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Haunting Love
Episode #333
April 28, 2013
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guests: Jennifer Wentzel and Carole Nelson
(M) My resurrection over the death issue will be the victory over that to which I died. So see, it’s just so huge. He’s so big that He killed me to conquer that which concerned me.
(Jennifer) And that, that is, is where the, the anointing comes in. The anointing comes in because it has been wrought out, wrung out, in your actual life. I can’t speak with any authority on something just because I read it. I can only have anointing and authority where He has wrought it out, wrung it out in my own life where I’ve walked it. So I might have a smaller testimony, but it is powerful in that it’s real, it’s real, it’s planted, it’s wrought out and those tether’s are gone and, and I can speak to what He’s done in my life and I can speak with His authority that He’s put in me in that overcoming. And I’m anointed for that when I talk to somebody about that. And there’s life through it, and you got wrung out, and so the Holy Spirit came and ‘woosh’, and I benefited from that. And it was planted and now my hope is that He’s going to walk it out and wring it out in real time in my life that I have that too.
(M) Gunter says Amen. I don’t believe, Jennifer, that there is any anointing that is powerful other than resurrection from the grave. And there is no resurrection without the cross, and there is no cross without a real-time dying; there is none. But in the resurrection is the power and anointing because it is Christ, no longer me in it. That’s why it is an anointing. It is Him. That’s why it is, it is possible to pass it on as light, not as words, but as revelation and light, because He is the One Who gave it, speaks it, and effects it in you. Isn’t that wonderful? It makes you love the cross. Years ago a girl, a woman said to me, “Martha, you love the cross, and I love”, I forgot what she said, I love the Word or something like that, but she said, “You love the cross.” I said, “I do? I must not know it.” No, I do love the cross. I go through it with as much resistance as a two-year-old Christian, but I know the resurrection side. I can’t say that I know how that resurrection will look, but I know that it will be light and joy and liberty. Where the Spirit is there is liberty. So, the value of the cross, the value of the cross is the resurrection.
(Jennifer) Now I don’t think that it necessarily needs clarification, but it came up in a comment in semi-relation to our blog. When I use the word experience, like if I am talking about my experiences with God, I suppose, I’m no talking about ‘la-la-la’, my feelings. I’m not talking about a sensation of God. I am talking about my life. I’m talking about my experience of God, which is to say my tangible, workable, the whole package, not just the pretty, not just the bliss, not just the happy. That is the reward of it, but it is not the all of it, because there is… Yes, it is the fullness of relationship in the same way, you know, I’m not married so I’m not gonna compare it to that, but you know, in dating someone you have days where you love everything about that person. And you’re just like ahhh, beautiful, wonderful, you know. Oh, I can’t imagine life without you and (she giggles) ‘la-la-la’. And then you have other days where even their breathing hits you down to your cell and you say why am I chained to this frog, to this monstrosity. Oh my gosh, so beneath me I can’t stand anything about you, your smell makes me crazy. Uhmm, but that’s, that’s relationship. You have ‘yay’ days, and you have ‘big nay days’, you know, absolutely not. And then you have days where it’s just kind of normal and you’re not really one way or the other. It’s, it’s the fullness of experience, I guess. That, that I believe is what we’re talking about, and I want to make that distinction clear. Because we’re not talking about sensations or ideas of God or little moments and emotional things. It’s just not that
(M) Oh, you talking, you’re saying it’s not believing your feelings, but it’s living an experience.
(Jennifer) Right. Yes, yes.
(M) Big difference.
(Jennifer) Big difference. Big difference. And I just want to make that clear. To me, John and Carole’s sharing of the cross experience, that is, that is the experience. In other words, that is what is being wrung out in their life in real time, second by second, minute by minute. This is their life, experiencing life. This is not an experience in the sense that, you know, I went to a conference and the worship was really great and I experienced enormous joy; that’s not…
(M) There’s a difference too I think between experiencing God in your spirit and heart, and experiencing what you feel in your soul that feels like it might be God, and not call it that but it’s just soul.
(J) It just reminds me of this whole devotion that you’ve got going on, “Who Are You God?” Which this devotion’s just incredible. But on February thirteenth you have one called “Yearning For God”. And this is how the Jewish Bible renders Psalm 91:14, “For He has yearned for Me,” capital Me, “And I delivered him.” The commentary from the Tehillim says, “The man of faith has displayed yearning for God, which is greater than love. For a lover’s heart can love a number of people or things, whereas one who yearns has only one desire, which excludes all else. Also love fluctuates, it flourishes and fade’s intermittently, whereas yearning remains consistently intense.” And that’s what I feel like you’re saying. There’s a difference between the feeling of love and the, and the yearning that we all are experiencing of God.
