Brown's Daily Word 12-04-09

Good morning,
Praise the Lord for this Holy and joyful season. It is a wonderful blessing to enter the new year through the season of Advent and Christmas. We are so blessed. We have reasons to celebrate. We are using a book and video by Rick Warren, "The Purpose of Christmas" for our Wednesday study. In it he says that one of the purposes of Christmas is celebration. We cannot celebrate the joy , the peace, and the good will the Lord gives to us unless we know Him as our Lord and Savior. May the Christ of Christmas propel us to proclaim the Peace of Christmas to those who have no clue about Christmas, who are blinded and walk in darkness. Those who live in the area, join us this evening at 7 PM on Time Warner Cable channel 4 for Friday TV out reach. I am sharing from Luke 21.25ff" The Summer is near".
Isaiah 2:1-4 gives us a wonderful picture of God’s peace. Verse 4 poetically states that the weapons of war will be transformed into farm implements. Swords will beaten into plowshares. Spears will be beaten into pruning hooks. At that time, nations will no longer train their militaries for war any more.
The United States did not enter the war until after WORLD WAR II until after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Both civilians and service men alike remember that event. From that day forward, no one living at that time would ever forget where they were or what they doing when they heard the news. After the events of December 7, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described that day as one that would live in infamy. Those who were not living at that time have learned about the events of that historic day from the history books. From the moment that Pearl Harbor was bombed onward, the name of the place known as Pearl Harbor became a battle cry.
Fitsuo Fuchida led 360 Japanese planes in the attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. Updated reports in 1991 suggested that there may have been as many as 5 Japanese submarines that were involved in addition to their 360 planes. The results of their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor follow:
- 2,403 Americans were killed
- 1,178 Americans were wounded
- Of the 18 American ships that were present, 11 were sunk, (8 battleships, 3 cruisers)
- 347 American planes were destroyed

Over two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ was born in a small town called Bethlehem. Far too many times we make light of the significance of this fact, that the Son of God, accustomed to the splendor, majesty, and glory of Heaven, would submit Himself to be born in the humblest of circumstances, wrapped in rags, and laid in a cattle trough for his bed. Jesus is the PRINCE OF PEACE (Isaiah 9:6). The name "Jesus" means Savior (Matthew 1:21). Jesus is our Immanuel, which means God with us (Matthew 1:23).
German theologian Karl Barth once said that in Christ both creation and humanity are reconciled. Forgiveness and reconciliation are one and the same in Him. It was only through Jesus Christ that Jacob Deshazer, U. S. soldier and ex-POW, was able to be relieved of his hatred for the Japanese. Jacob Deshazer had just finished flight school when he heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As a result, Jacob began to hate the Japanese passionately. He felt that he had an axe to grind, a score to settle. In fact, he was impassioned that he even volunteered for the bombing mission to Japan known as "Doolittle's raiders". While he was on that mission, he ran out of fuel. Shortly thereafter, he was captured by the Japanese. The next 40 months of his life he spent as a POW. 34 of those 40 months he spent in solitary confinement. One day, when he saw a fellow POW die of starvation, it enraged him all the more in his passionate hate for the Japanese. However, somehow, he began to reflect on the idea that Jesus Christ could turn hatred into love.
He spent the next few months begging for a Bible. Finally, his captors gave him one. Through his solitary hours with that Bible he came to know the Lord. After his conversion, he would pray for his captors even when they beat him. Obviously, through Jesus Christ, God had changed Jacob’s axe to grind and his score to settle into a cross to carry as a disciple of Jesus Christ. God had emotionally and spiritually turned his sword and spear into a plowshare and a pruning hook.
One day Jacob Deshazer and Mitsuo Fuchida met each other, a meeting that changed Mitsuo’s life forever. He had been called as a character witness for war crimes at a court house. He had been sent as an investigator to Hiroshima and back to Tokyo along with twelve others after the atomic bomb had been dropped in Hiroshima. Of those thirteen who went to investigate what had happened to Hiroshima, Mitsuo was the only one who did not die from radiation. Mitsuo stepped outside the court house as he saw a crowd around Jacob Deshazer. He noticed that Deshazer was handing out pamphlets of his testimony about how Jesus turned him from hateful U.S. soldier and POW to a new creation in Christ (Second Corinthians 5:17). Paper was scarce at the time, so many were lining the soles of their worn out shoes with these pamphlets. Mitsuo, however, took one and read its contents. As a result, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. He, too, had allowed God to emotionally and spiritually turn his sword and spear into a plowshare and a pruning hook.
The spiritual battle has already been won, but the victory that comes from Jesus Christ cannot be our victory until we surrender completely to Him. Sometimes we are guilty of harboring a grudge and feeding the fires of hatred long after the initial conflict had lost it’s fire. We do not have to bear arms to find ourselves fighting with God and each other. When we refuse to be the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9) that Christ has called us to be as His disciples, we will allow the devil to get a hold on us so that, in the end, we only keep biting and devouring one another until we have destroyed each other (Galatians 5:15 paraphrased).
If these two men who were enemies as a result of the war that they fought in can become brothers in Christ, then why is it so hard for some of us to do the same? The reason it is so difficult may be that we have not been willing to surrender those swords and spears so that Christ can reconcile us to each other and to God. We cannot proclaim Christ's peace, unless we have proclaimed it in our own lives.
In Christ,
Brown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAyplzXmjVE

The source: Mitsuo Fuchida as told to Elizabeth Sherril and Al Hartley. "Attack". Old Tappan: Flemig H. Revell, Co., 1975).



St. Petersburg ( Russia) Men's Ensemble
in Concert. On Sunday December 6, 2009.

The St Petersburg Men's ensemble will be in concert on Sunday, December 6, 2009 at The Union Center United Methodist Church, Endicott, New York. They will present traditional Russian classical Christian music along with some Russian folk music. The public is cordially invited to come. The concert is scheduled for 7 PM. The Union Center United Methodist Church is located at 128 Maple Drive, Endicott, New York. For Information call (607)-748-1358, or (607)-748-6329.