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The Lion And The Bear
Episode #206
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) Oh, anyway, I woke up this morning thinking about a verse I took years ago in Jeremiah 9. It says, “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his strength, let not the rich man boast in his riches; but let him who boasts, boast in this: that he understands and knows Me, that I am the God Who practices love, justice and righteousness on the earth, for in these things I delight, declares the Lord.” So I just wanted to boast in the Lord this morning, that there is no problem. The amazing thing to me is that this whole time, some sixteen months… And people who came to the conference saw how weak I was. If I had to walk across the room in the first and second conference, I had to get somebody to help me across the room; only the people who were there could see it, and it was very obvious, the weakness. And, but instead of a slow recovery of strength, I have gone from that weakness, to normal strength. But anyway, that’s really not where I’m going. Oh, I knew at one point that God knew me so intimately and so well, far beyond what I know of myself. He knows His purpose for me to my most minute detail. I have no clue. I’ve come out of this whole period knowing less than ever about God, but knowing only that He is God. And He took care of every minute detail. I was thinking this morning He took me to the ocean five times in one year. That is unheard of in my life. He just sovereignly undertook to get me to the sea, to the water. The water is an element that speaks of His vastness and His healing. And the water is real significant in the New Testament, and the rivers of living water. And I live with a river behind me, almost a mile of river, of the Tacoma River. And that river is a wonder to me. And I kept saying I need to go stare at the river, I need to go stare at the river. But the concept that God is so beyond our understanding and our demands, our rigid demands of Him, our rigid expectations of Him that we really can’t comprehend… Only now, He’s taken, it’s like He’s taken these pieces of a puzzle, and this week He has made an entire picture, put them all together to show me. He didn’t have to do that, healing was quite enough.
(J) Umhmm.
(M) But He’s taken me to His purpose. And…
(J) There was something so much higher than just your illness and your recovery and your resurrection life. There was something higher than that; there was a purpose higher than that that facilitated… This was just a…the sickness was just facilitating a greater purpose of bringing His life forth.
(M) Umhmm.
(J) And, which sounds real strange, and makes some people go ‘hmmm?’ But there was a process that He was bringing forth, and through that process He was bringing it forth through the illness.
(M) And you know what, John? Oh, this, I’m so excited about this. I have seen that you only gain faith from having passed through crisis and danger. I think about… It’s come to me, I believe it because I’ve experienced it now. David fought the bear and the lion, and he says it on the side of victory. We don’t know the fear. But anyway, he conquered the lion and the bear, protected his sheep from them without a pistol, ‘hello’, and then that gave him faith for a Goliath where the whole nation of Israel was paralyzed. So you gain a faith through suffering this way. You find out that God conquers it all.
(J) Hmm, hmm.
(M) You learn that He transcends every moment of it. And what I said on the tape was, about resurrection is that the resurrection life was going on completely apart from anything I felt or didn’t feel. The resurrection life was not hindered by the weakness of my body. It just, He just kept moving. The resurrection life is a force within us that we’re not in touch with. And I think He has to disable us into the resurrection life. You can read it about Paul in 2nd. Cor. 4:12, where he boasts about his weakness, because he knows. And how did he come to that knowledge? Not lightly, not by reading, not by anyway but enormous life crisis. (John is agreeing in the background.) And in that crisis God proves Himself to you. And I’m coming out of it with, it’s like, there’s no problem in the world. If you sit on the river, the power of the river carries you. And God is so sufficient that it’s like ah… You and I were in a little dangerous situation recently, and I really felt… I did plead the Blood and do warfare, but I really never felt there was a problem until I got in the front of traffic and dropped my bag as we were trying to get across the street. And then I thought that was a problem; but it really wasn’t. But someone in my life is in tremendous crisis and I cannot get concerned. I am so joyful about it. I am so confident in her God. I’m so confident in the things that are concerning me right now, that there’s no… I am the, I’m the, ah, the expert at fretting. That’s my old man. Well, somehow that old man’s been killed. Now, now I know that I will go through more and more depths of this. I’m not saying that I’ve got something that won’t have to be tested and expanded. But He produces faith through crisis; a faith that knows crisis is nothing for Him.
(J) We often, we do that dogmatic rigidness where we say, “oh it has to look like this, and it has to function like this, and it has to go from glory to glory,” but you don’t realize what’s between the glory to glory.
(M) Right, right, right, between the glory to glory. I know… we have come to know that He’s had so many purposes for our Body in this; so much learning responsibility and authority. And it’s like…You know, I’ve watched the military channel sometimes, especially like on November 11,th I was looking for something to see about war and cry over it, and thank God for the men who… Veteran’s day. So I was trying to find something really good to watch yesterday. And I realized that when you’re on the battlefield, there’s a camaraderie that’s formed. What is it Shakespeare said, “Brothers”?
(J) “We band of brothers.”
(M) “We band of brothers”, yes, and there’s something formed in us that is like a brotherhood. It wasn’t just through my illness, but it’s through all the, everybody’s different crisis and things that have happened. But we are like a band of brothers, and I was aware in several occasions at the conference that you could be rigid about ‘who we are’, and look at us as a rigid group, and we are not. We’re very fluid, but we are in the river; and with great respect for each other’s place and responsibility. So, but this has been another formation of the brotherhood of the church. You might could say it from your perspective as the servant.
(J) Well, I’m just thinking about what you said about David, and that David gained that experience and the life that took him through the Goliath experience, not through training, but through actual…
(M) Combat.
(J) Combat, absolutely. And you know, there were all those men who had gone through military training, and then you have David, who didn’t, but who was able to defeat.
(M) Wow, he was but a shepherd.
(J) But he had been through the actuality of the battle, face to face with the battle, and not to say that those men weren’t in battle before that, but all their military training didn’t get them through it.
(M) You are right, wow.
(J) It was a submitted heart, and a surrendered being. And you know, we don’t understand what David did out there in the…
(M) No.
(J) …in the fields. But we know that he did something with ‘his story’. He had to make peace with ‘his story’, because I don’t think he would ever have made it through with the lion and the bear, if he hadn’t made peace with ‘his story’.
(M) I think he said, “God let me defeat the lion and the bear,” and you come out of it knowing, you come out of it as you look back you see God more clearly than you do at the moment sometimes. But he knew that God had caused him to win that battle, so Goliath was nothing.
