Episode #258 ^{_{(Click to Listen)}}

With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guests: Don and Carole Nelson

(Don) Martha, you said something yesterday; if you can’t learn how to receive love then how do you, how do you give love? I think you said that in the car yesterday. If you can’t receive it, how do you give it?
(Martha) Yeah, that’s good. I feel like the times that I have experienced His love for another person, I have learned of His love more there, loving another, than His love for me. I have said to a number of people, I now know His love, because of the way He’s loved you, and endured and been patient and kept giving and watching Him, letting Him love through you is experiencing His love in a way that I’m not sure you can apart from laying down your life for others. And laying down your life, what you say, it is His love. When you lay down your life for another, to let His love carry you way beyond you’re even willingness, and beyond yourself, is to find out what His love is like. And it’s, it’s astonishing. But that is laying down your life, to let Him love in the level of His radical, unending, sacrificial love that is beyond our knowledge. We will only know that love really as He loves through us. I don’t, I don’t believe there’s any way to know it other than to watch it and let it be in you. It’s, it’s a, His love is not affected by anything in us. But…
(Don) On a personal note I can say that through the many years that I have known you, that love that you have shared with me, which comes from Him, is what has kept me. You have been such an example of His love, that it is what has kept me Martha many times.
(M) And you know what, only His love knows a person; otherwise we’re judging. It’s His love that discerns, and discernment is always for restitution, for healing, for reconciliation, for freedom, His love is always in that, in that goal.
(Don) And it is so uncondemning.
(M) Yeah.
(Don) Because that’s the way He is.
(M) “I didn’t come into the world to judge the world.” And even when it’s correcting, if you perceive it right, it’s, even when it’s…it isn’t, it is not condemning, and it’s steady, His love is so steady. But there comes a time, if you really don’t want love to take you over, He will say ok, that’s your choice, I love you enough to give you your choice. And He will let, He let’s people go. But many times He lets them go to withdraw Himself so they will need Him. So any, it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s all about love. But love does give you the choice of whether to let it take you, whether to receive it, whether to believe it even. So it takes a lot.
(J) And even your passion that would seem like condemnation, if you, you know, processed it like that and defined it with that, is more about His passion about what prevents His love from being (Martha: yeah.) impacting. And so He’s after that thing that is stopping the love, and He’s so passionate about it, its, its frightening.
(M) Yeah, my, one of my better verses is “Love is strong as death. And if a man would give the whole of his house for it, it would be utterly despised.” It is so given you can’t earn it, you can’t stop it, you can’t affect it, you can’t diminish His love by being rotten.
(Carole) “Many waters cannot quench love.”
(M) “If I make my bed in Sheol…”
(Carole) Yeah.
(M) “…even there You are.” So how exciting that, that ah, that we’re all missionaries. So thank you for listening so deeply, Carole, it’s quite been our panorama since, since you spoke that, and the amplification of our purpose. The purpose is not just me to go out, and John to help me go out, as the missionary.  Everybody is a missionary.
(Carole) Well He put me on this song by Don Potter while you all were gone and it just, I just, John’s looking at me, sometime I get so excited about certain songs because it’s so… It’s like the Holy Spirit just takes over and, and amplifies what He’s speaking. But it’s a song by Don Potter called uhmm, “How Much Time”. And in it the essence is, ‘There’s a generation waiting for the love we didn’t get.’ Now that love we didn’t get, we didn’t get for lots of different reasons, but it really doesn’t make any difference because the Lord wants to bring us to the point where we lay that down, where we, where we embrace our lives and every portion of our lives and we receive the love from Him so that the generation, the next generation and for those who are coming home wounded and, and uhm, in such great need, will receive that love through us from the Father.
(J) And it talks about having to forget.
(Carole) Yes, forget what lies behind, and move on to the high calling.
(M) You know that perspective is one, not because of my age, but because every life is brief and, and what his point was, is we don’t know how much time each of us have. He is the beginning and He is the end. But that, that is a perspective of I have only a small portion of time in which to love and give love and be loved and get love. And one of the passions I had in this meeting was ‘you don’t want to miss it.’
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) It will be your greatest tragedy if you miss the purpose, to miss even your own, to miss your own journey. You have been on the journey, Carole; He just identified it more for you. It wasn’t that you entered a journey, it’s that He could speak to you because you were moving in the journey.
