Moving to new address

 I am moving from "here" to "there" (http://rodneydrury.blogspot.com/)  This site will be up for a little while. but then it will all be "there" and not "here".

"If you live long enough, midlife will come."

http://rodneydrury.blogspot.com/

Inside, Outside, Upside down


"therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.  2cor. 7:1 (nasv)

Most of the time I don't want to be cleansed or pure of all defilement.  Most of the time what I want is to be right, powerful, truthful; and to have others honor me for what I want to be.  When times come (and they come several times a day) for me to be what others want me to be, I mostly feel controlled.  I love to be what I want to be and mostly reject what others want me to become.  Do I treat God the same way as I treat others? 

Inside transformation is very difficult.  There is a natural part of this that has us use disciplines and techniques to develop.  We can make and live out holy habits that help us, but this is not the same as being transformed. God uses the natural, but there is more.  So far from our hope is transformation, that we now mostly promote God's love that over looks our sin and mostly avoid all the biblical calls to be holy, pure, perfect; Christlike.  Why give your life to something that is never going to happen - right?

Hey!  What if the desire to be holy was a good thing?  What if "being what you are not" was a way of enjoying life more?  What if the holy that you are seeking to be was a distraction to the wonder of being the holy that the Spirit of God seeks to make us be?

In the above verse we are to cleanse ourselves in flesh and spirit.  Most of us know how to work on the flesh.  We can read and apply the Biblical truth to one of the lists in Scripture.  This is a good work.  We are to cleanse our flesh.  The body is good when it is under the rule of God.

Most of us have little or no skills at working in the realm of the spirit.  Most of us tend to be an extremist.  Either the things of the spirit are all good or all untrustworthy.  We might enjoy a dream from God but not trust it for guidance, or we might tell our friends that this is the will of God for the world. 

The Holy Spirit offers to us a thousand workings and wonders that change our natural and spiritual lives.  Maybe it is time for us to re-discover the Holy Spirit as God again.

I am an 80%

 

I now am in day two of recovery from surgery.  What do we call it when going to the hospital and having surgery is a normal part of our life?  Do we call that “medical restoration” or “mandatory renovation”? 

I thought I might write a book to myself entitled “Reflections from the bathroom floor”.  This booklet could contain my thoughts and emotions about life as seen from lying on the bathroom floor after passing out and collapsing.  Some of my topics might be….

• My family looks bigger from this perspective.
• Why they don’t believe me when I tell them “I’m fine”
• The floor is hard but I don’t seem to mind
• I can hear my inner man praying even while I am mentally out of focus.  It nice to hear my heart is more in love with God than my mind thought.
• Why I am more concerned how others will deal with what is happening to me then I am concerned what is happening to me.
• Will the paramedics be able to pick me up
• I think this cold floor is actually helping to break my fervor.
• Can I have a pillow

Thanks to the love of God, the prayers of many people and the medical blessings of our community, I live to have a 50/50 chance of having this again.  If I apply that to my weather forecasting skills, this means, maybe I will and maybe I wont. 

I any case God is with us on the bathroom floor, in surgery, in the recovery and with us back home.  A lesson that I seem to be learning again and again and again over the last 12 months.   I’m not complaining, but maybe I should apply my life to the prompting I had from the Lord on Sunday morning before all these events unfolded.

Rod, you get it right about 80% of the time, so you are wrong 20%  of the time.  Don’t be so confident in what you know as humble to learn/live what you don’t know. 

 

 

For me just cross out the word “women” above and insert the word “others”.

Don’t Just Do Good!

I have often sought to use my faith so that I would have something to share with others.  I would use faith to produce a miracle, get a prophetic word, obtain some wisdom.  For some, this may seem like a great thing, I feel it is less than “great”.

I now believe that using my faith for such things is good and at times, very good.  But the greatest thing that I can use my faith for is having a relationship with God that is unending.  I know that many think this impossible.  But try and have faith for it.  Try to have faith to live a life always abiding, always connected to the Father.

 

When we want to press on others what kind of person Jesus was, we often bring forth the truth that Jesus did nothing unless He saw the Father doing it.  We stress that connection of the man Christ Jesus and God.  Yet we often neglect this Christ like call when seeking a calling for ourselves.  We want the miracles, signs and wonders but somehow think the burden of unions with God just that, a burden. 

We can do a great many good works in life, but how many of them are in line with the will of the Lord?  We can justify our virtues, our giving and our sacrifice as making them worthy apart from the will of God, but are they truly.  What if “not doing God’s will” was just the same as “doing all kinds of good, but not doing God’s will”?  I have been told hundred’s of times that you don’t need to seek the will of the Lord if it is written in the Bible to do. 

I have discovered that what others mean by this is that they feel you do not need to seek God’s will to do what they want you to do.  If you pray but they are driven by missions, you should do missions.  If you do missions but they promote right doctrine, if they serve the poor but you encourage the wealthy….

Seeing the Father and doing what you see Him doing is your self identity.  Do you know who you were created to be and do?  The Father knows and takes the time to communicate that to you.  The whole of a personal relationship with God rest on seeing our Father leading us.  To be whole, complete, secure; you will need to develop the faith to do what God is calling you to do.  You vision must be more upon the Father than focused on the needs and desires of man or the church.  By doing the will of the Father you release His kingdom in heaven upon the earth.  It matters!

 

When God is not near

 

It Happens

I have gone through about a 60 day period of time that I have not felt the nearness of God.  I knew with my mind that this often happens in life because God is trying to help us grow up.  My emotions did not know what my mind thought it understood.

