Episode #430 – God’s Keeping Power

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God’s Keeping Power
March 1, 2015
Episode #430

With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow

(M) Carole and John and I have just finished a series of podcasts about transcendence, but it came to me to want to share and feel led of the Lord to share how I came to see that. Some months ago John and Carole planned a little stay at the beach in South Carolina to get away after Thanksgiving. And we usually, you know, go to rest and write and fellowship and have meetings with the Lord. But on the 1^st of November, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. So let me say at the outset that I’m fine and healed and well and clear and everything. But I didn’t know that at the time. And my mother had breast cancer. My sister had breast cancer, and my sister survived. My mother did not. So that probably would be the greatest fear of my life, and I had a few moments of total meltdown. But as I sought the Lord as we met numbers of times and prayed, and we got many promises of healing. I want to say there are three kinds of illness: sickness unto death, sickness to chastisement and sickness for the glory of God. And the Lord never called this a sickness of chastisement. But I begged Him for repentance, and I was up at 1 am one night, and I said, “I’m going to wait until You show me my sin.” Then by 4 or 5 o’clock I really saw it, and cried til 6; repented of that one. Then He gave another huge, huge area, and it was actually the failure to nurture myself, which I’ve talked about on some other tape series. But never did He call this a sickness unto death nor unto chastisement. And so, as I do always asked how He wants to treat His body; this temple is His. And Nee taught me years ago to either the doctor or faith, either one; God’s choice, not mine. So I waited, and I heard a still small voice, “You will have surgery.” So, the doctors were optimistic about it; early stage, stage one. But always the issue is whether it has metastasized into the rest of the body, and they have to go into a lymph node to find out and other tissues and other x-rays. So, I was at perfect peace because that was His will, and I knew it was. I knew that I would go for surgery. Where some don’t, that was His calling to me for His Body, not my choice. So, it was as if the Lord picked me up and moved me through where I should be, when I should be there. And the system I entered was Northside Hospital in Atlanta, and it is a highly efficient, highly professional, extremely caring process. But they move you through the system like clockwork. And in one of the x-rays they found a spot on my liver, and that was another little scare there. In the meantime the Lord absolutely took my mind off of it, and while I had my moments of meltdown, I was astonished how I was on other things. And I was not concerned with it and not involved. That was the strange thing. I was not involved. I was kind of outside of it, and it was happening for me, and not about me. So, I went for that MRI, and before I could get to the car from the x-ray unit, the doctor called and said, “There’s good news.” And then he said so and so and so and so. I said, “I heard the good news. Could you please repeat the rest of it?” And he laughed and said, “Your x-ray is clear. It’s benign.” So that was a relief, because that would have meant something very extremely much more serious than just breast cancer. So, by the time I got to the surgery, I realized that only my toes were left, and perhaps my brain that they had not examined with x-rays and MRI’s and all kinds of probes and so forth. And so, I went through surgery and the prognosis is excellent. It was an out-patient procedure, which tells you how minimum it was, not minor surgery, but it was in terms of cancer treatment, it was the most minimum you could ask for. And I had one day from the surgery after Thanksgiving to get ready to rest at the beach for a whole different reason than we imagined. So I have been nurtured and cared for by John and Carole and fed and comforted and loved. Carole and others everyday made proclamations of my healing from the scriptures He gave. This was a time when the Word of God was the boat on which we rode, and we sailed on that boat of the Word of God through the whole process. We had been memorizing Psalm 91 for months and it says, “No plague will come near your dwelling, no pestilence.” So that Psalm and then so many other scriptures: Ps 92:10-15 is the promise of my vitality and old age. My daughter gave me Psalm 18. This was probably a central scripture, the one I went back to over and over, and it happened to be a major turning point in my life. It was this scripture. Vicki gave me Luke 1:37 and 38, “For with God nothing is impossible, and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment.” And then Mary answered the angel, “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to what You’ve said.” And that was one I rested on. “Let it be done to me what You have declared.” And one major one was Jeremiah 39:17, “I will deliver you on that day declares the Lord, and you shall not be given into the hand of the man of whom you are afraid, for I will surely save you and you will not fall by the sword, but you will have your life as a prize of war because you’ve put your trust in Me, declares the Lord.” So many others; John 6:50-58. And Carole and Lori and Jennifer and John and others including Gabriella in Austria declared it and proclaimed it daily. And another one was Isaiah 41, “Fear not, there’s nothing to fear, for I am with you. Do not look around you in terror and be dismayed for I am your