(Carole) Well I remember, that just brings to mind. I remember when you said, you asked the question, you’ve asked it several times. Ah, how long have you been saved? And I was thinking let’s see, was that September or was that October of 19? And your response was, “I have been saved since the foundation of the world. I’ve just been in the process of having it revealed.”
(M) Well,  let me just end with this scripture in Psalm 16, by David. “Lord, You are my portion, and my cup of blessing. You hold my future. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. I will praise the Lord Who councils me even at night. My conscience instructs me.” I woke up this morning, early, early, and I was in a dream where I was arranging booklets. (Martha laughs) So it was like I woke up in the middle of a project with the Lord, (Martha laughs) that He was putting in me of ah, when He could get at me asleep. So Carole’s vision comes from her word. And her vision has expanded our vision. Your life is a mission journey.
(J) And we all are missionaries.
(M) Uhmhmm. So may it, may that vision of light bless you all.
(Carole) Lift your vision higher, higher than it’s been before for the life of Christ, by Milton Carrol. While we were on our journey yesterday to view Mt. McKinley, and Denali national park, we stopped for lunch in a place called Healy. And it was really a log, big log cabin type restaurant, with real, real logs that had been joined together. And our waitress came to take our order, and she just was, you just, exuding from her was unhappiness, probably bitterness. She was just not a…
(J) She was ‘racked’.
(Carole) She, yeah, yeah. By the time she left, I, I began to see that there was a crack in her, in her boundaries, her stronghold, her walls, ok, the walls, in her walls. I don’t mean she just got ‘gushy’, she certainly didn’t. But I saw, I saw a crack and I realized that because we have no idea what goes on in the Spirit, if we’re on our journey, if we are living the journey, the Holy Spirit is free to go in and move whatever He chooses to move, tear down, whatever He chooses to do.  It’s the influence; but the influence of, of what the Holy Spirit… we don’t see, we don’t have to see it. It is happening. And I was watching it happen. And I don’t know what will come of it; it’s really none of my business. Uhmm.
(J) I saw her. I paid a different lady; at the cash register she was a different…
(Carole) Yes, yes she was.
(J) …she was a different person than when she took our order, absolutely.
(Carole) She was closed.
(J) Umhmm.
(M) Ok. There was nothing deliberate that we did.
(Carole) No.
(M) It was not ‘trying anything’. I feel like Carole, when you see a person in that position to be a waitress, if you see them as a person, with a life? That alone… This is one of John’s messages, you treat a child as if he were ‘a person’. And in fact Helen Whaley got so touched by his dealing with this infant that she said this is a booklet, so, to tell John’s stories with children. But it’s simply treating a person as though they exist, they are a real person and they matter. And we all had that attitude without any agenda or organization of it, and I watched her, I could say relax. But when I first saw her the only thing I had was ‘oh’, that was it, compassion.
(Carole) Yeah.
(M) I really didn’t pray. I didn’t.
(Carole) Umhmm.
(M) You didn’t either?
(Carole) Noooo. I don’t think I did; I could, I could have, who knows, oh God. You know, I go, “Oh, God…”
(M) But see that’s the groan of the Spirit.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) To me a groan of the Spirit is a mighty huge prayer, because that’s the way the Holy Spirit prays, Ohhh, ahhhh, and that constitutes to God ‘the cry’. So you prayed, and I prayed without realizing that it was…
(Carole) This wasn’t a prayer. We weren’t praying a prayer so to speak.
(M) Right.
(Carole) And really, we were just ‘being’, and we were enjoying truly, the fellowship of the Body.
(M) Umhmm.
(Carole) And the rest was, “I have a light, and it always shines, it shines in the day, and it shines in the night. When the dark days come, and the sun isn’t bright, I will be shinning, because I have a light.”
(M) Ohhh.
(Carole) The light is the Lord.
(J) That light is love. That’s what we saw in the car.
(Carole) Yes.
(J) We said, oh my-gosh, the light is love. That is what the light is, it’s, and because the Lord is love, and…
(M) And traveling with Don and Carole is always to have joy. There’s just joy. I love to travel with them. We were enjoying the food. We were enjoying the cabin. We were enjoying the day. We were enjoying each other. It was joy was at that table. And that in itself is rare.