Episode #221 ^{_{(Click to Listen)}}

With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow

(M) But He does  resolve that parental issue. And I have a friend right now, who’s going through… She’s valiantly being led by the Spirit, oh my goodness, it’s incredible. She’s going through Luke 14. “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother.” She’s experiencing enormous rage with her father that’s she’s never been able to feel, and the terrific hurts he inflicted on her. And he was a very abusive, very selfish father. And he even demanded of her actually, to compromise her own integrity. He asked her to lie for him and cover his sin. And it damaged her heart; it damaged her integrity. And as a female she had to swallow his rage and hate for his own, probably for his own mother. But as she’s following the Spirit, and she’s followed the Spirit in tremendously costly ways, and by following the Spirit she’s coming into her great need of God. And the Lord told me this morning it was catharsis, she’s in a catharsis. And I looked up the meaning of the word. Some of these He’s given me these words I’ve heard but don’t know the meaning of, except vaguely. And catharsis means the process…
(J) “The process of releasing and thereby providing relief from strong or repressed emotion.” Is that the one?
(M) Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly it. So she’s coming through catharsis. But you know there’s one other element that I didn’t tell you about in the process of coming to sonship, and that is the humiliation of being reduced to absolute abject poverty and need. You only come into sonship through the door of your need. And the cross takes out away from you your dependencies, your sources, and when He takes the sources then you are nothing but a needy child. And the Holy Spirit leads you through that need to the joy of being supplied, as a small child. So becoming a child  entering the Kingdom, is the process of the, not coming in as a citizen of the Kingdom, but as a son of the King, a daughter of the King.
(J) That’s huge.
(M) Which is a complete unknown to humanity. Only the Spirit can get you there. So the Holy Spirit’s led her to that place of need, and I just see her on the brink of this bliss of being able to say, ‘I have an Abba’, ‘I have an Abba’, wonder of wonders. (Martha speaks this with deep emotion.) And so it’s the position, and it makes it seem like something you can do, but it’s something you have to be brought to, led to by the Spirit. And you can be… When you are led to the real position in which God gave you, which is that of His child, it has to be a reality, John. And it cannot be a reality unless you’ve lost everything on the earth, everything of yourself, and everything of every other human being. But it is worth the loss. It is the most glorious security.
(J) Go back to the Luke 14, can you read that one scripture you were reading again?
(M) “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father, mother, wife, children, brother’s, sister’s, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me, cannot be My disciple.” And then He goes on  to say ‘count the cost’. And it’s the king setting out to build, and to go to war. Verse 33 says, “So then none of you can be my disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.” It’s all demonstrated in the negative. This is the condition. And the strange contradiction, truth is always in ‘two’s’ that you can’t manage. The contradiction of the New Testament is, “Hate your father and mother”, and “Honor your father and mother”. Now that’s something only the Spirit can sort out and put in the right order for you. And the word hate … many translators have tried to soften it by saying it means, hate your father and mother as compared to your love of God. Well, the actual Greek word is despise and persecute.
(J) Well, if you don’t, if you don’t go to that process of hating, you will transfer it to God, and you will not be a son.
(M) Yes.
(J) There’s no way that you can still have your earthly father, and the flaws of your earthly father, and the story that God has created, with all it’s pains and wounds and everything else, you cannot go through that and, and not ‘leave it’; because you will not go to sonship without it. You have to leave, you have to hate, you have to despise, you have to persecute; Is that it?
(M) Hmhmm.
(J) The father of your childhood, to be united with the Father and Daddy of your creation.
(M) Oh yes, wonderfully said. Oh, wonderfully said. And John, the best way you leave, that He’s saying to me, He’s saying in that command that you have to go through your emotional disappointment, and your emotional contempt and objection, and your pains, at the hands of your father and mother, because they’re there. And in going through it, you come to the place of forgiveness, and in forgiveness, you leave.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) Because the forgiveness, just saying ‘I forgive you for what terrible things you did to me’, that isn’t forgiveness. Forgiveness is that, plus, ‘God You sovereignly gave me this, and I accept Your sovereign Fatherhood over my father, mother, sister, brother, etc.’.
