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with Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) When I was ill, at several points I was very afraid. At strange points I was not; I don’t even understand it. When they called in a surgeon and said we have to operate, you have a tumor, for some reason I was not afraid of that. I was very much at peace about it. So I think the Lord, at other times I was very afraid, I hasten to say, until the Lord just kept resolving my fears, and giving me His presence. So I think a huge fear was resolved in me through that experience, probably more than I know. But fear, fear that is a daily lifestyle is very dangerous, because it is evidence of the idolatry of ‘self’, which is actually the enthronement of Satan.
(J) One thing that fear does is it cuts on and really it’s a disbelief of the character of God. It says that God is not good. It says God’s not able to do ‘whatever’. He’s not able to keep you safe, provide for you. It really is a slander on His character. That’s exactly what it is. It is a slur upon His very character, because it says He’s not able to do what He’s promised to do. It’s really very insulting to Him, fear is insulting to Him, because see, it says, you’re not good. It goes right back to the core and says, you’re not good.
(M) It’s Roman’s 1. They knew that they didn’t give God honor or thanks, and they did not honor Him as God. And He is God. I think one day when we get to heaven we will see the enormous safety in which we were kept and never knew it.
(J) I agree with that.
(M) First Peter talks about an inheritance, and it talks about being kept by faith. And over and over again when I’m troubled there are so many scriptures, that God delivers us from evil, He will deliver you from every assault. And I was in Luke 1 for the Manna, and it’s the prophecy of Zechariah as he prophesied over his infant son John, he prophesied that we would be delivered from our enemies and that we would serve God without fear. So it’s an amazing promise that he prophesied there. Fear is not necessary, and it is not tolerable in the believer’s life. Fear is so deep seated that God has to sometimes orchestrate circumstances to bring the fears out. But the remedy of fear is faith. I came to realize years ago that the opposite of faith is not unbelief, though it is (unbelief), the evidence of unbelief is fear. So the solution for unbelief and fear, which are bedfellows, number one is that you are dead, the old fearful, terrified man, separated from God is dead. We don’t have to live as fearful beings. We can live in joy no matter what.
(J) It’s Adam.
(M) Yes, it’s Adam, the adamic nature. You reckon that nature dead, it’s not a flaw that is in me as a person; it’s a flaw of the nature in me. And as such, I’ve gotten to the place where I say, well Lord, there’s really only one sin, and that is forgive me Lord that I was alive out of the grave. Forgive me for coming out of the grave in the old man. Because every thing I am that’s wrong lies in the old man. And if that old man is reckoned dead, as a fact, then I’m free from fear and terror, and unbelief, and all those things. But the other remedy of faith is something I’ve come back to, and that is, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Hearing is a rich word in the Hebrew; it means, and in the Greek, it means, absorbing, it doesn’t mean intellectual knowledge, it means hearing with all your being and with your heart. And so to memorize scripture is to absorb it, and to chew it. And in that word that God quickens to you, is the faith of God Himself. So when you hear Him, you hear His voice, you receive not only with the word, a revelation, or a direction, you receive the faith for the very thing that word says. If you begin to memorize one verse a day, and I happen to be on John 15, I’ve resurrected this habit that I had lost, and one of the thing it says is, “if you abide in Me and I in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you”. Well in the memorization of that I receive not only the promise, but also the faith that the promise is operative. And because I was dwelling in Him, that’s first, that’s another subject, if you abide in Me, and My word abides in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done, not by you, but for you. So even when you memorize those small words become to you something living. And in that living word that you are digesting faith enters you of the very thing. And so as I’m memorizing them I’m thinking whatever I wish I can ask for, and several things have already come. Those two issues, believing that you are dead, and memorizing the scriptures and really soaking in the scriptures God gives you daily that does so apply. But fear is sin. It has to be confessed and put under the blood. And it has to be renounced. But that is so simple. Where there is a tremendous hysteria in a person that’s going to require probably some deliverance and ministry.
(J) Do you believe a lot of people are fearful to see the fear?
(M) I was, when God was dealing with me. I was afraid of the fear. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get rid of the fear. I was afraid that I was, well I was fearful that I was stuck with fear.