(M) I was thinking about the quote I read this morning by Tozer, in the NIV Worship Bible. It’s something like this, ‘Man needs God, and God needs man, and neither are satisfied until they have each other’. Isn’t that awesome?
(Carole) I just thank God that His need is greater than mine. His need for me is greater than my need for Him, and that’s the truth.
(J) And I’m grateful that not only is His need greater than mine, but His determined purpose to have me is greater than my determined purpose to have Him, because, yeah, He is a tidal wave where I’m a, a little flick of a pebble in a, in a brook. I mean He will come and (roaring sound) and I’m very grateful for that.
(Carole) Cuz I don’t have the energy. (Carole laughs.) I don’t, I don’t have the energy, I don’t, and He does.
(J) He has the energy, He has the where-withal, and He has the determined purpose.
(Carole) He’s the absolute provision. I told Martha the other day, I will, I find myself in Him. I didn’t even go looking because I didn’t have the energy. Seriously, I didn’t have, I didn’t have anything to go, I was, when your, when you’re cast down, you can’t get up, and you don’t have any energy to get up, and you don’t even really care about getting up. But He does, and He comes and He picks you up. And you go, you look around and you go, wow, the scene looks pretty good around here. And it’s hope.
(M) I’ve got to read this by Helen Whaley, exactly what you’re saying. “No matter where I go you will not let me be. You stalk me with Your Love. You wait, even as I shudder at my need. It is Love, because I’m ever need. Oh Divine Lover, You’ve come to slay me into Your Love. You overpower me with Your terrible, fierce, capturing Love. I cannot tame the ‘Want’ of it. I cannot outrun You or ever hide. My own emptiness, or is it ‘fullness’, is ever with me and I am so painfully aware of my ‘love-less-ness’; but it is the contrast of Your haunting, pursuing Love that is ever holding me that makes me even know my lack, while Your uncontainable Love wraps my tiny being and the whole universe, with Your longing.” (She says: Helen Whaley) “Turned into itself the question is, why can’t I love and be loved? And there is the answer. There is no ‘I’ in love, there’s love.” The ‘I’ He wants to eliminate is the old one so He can fellowship with the new one who is in Christ.” Isn’t that fantastic?
(J) When you said what you said, I saw this picture of when we were all sitting around watching that sheep have the baby. And she was having a lamb and she was pushing and she’s pushing and she’s pushing. And then all of a sudden she said I can’t push anymore and she laid down and she was going to die. I mean she had purposed so long and then she just said I’m done and she laid down. And I realized what happened and I got up there and I went over there and I assisted her. And, but that’s the thing. Your energies and your forcings and your determined purpose fails, and then all of a sudden you realize the Shepherd’s there assisting you and bringing forth Life. And that’s what happened that day. And we all were witness to it.
(M) So the yew didn’t die and the baby didn’t die, because you pulled out this beautiful little lamb.
(J) It was a big lamb.
(M) That was her problem, it was a big lamb. (Martha laughs.)
(J) When you said, what you were saying with Helen, I saw that ‘I love You’, comes as ‘I’ passes through love and is focused on You. So you lose the ‘I’, and you go into the You.
(M) And that’s what the cross does. That’s what He did with my objection to His wasting my life for forty years, at least twenty, some places; it was He took the ‘me’ out of it, so it was His love for all of us who were involved. It’s His love story really. It’s His love for me that gave me the privilege and enabled me in the privilege to serve Him. So it was His love for me. It was a gift to me to go through that for the travail for a soul. And so it’s not about me at all, from beginning to end. It’s about Him, because He’s the One Who endured beyond what humanly I could have endured. So it’s, that’, I’m just seeing that as a practical example of what you said. Say it again, you take, He takes the….
(J) You start with the I and you pass through the verb of love, and then your whole focus is on You. The end result is all about You, Him, rather than the ‘I.’ You lose the ‘I’.
(M) And so, through what little suffering I see not my victory at all. I see His victory not only over me but over them. And the pursuit, the violent pursuit of Love that is determined to conquer you and capture you to Love. How we resist that, because we’re stupid sheep. It’s like you and me trying to get the sheep in the barn over the ice. They resisted their savior. That’s all we know to do is, all we know to do is resist, and He knows that. So we won! It cost us, but we won that battle with the sheep!
(J) We did win that battle, but if you remember it had a very loud voice and a very looming presence that was screaming and running at them like it was gonna kill them, because I was, and then they ran into the barn. I mean, I was busting my rear-end all over the side of the thing, but the ‘roarrrrrrrah!’ came up out of me and… You know everybody thinks it’s this nice little crook and little staff, and it’s not always a nice little crook and a nice little staff. Sometimes it’s a ‘roarraaaah!’ and then they go ‘ohoooou’ and run away, you know?
(M) Where they’re supposed to be.
(J) Right, they go where they’re supposed to.
