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A Stone Jar, Empty
Episode #268
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) What He wants me to do, He does, what He wants me to be, He is, where He wants me to go, He goes, and what I need is Him, in all that He is.
(J) Practically, it’s just amazing because Christ doesn’t ask for a missionary; Christ asks to be a missionary in you. And Christ doesn’t require you to be filled with faith, He wants to live His faith out in you. And Christ doesn’t require me to be strong, Christ doesn’t require me to be filled with joy and delight, Christ doesn’t require me to be pure, Christ requires to live His purity, His joy, His strength in me.
(M) And that’s whey Roman’s twelve, one is really the basic requirement and gift God wants us to give Him. We really have nothing to give Him. The only thing I have to give Him is my body, and my will. And so He says, “I beseech you brethren, by the mercies of Christ”, because of Christ’s unbelievable mercy for us in our helplessness. “I beseech you”, I beg you, “by the mercies of Christ, to present your body a living sacrifice.” In other words, you don’t live in your body anymore, you live His life. You’re not gone, but you’re not living it. And a living sacrifice speaks of death and resurrection, and that the body is holy and acceptably human. It’s your reasonable service of worship, reasonable, and that’s what He called me to. That’s the basis of that testimony.
(J) It’s reasonable if you understand it. (John laughs.)
(M) It’s reasonable because it’s the only thing you have to give Him.
(J) Right.
(M) And we think we have so much more to give Him. And I told her, some of my life, I said, He called me to be a writer. I was not, didn’t want to be, never wanted to be a writer, and He called me to be a writer. And I just said, here’s my body, and I followed Him in the path. And it was a long path to even begin to write. It was a path of prayer first. And I said to her, He… I can say, not giving it anything special, this is normal Christianity, I can say, He writes what I put down on paper. And I said to her, you don’t understand, I hear those words, I cannot speak them, I cannot… they don’t come from me. The Lord will even give me words I don’t know the meaning of, and I have to look them up. I’m not stupid, I have a very good mind as a gift from God, but my mind is not involved in what He does, what He writes in me. Only to, to brood on His words with Him, only to receive out of the depth of the word in me what He, how He wants to express it. And Paul said I speak to you with words of the Spirit, and that’s what, that’s what we want to be; people who speak the words of the Spirit. Paul’s writings are the words of the Spirit. He got the words of how to express what God wanted to say from the Spirit. So even that, even our work, our calling, our anointing is Christ. I remember telling, trying to tell someone about the exchanged life, and I said there is only One Prophet.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) No one can say ‘I’ am the prophet, because I’m only the vessel of the Prophet, Christ Jesus, Who is Apostle, Prophet, Teacher, Giver, Administrator, everything. Christ is everything. And she said, “But what about me? I’m a prophet.” She didn’t get it at all. And really it’s kind of her downfall that she didn’t get it.
(J) Well it’s an incredible deathblow to our pride, because we do think that we have something to offer.
(M) Hmhmm. We do think He has made me ‘something’, and I can take that name to myself.
(J) So is this why Christ… Is this why Paul boasted in his weakness? Because Christ was his fulfillment, that anything you saw that was anything good, basically it was Christ.
(M) Yes, exactly. He came to discover it the hard way, I am sure.
(J) Well, you know something, which one of us doesn’t have to go through this in an awful, awful…way
(M) Yes we do, we have to live it out in difficulty and challenge and the cross, and continual conflict. But John, if you can get what He’s after from the beginning of your walk, how wonderful.
(J) Oh it’s beautiful; that’s absolutely beautiful.
(M) And I could see from her face she really did get it, because she said, “Oh, that is so easy.”
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) And may it be so.
(J) May it hold her.
(M) Yes.
(J) May it, may it wrap her around and hold her and keep her. And uhmm, it really is the only strength, the only power. It’s amazing!
