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Your God Written Story
Episode #183
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) Well, John, we have a number of subjects that the Lord is revealing. And it’s just a matter of picking out one, so what do you think you’d like to talk about? And I’ll tell you what I want to talk about.
(J) Well, I would like to talk about God’s sovereignty, and His choice over the experiences and circumstances of your life, and how receiving those and embracing those and accepting those unlocks the key to your dynamic, divine potential in Him.
(M) Well, I just read this to you from Psalm 139. “My frame is not hidden from You, when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth. Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in your book were all written the days that were ordained for me when as yet there was not one of them.” It’s astonishing how the scripture reveals His sovereignty down to the most minute detail, His sovereignty over every government, every event of history, and every event of your history.
(J) Personal.
(M) Yes. It’s hard to come to grips with that. It’s hard to really, really, let that be. It’s hard to approve of what you disapprove of, and to accept what God ordained for you in all your days. Your days are written before they’re lived. Your form was seen before it appeared. He is before and after, and He is God.
(J) And the amazing thing is that your path was directed and laid before you ever started walking it.
(M) Yeah, I think it’s just so simple, but it is very difficult because it requires giving up your concept of your life, your concept of yourself. And the further I go, the more I understand I do not know myself. I do not know Him. He is just such a mystery. He is ever wanting to be known. And I keep staying on this issue, this is the year of the mystery of God I think. But only if you know that you don’t know can you ever really know. So we have a choice, the choice is not to be something other than we are. The choice is not have re-written our history. There are people who re-write their story thinking that that makes it come out differently. But the choice is to let God be God, and accept the story He’s writing and His purpose.
(J) And that’s a hard work to do. That’s the acceptance of His choice of the story. It is extremely difficult work.
(M) Because the bottom line is we want to be God, and we think we are. And to let Him be God is the choice, continuous choice. I go back to Ephesians one verse eleven: “We have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose, Who works all things after the counsel of His will.” He works everything after the counsel of His will. Now predestination can become a legalistic doctrine, almost a fatalistic… Predestination’s a living thing, unfolding, and we have, we simply have the choice of whether we let Him be God or not, or to keep striving against it and try to be God ourselves. What do you think?
(J) I’m amazed at how you…it doesn’t really matter where you take your resistance to God. It doesn’t matter what flavor of sin you choose to indulge in, they’re, you know, it goes everywhere; I mean ‘good grief’. (John laughs.) Even though in the sovereignty of God your ‘flavor’s’ already chosen, but we’re predestined, so to speak, to choose a particular ‘flavor’. Ok, so we do, whatever. But it doesn’t matter where that goes, and it doesn’t matter what we’ve done, it’s the acceptance of that story that will break open the Life of Christ really. But that is not going to happen, I’m not going to see the exchanged life if I refuse to accept my own. I’m never going to see Christ’s indwelt Life pouring out from me, living my life out of me. Just I’m never going to see that if I refuse the story, and refuse to embrace the path that has led me to Him, regardless of what it is. And you talked about this morning bumping your head on the Word of God, and that if you refuse to embrace and accept the life and the circumstances of your life and the story of your life… talk about bump your head. You bump it and knock you out, and it’ll knock you out of your potential, it’ll knock out your destiny, and it’ll kill you. And it’ll kill the revelation of Christ being revealed out of your life by Him being indwelt and living that life through you. Does that make sense?
(M) How have you come to accept it?
(J) How have I come to start to accept it? (Martha and John laugh.) A long wrestling match with God.
(M) Kind of a Jacob?
(J) Oh absolutely. I’ve been wrestling with Him for 42 years, and you know my arm is real tired. And He’s you know…
(M) He’s winning.
(J) He’s winning, yeah. I’ve attempted to bolster up structures, to form and to fashion a life, and the forming of myself, (huh!) has literally caused my body to cave in upon itself, and I’m coming to the place that that caving in is causing me to cry out for mercy, and to say that I’m really sorry for the structure I’ve built in my pride to think that I could design my life, that I could make my life, that I could be something, someone. And I’m learning to ‘let go’, and let Him do it, let Him choose it. And it has been with great suffering, self-inflicted suffering, that I have, I have enforced, trying to make myself. And you know, recently the… Well it’s really been kind of a two year process of God saying, “Ok, let Me show you what that structure that you call life is. Let me show you what that really is.” And its falling in on me and hurting me, and showing me what it was all along.
