Episode #464 – Truth or Lie – A Mind for War

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Truth or Lie – A Mind for War
Episode #464
October 25, 2015

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

This is the continuation of a series of Podcasts started in Episode #463.

(Martha) I was on Sparks this morning and his book about spiritual warfare, and he said this. You have to find out the tactics of the enemy. When you go to war, you have to know what the enemy does. You don’t have to know a whole lot about the enemy. You don’t have to know the deep things of the enemy. Forget that. It’s real simple, and his tactics are all the same. Sparks said or wrote about the mind. “If the enemy can get into the mind, something which is not truth, the lie, he has undermined your whole position. If he can get a lie in, if he can get a half truth in, if he can wrap it up in pious platitudes, he’s got you. The primary strength of the believer against the enemy is that he is absolutely girded in his mind with the truth.” So you can say, “Oh no, I have been given authority over every power of the enemy. Oh, no, I have a sound mind.” You have to refute it directly, and once you do, you become fortressed in that truth, and you’re less susceptible. But this was something the Lord taught me early on when I was into inner healing. He taught me that, and he did it in my life as well. If you’re not given, if you’re not helped in your parenting as a child to exercise your will and your choice, you lose the belief that your will makes any difference. And He taught me that the… I would read this statement, “You lead in the Christian life by your will,” and I didn’t have a clue what that meant. And then one day He took me to Psalm 101, where David was exercising his will, “I will dwell in my house in a perfect way. I will silence every liar,” or whatever it was. And God said, “Say that to Me. Choose that.” And I said, “I really can’t perform it. It’s really kind of big.” “I’m not asking you to perform it, I’m asking you to choose it.” And so, I went through that Psalm numbers of times over the years to make those same choices. And then I began to understand the power of choice, and that’s why I teach so much about choice, because your life is ruled by your choice. Ok, and so I began to help people, a number of people through the years to take back their right to choose. So I’ve recognized with a lot of people I’ve worked with that they don’t possess their will, and they’re discouraged because they don’t think any ability to follow the Lord. Their choice, they don’t even understand choice. When children are raised under severe legalism they don’t believe their choice makes any difference. If they’re also in extremely abusive, alcoholics say, situation where the child has no space or opportunity to exercise their will, they don’t believe in it. And so, you have take back your will. It’s yours. It’s your sacred gift from God. You are free.
(J) And it’s the most assaulted. It’s the most assaulted thing, because if you can take my will, you can take my life.
(Martha) Right. That’s exactly what Sparks wrote or said. Ok. “Here we find Satan masking himself, and what he is after is to get at the will of the believer. Once he can get his way into the will, capture the will, get the will on his side acting in his favor,” and I’m going to add listening to the will of Satan, “he has captured the citadel, the high place, and the battle is his. How will he do it? He will seek to get at the will first through the conscience, for nothing will carry the will more effectively than the conscience. If he can get the conscience, if he can accuse you through reason…” So what the enemy does is he makes suggestions to you that you think are your thoughts. That’s why you have to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and you have to know the Word, so that you can say, “No, no, no, I’m dead,” or, “That’s a lie.” You have to know, you have to know what’s going on in your heart and your reason, because if Satan can get an inroad into your reason, he can make you bitter where you wouldn’t be bitter normally. He can make you believe a lie. He can make you believe… He can exaggerate something. He can make you believe that somebody is against you and then a whole division takes place that had no basis in reality. So, you can’t permit yourself, and I’m fighting this on a particular ground right now. I’m fighting against thoughts that I know are contrary to the will of God, the nature of Christ, and I’m having to just stand on the Word. Part of the warfare is your “loins are girded with Truth.” And I haven’t gone back, but I be that word mean reality, because truths is one thing, but the reality of God is another. And so, we have to, we are girded. We have to be girded in our loins. I read that that’s the place of strength, the thigh. Your strength is in the truth that you understand and know; the facts. And so, when the enemy can get you about the truth, he has weakened you.