(M) Well and all of our idea of worship… The one thing He wants in worship, we are very loathe to give Him, and that is our body, which includes our brain and our heart and our mind and soul; the body includes that. He is to be, He is to be visible in our body on this earth, and that is worship. I think it’s what Jesus meant when He spoke to the woman at the well and He said, “Neither in this mountain nor in the temple, will you worship.” You will worship Him as He lives within you. And the worship to Him will be to surrender your body as a vessel, an empty vessel. Oh this morning I got something that I’m going to put in writing somewhere. But I was considering that we are an empty vessel; we are merely a vessel, that’s what He asks of us in the New Testament. It’s different than the Old Testament. And the first miracle in Cana was the water pots at the wedding, the wedding of Cana where they ran out of wine. And so, I’ve heard others say that it’s a picture of the marriage of the Lamb. But this morning I saw it for myself, that those water pots were stone, John. I don’t think I’ve ever caught they were stone water pots sitting empty waiting to be filled with water for purification. And Jesus said go fill the water pots. Well they, each one was from thirty to forty gallons, but they were stone. That’s what we are, we’re empty, and we are stone. There’s nothing in us but stone.
(J) Hmm.
(M) Our hearts are stone. Our minds are set in cement. And (Martha laughs), and we are also empty. And I remem… I’ve told this, but I got it just fresh this morning. You have to become empty before the water of the word can cleanse you. What are you laughing at? (John’s laughing quietly.) The stone?
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) So, I was thinking this morning, I came to the Lord through having all my dreams fulfilled. And somewhere around twenty-six, I had everything that a woman could want. And suddenly I was an empty stone pot, with no meaning and no purpose, and no fullness. My fulfillment did not fill me. And though I wasn’t reading the Bible, the Word came to me, and you’ve heard me say, it was, it was emblazoned in front of my face; I could not escape it. It was “Thou shall love the Lord your God with all thy heart, with all they soul, with all thy mind, with all they strength.” And that word filled me to reveal my emptiness; that I did not, the one thing He wanted was that I love Him, and I had nothing in me that loved Him. I was totally empty of that Word. And then He came and gave me His… He filled me with the Word by reading the Bible until I saw Jesus. He filled me and purified me by the Word, the water of the Word. And then when He began to pour me out to other people several years later, what came out was the wine of the Holy Spirit. You see? It’s about salvation. And so, that’s, that’s our transformation. That’s a picture of the marriage of the Lamb, of how He saves us. We come to our emptiness as stone pots. Then the other thing is, we are clay jars; we’re earthen, we’re out of the dirt, we’re human, and we hold this treasure in clay pots, that the exceeding greatness of the glory should be of God and not of ourselves. So we’re just containers. That’s all we’re meant to be. We were created simply to be a container. And that we’re the temple? Jesus said neither in the mountain where you worship, as a Samaritan, nor in Jerusalem at the temple, will you worship. Worship stood before her, in a body. When He ascended He has no more body but our body. And He wants us to manifest Him, His words, His countenance, His light, His glory, to manifest Him without knowing it, and to let Him be seen in this world in a body. He is all about the incarnation. And so we are vessels. If we can understand and accept that our emptiness is all He wants. All He needs is our, an empty body. Let me see, Ian Thomas, Major Ian Thomas puts it this way, “You vacate, He occupies. You exit, He comes in.” Yet at the same time I could tell this young woman, I’m here, but I’m observing a Life of which I am not capable in one speck.
(J) We have to value what He values. And I have seen that I value… My emptiness has not been my value. My emptiness has proven my lack of worth, and lack of value, so if I have nothing to offer, I have no value and no worth. And so when He asks that of me, it’s a death nail of my hopes, my dreams, my pride, my ah, my own self-esteem and self-value. And then you just say, I’m completely…It, it’s a mourning. You go through a mourning, that you’re like, “Lord, I’m nothing, I am nothing and I have no value, I have no worth, I have no noth… But the paradigm shift, so to speak, is that you have to value what He values, and He never values what I value. I always value something so beneath Him. And He always has something, and it’s just insulting because I always, you know, I always go on the low end, and He always has something so much higher. And His higher is, “My value of you, and your worth and your value is not what can come out of you. It’s not what you can produce, it’s not what you are, so to speak, it is being an empty vessel so that I can come in.” And that, that’s the paradigm shift that I have to see, that my value and worth is what He says it is, and He says it is not something that produces, but something that carries…
(M) Receives..
