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Leaving the Land of Your Limitations
Leaving the Land of Your Limitations
Leaving the Land of Your Limitations
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Leaving the Land of Your Limitations

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Leaving the Land of Your Limitations is a Book that will help anyone who feels they are stuck in the status quo of life, or that has had limitations placed on their life by themselves or other people. This Book is born out of Dr. Kevin Drury's own personal emergence out of personal limitations that hampered his progress toward becoming who God called him to be and to do. The reader will be encouraged and challenged to challenge their own challenges and challengers.

The reader will be taken back in time to look into the lives of those who Jesus had a very high value for in first century Capernaum, in Galilee of the Gentiles. Jesus was called to the lost sheep of the House of Israel but he spent much time in the land of those who sat in darkness.

This Book is a journey of discovering Jesus' plan of leading people out of their own limitations, whether real or imagined. In discovering whose we are we will discover who we are. And if discovering who we really are we will discover why we are. Then we will discover why we are where we are and how to leave where we are to where Jesus has always seen us and is calling us.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateApr 16, 2018
ISBN9781543932195
Leaving the Land of Your Limitations

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    Leaving the Land of Your Limitations - Dr. Kevin Drury

    Chapter One

    Weathering the Withering

    Intimacy is such a vital component to our human existence!

    We all long for deep and meaningful connections that feed life into our felt needs. God created all mankind with that need and created all of us in such a way that we will never find its truest and richest fulfillment in anyone but Him. Then and only then will we succeed in living into-me-see with each other!

    Mark 3:1-35

    [The man with a withered hand

    can also be found in Matthew 12 & Luke 6]

    ¹ And He entered the synagogue again, and a man was there who had a withered hand. ² So they watched Him closely, whether He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him. ³ And He said to the man who had the withered hand, Step forward. ⁴ Then He said to them, Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill? But they kept silent. ⁵ And when He had looked around at them with anger, being grieved by the hardness of their hearts, He said to the man, Stretch out your hand. And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored as whole as the other. ⁶ Then the Pharisees went out and immediately plotted with the Herodians against Him, how they might destroy Him.

    ⁷ But Jesus withdrew with His disciples to the sea. And a great multitude from Galilee followed Him, and from Judea ⁸ and Jerusalem and Idumea and beyond the Jordan; and those from Tyre and Sidon, a great multitude, when they heard how many things He was doing, came to Him. ⁹ So He told His disciples that a small boat should be kept ready for Him because of the multitude, lest they should crush Him. ¹⁰ For He healed many, so that as many as had afflictions pressed about Him to touch Him. ¹¹ And the unclean spirits, whenever they saw Him, fell down before Him and cried out, saying, You are the Son of God. ¹² But He sternly warned them that they should not make Him known.

    ¹³ And He went up on the mountain and called to Him those He Himself wanted. And they came to Him. ¹⁴ Then He appointed twelve, that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach, ¹⁵ and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons: ¹⁶ Simon, to whom He gave the name Peter; ¹⁷ James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James, to whom He gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder; ¹⁸ Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Cananite; ¹⁹ and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed Him. And they went into a house.

    ²⁰ Then the multitude came together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. ²¹ But when His own people heard about this, they went out to lay hold of Him, for they said, He is out of His mind. ²² And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, He has Beelzebub, and, By the ruler of the demons He casts out demons.

    ²³ So He called them to Himself and said to them in parables: "How can Satan cast out Satan? ²⁴ If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵ And if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. ²⁶ And if Satan has risen up against himself, and is divided, he cannot stand, but has an end. ²⁷ No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. And then he will plunder his house.

    ²⁸ Assuredly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they may utter; ²⁹ but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation-- ³⁰ because they said, He has an unclean spirit.

    ³¹ Then His brothers and His mother came, and standing outside they sent to Him, calling Him. ³² And a multitude was sitting around Him; and they said to Him, Look, Your mother and Your brothers are outside seeking You. ³³ But He answered them, saying, Who is My mother, or My brothers? ³⁴ And He looked around in a circle at those who sat about Him, and said, Here are My mother and My brothers! ³⁵ For whoever does the will of God is My brother and My sister and mother.

    Compromise Convolutes The Truth

    What we have in this text is a scenario of a church [synagogue] within a city [Capernaum] that sat in a region [northern Galilee] that had so compromised truth that it had become so convoluted the people did not recognize Truth when He stood in their midst.

    Truth came and stood in their midst and they missed the truth He came to give them. Jesus would one day stand before Pilate and be asked by him, What is truth? We can understand how a Roman prefect did not recognize Truth when He stood before him, but how did the Jewish people and their leaders who were supposed to know Him, so badly miss the mark of truth on the Man who called Himself ‘the Truth’?

    Compromise convolutes the truth! And when we begin to compromise truth, when we begin allowing anything, no matter how minute, to enter in and cause us to question established truth, we are in a very dangerous situation.

    The first part of verse 1 says, And He entered the synagogue again.

    The text tells us that Jesus is in Galilee and specifically Capernaum. We know this is true because in Mark 2:1 we read, "And again He entered Capernaum after some days, and it was heard that He was in the house."

    Most of Jesus’ ministry was in Galilee and beyond, not Judea and Jerusalem. Jesus was from Nazareth in Galilee. It was said about Jesus, Does anything good come out of Nazareth? I believe the very place you receive the most accusations against your identity, character and call of God on your life is THE place Jesus will visit the most and spend the most time.

