Philip’s Musings

I hope I’m not repeating myself too much…. but what ever happened to simple!   That is what one calls a rhetorical question…. we humans do not know simple… we know complicated…  give me anything to do and watch out…..     :)    It was Darryl’s wife….  Martha… that got me going  this time…  thanks Martha…. 

Philip is the definition of OCD…. obsessive compulsive disorder…  I can out compulsive everybody I know…

If big is good… I gotta do bigger... biggerer is betterer... always… doesn’t matter what the area is….

Business? …. Jersey Crane Corporation had to go from successful to become “Coast to Coast Crane Corporation”   Want to buy a franchise… I had the perfect system…

My bookstore… same thing… from successful  to “Coast to coast Christian Bookstores” .. already had franchises going on that one…

How about the perfect church…. man… did we ever have the connecting the dots thing  down perfect… we had the blueprint for what God really had in mind!

Want to learn how to get in shape… follow Philip’s program…want to run a marathon… I developed the right program for that to… I developed the perfect program for everything… want to find God …. just do this… didn’t matter what… I had the plan for you… my way is the best way… I’m only saying this because because you don’t know anybody like this… right?    

More is always better… just like bigger is… ran 5 miles today… then do 6 tomorrow… ran a 9 minute mile… do an 8 minute tomorrow… got 3 congregations going in Jersey… 5 up there in Vermont… let’s send a team to London… buy an airplane….stretch yourself to the limit always… in everything we do… until….?????  Until we see it…. see the death it brings… some of my OCD  left me at the white picket fence in 1999…. a little more each year since…  even more just yesterday in my comfortable chair up at the Lake looking out the window and talking to the Lord…. tell you about that soon….

Where do you think all that hoopdydo comes from… hint:  It is not God… He said that He  “preserves the simple”…  it is from the other guy… your enemy… my enemy… God’s enemy….the enemy that wants you to burn out… wants to destroy you… wants to kill you… God says:  “take no thought for….”  “my burden is light…  ” be still and know that I am God…“    you know… He says all kinds of strange things like that…. hoping we will all get to the place where we can see it…

I finally repented… discovered life is not supposed to be complicated by doing much more than even 20 people could ever find time to do… life was designed to be quite simple… Keep It Simple Stupid… er… uh… Philip!  You know… I never saw it until I saw it.  What is it about us human beings that has to make everything so doggone big and so doggone busy and so doggone impossibly complicated?

Now I hope you can follow this… this next statement is very profound… are you ready for it?  We can’t see what we need to see because we haven’t seen it … and we will never see it until that glorious moment when we actually stop…  cease from all our striving….and ask God to … hang in there with me… let us see it… and you know what… we will then see it… because we see it… 

….and there will be no more striving… life will become very simple when we let God do only  what He wants to do…. There were a thousand things Jesus could have done… but He didn’t… He only did what Father was doing… only what Father was saying… nothing else….bigger was never better for Him…

Hmmmmm….  Do you see it?

I might just as well say it… yet one more time…. I’ve said it here and there over the past 3 years of posting… might as well say it one more time… and put myself in line for a little “tar and feathering“… why let old T. Austin Sparks just stand there all alone after all these years… 

….so here it goes… the highest good (after having collided with God)…..  is not to leave this foul and miserable world to become a preacher and stand in a pulpit… sorry… it is not… I’ve told the story before and may just tell it again next time… but this time…

Today… Bodie sent me another old Gem  from T. Austin… gotta share it with no explanations or interpretations… this is just T. Austin Sparks… archaic turn of the century language and all… he wrote this back in 1937… I was just about to turn 2 years old…. how old were you?….  

“You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life… (John 5:39).

Ministry is the expression of Life, and not the taking on of a uniform and a title. Once I thought that to be in the ministry was to go into a certain kind of work, to come out of business, and, well, be a minister! So one got into the thing. Many, many are labouring and toiling in it, breaking their hearts, afraid to leave that order of things, lest they should be violating what they conceived to be a Divine call. Many others cannot get out of it because it is a means of livelihood, and they too are breaking their hearts. It is all false. Ministry is not a system like that. Ministry is the expression of Life, and that is but saying in other words that it is the outworking of the indwelling of Christ. Disaster lies before the man or woman who ministers on any other ground than that. When the Lord gets a chance in us, and we really will trust Him on that ground, take our position there, He will show us that there is ministry enough for us; we shall not have to go round looking for it. The real labour so often is to get us down to that ground, the delivering of us from this present evil age even in its conception of the ministry, unto the heavenly ministry.

