Resurrection Life Rises in Suffering – Episode #594

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Resurrection Life Rises in Suffering
Episode #594
4-22-2018

With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special Guest: Jennifer Wentzel

In times of suffering, Martha experienced something even greater than healing. Her total inability gave rise to the miraculous Resurrection Life of Christ!

Martha:
We are sitting here in Jean Mixon’s lovely house and there is a cross breeze and we are enjoying so much the air moving around the room besides us. And I spoke about Billy Graham on the last podcast and his impact on me. So I want to say that I am now a disciple of Billy Graham and everybody that I have said that to laughs and I laugh, too. But I said, “You know what? Billy Graham would have received me because he received everybody including, what is the man’s name, Woody Allen. He was very gracious to Woody Allen. He would be very gracious to me. I certainly believe that Billy would have accepted me.” But I’ve come to view him through the Lord’s eyes and I said some of it on that tape. But the one last thing I want to tell is he had Parkinson’s disease, which is a terrible, debilitating, paralyzing illness, and you have it for years. And though they didn’t hide it, they didn’t say much about it. But someone asked him, “Billy, why do you think the Lord let you have Parkinson’s?” And he said, “Oh, so that I would depend on Him for everything.” For anybody to understand that is God’s goal is a miracle.
John:
Umhmm.
Martha:
To understand it in the face of Parkinson’s is a saint and to accept it on that ground because God’s wants us to rely on Him for everything. And He is extremely passionate in the scriptures about it. I’ve been looking through, not quite ready with it, but I’ve been looking through the scriptures where, it’s just very simple. I’ve followed the word ‘relied’ and it’s funny that over and over again there are stories where a person relied on someone other than God and God’s reaction was the most extraordinary wrath. I will come back with it in the Tape of the Month at some point. But I want to tell this month because there are people who have prayed for me every day for years and just to give you the briefest account of it, I guess it was four or five years ago my husband came down with a terrible, debilitating, rare disease. And so we had to live near a hospital. Our son who is a doctor said, “It’s going to affect his breathing and you are going to have to be able to get him to the hospital immediately.” So we lived two blocks from the hospital. And it was a very trying time. My daughter had cancer at that time and surgery. I had cancer at that time and surgery. We lived with my husband’s hospital visits – terrible, terrible times. And this went on for months and months and years. And as I tell in the book of Altogether Forgiven, he was healed of that disease but then he was diagnosed with cancer. But as a result of all that trauma, all that extreme physical exertion, because I was very, working very hard and… At the end of it, when my husband passed away, my body sort of just collapsed. And though my health registered good by blood work and all the tests that could discern it, I was in extremely, extraordinary good health but my body was in complete collapse. You might say, broken. And I was at the conference The Road That Leads to Life, there were a couple of times that John had to practically hold me up to get me to the chair and it was a little bit obvious where I was. But…and then the Lord would come through. And actually throughout that time of trauma, every time it was time for a Message of the Month, I would sit down with no strength, no ability, and practically no message. And John would turn on the mike and the Lord would be there and He would deliver a message that blew me away. And this happened over and over again. In, but my condition was so weak that I could do absolutely no work and it was a peculiar kind of sick weak. And several people picked up on it and I am astonished that they have told me they prayed every morning for me for health. But this went on for many months. And a friend of mine, who’s a marvelous nutritionist, knows volumes about health, flew out here from California to spend a week with me and take care of me and cook for me. And I sat down and told her all the things that I had been through in some detail and she said, at the end of it she said, “Martha, what you’ve been through could take your body two years to recover.” I kept thinking, “I just must get a little bit stronger.” But she helped me understand that I was, I really was in a sort of physical crisis. It wasn’t emotional particularly or spiritual. The Lord was always there. But it was, it was a very debilitating condition I was in. Anyway that’s enough of that. So I recently, at time my voice would completely go to a whisper and it would be obvious that I was just completely weak. And I had, I had some despair about it. My daughter would always ask me and I would always say, “I am fine!” like a good liar. And I didn’t want her to worry. But this time I said, “Please pray for me. I am so sick.” We hung up the phone and in less than five minutes I felt like I had been shot right out of a cannon. I knew that I was healed instantly. And I felt like I had my very self back. The Lord showed me that He laid me down in green pastures to restore my soul, and I felt like my soul had been restored although I didn’t have the words for that at the time.