    My dad died when I was ten years old. I wrote briefly about that in my Book, Welcome To The Wilderness. One of the things I remember him telling me is this, Kevin, if you will work harder on the things that you are not that good at doing without neglecting working on those things you are good at doing, you will be a much more balanced person.

    Jesus comes into all the places in our lives that are out of balance in order to bring balance and divine order!

    You may say, Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Jesus will answer, I will show you by spending most of My time there. Tap yourself and say, There is hope for me because Jesus is coming again to that place in my life where I don’t even like to go.

    Would you take a moment right now and say this prayer,

    Jesus, I ask You to help me allow You to enter into that place and bring healing and deliverance so that I will be able to leave the land of my limitations and reach out and grasp all that You have for me.

    Capernaum was Jesus’ base of operations for His ministry, and He came in and out of there as He traveled and ministered in that region.

    Our text tells us that Jesus entered the synagogue again. This was not His first trip to this church [synagogue], city or region. Jesus came in and out of this particular house of worship. The word again literally means: again and again and again. Jesus continued to come into the city of Capernaum and the synagogue [church] there, and He would go out. He would come in, and He would go out. He would come in, and He would go out!

    When Jesus gives us access to His presence He is wanting to see if we are being responsible with why He is present. The very fact that Jesus kept repeating His visitation was to give the people there more opportunity to be responsible by not continuing to live in the land of their limitations.

    When Jesus continues to visit us He wants to give us the opportunity to make a place for His habitation!

    Adam and Eve were given access to the Garden so they could be given responsibility for the Garden. We find this wonderful truth in Genesis 2:8,15.

    "⁸ The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put1 the man whom He had formed. ¹⁵ Then the Lord God took the man and put2 him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it."

    The first put gave Adam and Eve access. It means to appoint, ordain, to set in place, to lay hands on to commission, to put in charge.

    The second put gave Adam and Eve the responsibility to tend and keep the Garden. It means to rest, to settle down, to remain. This word does not mean to cease from work. It means to work without striving!

    I learned a valuable lesson on rest as I exited an extended wilderness season in the fall of 2012. I wrote of this as well in my Book, Welcome To The Wilderness. I learned that until I found the rest of God I would never find the rest of God. In other words, as long as I was striving to work to please God, I would never discover everything God was wanting me to know about Him.

    Work is not a part of the curse! Work is a part of creation because the Creator is a very productive worker!

    Unproductive work is a part of the curse!

    God gives us access to His presence to see if we will be responsible with His presence! When God shows up in a particular place for a particular person or people, He is not there just to have fun. He actually wants to accomplish something significant, and that is fun!

    Your life and my life, your heart and my heart, are a garden! We are responsible for who and what we allow in and out of our garden! We have to tend [work] and keep [guard] our own garden which means we are responsible to allow Him in and everything He comes to bring and to do. But we are also responsible to keep everything and everyone out that will hinder or prohibit Him for accomplishing what He comes to do.

    When we become responsible for what is sown in the garden of our own hearts, we will be more responsible for the area of responsibility God has sown us into. When we are irresponsible with the responsibility of managing our heart there is no way for us to be responsible for the garden we are sown into.

    The people in Capernaum and the synagogue [church] knew of Jesus, but they did not really know Him. Do you really know Him?

    Jesus spent three and a half years with twelve hand picked disciples, and toward the end of His earthly life He said to Philip, Have I been so long with you and you have not come to know Me? [John 14:8]

    It is possible to have access to Jesus and never move close enough to Him to actually really know Him!

    It is a crying shame but we see this over and over in the Scripture where God shows up and people do not recognize that He is there, or why He is there. We see it in the life of Jacob when he laid his head on a stone in Luz [Lose]. He woke up and said, God is here and I did not know it. [Genesis 28:16]

    God forbid that He manifests Himself in us or in our midst, and we are unaware of it. There is a whole segment of Christianity that is looking for His coming in an unknown secret rescue operation called the rapture, and they are not aware of all the times He has been coming to them.

    There is a very real possibility that if we are not recognizing His coming to us now, we will not be aware when He comes in the future.

    It happened in the first century. He came to His own in a way they were not expecting. Though they should have known how He would show up based on their own [Old Testament] Scriptures. Not only did they not recognize Him and reject Him, they murdered Him.

    I wonder how many of God’s people are killing what He is trying to do today by their unwillingness or inability to recognize He is present, and is wanting to impregnate them with His purpose for them.

    We need to train our spirit to recognize each time He comes so that we will get the maximum benefit of His manifestations in our midst.

    Jesus was conveying His value for the people, the city, synagogue [church] and the region they were in. In essence, what Jesus was saying to the people in that synagogue [church] in Capernaum, and in Galilee, was, I want you to see the value I have for you.

    His continual coming to them was an expression of how highly valued they were to Him in His life, in His mind, and in His heart.

    I believe what Jesus was saying to them is this, You are worthy of My investment. If Jesus did not believe they were worth His investment He would not have kept coming.

    The question is not what value does Jesus have for us. The question we must ask ourselves is how much value do we have for Jesus.

    We are talking about leaving the land of our limitations! In order to leave our limitations we are going to have to get rid of all the limitations we have regarding our value for Him and His manifest presence.

    Jesus was giving them the opportunity to raise their value for Him!

    They were living at such a low level of appreciation.

    They were living at such a low level of understanding.

    And they were living at such a low level of expectation.

    Why? Because they lived with such limitations that they could not even reach out and touch Him while He was there in person. Why? Because they could not wrap their minds around that reality.

    There was a man in the synagogue [church] in Capernaum who had a withered hand. His withered hand represents the fact he

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