(J) And receives.
(M) As children we are made to carry responsibility in order to be loved. That is what makes us think that; that’s what makes it so hard to be unable to do anything. But that’s the child. That’s Him reducing you to a child. However, in emptiness, in my being empty, I’m only empty of a dead woman who is unfixable. And that’s another thing I said to this young woman is, you can’t be fixed; you’ve been made new. And it’s not that when I vacate my body I’m actually vacating it on this earth to have a heavenly life of union with Him in this body. I’m here, but in union with Him, to such a degree which when you reach a certain place, where you, you can’t… He is you and you are Him. And there’s no division at all. So that you become the ‘you’, you would have loved to be, if you could’ve been it.
(J) Yeah, but in that you have to, you have to die to and lay down your hopes of being that thing that was lovable. And it always goes back to the parent.
(M) And so He’s destroying all of our hope in ourselves, all of our self-confidence.
(J) But it’s never a, it’s never an easy thing. It’s never a ‘tra-la-la’ thing, it’s never a ‘skip-to-my-Lou’ kind of deal. It is a, it is a death. It is a mournful death, where you, you know, good riddance! It’s a wonderful thing. (Martha laughs.) Because really, self-life is . . . “so self, it’s just gross, it’s never going to produce anything good, and ah, it’s just, it has no value. But it’s, it’s a, it’s a renewing of your mind that you have to say, ok, You want emptiness, not fullness. You… and I don’t gain Your love with my fullness; I gain Your love with my emptiness. It’s totally different, because a parent tells you, you get my love if you do what I want. God says, you get My love…Number one, He loves us ‘period’, which is mind-blowing. But that My love is expressed to you as you are nothing, as you are emptied, not as you ‘do’.
(M) And, and it’s what I’ve said for forever, God loves you for no reason. God loves me for no reason; I’ll never give Him reason. I’ll never be anything lovable, so that He can love me.
(J) I do, I do get it. (Martha laughs.) But, but I don’t get it.
(M) It’s, it’s, it’s terrible to be strung between two existences, where you have, you’re coming into the indwelling of Christ in ways that you don’t see, Mister John. Everybody sees Christ in you, but you.
(J) Well maybe that, maybe that’s the control that we were talking about.
(M) What do you mean?
(J) Maybe the control was to produce and to be something in order to have value and worth, and God’s saying that’s not My value, this is My value, My value is emptiness.
(M) And weakness, as Paul…
(J) Yeah, and that’s real hard, that, that I so don’t value weakness. How could you value anything weak? Hee-hee-hee.
(M) Well, I have no doubt that Paul went through the crisis of that.
(J) He’s a man, and he’s human, so there’s, there’s no way.
(M) He was quite a large-lifed man.
(J) He was very, very sufficient.
(M) Oh, yeah…(Martha laughs.)
(J) I mean, you know, think of all the scriptures he says, Jew of Jews, I was a Hebrew of Hebrews; I was the top notch.
(M) And a zealot for God.
(J) I had everything. I was everything that, that anyone could require to be for God. I was there, but I was nothing (John laughs) that God required. Can you imagine? No wonder he had to go to the dessert fourteen years and die.
(M) Exactly. And read 1Cor. 4 and 2Cor. 4, about his sufferings. He says, “We suffered until we were almost dead, and indeed we had the sentence of death within us, but it was so that”, that big so that, “our dependence would be on God, and not on ourselves.” So he had the sentence of death to the old man. We have a sentence of death that has been executed and judged and even accomplished.
(J) Ok, well I’m, I’m really praying that this podcast, this if it’s two or whatever, I don’t know how many it’s going to be, but this set of podcasts, about this subject, is a strategic nuclear bomb out into the Kingdom.
(M) Oh, well then, let me say it again.
(J) I want you to! I want you to!
(M) Hallelujah. Ok. What He wants me to do, He does; what He wants me to be, He is; where He wants me to go, He goes, and everything I need He is.