God. I will strengthen you and harden you to difficulties.” And He did that. In the middle of it I had a severe back injury and was absolutely miserable. But when I went into surgery and all the preparation, which was five hours of preparation almost, four hours at least. Oh, my back pain disappeared, absolutely. I was put on a 12 inch wide, steel rack for one x-ray. I was in wheel chairs and backless chairs and all kinds of miserable devices, and I had absolutely no pain. That was a major, major miracle and gift for me, because I would have suffered a lot. Somehow the back injury just vanished. And then we were certain there was a lot of enemy warfare trying to take me out. I knew that deeply. So Jeremiah 30:17 was there “For all who devour you will be devoured. And all your adversaries, every one of them will go into captivity, and those who plunder you will be for plunder. All who prey upon you, I will give for prey. I will restore you to health, and I will heal you of your wounds, declares the Lord, because they’ve called you an outcast.” So, I am already after 9 days ago, I am already so removed from it. It’s as if still that… I said to the Lord, “I need to sit down and absorb this, what I have been through and what’s happened, that I have had cancer. I’ve had the big “C” word, the frightening “C” word and I have survived it and will survive it and am healed.” I’m in the most enviable place you could be. And of course my heart is very, deeply stirred for women who go through this. And I felt like He said, “No, you don’t.” It was as if I passed through it, outside of it, above it and beyond it; and that it really never really got into me as an identity. It never got into me what it meant. And so when we came to the beach we settled down for a couple of days and on Tuesday morning all of a sudden I saw the incredible thing that God had done, and I began to talk to Carole and John about transcendence. And as the words came to me, “Transcendence is greater than sovereignty.” Sovereignty is God is in control, but transcendence is such a super-natural exercise of His sovereignty. And John and Carole began to get such revelation. They had words for it that I couldn’t put it into words. All I could say was… I had a visual of that this tremendous wind of the Spirit came down from heaven, picked me up, moved me in spite of myself, carried me through the process of this experience to the end, and everything I needed was there. Everything was provided. Every expert person was there. My son is a pathologist, a cancer expert. He and his wife came to Atlanta, and he was able to look at the slides and be very involved with the surgeon. And so, it was like I said, we floated on a boat, all of us together got on this boat. I was sailing on it, and we sailed through. And I began to see life with God is like that, that it is a transcendent move of the Spirit. And we saw Carole move through the death of Don. It was a transcendence where God reached down and picked her up and just carried her through. For even now under the second year, she’s still being carried where that issue is concerned in her life. There is the most incredible grace, power, peace, freedom and still tears, but the most incredible transcendent move of the Spirit on her that just picked her up. She was in the greatest, possible level of weakness, and that’s when God picks us up the best. But everything He does in our lives is under this transcendent, enormous power of God. John went through it with his finger. When he came to knock on my door at 9:30 at night and just said, “I’m on my way to the hospital.” And I said, “You’re not going without me.” And he was peculiar, bizarre. He drove the car 45 minutes to the hospital. He was completely at peace. He actually had joy. And he moved through that whole experience. When they held up the finger he smiled and said, “Oh, just throw it away. It won’t work, will it?” And they said, “No.” He said, “Ok.” I was sitting there, and he said, “Ok, throw it away.” Oh, it was incredible. And I thought, my goodness, his male, warrior spirit has kicked in, and he’s facing this like a champ. No, it was not that. It was transcendence. God picked him up from the moment it happened he knew what to do, how to get ready to go to the hospital. He could drive the car. He drove the car back, and he had the very phenomenal surgery that repaired his finger and hand so that there’s virtually no evidence that it was ever cut off. And he told about it in I think in the podcast and in one of our conferences. And Wanda Zoller came up and asked him a question that I had not asked him. I didn’t think to ask him. No one thought to ask him but Wanda. I’ll love her forever for this. She said, “John, what was it like.”   And I want John to say.
(J) Well, I remember, you know, just that I said to her that the…. And that was what I talked about in the CD, “Pointing Towards the Kingdom,” from the “Reign of the Kingdom” series. And I said that the Son was worshipping the Father within my body and within my life in my darkest place of fear. And she said, “What did that worship look like?” And I said, “It was very loud. It was extreme and it was loud.” That blew my mind, because it wasn’t like I was sitting there singing or it wasn’t like I was… It was His presence in my body worshipping the Father, and it wasn’t like He was using my arms or my legs or my voice or my… He was dwelling there and was resident within that dark place of fear, because I always had a fear of, you know, illness and stuff like that. And so He brought light into darkness and into my unbelief ultimately. Yes, it was to my unbelief.

God’s Keeping Power – Episode #430 – Shulamite Podcast