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Jonah’s Need
Episode #316
With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special guests: Carole Nelson and Jennifer Wentzel
(J) Well Martha you just did a tape of the month on Jonah. And we’re discussing that and I really ah, would like to have that on, on a podcast, because it’s ah, rich stuff, it’s overflowing from the message that you just gave.
(M) I am over the top excited about this message, because I had never heard it; I’ve never understood it. Jesus referred nine times to Jonah, and I did not realize that until I got into it. And it’s just this huge, huge message. And so we, Carole just realized she had an experience of the same principle.
(Carole) Well, as we’re, as we’re ruminating going through this story, which is just so… Oh my goodness, I, I can’t even find words because it’s clears up questions that I didn’t even know that I had. And uhm, but it also brought to mind a very personal experience that I had with Martha, and I’m gonna put her in the, in the place of Jonah at this particular moment, but she was a totally different hearted Jonah. And ah, there was a, I sinned against Martha. Well it’s been a long time, but it was bad, it was really, really, really bad. It was just a thought, but the Holy Spirit got so hold of me over this thought that He told me I was gonna have to go confess it. I was down in the Atlanta area at the time, and she was up in Suches; and I had to drive from Atlanta to Suches, and that’s a two-hour drive, and I was in hell over that. I was terrified, because it was so bad that I felt like if I confessed this thing to her that I was done for, that she would have had no choice than just to reject me. Because it was, it was really that bad. And ah, and I knew it. And so I came all the way up, and I didn’t get to see her face to face, I wanted to, but I had to do it on the telephone. And I confessed this to her just knowing that it was gonna bring God’s complete rejection. Instead, she began to cry, and she said, I knew God would do that. Now later on, after we had gone through it and worked through it, uhmm, she wept and said, “I knew God would do that.” And what I’m seeing is, was He, He so wanted me to deal with this sin, to repent of it, to be free of it, so He could pour in His absolute love and complete compassion into my heart and my soul and my being, and that’s what He did.
(M) Carole, what I’m seeing these days is, is how crucial it is to have a heart that is that honest with yourself, and that honest with God. And, “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” And so you didn’t, you came immediately, as soon as you could, and, and you had… But you were honest with God about it and He told you how to solve it. And you didn’t know that He wanted to solve it with grace, and forgiveness and love and all that, that is God. But that’s the crucial emergency issue of life, to keep your heart with all diligence. And I thank you for sharing it that openly, but the real thing is that you live with your heart, absolutely transparent to God, absolutely open to God, and so what comes out of you is pure. And, and it’s so easy to harbor thoughts that are damaging and cursing to other people without repenting, and without realizing, that’s just a thought, I can think it and just keep it and it really doesn’t matter. Oh, it does, it forms your life. It forms who you are and it will become fruit in your life. So it’s, I never, I somehow or other from the beginning I’ve understood God knows every thought of my heart, every, every speck of inside of me that no one else knows, and so there’s no point in trying to hide it. But it’s not typical I don’t think to be that open to God and that accountable. You are utterly accountable for every thought, word and deed done in the body. You brought every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. And to me the story is about you, and about Him. You obeyed Him. And ah, and you’ve mentioned that to me two or three times with grief still. But it was, it was so commendable, God knew what you would do.
(Carole) I, I met, I met a God at the end of it that I had no idea existed. I had no idea that His compassion went that far. So I, you know I met Him. But I see you as, as the prophet, not Jonah, not really Jonah, really not because Jonah didn’t want the grace for Nineveh. And I was Nineveh, in my story I was Nineveh. And you, you did, you wanted the reconciliation.
(M) You know that He met you.
(Carole) Oh, I know it was Him. I was, I was stunned. I was stunned by His response and His love in the light of how I saw, how He let me see in His light the depth of even that wickedness and evil of that thought, that His love went way beyond that, lower than that, higher than that.
(M) See He didn’t want you to remain in the what, fear or shame or whatever of that, He wanted you to know His love transcended it all. He wanted you to know something about Him. And if you hadn’t obeyed Him, it would have been bad for your spirit, because you would’ve considered you knew how He would respond, and He wanted you to know He didn’t.
