Episode #467 – The Struggle Between Pride and Simplicity

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The Struggle Between Pride and Simplicity
Episode #467
November 15, 2015

With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
Special Guest: Carole Nelson

(Martha) We’re sitting here this morning, the four of us, Carole, John and me and Jennifer. And at 5 o’clock this morning I saw myself lay hands on Carole and pray, and called and asked her if she could have a visitor that early, and she did. So, we got together and first of all there was nothing. And then suddenly the Lord gave me the prayer and the unction and the information that I didn’t have on what I was here to pray for. I was to pray for the healing of Carole’s mind and breaking the law of generations from her inheritance, and to bring down the, I’ll say a stronghold of intellectualism. Let me explain what that is. We’ve all had this. Everybody has this. “I want to be smart. I want to be smarter than I am. I don’t want to be who I am,” and so I make myself go to the mind instead of letting the beautiful simplicity of the spirit in me connected with the Spirit of God bring the words of His mouth through me. I hope that makes sense. We all have to get rid of… I did it early on in trying to write with a pastor who was helping me, because I knew what I was writing was gobble-de-goop. It had no meaning, and you couldn’t understand it. It was a defense and a… oh, it was just a mess, and I knew it. And I had to come to ask for the simplicity of the Spirit. I’m on the verse that says, “I’ve espoused you to one husband, and I fear lest you leave the simplicity of devotion to Christ.” Folks, everything in God is simple, so simple. Everything complex and intellectual is of the devil. The greatest brilliance is in those who can say the most profound things in one sentence and two. My calendar is the Franklin Covey and each page has a quote from someone. Most of them I put an X over, cause they’re strictly human, but many of them are profound. And so those who can be the simplest in the simplicity of Christ are the ones who can be easily understood, and who can speak with the flow of the Spirit. And Carole has this amazing brilliance of her spirit. She will often in our meetings she will make one sentence, and Jennifer and I both say you just reduced it to the essence. And that is the brilliance of simplicity. In her spirit she’s so rich that what she says sums up what we’ve been on for an hour. And so she has this beautiful gift of the Spirit in terms of simplicity.
(Carole) Well, as Martha said when we started this morning there was nothing. And I mean nothing. And we even got a little drowsy and needed some coffee. And then she said, “Well are you getting anything?” I said, “Well, the only thing that I got was… It was one thing but it led me to open the Word, and it was right there in Nehemiah. And, of course, Nehemiah was in Babylon, and he was the cupbearer of the King, and he got news that Jerusalem was just completely torn down, the walls were all torn down, and he was heartbroken, stricken over it and went to pray about it. So we were contemplating what those walls were all about, that he was sent back by God to build. And Martha said, “What do you think those walls were about?” And I began to struggle to try to tell her.
(Martha) You didn’t struggle long. It came right out of your mouth.
(Carole) But it was in that context of my struggle, Martha, that God gave you the unction and the prayer for me came because I was struggling so. And I wasn’t able to get out, and I was struggling going to my head to try to get out. And it was at that point that all of a sudden she said, “Stop. I saw myself lay hands on you.” And she laid hands on me and I jumped, because it was loud. The Holy Spirit was very loud, and He began to just pray over my brain to reconstruct my brain, to heal my brain. And she began to see the… It obviously was the sin that I chose, but it was also a generational sin of my family. On one side it was confusion and so forth. The other side was self-confident, intellectualism. And she began to break that in the Name of Jesus. And I struggled to see, and then I really did see the wall and the stronghold, and my real life struggle to… When I go to write I go through a struggle to do that. Number one, the Lord has been reducing me over these years to convince me that I am nothing and that I know nothing. And I am very aware most of the time that I am nothing and that I know nothing. And I’ve got to tell you, that is a vulnerable, frightening place to be. That is the reality of that. It isn’t some, “Ok, I know nothing, and I am nothing,” kind of thing. Oh, no. No, when He reduces you to that reality, it is a frightening place to be. And the truth of the matter is I feel like I’ve got to come up with something. And therein is that stronghold exposed. And I will go to intellectualism and to be something other than what I know I am, which is nothing.
(Martha) Well, I’ve often said God chose the foolish things, the things that are not to confound those that are. And to come to that willingness… Tell me I’ve made a mistake and I’ll say, “Oops, sorry.” Tell me that there’s something I don’t know, and I’m fine with that. But tell me I’m a fool, and that cuts out every possibility of having anything. And that’s what He wants. And if we’re not a fool, He will reduce us to know that we are. And it’s the most attack on our pride, our primal pride to be something. And I’m going to talk about this later in more detail, but I was in Isaiah 14 reading about Satan’s fall, and I saw something I had never seen with such clarity. He said, “I will make myself.” And so, what we do in so many situations that this little group has been through, and the testimony of Helen Whaley that’s so brilliant on the podcast today, is that she “made herself” something she was not, because she didn’t like what she was, or she didn’t want to be what she wasn’t. And that’s true of every human being. My education is limited. My education was in the arts kind of, but I never had a liberal arts education. It was strictly interior design. And I was in a world of senators, lawyers, military Captains, military officers. My whole world was with people who were way beyond me. And I always felt so ashamed and so intimidated. I weighed myself intellectually, and it was a false measure. It was love of the world. And God had to bring me through a great process to accept that He had limited my education, because I would have gotten lost in it. But that’s… Being nothing and having to be nothing, having to live that way every day of your life is the most frightening human experience. And it goes on and gets worse all the time. I’ll think, “Ok I’ve got it. I’m a nothing. And oh, no, I don’t know it.” I have to find even more… I have to be something, but I’m nothing. I have to be something in God and something for God, but I’m nothing, and that is both devastating and frightening. Jennifer just said it a few minutes, so I’m going to have her say it again in a minute. The unwillingness to be nothing is pride. And so what Carole and I got down to was the name of this intellectualism is pride, and I knew it because I do it personally Simply pride. And I have to be willing to be nothing all the time. And so the work among us has been to reduce us to be nothing. And I want to say very truthfully that many people have left us because they were not willing to be nothing. They were going to be something, and it was a tremendous drain of us and interruption of us and of the work of God. Somebody with ambition is just a nightmare. If you are trying to be nothing and let Jesus be everything, to have someone under your face who is determined to be something and be better than anybody, that is a divided heart. I want me, and I want God, both.
(Carole) And you said, Martha, that the very foundation of that, the very base of that is pride. But the fruit of that pride leads to selfish ambition and jealousy. And that drain and that pull on the Body whose focus is Jesus Christ is devastating. And…
(Martha) It’s so simple. I’ll be talking about that too, that Satan’s nature is pride, but his fruit is selfish ambition. And the fruit of selfish ambition is jealousy, and the fruit of jealousy is murder. It’s just real simple. That’s how it goes. So, thank you, Carole, for bringing that up.

The Struggle Between Pride and Simplicity – Episode #467 – Shulamite Podcast