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with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) John I want to do a little explanation, or expansion, of something I said in the last podcast. I talked about ‘hupo’, coming under. I’ve been talking about surrender, and the word means come under, but it also means come under the order. And I just stopped at the order of the Body of Christ. But I want to take it to the enormous order that is under God. It’s bigger than, His order is bigger than any organization on the earth.
(J) Humum.
(M) His order is set in place. I don’t know how to explain it except that when you come under Him, you don’t just come under the Trinity, you come under the order of the Trinity. And you enter another, I want to say dimension, but I don’t know that I like that word. Let me use it because I don’t know another one other than you come into the spiritual realm.
(J) Umhum, umhum.
(M) In the spiritual realm… When you surrender to God, you surrender to the fact that He is Lord and Master. So He is Master of all that is in your life. You come under the order of God. And His order is nature and, and it says in Job 5 that the wild beasts will be at peace with you, and you will look at your fields and there will be nothing missing. And He promises in Deuteronomy 28 that I was going over yesterday, the blessings to hearing His voice and obeying are just enormous. When you surrender, you surrender to obey; but you come into another realm of economics, another realm of government, another realm of yes, warfare. But that’s insignificant really to the realm in which God’s order exists, and the harmony that you can come into in your life. It’s like when you come into the Kingdom, to the spiritual realm, you step out of the chaos of the other realm. There are only two. You and I memorized Colossians 1 sometime back, and one of the verses says, “He has delivered you out of the Kingdom of darkness, and into”, come on.
(J) “And into the Kingdom of the Son of His Love.”
(M) Yeah. That was the New King James Version that we liked. There are two kingdoms; one is illegitimate, and one is transcendent. So I just, I wanted to take that coming under the order, into something much bigger than the Body of Christ as such or the order of, that God sets up. Go ahead.
(J) When you said chaos, actually right before you said the word chaos, I was thinking. Is fear just of the chaos? Because really we want control; I mean that’s what we want, we want control. So is, are we in fear of the chaos, and ultimately its death. But is it not just chaos?
(M) Oh that is wonderful; I never thought of it in those terms John. Why don’t you tell more about it.
(J) Well I mean, you know, if we come underneath an ‘order’, and a place of peace. Order to me is peace. And so if we come up underneath order and come out of that chaos… I mean the world, if you look at the world right now, if you look at the world ever throughout all history, the world has always delivered chaos by itself. All, I mean during Jesus’ time it was chaos. Pre-Jesus it was chaos. Everything has been chaos since the garden. And there was perfect order, and then we chose to come out from underneath order and go into chaos. And so, I mean, what is the whole control? All our control is really just to grab hold of and take control of the chaos, which is impossible. We can never take control of chaos. All we can do is come under Christ, and come under the Kingdom, and into order. And that’s where I think it’s really cool is that the surrender is the only way of going into that order. So God’s saying I know you want control, I know that your goal is control, but you will never have control, ever, ever. None of us ever will have control, but if we will bow, and we will go into the order of the Kingdom, and under His order of things, we’ll be in peace, which is what we strive for, and we will be out of the chaos, which causes the fear, which is the fear of death. Does that make sense?
(M) Oh, absolutely. And see, what you come under is the power of God, which transcends everything. You read something from Nee this morning; I want to ask you to read it.
(J) This is the most amazing thing. I didn’t know this, but “The Lord My Portion” from Nee, is a daily portion, a daily devotional, 365 daily devotions that are very, very small. I mean it’s not… And it’s always just a power punch. I mean every single morning. He reads Exodus 4:10 which talks about Moses talking to Jehovah and saying that he’s not eloquent and that he’s slow of speech, and slow of tongue. And ah, Nee says, “Knowing ones own uselessness alone is still useless. The important thing to know is the power of God, and this is true resurrection. God wanted Moses to know that it was He who made man’s mouth. God tried to encourage Moses, but Moses said oh Lord please send someone else to do it. Moses again excused himself. When God heard this He was angry with Moses. And why? Because even though it is of great importance, and highly acceptable to God that we are brought to the place of no self-confidence, and no self-reliance, never the less if we stay there, and refuse to go forward by trusting in God, we will greatly displease Him.” And then the second little paragraph is, “How we need to be careful, lest we swing from one extreme to another. God takes us through death in order to raise us up; death is not the end, resurrection is the goal. We will be of no use if we remain in death, and not come into resurrection.” And so when I read that I thought, you know, I’m going through, apparently I’m going through a process of surrender and of death. And when I read this I saw my focus has been on my uselessness. And God’s goal is for me not to even look at my uselessness because that’s faith in that uselessness. And He wants me to go into the belief in His faithfulness, and Him as God. So I, I, that ministered to me, so.