(Carole) Your “(His) truth shall be my shield and buckler.” Psalm 91.
(Martha) Wow. Wow. Umhmm. So truth is your protection. It is your strength. And one of the things that David does in the Psalms is he repeats the truth about God. That’s one of his ways of fighting the thoughts that come to him when there’s an attack. We have to know the character of Christ. I had an experience with someone over a period of several months, and that person had absolutely no connection to the integrity of Christ, to just the basic spiritual principles of “you forgive, you don’t slander, you don’t expose, etc, etc,” the basic, there are basic standards that are in the Word that you don’t need to have a revelation about. And so, this person… There’s no way that this person will long survive, because the enemy… She has no girding of her strength with the truth. And if you don’t have truth as your strength, what you do is build flesh. There’s someone I love dearly, and I have worked with her, or walked with her a long time, and she’s given me permission to read this letter, which is… She didn’t even know that I was on the issue of the lie, and that we were refuting the lie. And this is a kind of a confession. She’s given me permission to use her name, Helen Whaley. This is a beautifully written example. “I spent my need on myself, and it became the motivation to gain what I decided I should have. What the lie said was withheld from me by God, the same lie in the garden, God has withheld something. Need is meant to know Him, and there it becomes treasure. When I defend the Lord in myself saying the words without the revelation, I’m defending the lying, false story I made up of me and of how I think God should be, really saying I would have done a better job of being god in my life. To write my own story is to make myself make up myself and make up everyone else.” Do you see? That’s the way of saying it was all lies. “The people I make up can’t be people and be who they are. So, a demonic torment of fear came in through a door I opened in rage and bitterness that infected, distorted and defiled everything I saw or touched. I can see it running through my life. It began with that little lie of garden, ‘you didn’t have what you should have had in childhood or whatever,’ and so it grows and grows into a bigger and bigger lie until everything in your life is a lie. You don’t know anybody, because you have a lie. They are formed into a lie you make about them.” And that explains so much to me about how people can completely misunderstand one another, because they have started on believing a lie that grew and grew and grew into a monster that then possesses them. And then she says, “The battle is precise.” That is brilliant; ‘the battle is precise.’ It’s not all over the map, not a general flailing. It’s a battle against the lie to believe God is good and He is God. She said, “I blamed others, but I was actually the lie.” That was a lie. She was blaming God, and that’s something most people, we don’t ever get to. “I made up my God to match the story I would make my life to be.” See how subtle it is? Now this dear woman has done an extreme amount of work as you can tell to find that it was a lie. That’s the big one right there, to realize that what you’re living in, what you’re believing and thinking, feeling and emotions go with it. All the emotions tell you the lie is the truth. But she has done the work of integrity, of coming into the light discovering the lie, and then refuting it, and now coming to the truth. And she quotes this scripture in Matthew 11. “Blessed, happy, fortunate and to be envied is he who takes no offense at me and finds no cause for stumbling in and through me and is not hindered from seeing the truth.” And if we can be hindered from that truth, Satan will do it. She ended by saying, “Acceptance of my story and living in my life that He gives,” meaning the truth, “is my worship of God.” You worship Him in truth. You see? It all comes around to what Jesus said, “You must worship the Father in Spirit and Truth.” Reality. And so she came to reality, and then she had worship. Isn’t that fantastic? So, we don’t know how much we are bombarded by the lie; we’re infected with the lie; we’re endued with the lie. And she ends by saying, “I love the Lord, my God, and His beautifully purposed will in my story that is His to write.” Not hers. She wrote her story as we all do, and she discovered He was writing the story. And that was the truth. And that means there’s a whole universe to discover about your story, and it’s not this limited box, teeny box that grows smaller and smaller of the lies. And the lies are basically about God. So if you know the truth of what the Bible says about God, about who He is, about who Jesus is, even if you don’t fully believe it, if you know that’s the truth, you can stand on that. So, it’s crucial for you to be girded with the Word, and that is our offensive weapon also, which we are learning to use.

Truth or Lie – A Mind for War – Episode #464 – Shulamite Podcast