(J) Who was it that said, we have nothing to fear except fear itself?
(M) I believe that was Franklin Roosevelt. It was either him or Churchill. It was Franklin Roosevelt, it was.
(J) So Roosevelt said there’s nothing to fear in a fearful time. World War Two? Or One?
(M) Let’s see, they’re quoting it as during the Great Depression, oh wow, the war was ‘over there’, but the depression was here.
(J) World War One, right?
(M) (reading reference material) He was referring to the economic conditions of the time. Franklin Roosevelt said that as we looked up the quote, we found that he made that quote in his first inaugural address. “Let me assert my firm belief, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself; nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” That was a spiritual principal right there wasn’t it? It encompasses the thing I’m trying to say. I wouldn’t have put the word retreat with it, but it’s a wonderful word. When you retreat, you retreat from life, you retreat from risk, you retreat from people, you retreat from yourself, and certainly from God.
(J) And when was this?
(M) This was in 1933, it said he was referring to the economic conditions of the time, the Great Depression. He was essentially saying, it was during the Great Depression, and see the war was across the sea, we were all affected during World War 2, but during the depression, my grandmother would talk about the depression. My parents would too. The crisis was here, on our territory. And I remember Kenneth’s grandmother saying homeless men would come to the back door and ask for food, and then he would.
(J) My grandmother told me the same thing.
(M) Really; and it was just a terrible time. I remember stories from my childhood of people that came out of the depression retained a little fear, most of them. They’d hold onto everything.
(J) Pack-rats, they called them.
(M) Yes. So they didn’t all conquer their fear, by passing through it. I remember once I almost had a horrible wreck, it would have been multi-car wreck and I avoided it, but it shook me for a couple days. And the Lord said to me, you’re viewing the wreck as something that happened, and you’re afraid. You must view it that I saved you. So see, we come up to a terrifying event, and we register it with fear as though it really happened. Our fears are our beliefs. I believed in the wreck the wreck that never happened. So I had the emotional reaction to it.
(J) You know in "What the Bleep", they said that the mind cannot differentiate between reality and so.
(M) Right, between what happens and what doesn’t happen. If you envision it, your mind and body register that it happened. And the Lord had to kind of shake me and say, look, I saved you, remember? Can you just change your view? To one of gratitude, and wonder and awe at Me? If you meditate on fears, you increase your fear. It becomes bigger and it becomes more real and it becomes an effect in your body; and your body will bear the effects of it.
(J) A sickness.
(M) Yeah, it will turn into sickness. So, halleluiah, there’s a remedy, memorize scripture. The more you eat it, and the first Psalm God gave me to memorize was Psalm 26, and it’s all about fear. It’s” the Lord is my light and my salvation, of whom shall I be afraid”.
(J) Do you believe that the last generation, the end-times generation, that fears will amass?
(M) Jesus said, ‘Men’s hearts will faint from fear”, yeah, they’re going to be events that we will have. We’re in a rehearsal right now. God is preparing us for difficult times; I don’t know when it will be, but it will certainly be in our grandchildren’s time.
(J) You mean like inoculated.
(M) Uh-huh. Yes we are.
(J) And if we’ll overcome those fears, from the inoculation, then the larger fears will be, we won’t be taken out with them. (M) Right, and part of it is Psalm 91, the memorization of that Psalm is to establish you in the power of God, to keep you in the midst of great, not only chaos and disaster, but disease. I believe that my own laziness, and the enemies attack, caused me to stop memorizing scripture. And I’m so excited about it. Even though right now I’m struggling with a passage, I’m still working on it. I’m trying to do a verse a day, and I’m so excited about it because I really see why the enemy would so attack that one discipline, that one habit. And we’ve memorized together in our group, and we’ve had great results, we still remember memorizing passages together, and it’s like it explodes into a revelation. When we memorized Col. 1, Christ is the King of the Kingdom, and it exploded for me, and I did a whole series. I think all that I’m seeing about the Kingdom, came from that, began at least, with that memorization. So may God reveal our fears and solve our fears. And in Psalm 34 it says, “come you who love life, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord”.
(J) Is to fear, hatred of life?
