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True Freedom
Episode #185
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(J) Recently I wanted to tie these two last podcasts together, because really my heart is that there was a gentleman who requested ministry. And he was confessing to us a particular sin that he had fallen in, and was involved with, and was really looking for help and for truth. And so, my heart really kind of poured out, and had real compassion for him, and you did as well. And so you really wrote him a letter, and it was really wonderful, and I think it connects both of these last two podcasts perfectly. Because there is a sovereign issue, and there is a Blood issue. I’d like to answer this on the podcast, because I don’t believe… It doesn’t matter what the sin is.
(M) Hmhmm. (Martha speaks in background.)
(J) Your choice, yeah, and your story, yeah. I don’t believe any particular sin is a factor; it’s where you took it. I think all the sins are the same.
(M) “All have fallen short.”
(J) Exactly. That’s right.
(M) That evens it all out. But go ahead.
(J) So anyway, I would like you to kind of answer this letter. Ok, you don’t have to read the letter, ok; it’s a broken person, ok. It doesn’t matter, it’s a broken person, and we’re all broken. But I think the answer is for all of us, wherever we’ve taken our sinful life, the answers for all of us.
(M) Well, the Lord stirred my heart, as you say, with compassion. And I realized from his e-mail… I said to him there are two words you have not mentioned in your therapy or your journey, forgiveness and sovereignty. And I meant your being forgiven, and seeing the sovereignty of God over your whole life. And I wanted… Those two words were not there. And I asked him, were they in there, you didn’t mention it, but for me that is the solution, forgiveness and sovereignty. And I gave him Hebrews 12:15-17, and I said that I’ve learned that the root of bitterness is, always leads to immorality. Well, the immorality example in the scripture is Esau, “That no root of bitterness rise among you defiling many. Don’t be like Esau, who sold his birthright for a bowl of porridge.” Well, that doesn’t seem to me a serious immorality.
(J) Right.
(M) (Martha laughs) I always w… Why does the connection to Esau and the bowl of porridge? But I saw that immorality is choosing something over God; it’s choosing to indulge yourself, whether it’s food or anything else. It is immorality. Whether it’s cheating in business, whether it’s lying, whether it’s slander, gossip, whatever it is, it’s immorality. And we believe we have the right to it because we’re bitter with God. So, I just said every form of immorality is an indulgence of the flesh, is from not believing that God is sovereign over my life entirely. That He let me down, or whatever. So…
(J) Well, every one of us can say, oh, well, my parent, my brother, my pastor, my church, my president, my… hurt me, and this is the evidence of it. You know? But it doesn’t matter who hurt you. And I don’t minimize the levels of hurt out there, and pain out there.
(M) No.
(J) Because I know that they’re great, and that they’re horrific. I know that you have a friend Linda Dillow that deals with people who has… Deals with things that I don’t even want to go into, ok, abuses. But there’s a story written there, and there’s a sovereignty there, and there’s a forgiveness there, and I don’t know, you can be locked in your prison, or you can be released. And so, continue with how you were going on the feeling forgiven and everything.
(M) Well I asked, I wrote do you feel forgiven? Do you feel forgiven, probably not. Are you forgiven? The right answer is yes, I’m totally forgiven, but that’s the wrong answer. No, you are not forgiven; you are only forgiven if you forgive. That is an absolute repeated principle in the New Testament out of Jesus mouth. The only one thing you pulled out of the Lord’s Prayer was the root to repeat, “If you do not forgive as your Father has forgiven you, you will not be forgiven.” So that forgiveness is part of being healed. He was a wounded child, and then he said the Lord was his Lover. And I wrote that your Lover will bring you from being a victim, to seeing that you were always in His hand, and your wounds were the wounds of a friend who is preparing you to know your Lover, who is jealous of everything you love. And to know this Love is worth giving up anything. So…
(J) Do you think that some of the hardest forgiveness is the forgiveness of ‘self’?
(M) Absolutely. We don’t… that doesn’t occur to us.
(J) I can forgive papa, or mama for whatever they did, but when it boils down to forgiving yourself, whew!