I have had so many years of the nearness of God that feeling His absence (in feeling not in reality) was alarming.  I found that I could not find comfort in the sense of His presence.  I was being led by the Great Shepherd into areas of life that I would not travel if He did not take me there.

At times when I share in this regard, I have people respond to me that all you need is the Bible.  They seek to encourage me that if I “just did what the Bible told me to do”, I would be fine, and I need to learn to dismiss those emotions, promptings and feelings anyway. 

The trouble for me is that I have had so many years of a personal relationship with God that going back to having the Bible only, and not having the encounters of the indwelling Holy Spirit are quite dis-satisfying.  For me it seems like have the wedding license without the bride.

Faith

The reason that God removes the sense of His presence is to draw us closer to Himself, not to push us away into books, sermons and the counsel of others.  When we go through times of not knowing that He is there, live in loving defiance.  Speak to God more, set in His presence (though unfelt) more, depend on Him more.  I am talking to myself here.

In the end your faith will increase.  Not the faith that comes from standing upon a passage of scripture.  That kind of standing is very good and essential.  The word of God, the scripture lead us into all kinds of truth.  One of these truths is that you can have a relationship with God who dwells within us through His Holy Spirit.  So “abiding”, “having fellowship”, “hearing the word of the Lord”, all become more than interactions with scripture.  Even when we read scripture, we seek to hear what the Spirit is saying to us, how God is convicting, what promptings to obey.

Grow up Rod

So my lack has been for my good.  God has been working with me to help me grow up.  I show how immature I am by how discouraged I get when God does something I don’t like.  If I would grow up more I could not be discourage by how God is dealing with other issues around me.   My fears would be confronted with faith.

Don’t Pretend

The last thing that I want to share is “don’t pretend”.  Maybe this is a personal dislike, but I hate it when people pretend.  Some people pretend that everything is great and others pretend that the whole world is falling apart.  Where are those who live in reality.  Most every day has good and bad and I feel sorry for those who attend churches where the standard “Christian” greeting is “I’m blessed, the head and not the tail, never been better”.  I often think but seldom say, “You should serve somebody and change your perspective”.

I find it much easier to love real people.  Those however who project un-reality, have little I can relate to as the vale of projected deception is not something others can hold or relate to.  We need real people to have real relationships.   We have a real God who relates to us both in His greatness and in His absence.  He leads us into abundance and into poverty.  He heals and allows us to die.  Let’s not pretend that God is one thing when He is more than ten thousand.  Let’s not pretend His is always near if He is not.

More - Not hungry for God

October 18, 2011

Of all the stuff I have tried over the last ten years, I think this experiment has received the most passionate of responses.  

For those just dropping in, I am in a season of not hungering and thirsting for the Lord.  I am not going after God.  BUT, what I am doing is seeking to be fully obedient to Him moment by moment.  My mindset is like Israel being led by God out of Egypt and into the promise land.  I see myself as needing more to obey than to set the course.

How can you not hunger for God and expect to grow, or even be a Christian?  My response is “I know God has promised to reward those who seek after Him, I also know all who seek Him find Him. But is there another way?”  And answer to “is there another way” is –yes.  

In history some who were called saints, some who performed miracles, and some who lived extremely holy lives did what I am doing now. (I said it that way to bias my argument.  How sad that I felt like I could not convince simply by saying “Godly people”).   I didn’t just come up with this idea, I took it from them.  Jesus Himself also did what I am seeking to do.  Jesus did what He saw the Father doing.  Jesus also taught us that His sheep know His voice.  Combining all these I feel like this season of discipline is about overcoming my American spirit of elitism and humanism by practicing the humility of obedience.  What leader wants to be told what to do?  What missional purposeful ministry wants to put their agenda on hold and wait on the Lord?  I am not saying they should.   I am saying I am giving myself to discover if there is another way.

We appeal to the fact that Christ went about doing good, and we hold that the true imitation of Him consists in doing as He did rather than in being as He was. The hermits thought differently. Philanthropy was, in their view, an incidental result, as it were, a by-product of the religious spirit. Here, no doubt, there is a great gulf fixed between us and them. There is a difference of ideal. It is possible to aim at doing good, and snatch now and then, as opportunity offers, a space for the culture and of spirituality, for the "making" of the soul. It is possible also to shape life for the attainment of perfection, welcoming, as it may happen to offer itself, the chance of usefulness. The latter was the ideal of the hermits. Is the former ours? Surely the purest altruism will decline to accept it. We recognise, when we are at our best, that what we ought to aim at is that good should get done, and not that we ourselves should do it.

Hannay, James O. (2010-07-05). The Wisdom of The Desert (pp. 17-18). Unknown. Kindle Edition.

I am overwhelmed at times with the calls to do all the good we can.  One troubling of my soul is all the pushing aside of others so that we might be the one who wins the prize.  I must be the healer; I must be the prophet, the apostle or even the servant.  We share the works of God very little.  Being driven, not abiding in Christ and bearing much fruit, is the new call to order.  We once thought that apart from Him we could do nothing, but now we do a great many things.  Our independence is more productive than the old school of trust and obey.  

Teresa of Ávila shares a list of items that assist a person in union with God – transformation.  One of the items on her list is to not seek the right form but simply obey God, moment by moment.  She coaches us away from trying to do things right in order to get God to bless us and encourages us to humbly submit to the Lord.  I think I will keep trying this for a little while longer.