The Lord Jesus is our pattern. You see the spontaneous ministry, the restful ministry of that Heavenly Man. I covet that! It does not mean that we shall become careless, but it does deliver us from so much unnecessary strain. That is how it should be. May the Lord bring us to it; the heavenly Man with the heavenly Life as the full heavenly Resource. “

All this stuff I have been saying about the “Ordering of the Dots”…. there are tons a bunch of other people who have seen this on one level or another… lots of folks saying the words… some of them willing to actually wait  and let God do whatever it is He is going to do with it all… we are trying hard to remain in that category… the willing to wait category…

That is not an easy thing for people to do… it is especially not an easy thing for Philip  to do …I am thankfull to have Ellen.. Bodie/Barbara and Jeff/Sandra walking with me… walking closely with me… to help keep my head screwed on straight... to wait!       

Others don’t have exactly what I have… friends like I have…. dots I have been connected to…. they don’t have folks like that to help them… the same way I have been helped…. instead …they come out of their particular religious system… then start building again… determined to do it differently this time… and end up doing it in the “same old/same old way”  because they have no other model… Satan wins again… they once again adapt the world model….. organize it… sell their newest version of  “same old“… and the only real difference this time is… they no longer call it Church… but you know… if it walks like a duck… quacks like a duck… has meetings with a bunch of other ducks… you might as well just call it a duck…  

I want to show you something… this is not something new… this goes way back… T. Austin Sparks  was almost tarred and feather by the religious system 60/70 years ago for saying things like we are saying… like he said below… fortunately for T. Austin it was not quite like it was in the good old days of the early religious system… back then he would have been burned at the stake...  

I think it is worth a read….

“The Lord has not called upon us to form churches. That is not our business. Would to God men had recognised the fact! A very different situation would obtain today from what exists, if that had been recognised. It is the Lord Who expands His Church, Who governs its growth. What we have to do is to live in the place of His appointment in the power of His resurrection. If, in the midst of others, the Lord can get but two of His children, in whom His Life is full and free, to live on the basis of that Life, and not to seek to gather others to themselves or to get them to congregate together on the basis of their acceptance of certain truths or teaching, but simply to witness to what Christ means and is to them, then He has an open way…The Church is not increased by your going and taking a building and trying to get people to come to it, and to your meetings, and then forming them, by a church roll, into a local church. That is not the way. Growth is by Life, and this, to begin with, may be by the entering into Life of but one soul, and then after a long waiting time of another; or it may be more rapid. But the point is that it is increase because of Life. That is the growth of the Church. For the growth of His Church, the Lord must have Life channels, Life centres. I believe that, given a Life centre, sooner or later one of two things will happen, that it will be abundantly manifest that Christ is fully and finally rejected there, or else there will be an adding, a growth. There is tremendous power in Life, and the Life of the Lord either kills or quickens. It depends on the attitude taken toward it. He is a savour of Life unto Life, or of death unto death. Things can never remain neutral. What the Lord needs is Life centres.”

Well…..Was it?…. was it worth the read…?

I have been trying to establish a completely different model of the “ordering of the dots” … my premise is that the ordering that God has in mind… is in …His …mind.… and His alone… and also that He has not chosen to reveal to us… what all the dots together … is supposed to look like here … here in time and space…

The one thing Father has  told us is that it will look like His Son Jesus.… His life in us will so transform us… so change everything we do and think and are…. that we will no longer look like what we used to be before we met Him… before He came into our lives…. before He put His very life in us…. we are going to look more and more like Him every day… Philip will hopefully some day be much more gentle and loving… and even less sarcastic…  

He is building us … His people…. His ecclesia.. His “called out ones”… His people… individual human beings…. called out of the kingdom of darkness into His marvelous Kingdom of Light… His church… His people… not a building… not a system… nothing that resembles anything we have seen for over 2000 years of men’s effort… it is the wrong model… it is the wrong pattern…

He always has a pattern when He wants to build something… He gave Moses a pattern for the Tabernacle… He gave David a pattern for the Temple… those were structures… He has given us a different pattern today… it is no longer to build some kind of building… some kind of structure… some sort of system…

….it is a pattern to build people…. we are now His temple… we are now His tabernacle… we are simply to be containers  of the living God…. He has filled us with His life so He can now live His life in us wherever He has placed us on this planet… He will connect my container with other containers… I have chosen to call each container a dot… and He is going to do whatever it is that He wants to do…with each of those dots…

Men just can’t seem to handle that… we need to control it… we need to say it looks like this… or say it looks like that… do you a have any idea how many thousand different denominations there are that are telling us that it looks like this…or looks like that… not to mention all the independents who have the truth… the whole truth… and nothing but the truth… Philip had it… come on… I even saw how to connect all the dots and that was 35 years ago….what a crock….we all have our own idea of the pattern….you know… the one that God really, really wants…. what God intended…

…sorry… He has not told us that anywhere…  or at any time…  He has not told us what all those connected dots are supposed to look like… He is the only one who knows that.

