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with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(J) This is the completion of the message Martha taught in Vancouver, Wasington.
(M) It’s not failure of service that this was about. It’s not Jacob’s failure to run to Laban and have to work fourteen years; it’s not that failure, though I know that one, but that wasn’t it. There’s a failure of unbelief, there’s a failure of fleshly performance to do the will of God; I know those, all those failures. This was a peculiar defeat. It was sort of like Joseph in prison, expecting the baker to tell Pharaoh about him and get him out. Joseph had been faithful unendingly in his life, and his faithfulness did not gain his release. His faithfulness was noted and no doubt rewarded, but it was God and only God who decided when he would get out and what He would do with him when he got out. I’m nothing, you’re nothing. There’s only God. And that Jewish phrase has become for me, not only my defeat, but my liberty. And then I understood what Jesus was saying at the beginning of this. When you serve Him, you do so with the motive of love, and you serve Him out of obedience; but when you ask Him for something, you do it on a different ground. You come to Him in the faith that you’re His child, and that alone. He will not be bargained with, you will never earn anything from God; He will not have it. He will not receive a bargain. I’m nothing. When I have done everything I’m supposed to do, even anointed with power, still I’m nothing, and there is no profit to my labor. There’s only profit in my relationship as His child. And that profit is the result of faith, not obedience. That’s why the principle began with “if you have faith like a mustard seed, you will say to this mulberry tree be uprooted and be planted in the sea, and it will obey you.” And so, we did the podcast, laughing all the way through, and my trying to explain, no, I didn’t fail God, that particular time. It was that you come to the end of your faithfulness; you come to the end of your obedience. Joseph was, in his interpretation of dreams. He was in a spiritual level that knew the heavens, but that was not going to get him out of jail. God moves only by being nothing, and asking Him to do it, knowing you can’t. It comes by the defeat of ourselves as having any power; therefore it’s the defeat of being God. By the end of the podcast I couldn’t even speak for laughing, because I said, my whole walk has been God saying you’re fired as God. Once again, you’re fired. So then the story, I can’t tell you the details of the story, but I can tell you the events. So then, I let go of this disastrous, troubling situation under my nose and in my face. I let completely go, saying I’m nothing, they’re nothing. They can’t ruin anything; they have no power that God doesn’t allow. I have no power, there’s only God. Then there’s just obedience, you just obey and tell God what you want. And so, I was driving in the car and all of a sudden I saw the heavens had shifted and I called John and I said, the reign of this situation has ended, it’s over. He said, well what do you see? I said, I don’t see anything on the earth, but I know that the heavens have shifted and the reign of this evil has ended. Somebody beeped in on the phone call and I said, hold on just a minute John. It was to report to me that the reign of that evil was leaving. But it was never on the ground that I had done my duty, or His will, or even that I had been anointed. It was simply on the ground that Father, I’m your child; I’m your servant, but I’m also your child. And I believe that You are God, and no one else is. And when that point comes, that I can contribute nothing to His Godness. I can earn nothing, no matter how faithful. He does not respond on the ground of earning; He will reward everything, some of it will be in the next life, but He will not be bargained with; He will only be God. Now maybe you haven’t, don’t need to learn that; but for the nine-hundredth time I have learned it. And it’s freedom. And so, God defeated what I couldn’t defeat. God changed what I couldn’t change, by faith, by faith that He was God. Not faith that He and I together were God; but faith that He only, was God. And He’s transformed completely the whole situation, and it’s under the Tree of Life, and it’s amazing. So that’s where I’ve walked. If it speaks, hallelujah, but when I go to write it I will be out of it, and it will just be, you know. But you’ll know, (laughter) that I got fired in the process, and I learned the difference between a child and a servant, and how God responds. Yes, we serve Him, that’s a given, but it’s about being His child.
(Question from listener) When you realized you were nothing, you were fired from being God, did that cease your activity?
(M) No, there was more obedience. You’re right, that was it; there was more obedience afterward, some unpleasant. But I didn’t have the same expectation that if I obeyed then He had to do His part.