(M) I think of T. Austin Sparks who said, “Only the failed person… God only uses people who are completely defeated”.
(J) Hmm.
(M) We think that all the principles of the world are the same in the Kingdom, and they are the exact opposite. In the world it’s effort and strength; in the Kingdom it’s weakness and failure. I’m old enough in the Lord now that I’ve seen so much, and so many countless times, that what I have walked through God orchestrated for the sake of a number of people. And the same is true of every life. You can only relate to other human beings if you have had a human life, a normal human life of disappointment, failure, and then the humility and humiliation of accepting that God writes the story. And you know, “there is a time for every purpose under heaven”. I used to love that passage. I’m not sure I ‘got it’, and I’m not sure I do yet, but there’s a time for this, this…it’s not that you’re late. Part of the sense of failure is that ‘it’s taken me so long’, or ‘I’ve been over this before’, but there is… If the days are ordained, and they’re all written before you live them by the incredible, mysterious sovereignty of God, then there’s ‘a time’ when you see. There was a time for Peter to see who Christ was. Some of the others didn’t see it then, the time for them to see it was later. And so you see what God is after in your life, and even see your struggle against Him. It’s like the man who said, was asked to give his testimony. He said, “I ran as fast as I could from the Lord, and He chased me and caught me.” So this is your time, the perfect time in His, in His writing of your story. It’s the perfect time, the day for you to see.
(J) I mean I’m not trying to be cryptic in it. I’m not trying to, you know, but you can listen to the podcasts in the last two years and tell… You know, I’ve told things that have gone on, and what’s gone on, and you know, I’m just seeing now more completely what those issues, and things that I have experienced, what the purpose of them were.
(M) Well, I think that you helped me see yesterday as I was working with someone, that this is the time when God is reaching down deep, deep, deep, in some of the deepest areas that we’ve ever known, to bring forth out of us those… what would you call them, pains, resistance?
(J) Pains, resistance, fears, pride.
(M) Sins.
(J) Sins, hmhmm.
(M) And it’s like I began to see that when He brings that out, what you need is the Blood. And only when you need the Blood do you receive the Blood. Only when there’s no other, when you exhaust your attempts to ‘fix it’, change it, re-write it, change yourself and ‘be different’, only when you come down to see that it’s just sin of resistance, then you’re ready to take the Blood in reality; to drink the Blood and eat the flesh of the Lord Jesus, to bring it to an inward place. And we believe that there’s going to be a great out-pouring of the Spirit, as many people do. And we’re praying…that’s one of my main, main prayers that the Lord, “Fill us with Your Spirit to fullness.” And I believe that this horrific cleansing that’s going on among us is deep, deep things, as you said, the deepest of all pains He’s pulling out. It is to fill us with the Blood of Christ and His Life, so that we’re ready to be filled with the Spirit.
(J) I think we want it to be so complex. We want it to be so involved and complex, but you have just said, you stated it very clearly and very simplistically. It’s sin, ok, whatever category it’s in, it’s sin. It has to be shown you as sin, it has to be cleansed with the Blood, and you have to get a new life through the Spirit. It’s real easy, it doesn’t matter where you’ve taken your ‘whoredom’; ok, that’s part of your story, that’s part of your testimony, yeah, great. But really, you have to see that you have just exhausted your own strength, your own effort, your own willfulness, your own pride, all this. You’ve just exhausted this, wherever you’ve put it, you’ve exhausted it, and then you have to see it’s complete. It’s a complete pride, it’s complete trying to work out your strength in whatever, it’s complete, and then you completely need the Blood.
(M) Yeah, thank you. We believe it’s so complex, and when the enemy is attacking us or suggesting that, his subtle lies, it becomes so complex and we just cannot get the answer. We can’t unravel it.
(J) Do you think that’s the purpose of Satan?
(M) Yes, exactly, to make you ‘think’, to make you go into knowledge and speculation and imagination. Paul called it the simplicity of devotion to Christ.