I don’t really think He is ever going to tell any of us what it will eventually look like either… especially Philip… He knows that the first thing Philip will do is …. try to make it happen!

Can I be really bad here today and suggest something terribly weird… that maybe men have determined how the dots are ordered… how to arrange the dots… according to their own vision of the “Dotdom” ?

And also maybe suggest that that vision of men, has never… not ever… been the vision that God has for His people… ?

We… and I am putting myself on the top of that all inclusive “We“  list... we have created something that God never intended… something modeled after the Kingdoms of this world…. modeled after the world’s system of  governments… first the Roman Catholic model after the Feudal system… Luther remodeled the same model… every time God revealed that there was something else He had in mind…. every reformer just re-formed the original model… when I finally saw the perfect church system... it was modeled after the same old model that came from the minds of men… not from the mind of God. I repented and asked God to forgive me.

Before Jesus even left terra firma. … you could smell it coming… “So is this the time Lord… is it now that you are restoring the Kingdom to Israel?”  They had no understanding of the kind of Kingdom Jesus had been talking about…. talking about for 3 years ….. well nobody does actually… and may I suggest that we do not …. because…. He does not want us to!.

Jesus even responds to their question by basically telling them something that we all need to hear… He said that they don’t need to know things like that… “it is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority.”  

I long for the day when His Kingdom in me can respond with that kind of gentleness… Philip would have been reminding them of the countless things I had told them about the Kingdom…. and say something sarcastic like…

“Wazamatta wit you guys… ain’t you ever gonna get it?…. how many times have I tried to tell you that my Kingdom is not of this world… my kingdom does not look like any Kingdom you can see or touch or feel…. my kingdom has nothing that looks even remotely like what you see anywhere here on this earth…

…people who are rich or strong or smart or wealthy in any way… the ones with all the answers (like Philip before he repented) …educated up the gazoo… experts of any kind… for all those people “it is hard for  (fill in the blank) them to enter the kingdom… one needs to be like a little child (the opposite of all those others… in order to enter the kingdom… remember what I told you when you asked me which ones of you would be the top dogs in my kingdom… can I be the one at your right hand… well… maybe I’ll settle for sitting at your left hand…. second in command isn’t too bad…

….it is the least that are first in my Kingdom… I am the Kingdom… I enter you and the Kingdom is within you… I am in the Father… you are in me …. we are one… it is my presence in you that makes the Kingdom present…. makes it possible to be in the Father … when you are in me you are in Him… we all become one…

I am in people…. not systems!

….wazamatta wit you guys….when are you guys gonna get it…  

There is more to come …..

ahhhh….. we have come to what may just be the final exhortation….  but maybe not…. 

there is a guy named Darryl Rodman… 

I am very thankful that Darryl has pressed me to keep on looking… by saying things like… “is there more here?”…. “lots more to be revealed here, I think”...things like that… suggesting a further turn of the diamond to see all the facets…

It has been an incredible spiritual experience for me as I continue to ask the Lord about all this….. about what He wants me to see about this thing I have been calling the connection of the dots... then all that has come since then ….  as I have wrestled to somehow articulate what He has shown me… I had thought I was finished… then Darryl wrote this:

“Have you ever done one of those connect the dots pictures. A bigger and clear vision comes out of how the dots are ordered and how they are connected. Just looking at dots can’t reveal that vision, but when they are connected in the right order then we see what was hidden on the page. And what is hidden is a fuller revelation of the purpose of relationships and how they fulfill the kingdom of God in the earth. More here still?”

In all that I will be saying…. I do not mean to imply that Darryl would either agree with me or not agree with me… our relationship as  friends  is not based on whether we agree or not…. we have known each other for quite a while now… each of us has a different call on our lives… each of us answers to the Lord individually as we seek to hear His voice… see what He wants us to see and do what He wants us to do….  Jesus said time and time again some variation of… “I only do what my Father tells me to do”  … and each of us is committed to that in our own individual lives… we are also committed to walk together and to stimulate one another to righteous and good deeds… encourage one another to live openly and to seek first  the Kingdom and it’s King…  each and every day of our lives….

