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Facing God Alone
Episode #297
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guest: Julie
(M) We’ve been on the podcasts about solitude, and I had been thinking about the fact that; why people don’t go to solitude. It’s very deliberate.
(J) Hmhmm.
(M) Why do you, why do people dread solitude? Some people absolutely will not make any space in their life for solitude; they’re terrified of it. And I think the reason is accountability. If you don’t have the knowledge of accountability for what you’ve done and haven’t done, you will not follow God. I think for me, after He invaded my life with love, the next thing was responsibility. But He defined responsibility as ultimate accountability. John said something to define solitude, and I heard it and later it so struck me. Define solitude, John, and what does it mean?
(J) Well, as we were describing it, solitude is Lordship. And so I saw that, and this definitely ties what you’re saying, the accountability. If you will force activity or you will force doings or deeds or whatever, if you’re forcing all kinds of stuff into your area that should be in solitude, it prevents God from being God. It prevents Him from being Head in your life. You know, it’s that kind of dethroning Him with your own doings.
(M) Yes, you’re lord. But it’s a brilliant…Who would have ever, but you, described solitude as Lordship. But this is the verse that I ran across. “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed.” But now there’s one translation, not through a Man, but “He will judge everything by that Man”, capital ‘M’. There’s a better translation than the “New American”. What it means is that God’s standard is Christ.
(J) Hmm.
(M) And we’ll all be judged by that standard. Whether we measure up to that standard will be the judgment. Well, the problem is that’s impossible for me to do. But the goal of God is to conform all of us to the image of Christ. And it actually means the degree to which we’ve allowed Christ to be formed in us in character, in nature, in every way, through the cross, dying to self and letting Christ be, “for me to live is Christ”. “ I am crucified with Christ and I no longer live, the life I now live, I live by the Son of God Who loved me and gave Himself for me.” We will be measured by how much we allow Christ to live. That will be the judgment, but there will be a judgment. And that accountability was made real to me, goodness, in my twenties. That was one of the most powerful things He did was show me the accountability in the Word of God, and it became very clear to me. It changes everything. If you’re willing to let Him show you accountability, then you’re responsibility falls next in perfect order, because then if you’re accountable to Him, and you live…We live before Him accountable all the time, whether we’ll accept it or not. We live under the eye of God. I was watching the movie, “The Tree Of Life” again, the second time. Incredible movie; it’s about God. And the little boy says his normal prayers, ‘God forgive me’, blah blah blah, and then he kind of wanders off and says, “Where are You? Are You watching me?” And yes, yes, He is observing our heart, to the depths of us, and that accountability is inevitable. It’s coming to all of us whether we imagine it’s not or think it’s not. And the thing that Satan removed in the garden was accountability. He said, “You will not surely die.” There’s no consequence to eating that fruit. He called God a liar. And we call God a liar when we don’t live under the knowledge that there are consequences to everything. I shared that with someone this week. I said you go can go your way, but you must understand, and God will let you. He will even help you. If you want to be blind, you will be blinded by God. That’s what happened to the Pharisee’s, they see and don’t see; “Let these people be blinded.” But it doesn’t change the outcome. You’ve lost, this person lost a sense of consequence. And so that accountability… Julie was telling me this week something about discipling and accountability, that I discipled you to accountability.
(Julie) Well, can I share the context?
(M) Yes.
(Julie) I was driving back from the Atlanta airport having just put my eighteen-year-old daughter on a plane to fly away to New Zealand and begin her life with God. And as I was driving along, all of a sudden the Lord began to show me what He had done in my life through you that I didn’t realize. I appreciate more and more all the time that the mainstay of your discipleship has always been accountability. That’s where you began me, and that’s where you’ve always kept me. It was repentance with no excuse or blame. In fact the first time you ever, I ever heard you speak, that’s really about the only thing I got of everything you said. But that, that helped me and began a huge transformation in my life of coming into what I can now see was both accountability and solitude, that they’re kind of one and the same. Because you were leading me in repenting of all the responsibility I had not been in, and coming into that responsibility. But as I was driving along it’s like all of a sudden the Lord spoke something to me. He said very simply, very clear. He said, “All abuse is irresponsibility.” And He just panned back and He showed me this multiple generations of my family. And I won’t go into detail, but essentially what He was showing me was there was a pattern in those generations of crushing children and abuse of different kinds. And it was interesting that the Lord didn’t make any distinction of the degree of abuse or the kind of abuse. It was all on one plane for Him. It was simply irresponsibility. And it was parents not being in their accountability and dumping it on their children as such. And so it led to just a weeping worship, because I saw how when the Lord came to me through you with accountability, He was delivering; He was breaking the cycle of generations, and a whole cycle of abuse by bringing me into my accountability. He was showing me that it was because He had brought me into my place of accountability and solitude and sole responsibility before God. That is why my daughter could be flying to New Zealand as intact as she is, because it has spilled over. My children have seen that, and they have come up under that, and they in their, even to be sixteen and eighteen years old, they are in tremendous… They get it. They’re in significant accountability before God too. And I just had no idea that the power of that. I had no idea that the Lord was looking at it as breaking a whole cycle of generations and delivering generations in that one simple thing, that I would repent with no excuse or blame. And I would face Him, and I would be alone in my responsibilities and work out my life directly with Him, as you both taught me and modeled for me.
(M) Well, actually it’s coming to the light, isn’t it? It’s coming under the light as He is in the light. And when you’re in the light, you see, you see yourself. And solitude is light, because you’re going just to be with God. And it’s that. Solitude is a place where you walk in the light. And it says, “If we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.” Such an enormous universe is in that one verse. There’s an ‘if.’ First of all there’s an ‘if.’ Means we can or cannot, our choice. But if we come to the light, we will meet Him, Who is light and lives in the light, and then you’ll see what we’ve done, and then the blood of Christ can cleanse us, and we’ll have fellowship. Fellowship is based on light first, then blood. And without that functioning there is no fellowship. There’s no relationship. There’s no relationship in the Body with Christ. So, then it goes on to say, “If we say we have no sin we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” It goes on to say that “We make God a liar.” But that, I don’t know, it’s that word responsibility. I remember the Lord had said to me, I think it was this way, “Intelligence is responsibility.” And that means that if you’re not responsible, you’re not smart, no matter what. You do not have spiritual intelligence, practical intelligence until you have responsibility. And responsibility is a beautiful thing. It keeps you grounded in reality. It keeps you sane. It keeps you in need of God. And to avoid responsibility, we really in human nature, we do not want to bear responsibility. We think we shouldn’t have to, but we were created for a garden with responsibility. And it was a tremendous responsibility to rule, not only to work, but to rule and subdue the earth. That was our responsibilit. We were created for it, and so when we don’t pick it up, we are a drag and a menace and a weight to everybody else, because somebody has to pick it up.
(J) Umhmm.
(M) We’ve had people in our family that because they wouldn’t assume their responsibility it fell on, like a heavy stone, on others, for years and decades. And it created such, how shall I say, trauma. It created crisis, because we had to bear responsibility that was not ours to bear. And it created a tremendous crisis in the family. And it does. Alcoholism, addiction is a disease of irresponsibility. That’s what I’ve learned. If the alcoholic will not accept responsibility to live, he uses the alcohol to escape, or the drug, or food, or whatever, to escape from the responsibility of living life before God under that terrible light. But that’s where everything gets solved, in the light. It’s not just that you come and be accountable. It’s that God meets you in the light, and then everything is solved, and you are transformed by the light, into the light. You become the light of the world.