(J) Remember the other week we were going around and around on the fact that you will have… there is no other story. There’s only one story written on your life, it is in your DNA, and it is the story of your parents. And you will see that story over and over and over and over, throughout your life until you deal with it, and until you go through the Luke 14: 26, where you leave and hate and, and leave that parent, you will never come into that sonship.
(M) And I believe, at least it was true in my life, that you cannot honor your parent until you have seen they were God’s gift.
(J) God’s choice.
(M) God’s choice and God’s gift.
(J) It’s a big thing to see God’s choice, it’s another whole, another realm, and obviously is why I said ‘choice’, and you said ‘gift’, because you’re in the gift realm, and I’m in the choice realm.
(M) Now, I’m also forty years ahead of you; (Martha laughs) maybe not that much. But ah, it’s like I tell my daughter, well I ought to be there, I’ve been at it forty-two years now. If I’m not, God help me, I need to get out. But it is true, it becomes a gift, a gift you rejoice in.
(M) I’ve seen you respond to your father, and things that have been painful in your life, and see it, and cry, and thank God for your father, because you do see him as a gift. It’s evident in your, in your talk.
(M) My tears are not pain.
(J) No.
(M) They are how precious he is to me, and how he was the instrument of my Real Father. And so I think just, I just adore him.
(J) Can you rub that on my head please? (Martha and John laugh)
(M) Well, the Holy Spirit will get you there, because it’s a reconciliation with God, not with your parents.
(J) No, because your Creator put you in that situation.
(M) And I really think the secret of this, unless you hate them, I think the, I think the secret is, unless you realize you do hate them.
(J) Hmmm.
(M) Unless you are willing to realize that you do hate them.
(J) And hate God because you…. Hmhmm-hmhmm.
(M) Exactly. There you go. I think that’s the secret, like you saw the secret of Moses’ father-in-law and the slavery issue. I had never seen that. I’m in stunned wonder at that, because it’s so true; it’s strictly revelation because it’s not written that way. But anyway, I think you have to come to that terrible objection, that even the best parents have to be, have to… I don’t know how to say it.
(J) It doesn’t matter who your parents are, they are supposed to wound you.
(M) And fail you.
(J) They are intended to do it.
(M) They can do nothing else. No. And, and…
(J) They were created to do it.
(M) Yeah. They were created to make the hole that God wants to fill as Father. And I remember walking, many years ago I was walking in a place, beautiful place in Alabama. And I was brooding on how huge the hole in me was of enormous, oh, continuous suffering. And I was just saying, just whining and saying… and He said “Yes, yes, I’ve made a big huge cavern in you, and it’s to be filled with My love.”
(J) See, that’s so yummy. Really.
(M) Yeah.
(J) That’s hope-filled.
(M) Awhh.
(J) That’s huge, if you see that, yeah, I have dug a big hole in you, it’s huge, but I’m going to fill it. Ok, that’s great. If you stay and stare at the hole, and refuse to leave the ‘hole’, that’s when there’s a problem.
(M) Well, and that, that sparks another element of the process, John. You only follow the Sprit by hearing. So if we could say the simplest think in the Christian life is not all these processes and lists and dos and don’ts.  It’s just listen; live listening. Learn to listen to the Voice. And you will not hear the Voice without surrender. You will think you know the Voice and act on what you think you know, but you will not hear because God speaks to those who will hear and do. And He’s speaking to everyone, but when we aren’t surrendered we won’t hear Him. So the, the element of our responsibility in the process is not only to surrender our will, it is to listen, to live a life of listening. When I got up this morning I just had to say, speak to me, I don’t have, I don’t know where I am, I don’t know what anything is, I don’t where to go. So that’s when He led me to that one sentence that Oswald Chamber’s wrote, “The only consciousness of Jesus’ was of the Father.” That means Jesus wasn’t conscious of people, of the world, of Himself, of anything, of His suffering. He was conscious of the Father. And I want to be so ‘in union’ with Christ and the Father, that I am conscious of their relationship, and their interaction, which is absolutely, well, Divine. That’s all, that’s the only word I can describe it. It is incredible.