(M) And I think that is the most crucial, but the most humbling thing, because it does take humility to forgive yourself, and to accept your forgiveness. You said he’s a broken person, and we’re all broken.
(J) All of us, every one of us.
(M) Hmhmm. We’re broken by life, and then we’ve broken ourselves.
(J) I feel like when we make our sin complex, and when we say oh well, it’s ‘this great sin’ or whatever, I think that’s distancing our self from God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness upon our self. It’s a frightening refusal to accept the forgiveness and forgive. When you categorize your sin as greater than other people’s sin, it’s distancing yourself from the work of forgiving.
(M) Good grief John. But it’s also if you distance other people’s sin that you consider as worse than yours, you’re distancing yourself from reality.
(J) And from the work of forgiving them for that sin. Because why would you even call it a sin unless it’s affected you?
(M) Hmhmm. Hmhmm. So now, after I’ve read the letter, what would you add to it?
(J) Well, I was flooded with it. I was really flooded with the Scribe, being capital ‘S’, Scribe, God, writing a story on your life, writing, authoring a story, and the major work of accepting that. And that this gentleman’s freedom, outside of what you’ve stated, sovereignty and forgiveness, will never really happen. The true freedom will never really happen unless those two issues are dealt with.
(M) But do you know what? Didn’t you feel great love for him? I did.
(J) Oh absolutely.
(M) You said you were flooded with it. We were… I was flooded with love for him, Christ’s love. That’s what I wanted to come through, and e-mails don’t always convey that. But I experienced a tremendous love for him. The Lord is after him.
(J) I was excited that he saw the Lord as his Lover…
(M) Hmhmm.
(J) …and is in the process. I was encouraged. I wasn’t, you know, he’s not through the process, but I was encouraged where he was in the process. Because God is going after him, and is… He wouldn’t even mention it if God wasn’t ‘after him’.
(M) You know, John, this ministry was birthed in the book “All and Only”, which is about sovereignty. And that book and those insights are dear to my heart. But the average Christianity doesn’t want God to be that sovereign. We really don’t want Him to be. And so we don’t want that subject… You only come to that subject if you need it, and only if the Holy Spirit brings it to you. He brought to me the sovereignty of God very early in my walk, with tremendous clarity and tremendous power of the Spirit He brought to me the sovereignty issue. And that book was written over a number of years. But it is, it is our healing to know that He is sovereign.
(J) But it’s tremendously scary and humbling to know that He’s in that much control. And I don’t want Him to have that much control; you know what I mean?
(M) I do.
(J) It’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a, (John laughs)…
(M) A living…
(J) …a living, breathing God Who makes choices for my life, and then tells me what they were. (John and Martha are laughing.)
(M) And even worse, to make choices for your life and not tell you what they were. (More laughter)
(J) And then reveal the curtain at the end, door number two, that’s your choice.
(M) The mystery of free will and sovereignty; there’s no resolving that mystery, it’s too big. We do have a choice.
(J) No, it’s accept it.
(M) Yeah. So I think that this particular work of God, this particular church body that we are a part of, a primary message and testimony of this group is sovereignty.
(J) I’d say we’re kind of on the merry-go-round of sovereignty, that we continue to go around, and around, and around on it again; deeper levels, yeah.
(M) Bigger circle.
(J) Oh yeah, but you’ve got to say, ok, yeah. I mean really. I mean I’ve been here for sixteen, is that right? Sixteen years.
(M) Hmhmm.
(J) And it’s just been one, one circle after another of His sovereignty and then proving ‘I really Am’.
(M) I think of one of my, the realizations I’ve had right before the last conference in October was ‘what is My Name? Your Name is God.’ That means You are really God. And that means sovereign, omniscient, omnipresent, the beginning and the end. I t is a subject we dislike, we don’t believe… We believe in good and evil, and if things are in categories then it means God is not sovereign. If there’s evil out there, it means God is not sovereign. I can’t, “I don’t exercise myself in matters too great for me”, of why the evil’s there, why there are disasters, that’s too big for me. I just know He’s sovereign. He rules, He is on the Throne.
