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with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) I remember Carole had a vivid revelation some years ago that there is the fruit of religion, which is the tree of good, the ‘good’ part, and that is torment. And the reward, I think she called it the reward of religion, is torment; because it’s from that tree, it’s the good.
(J) There’s a sowing and reaping, and it’s real.
(M) It really is. And if you sow to the Spirit, you’ll reap from the Spirit as well. But it’s all about the tree; can you just see it all over scriptures, the vine we’re to abide in, it’s the seed, it’s life and death placed before us. It’s God and Satan, ever represented in many metaphors.
(J) I saw it as being, what does all of humanity really want? We all want peace. From Miss America, “World Peace,” to the Jews in Jerusalem peace; but really corporately, as a whole, we all want peace. And some people believe that they can get that peace through violence and destruction, and some people believe that they can get it by rolling-over, but the fact is, is that we all want that peace. And when you have erred in this and you go into that hysteria and you go into that place of fear, it jars you; it’s the due course and the due reaction to our making the wrong choice. And if you give someone over, so to speak, and you say, I will not go there with you, it allows them to really see where maybe they’re not hearing God, maybe their heart isn’t fertile. Maybe that’s the only reaction they’re getting from God, is that this is wrong. Maybe they don’t hear God in any of the circumstances and under the words He speaks, but in your saying “NO,” and the chaos that they just sit and dwell in and that hysteria and that fear, and maybe that would be the only thing that would lead them out.
(M) Yeah, you’re right, we want peace and when there’s not peace, I had someone write me recently, “I just want peace.” And I really thought to myself, if you want peace, I didn’t say it, but there’s no peace for the wicked saith my God. And the wicked are on that wrong tree. That’s why they are wicked, it’s because they have listened to the wrong voice. It’s all about a voice. At the back of every life is a voice. And you know, its interesting John that the connection between knowing Christ and human knowledge, there’s a human vacuum of knowledge really and truly, and we do not know. It’s amazing to me that God wants us to know Him. He sent Christ for the purpose of revealing who the Father is so we could know Him; He wants to be known. He says all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Christ. So it’s our vacuum of knowledge has to sent us to the Tree of Life. And we will receive from that tree, all the knowledge we need for life, and all the knowledge we need for our calling. Paul reduced himself, to the knowledge of Christ and Him crucified. This great intellectual giant, this educated brilliant man, this extremely high IQ, allowed himself to be reduced to the knowledge of Christ and Him crucified. So there’s great satisfaction in this quest for knowledge that we have; God-given, but sent the wrong way in Eden; that satisfaction of knowing Him is in the Tree of Life, and it comes from listening. It’s legitimate to want knowledge, but it’s the knowledge of Him that is the only true knowledge in the universe available to us. Everything that we need to know is in Christ. But above all it’s listening to a voice. I think that I have said before that the greatest surrender and probably the last surrender, is the surrender of your mind to the mind of Christ. It’s so evident in Paul that he’d done that; that his thoughts came from God, from the Tree of Life. He reduced himself to that; but it’s the last surrender we make, the right to my own thoughts. If we understood that the right to our own thoughts is the pathway to death, for us and everyone we speak to out of that death, we might be less inclined to think we know. But I really have seen that humility is only humility when you live knowing nothing except what God tells you; it’s not humility until it’s that. The assuming that we know anything about anybody, anything about anything, even if we know yesterday’s revelation, it has to be God’s Voice today. When do we eat bread? We eat bread everyday, three times a day maybe. Jesus said, “Man cannot live on bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God”, and that is knowing Christ, to hear.
(J) It’s the life-giving grain, the life-giving seed.
(M) Yes, the life giving vine, its all Christ.
(J) I just see the whole thing as the Shepherd. It’s all about the Shepherd and the Father who wants to lead you to a pasture that is fruitful, that is green and lush and water that is flowing and clean and clear. So often we choose and like more, the swill-water, and the thicket and the briars, we like that better, but He’s always trying to say let’s go to the Life. And you know, if you need to get a mouthful of thistles and briars to find out that you’re eating from that nasty tree, then maybe that’s the way it has to be. Maybe that’s part of His crook, that crook does a two-fold thing.
(M) With the experience I’ve just related, I began to take in what her heart and mind was sending to me; I began to eat of the same tree. And I was tasting the bitter fruit of that in confusion and despair, and just such uooo; that’s how you describe it, it’s an ‘uooo’, a yuk. But when I backed up and realized, and went to Him and said You’ve got to help me here; then He spoke somehow, somehow within my spirit He conveyed His thoughts to me. He’s so ready. As Moses said, it’s not something that’s way out there and up in the sky and up in the stars, it’s in your mouth and in your heart that you can hear Him.
(J) And because you were at that moment, eating from the Tree of Life, even though the onslaught came against your eating, and the grain that you had eaten, and all of a sudden you were being captured by that, but the awesome thing is that because you had eaten and because you had been filled with that Life-giving bread, you were able to turn it around. If you had been eating from your own tree, you would have gone off the deep end with that whole lie, wouldn’t you have.
(M) Probably so, and because I went to the right tree, not because I went to the right tree, but because I was perplexed and troubled and I said I don’t know what to do here, I don’t know what this is. You’ve got to help me. ‘Need’ took me to that tree. If I take my need to God, I’m at the Tree of Life. And the situation evoked my need to know what to do in the situation. And I really didn’t know what I was dealing with. It was only the next day that I realized it was an example of the Two Trees. I knew nothing, and I knew I knew nothing. So that’s a constant ignorance that we live in, and if we’ll accept it, it’s the way to the right Tree.