I called my daughter and said, “What did you pray for me?” She said, “I prayed what the Lord told me, Isaiah 31. ‘Those who wait on the Lord shall mount up as wing, on wings as an eagle. They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.’” And I said, “Oh my goodness, that’s what it felt like.” It felt like I shot up. And the Amplified says, “Like an eagle flying up to the heavens.” It was the strangest experience I’ve ever had but I was well and I knew it. And I knew that I had myself back. We found out that John was praying desperately at the same time because he could, he saw me. He knew I was really low. And as I say those people that prayed for me every day for years and those people that caught on to how bad it was earnestly prayed for me. And I wanted them to know that I have been healed amazingly, instantly healed. It’s taking me a little bit of time to get strength back in my body. I have having to extend, I’m having to recover strength, but essentially that whole illness is gone. So it’s given me a whole new… I am using that scripture in prayer mightily. And I want to know the secret of it. It’s, there’s a tremendous secret in that scripture to mount up on wings as an eagle.
John:
I love that you are laying side-by-side Billy Graham’s Parkinson’s and his dependence, and your experience where you are being shot up out of a cannon and mounting up like wings of an eagle and that’s very interesting. That dynamic, those two parallels are very interesting to put those two together.
Martha:
Okay, this relates to the story I learned of Billy Graham because I began to ask the Lord after I wrote the book Altogether Forgiven I felt like I didn’t say enough about the resurrection or that I wanted to say something else about the resurrection. I said, “Lord, what do I know about the resurrection life? Do I, have I known it? Do I know it? Have I ever experienced resurrection life? I don’t know what I know.” Because there is a scripture that says, “He works within us to accomplish things that we can’t imagine.” He is always at work within us, things we don’t know that He’s doing in our spirit. And so I know that what He has accomplished I often don’t realize. I am moving in a mystery. You are moving and living in an unfolding mystery. So I said, “Do I know anything about resurrection life?” And He said, “Well…” He reminded me of how weak I had been and how time after time I would sit down at the table in the office to tape the Tape of the Month and think, “I cannot do this. I am absolutely, desperately dependent on You, Lord.” And I would say, “Turn on the mike,” and here would come a voice that I didn’t have. And here would come a presentation that I hadn’t fully known and scriptures and everything, and I would sound completely sound and healthy and well and strong and then as soon as the tape was turned off, there I would go back again. And I never realized that I had experienced His resurrection life, where He does everything and I am incapable of everything. I can’t do anything. So I know from that experience, in the middle of it, as I was debilitated personally in my practical life, completely debilitated, He wasn’t! But He was causing me that one thing that He wanted, He was causing me to lean on Him utterly, completely, desperately, frighteningly, hysterically. And for Billy Graham to realize that was the purpose of his disease and accepting it with such loving grace is amazing. In the middle of that debilitating state, I did a conference called The Road That Leads to Life and at that conference, He called me to do it, I had no agenda, no outline. I knew where I was going and sort of how I was going wander there but I didn’t have any preparation that I could seek myself on and I had, and I can look back on, this is resurrection life now, please listen. I look back on that conference of how many hours, Jennifer?
Jennifer:
Nine hours, nine CDs.
Martha:
Nine to ten hours! I cannot remember what I spoke because it was not me. Everyday in my room I had a meltdown crisis and have to say, “Ok, You’ve never failed me, never once and You won’t fail me now.” And I would sometimes have to be helped, as I told you, to the chair by John and helped back. And I would stand up in that state of complete collapse and the voice of the Lord would come through and present… I want to go back and listen to us someday because I have no idea if it was really good. I want to say to people, “Did you go to that conference and did you get anything or was it super better than usual?” because I was so depending on the Lord, so frighteningly, utterly, absolutely emergency, depending on the Lord and I think He never failed to come through and He never failed…and someone said to me just yesterday…I have been saying to the Lord about a week now, “Lord, I want to know what that conference seemed like because that was Your resurrection life present there completely.” I wasn’t in it. I would have been if I could. If I could have pulled any strength of my own, I would have done it. But someone came yesterday and told me that it had a complete sequence. She said it was beautifully put together and beautifully orchestrated.

So I want the resurrection life every second. And it’s going to take a work of God in every life as it did even with Billy Graham, the greatest man of the twentieth century and perhaps the twenty-first. I mean, there’s nobody that has born the fruit for Christ that he bore.

Resurrection Life Rises in Suffering – Episode #594 – Shulamite Podcast

In an extended period of suffering involving great physical weakness and collapse, Martha experienced something even greater than total healing (though she was, in time, completely healed). Total inability gave rise to the miraculous Resurrection Life of Christ!