(Listener) But you remind me, your whole story, sometime after my wife and I got married, and we had kids and stuff, and after a year or two that we were married we a difficult situation in our marriage in our life. And that continued for a couple of years. We had a really hard time, but we had faith in the Lord and we just, you know, you can’t do much about it. But then my wife started working a different job, and we got better financially. And when we started getting better financially, the whole time I kind of had this grief; but I couldn’t understand, I would always think Lord, why did You let this happen? Why did we have to have such a hard time? And I didn’t want to think about it because I didn’t understand it and I really had a hard time because I always thought, well if I serve the Lord, and if I’m obedient, and I’m faithful, and I do everything that I can, then the Lord should bless me. It’s just an automatic thought that if I’m good then God has to be good to me. And I realized it doesn’t work that way, and I was with all my heart, faithful to the Lord, and at the same time I was broke and poor and it was just the way God wanted it to be. And now I can understand that; He’s not going to ….
(M) Oh, thank you for telling me. Sometimes I have to say to the Lord, I will not be offended with You; I will not, I refuse to be offended with You. And that’s what the Jewish man did; he went screaming out in the woods and said, I don’t understand, I don’t understand, we did everything right. We celebrated the Feast of Booths, and we did everything right; we gave, and it was a disaster.
(J) To excess.
(M) Yeah, but it was all, not to just serve God, but it was to get something from Him. And He won’t co-operate with that.
(J) He buys the citron, they called it the diamond, it was the most perfect lemon basically, citron; it was the most perfect one in all of Jerusalem. They sold it for an exorbitant amount of money, and he was glad to pay it in his devotion to the Lord, but it was kind of an…
(M) Well, it was the Feast of Booths, where they make a Succoth, and it’s to remember Egypt when they lived under the stars, and they were to supposed to worship, somewhere in the scriptures, with four elements, and one of them was a lemon, a willow, I can’t remember all four. And so it was a big deal to go and find them. And we talked with a Rabbi once in Jerusalem once, and he told about finding the most perfect pomegranate that he could find to give to the Lord. So he buys this lemon for a thousand shekels, and they were very poor, but he thought it was so good, he bought this perfect lemon. Well, the…and then he would go to the temple, the synagogue and worship with it. And so what do the criminals do? They take the lemon and cut it up and throw it in the trash.
(J) Make salad out of it.
(M) Yeah, make salad out of it. And everything he does is completely thwarted. What’s funny is it so happened that two of our sisters in the mountains had watched that movie part way, and they got so frustrated that they said, this is trash and we’re not watching it anymore. Because it was so frustrating, the whole thing was so frustrating because everything they did was, anyway.
(J) Ushpizin. It’s really a sweet movie.
(M) It’s very sweet, when you know the story. I think we think highly of our own obedience. I think highly of my obedience; and it’s nothing. I left out the most important verse, that they said to Jesus, what are the works of God? And He said, “This is the work. to believe on the Son whom He sent”. And so it’s faith in the Son that touches God. That’s the work. The obedience is not really the work as such. You wouldn’t obey if it weren’t by faith that you knew what to do, but I’m just saying, that the work is faith. That’s what’s rewarded. That’s what moves the immoveable mulberry tree. That’s what moves the mountain, is faith. And when I got into just God is the only one who can do anything about this. And you can get into a situation where it seems like people have power. You know what I mean? It seems like they have the power to oppress and invade and all that, but they don’t. And faith is, there’s only God. There’s not Martha, there’s only God. And then is when the mountains move, quite apart from anything that you expect or demand. Excuse me for being excited about it, but He is God, He really is.
(J) It’s funny how when we get at a certain age when you can ask someone to just do something for you and they’ll just do it because you asked them to. Then all of a sudden when they get to a certain age and they have that knowledge and they can say, can I barter with you? Will you pay me for it? That knowledge begat that sort of that bartering with God, that we all of a sudden get enough knowledge, under the wrong tree; and we say well Lord, I know enough about You.
(M) That I can make You be You.
