Episode #434 – Open Heavens

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Open Heavens
March 29, 2015
Episode #434

With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special Guest: Carole Nelson and Jennifer Wentzel

(M) You reminded me the other day, John, or recently where I said, “God, I just don’t love You enough to do this.” And you reminded me that He was so pleased I just told Him the truth. That’s a confession. That’s a confession of failure, and I was saying, “You have to fix that,” and so He does. But Nathanael…Here’s what He said to Nathanael. Nathanael…He said, “I saw you under the fig tree,” and he immediately worshipped Him. “And You said, “You see me now?” “You will see an open heavens and the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” There are open heavens. That tells us what open heavens are, someone who can tell the Lord the brutal honesty and that without any façade, guile, duplicity, deception, subterfuge, hidden agenda. To that one there’s open heavens. And as I’m going back over my life about this, I’m seeing how God has been…It’s not like I’ve had light sin or little sin. I’ve had huge, horrible sin. It’s so easily rid of. There are times when the Lord has come to me. I was not asking for the glory when it fell on me 35 years ago. I didn’t know the glory. I wasn’t asking for anything, but, “Help me get through this conference.” That was it. He just broke in. Driving the car one day and He broke in with a vision. Walking down the hall in the church one day and suddenly opened up before me an open vision. That’s supposed to be our heritage. That’s the book of Acts. That’s, that’s what we’re supposed to have. And I believe this is the key to open heavens for everybody who will take hold of it and believe that we are cleansed of what we confess. We are that second cleansed, because we receive it. We’re already cleansed, but when we confess it, then we can be fixed and cleansed. I believe this is the key to the outpouring of the Spirit on believers. We are stuck on our sin, so many of us are. So many others, vast numbers of others, don’t even deal with their lives as having any sin, because they don’t walk in the light. And we’ve met them too, who walk in darkness. There is a diabolical brilliantness to people who don’t confess sin and purport to know God. So that’s the scary thing of the end times. But as born again believers we have access, we have been given “every spiritual blessing in heavenly places.” We have been given everything that pertains to life and godliness in Christ Jesus; everything. And I want more, I want more of heaven. When I had this experience, and I’ve written it out, and it’s going to be probably a couple of months before it’s ever available, but when the glory came on me before that conference, I felt like I was just a hair between me and heaven and seeing into heaven. And I believe that heaven is that much around us, on us, for us, and we are so blind, because we have the…What does the veil mean? You can’t see. You can’t see spiritual realities. Like Elijah said, “Show this man the real reality and he sees this army of chariots.” There’s a whole reality right before us that we can’t see because of this veil. And the veil for some is not about sin. Some are confessing endlessly sin. The veil is there because of the unbelief in the cleansing. For others the veil is there from not seeing. And you just told me yesterday about a book that sold in the millions that was a complete lie of a little boy that supposedly went to heaven. It’s not the “Heaven Is for Real” book, but it’s another one. And now the boy’s conscience…God bless him. His conscience hurt him that he was, he and his father lied. And the book has been withdrawn. So that’s the kind of counterfeit of heavenly experiences that are going on. I went to a group I followed for a while, and the Lord told me to go to a conference, which I had never done in my whole life before or since by myself. So I got on a plane and went. And I went there to see how absolutely false. It was all about walking this and that with angels and nothing about Jesus. Nothing about repentance. Nothing about holiness. Nothing about the Bible. It was only fake experiences that the enemy will give us. And I walked away and said I’ll never read anything of you again. I’ll never come again, and I haven’t. And this was why Andrew Strom left it for the same, about the same time, for the same reasons. So… But the conclusion is sin is not a problem. It is completely solved. Grace is, “Where sin did abound, grace did much more abound.” If the Law had glory, much more does grace have glory. It’s overwhelmingly so, and I’ve been…Really I’m embarrassed that I’m just now realizing these two parts. I remember saying it. I remember teaching it.
(J) But you live it. You lived it, so what shame is there in that? Just because you didn’t know what you were living?
(M) Well…
(Carole) But you know what? When you said that to me this morning, I got so excited about it, but when you’re telling it, I went, “Oh, my, I’m so full of pride that I have not believed that,” and there was this silence, and you laughed and said, “Well, then confess it, and be cleansed! And be cleansed!” I said, “Ok, I’ll do that!”
(Jennifer) I just, I had such a picture. One of the things that I have, I don’t want to say I’ve despaired over, but I have definitely cried over it and been angry over it, is I think, and I don’t mean to call them out in any negative way because there’s a lot of grace and hope in that program, but kind of the Alcoholics Anonymous, which is forever after you are an alcoholic. There is no escape from that title. You are what your sin is, ok? And there is certainly a place for that program. I bless it, and I bless the people that are moving through it, but I know for me I think the thought of living out the rest of my life under those conditions, under being permanently defined in that respect by the most debilitating of my sins. It’s not the only sin, alcoholism addiction, but it is certainly one that leaps to the front when you’re under it. And it’s just been equal parts infuriating and grievous to me. And sometimes, maybe most of the time, things that hit me like that are either born out of places where I have been delivered, and so I have a passion for other people to be delivered from something and to break through what I see as a lie perpetuating there. Or it’s about something that I haven’t seen about myself yet, and listening to you, Martha, I realize that part of my despair and my anger is because that’s no small part of where I live really. I, not encompassing, I’m not making any blanket statements, because grace is much bigger than I am, but there is a place in my life where I have applied the miracle of the gospel to the system of the world.
(J) Oooo
(Jennifer)  And the world is not “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.” The world is once you have done something, there’s a certain amount of time you must spend atoning for that.
(J) Oooo
(Jennifer)  And there are certain things that you will never truly atone for, so you take a permanent place at the back, the back of the line. You never make it up to the front again. And there is an aspect of that in Alcoholic Anonymous that is very much within the world’s system. It says, (Jen’s paraphrase) “You have done these horrifying things. You have caused pain and destruction, not only in your life but in the lives around you, and so for the rest of your life, ‘Know your place.’ And that place is you are an alcoholic. You are ever and always first an alcoholic. And you should be grateful should anything positive come out beyond that, because you certainly don’t deserve it.”
(M) You know what that is, Jennifer? The alcoholism or any addiction…You’re not an alcoholic by the way. You’re not speaking from that.
(Jennifer)  No.
(M) They say, I believe, that alcoholism, any addiction is an issue of pride. So they make you take the label to solve the pride, and it never does. I know a man who had enormous pride and he tried to solve it apart from Christ, and it was devastating

A related resource on the Experiencing an Open Heavens and is found at LivingChristianBooks.com.

Open Heavens for Me – Episode #434 – Shulamite Podcast