What I have been shown is much too long for just one post…. so this will be continued over the next couple days… the first one I will call:  “How the dots are ordered”

The next will be called  “How the dots are connected”

Tune in… you might just find some interesting things to wrestle with yourself…

Yet another thing friends do is they exhort you… they encourage you…  I am trying to find time to keep up with my friend Darryl’s exhortations! ….  

Thank you Uncle Darryl….

The one before the latest one was a reminder not to forget something… don’t want to misquote… this is what he said:   “So don’t forget the passage about how much we love the Lord is revealed in our personal obedience to all He asks.”   Darryl is referring specifically  to:    John 14:15   “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.“  Very … very important to keep in mind when I am saying the kinds of thing I am saying… like our connection to The Dot….that intimate personal relationship… pressing in to Him…. and not into a religious system…

I know where Darryl is coming from in this exhortation… he understands the 70’s… so do I…. I walked thru all the days of the Jesus People thing… all the …”it’s just me and Jesus”... don’t need anything or anyone else… certainly don’t need religious structures or church stuff…   Back then Jesus was the next high of the hippie type folks… from high on drugs….into a different high… they were into freedom... the long hair…. the beards… the sandals… the drugs…. the booze… the sex….the cry became… “All I need is Jesus…. get high on Jesus instead of drugs… and on and on…”   some lifestyles didn’t change very much… they talked about loving the Lord but nothing was changing in them… scripture tells us…you “will know them by their fruit.” …. fruit is character… there was very little fruit…

The Church didn’t know what to do with them…. turned them away and turned them off… some made it into the Churches… they cut their hair… took a bath…became accountable…. stopped all the stuff we told them was sinful… at least outwardly they stopped … but that’s another story… my perfect Church  was one of those and we got those young folks in… got them  straightened up and flying right …. in a hurry…. yessirreebob we did…    

….. like I said… that’s another story… maybe tomorrow…

Neither of those scenarios  is what I am talking about.  I am talking about walking closely with the dots that The Dot connects you with… helping each other to walk the walk… not just talk the talk… out of all those relationships… and pressing constantly into.. the Dot… we start to change… we change what He is showing us needs to change… when it is the perfect time in our life to see it and act on it… we fall more and more in love with Jesus and want more and more to do… whatever it is He is telling us to do…so different from all that I will be sharing next time… 

That will be from yet another exhortation… that thing that friends do…. and you will never guess who exhorted me….  

on the morrow mayhaps….

After saying all that yesterday about what friends do and how friends act… I hear from the guy who started all that “Musing around”  that I did… my friend Darryl… who then encourages me to take it further… my interpretation of what he said … basically was … OK… and then what… after that…there is more coming here… we have this beautiful friendship… what do we do now…?

That got me going again… so here it is… the old “keep it simple stupid” formula…

Don’t complicate this Philip…. like I have done so many times before… like so many others before me have done… don’t complicate this lagain, Philip… you see… whenever the Lord would reveal something to me in the past… it became my next religious program… the “ten steps to the perfect everything”… just keep it simple this time old fella…..

Here it is….. simple….I get connected to God by what His Son did to make a relationship with God once again possible… I now have a relationship with the One who created this whole thing… I get connected to the DOT … the first Dot… the really really Big Dot….the Dot where it all has to start… for all of us… at that same time hopefully even seeing  that He loves me and wants to be my friend… and we start to build our relationship with each other…

Maybe even more hopefully somebody actually explains it to me so I don’t have to wade thru 40 years of religion  to maybe finally get there someday… hopefully I will realize there is absolutely nothing  I have to do to keep Him loving me… no religious hoops I need to jump through… nothing…. no thing… nothing!

Just start building that relationship… start walking with Him… talking to Him… listening to His voice… only do the things He tells me to do… out of that relationship with Him… doing that walking and talking wherever it is that He has placed me in this life… my physical location… my job… my neighbors… my friends… right there… using the gifts He has given me… starting to learn how to love others... owing no man anything but to love them… serving others… living my life to bless others… in the process learning that in losing my life…. I suddenly gain true life… all my pride and arrogance… my selfishness… my self-serving lifestyle…. my taking… using… grasping…promoting… all my self importance that feeds on recognition… feeds on the praise and adulation of others… that loves the power… loves the position… loves the control…. loves “being somebody” …. all of that other stuff  goes into the ground and dies…. and I wait.