(Jennifer) I was just thinking how awesome that story is, that story, I love how it reveals just how many levels God is working on at all times that we don’t even comprehend. Uhmm, because Jonah’s ‘hissy-fit’ after ah, Nineveh you know, repented, and God relented and withdrew His judgment, and you know He’s like, ‘yeah, I knew You were gonna do it and that’s why I didn’t wanna go and just kill me now,’ (Jennifer laughs) he just fell apart, it was such a drama. Uhm, but, I mean I, I totally relate to that believe me. (Martha laughs in background.) So it’s all this drama, but, so clearly and uhm, John had mentioned earlier that there was clearly some back-story there for Jonah and Nineveh, and you know probably some really bad stuff, like ‘Mad Max of Thunder dome’ bad stuff, but… So I think there’s even this other level that I saw when John was mentioning that, and that was that God wanted to free Jonah. It was for him too. His bitterness and unforgiveness was weighing him down, was eating him alive such that he threw a complete temper tantrum with the Lord Who saved him out of the belly of a whale. It was that big that it obliterated everything else. And he was like, ‘I’ll die now!’ (Jennifer laughs.) So a man who had been brought to the brink of death, so he didn’t say it lightly I don’t think. But I think the Lord wanted to heal him from that, to, to uproot it, to free him from that horrible shame that he had wrapped around him, and he was, you know, he, he wasn’t willing for it. But I think that’s just another level that God had, He was just on every single, you could just see Him and it’s unreal.
(J) It’s beautiful. It’s really, really wonderful. Uhm, I know, I know that there’s gotta be something more to, it wasn’t just the fact that ‘we’re Jews, and they’re Gentiles’, it couldn’t be that because you don’t die on that, you know what I mean. You don’t, you don’t… You could say you’re gonna die to, to some doctrine, but you don’t literally say, ‘pitch me over, I’m fine with that, I’d rather die than go there’. So there had to be something extremely personal and ah, I mentioned the 9-ll, and then I said, you know. Ok now, in 9-11 I don’t have anybody that I personally know that died during that day. I don’t know anybody personally. I know that ah, one man who was in the ah, Pentagon, whose office was destroyed and who was called out of his office, ah, just minutes prior to the plane hitting that. I mean his office was right where the plane hit. But he was called out of his office and he was saved. So I don’t know anybody personally that died from it. But I can tell you that if ah, my brother or my sister was in the Tower’s, and I knew that they were on the eighty-second floor, and that plane hit there and destroyed their lives and killed them and there was children that they left, I can tell you that I would have a whole lot more passion about the war that undertook. There would be the gritted teeth of, you know I’d have to do a major work of forgiveness, and if I didn’t have Christ there would be absolutely no way that I could ever forgive. Uhm, murdering with our American planes ah, my family, now that would be a real hard one. And ah, so I’m thinking that Jonah had to have had a real personal, there was someone in his family, there was someone in his community, there was someone was tight to his heart that something happened with the Ninevites; I don’t know what it is. But uhm, that is why he said I would rather die, I would, pitch me over. And how do you sit in a whale for a couple of days thinking about, hmm, I really don’t think so, being ingested. How can you just sit there and say, huh… Whatchu got?
(M) Well, I want to research it out, but this commentary says that Nineveh was a dreaded enemy by many nations in that day, because of extreme brutality to war captives. So if they captured Israeli was captives, what they did to them was exactly what you said, would have been probably beyond our imagination. So, there’s part of it, we’ll see.
(Carole) It makes me think about even today, right now, what’s been going on over in Palestine, having rockets shot into your villages and people killed, and there would be retaliation, justifiably; uhmm, justifiable retaliation. But that kind of enmity between, is that not, would that not be the same type of human enmity that would be there between Nineveh and Jonah and his people?
(J) Well look at modern day Syria and Israel, it’s the same people; I mean we’re literally talking about the same people. And these people are sending in rockets into places that can be closer to kill Jews. And literally they have this force of thought, of prevailing thought going against Israel saying let’s push those stupid Jews off and into the ocean and take that land. Let’s get rid, actually let’s just get rid of the whole thing; I wouldn’t care if we have their land, let’s just, we have our own land, let’s just push them out. So you have this thought behind there of all these people that want to kill you and, and not just mildly, they’re willing to blow themselves up in your buses, they’re willing to do heinous things to you. And if those are my countrymen, see I don’t have that right now; I don’t have that thought. My Mom’s driving on a bus to go to, to work, and some guy hops on that bus and blows himself up and my Mother’s all over the street? Ok, it just got real.
