with me one morning by the fireplace, someone that I don’t get to see very often. And she said something that impacted me so deeply. She said every morning I say to the Lord, I bow my will to Your will. You see she goes immediately to the altar and gives up her will, her choices. And she said, grace and the will of God are taking me over. Isn’t that wonderful?
(J) That’s awesome.
(M) But she begins everyday with the altar. She wouldn’t call it that as such, but when you give up your will, your choices, your preferences, your desires, and you say I bow to Your will, then He has permission to take you over with His will. And there’s a beautiful grace that goes with His will.
(J) You don’t start your day with the commands saying, fix it, fix it, fix it? Quick, quick, quick!
(M) I don’t think I’ll answer that on the grounds it might incriminate me. But it has become just precious to me to begin, the very first thing I say to Him, is now that. I bow my will to You, and to Your will. I’m going straight to the cross, straight to the altar. And then when I rise, I will have resurrection, I’ll have the vibrancy and energy of the resurrection. So there is such a solution to this issue of control. A beautiful, wonderful solution, that if we could see the whole picture as Abraham did, that its worship, its death, and its resurrection. You’re silent (John).
(J) Well, I’m silent because I just went through something that I knew the answer, and then I didn’t do it. I knew the relinquishment, the non-control, and then I went right into it and immediately, well, not immediate, immediate, it was partly into it, and also I started saying ok, sort of like you were saying sort of like ramping up. And then all of a sudden I was like oh, no, I’ve done it again.
(M) And you had just been such an example to me, just before this happened you had been such an example to me of being free.
(J) Well me and my best friend Peter, who always has that foot right in his mouth, right after he turns around.
(M) Which shows us we’re without excuse. God was preparing, and you were just completely free of somebody’s expectations. And you were understanding that you could not, you weren’t going to, accept their expectations, and you couldn’t function in them.
(J) But then you came deeper into the part of that relationship that was a little closer to the heart, and then all of a sudden they came rushing out.
(M) Well, we’ve repented haven’t we (John).
(J) Yes we have.
(M) So that too is the answer, to confess it and put it under the blood. I think it’s a wonderful solution and it’s certainly the total solution.
(J) And who doesn’t want the resurrection life.
(M) Right. But it does take giving up your own life, your own life source, and coming to the cross. Well John, this is so rich, and I have so much revelation of it that I’m going to have to do a Message of the month, probably January, if I can.
(J) Because December’s going to be about the Sabbath Rest, ok.
(M) But you know everything in us is contained in the word the body, the soul, the heart, the will, the mind. The word says, I beseech you brothers by the mercies of Christ that you present you bodies a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service of worship. Ok, I believe that’s the ultimate worship, is to surrender your very life so that He can live. Then you discover and you meet the faith that the death has already taken place in Christ. Isaac walked away from that altar alive. And Jacob had an altar and Moses had altars, just all the greats of the Old Testament. Noah built an altar before he left in the ark and he made a sacrifice, an offering of one of every species.
(J) Really.
(M) That was the first altar actually.
(J) I never knew that Noah did that. I had no idea. I mean think about it, even to be in the ark, you have to be sanctified. (M) Yeah, it’s phenomenal to imagine it. It’s the first time altar is mentioned, is Noah. And there had to be death before there could be resurrection. And that too is a picture of death and resurrection. And all through, everything has to die for there to be the divine. There has to be no flesh involved, no ‘self’ involved, or the resurrection cannot take place. But the wonderful thing is through that, through the death, there is resurrection life. And that life has power and authority, energy, vitality, life and glory, because it is His life. We need to learn the altar don’t we.
(J) Absolutely. Do we always have to bump our head on the threshold? Going into something, do we always have to like slam our head and get a whole big huge goose egg in the center of our…that everyone can see, this goose egg.
(M) So you won’t forget. I don’t want to bump my head again, I’d rather go and die.
(J) I wish we could do it with book-marks, you know, little book-marks, but no, I have to do it with a big huge goose egg on my forehead.
(M) Well Lord teach us the life of the altar. And see when you, as my friend was doing when she bowed her will, she was bowing all control, and relinquishing all control. And she’s really a remarkable person in the Lord. She’s far more remarkable than she herself knows. So thank God for that one statement. So that’s the solution to control.
(J) It’s the only one too.
(M) It’s the only one. It’s utterly sufficient, doesn’t need to be any other, because we die with Christ. It’s just we have to come to agreement.