(M) Well, John you know, resurrection life is its own power. In other words, I might hinder it, but if I surrender utterly, resurrection life will take me. It will rise and go. And that’s what it’s doing in me. His life is so rising in me that I’m exploding. And you’ve just introduced where I’m going, because the uselessness that you have to come to, the powerlessness, that is the result of the fire.
(J) Ummm.
(M) That’s what happens, you find out you have no power, and the relinquishment of power is death. That’s what death is. I learned it by going through a parent who was ill, and I took care of them till they died. And I watched; it’s a slow letting go. And some do it and accept it, and some get ugly. But, and that’s true in life because the death comes to set you free of being God. But we don’t want to give that up.
(J) Are you saying that everyone has to go through that process?
(M) Oh everyone does. Now, not everyone will.
(J) Oh.
(M) So, some people will die in denial, and some people will die fighting and spitting, and some people will eventually come to peace. I heard a story this morning, Carole’s accident, where her car was totaled. And she saw it coming and had just a split second. And she knew that she could be about to die. And she had absolute peace. And the whole story’s quite amazing; the Lord just completely captured her out of that situation; saved the car. She could have gone over an embankment and turned over countless times up here in the mountains. And it happened several years ago, but I’d never heard her tell the whole story. But it so… I said oh Carol, that’s it. For the believer there’s no experience of death. The experience of death lies in letting go of power. And to find out you’re useless, to come to that place where your self-sufficiency has died is the true grave of the death of self, because self wants power, self wants self to have self’s way. And so when you come to the end of that, if you’ll let it be and you let go, and you relinquish, as we’ve been talking about, resurrection life starts rising. When God strikes you with resurrection life, it is so big that… And here’s where it is taking me now. You said something, I don’t remember what it was, but it sparked this. That, remember John when I told about the scripture in Zech. 13, that ‘you will know My Name, and you will pray and I will answer you’, that that was the result of the fire? It was in that quotation in Zech 3 that He gave me that explained my whole question. “I will bring the third part through the fire and will refine them as silver is refined and will test them as gold is tested. They will call on My Name and I will hear and answer them.” And remember I said, what is His Name? God. God is God.
(J) Oh, yeah.
(M) And you don’t know His Name until you know that God is God. You can learn all the different names, but you still might not know that He really is God. But when you’re reduced to… the irony is that when you’re reduced to powerlessness, you somehow know that He is God, and nothing else is. And He can do… nothing is impossible to Him because He is God. So you come to the place of relying on prayer. I’m going to tell an experience, and then I’m going to relate it the scriptures.
(J) Ok.
(M) I’ve been praying for someone for really a long time. I’ve been praying for her. Nothing ever seemed to break. And when you know that God is God, you know that there is nothing real but Him. There is, the order I’m talking about is a reality, the reality. What we see, Paul said we don’t go by what is seen, but by what is unseen. We’ve got to get to the unseen, John. To live as believer’s and be effective for the Lord we’ve got to get to the unseen. And the unseen is the Reality. What is seen… I have struggled with what is seen and fought against it.
(J) Humhumm.
(M) And you can never move it. You said it, you said it; you said, “You can never change the chaos”.
(J) Right, sure.
(M) That’s what you said. Twenty years ago the Lord gave me this statement. “I am not involved in any human conflicts; they have no reality. I’m not involved in any human enterprises; they have no reality. I’m involved with God, for He is the only Reality.” Now of course I didn’t understand it. I thought I did, and I lived it and I wrote it and I read it, and I prayed it, because He said, “This is what I want you to know. Human conflict, you are not to be involved in it.”