(M) I believe it is John. Because I remember registering that in Psalm 34. Because that’s a pre-requisite for learning to fear the Lord.
(J) To love life.
(M) Yes, to choose to love life; to want to live. And I think too, fear is the excuse you give yourself, because you hate life. So fear is your way of saying, it’s not my fault!
(J) It’s too hard, it’s too awful, I hate life.
(M) And there’s a verse that I read for years, and didn’t understand. It’s in two places in the Proverbs. “The sloth says, there’s a lion in the streets, there’s a lion in the street’s”. So Jesus said to the one talent man who buried his talent, it is not fear, it’s laziness, and wickedness. If you keep fear it’s because you’re lazy and wicked, and it leads to laziness and wickedness.
(J) So you amass something to prevent you from even having to do the work of living life.
(M) Right. And this also was a prayer of mine,“This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord camps around those who fear Him, and each of them He delivers; fear the Lord you His saints, for there is no want for those who truly revere and worship Him.” with godly fear. And I remember the scripture that says don’t fear the one that can kill your body, fear the one that can put your soul in hell.
(J) Is fear a boundary and a protection of ‘yourself’ from God?
(M) I think we can build it as that; believe in it as that.
(J) I’m not talking about like minor fears, I’m talking about strongholds of fear; are they not put in place to protect us from a God that we think is not good? Is that not what it is?
(M) Yes. “What man is he who desires life, and longs for many days that he may see good”, and that’s a, the one that David wrote, that you could teach that one to fear the Lord. But if you don’t love life, and want to live for many days, you’re not a candidate, apparently, to fear the Lord; because you’ve already withdrawn, retreated.
(J) So it’s huge.
(M) It’s huge, it’s deadly.
(J) That’s why He had such repulsion of it.
(M) Yes, that’s why He could say, oh ye of little faith, and did you not know, get it, when I divided the loaves?
(J) I don’t think He was nice.
(M) I don’t think so either, because the original language indicates His passion. We could go on and on, on this one couldn’t we.
(J) Well can you imagine Him firing at you? All of a sudden you’d say, oh, I think I’m afraid of You.
(M) And think about Jesus complete absence of fear. He was asleep in the boat when the storm was raging. He was never afraid.
(J) Obviously getting wet.
(M) His soul was sorely troubled in Gethsemane, and if He was afraid there, He was dealing with it, with prayer. But there’s no evidence of it anywhere else that he lived or tolerated fear. He was not a man who was afraid. He depended on the Lord to sustain Him.
(J) Well that’s a lot of food for thought, I can tell you that.
(M) It’s a symptom, not a problem. And I don’t think I’ve always known that. It’s a symptom of a huge problem. And it does devastate the people around you, one way or another.
(J) I’ll work on the “Fear Not” and “No Fear” message and I’ll put that on the featured items, so that people can get that. If they have struggled with fear, and see a stronghold of fear in their life. We’ll go ahead and make that available. You speak so clearly and concisely to the Honduran’s; it’s precious, because you speak on a real basic, just real elementary level.
(M) Elementary, yes, we need that.
(J) Yes, and then the other one, oh Martha, the message is awesome.
(M) Is it really?
(J) It really is. So I’ll make that available. I’ll go ahead and put that on the featured items at https://divinedesignedlifepodcast.com. And if you have issues with fear, you’ll be able to get that. And check out the profiles, we put that up recently. We’ve got some pictures in there, and some cute things in there.
(M) Just a beginning.
(J) Yeah, just a beginning, but it’s cute, and it’s up there on the ‘Who Are We’, and you can go in and see pictures of Martha and her grandchildren and you can see me, and the garden and different things. We’ll just end here with this, an we just bless you for listening and for following the podcast and subscribing.
(M) And for your comments to us that are so encouraging. And I add my blessing too, and ask the Lord to bless His word, and He can use this vehicle to speak to you. I’m just so excited about memorizing, so I just repeat that. Please, please, memorize scripture; it will transform your life and give you the faith that you need. Oh, now I see a Bluebird,
(J) A Bunting.
(M) A Blue Bunting on John’s porch. So let me go back to my garden John.
(J) Fly, fly.
(M) Ok.