What I am waiting for is simply for this… for the DOT…  to start connecting me with other little waiting dots who have discovered what I have discovered… waiting for us to discover each other.

What do those dots do?  They build relationships with each other as they continue to walk with the DOT and with each other … still doing only that which the DOT tells them to do….. then they continue waiting…. and waiting…. dieing a little more since waiting is the last things we human beings want to do… waiting…. until the DOT connects them to other waiting dots… and then other waiting  dots…

When the dots decide it is time to organize the thing  and really do something  to serve the Lord together... really connect all these dots together and do something really great for the Kingdom of God……  humbly then I will assume the leadership role… then yet another tower is erected… like all the religious towers before them….and death enters… as we get our strength back … we take back our lives… we save our lives… when we save our lives… we lose them.

and… the DOT... leaves …. He loves us too much to force us to just sit there and wait… to force us to to depend totally on Him for every single thing in our lives… no… He won’t make us do that…. He loves us… so He leaves us… to whatever it is we really want to do…

….. and all us little dots can now to do whatever is right in our own eyes.

Glad I decided to stop that cycle.

I put up some thoughts on Facebook this morning…. got a couple neat responses …. that got me “Musing”… what I  said on Facebook was:

“Just a bit overwhelmed this morning … by just how much God loves us… hard to get it thru my thick head after all the years of religion that I went thru to brainwash me about stopping this and doing that or God would pop me upside the head…. I mean all that stuff was a bunch of lies… all He wants is… to be my friend.”

Then… my friend Darryl commented:   “And then we will do what friends do, and act like friends act.”

Well then there now… that got the old heart buzzing so when I went down to spend my half hour on my Airdyne… I asked the Lord about what Darryl had said… and to show me what friends do and how friends act….it all came back so quickly… the Lord said: “What are you doing now? “  “I’m spending time with you, Lord…. er.. uh… I’m spending time with my friend” … then I get all mushy when He says:    “And I am spending time with my friend.”

Rocket science?  Not hardly… God was spending time with His friend Philip the same way he spent time with His friends Adam and Eve … way back in the beginning… just walking and talking with each other in the garden…at least till they messed up and decided they wanted to be in charge… then when God came strolling thru the garden for His nightly chat with them… Adam and Eve hid themselves from the presence of the Lord... not a good choice.

Obviously what friends do is spend time together… chat together… enjoy one another… build their relationships with one another… doing those kinds of things should consume a whole bunch of my “actions” … how I act with a friend would never ever be…. to hide myself from their presence.

What other kinds of actions do friends take… what other things do they do?  They initiate things to do together… they talk all the time… they see each other regularly… they take meals together from house to house… they are open with each other… they are honest…never lie… share life together… they help each other… care for one another… pray for each other… laugh with one another … cry with each other… love one another…. support each other… cover each other’s back…. and on and on and on.

Nah…. not rocket science… you see….those connected dots I’ve been talking about… they are all my friends… I have relationships with them… and we work at building closer and closer relationships with each other… all the time… because we do what friends do…  we act like friends act…

So glad I learned this… I mean….if it was up to Philip to communicate what Philip has   “seen and heard and beheld and handled…concerning the one who is Life…”    it would simply just never ever happen...  just wish it hadn’t taken me soooooo long to discover it… I guess that’s why I say things different today than I used to.  I used to point people to my religious system… my doctrines… the things I was taught… the marvelous true things I had seen… and heard others say….or read in books…. but as I handled them… there was no life… it didn’t work the way I was told it would work… somehow… we just missed God in all of it…

You know why… ?… because He is not in all that stuff … He is in people… the way He communicates who He is… is by His very Life in us… no life?… then there is nothing I have to communicate… it is not words… or systems… or structures… or buildings… or doctrines… it is simply Him… His Life.. He communicates Himself….

What a privilege it was on Wednesday morning laying on that procedure table waiting to get my heart zapped to bring me back to life after they stopped my heart… amazing… freedom… simply to be me… fool around… have fun… enjoy myself kibitzing with all those other people… I didn’t have to say any religious stuff or make God talk or put on my plastic smile… I just was having fun… enjoying His presence… His life…

Today… I am a new person again… just kicking back… enjoying being alive in Him… enjoying my wife… enjoying the new day… enjoying my friends and family… enjoying this wonderful business He has given to us in this wonderful little town where He has placed us…

Just seizing this new day….

Carpe Diem everyone!