Good morning,
Praise the Lord for the summer season; I love summer. Praise the Lord for all the seasons. Our Lord is the Lord in every season and indeed He is the Lord of all seasons. This week our church is involved in our annual Vacation Bible School. We are blessed to have children come for whole week to learn about Jesus and His love. I praise the Lord for our faithful and very dedicated workers who labor with much love to make a difference in the lives of the precious children.
Sunday, September 12, is designated "Back to Church Sunday". This will be held on the day after 9/11. We are inviting our neighbors and friends to join us for special worship service ( 8:30 and 11:00 at Union Center and at 9:30 at Wesley).
We are praying and planning to launching a Saturday evening worship service in September. We will have our first Saturday Evening worship Service on Saturday, September 18, at 6:30 PM. Our Saturday evening services will be held at the First United Meodist Church , Endicott. The historic Church is centrally located in Broome County. The Worship and Praise Band from Davis College will minister in music. Rev Earle Cowden will be preaching. There will be ministry for the children and the youth provided. Those who live in the area please join us for an evening of wonderful worship and praise and celebration. We are praying and targeting our unchurched neighbors and friends. Please pray for these worship services.
We love stories about answered prayer. We get a thrill hearing accounts of God’s miraculous interventions in people’s lives. It motivates us to be more diligent about prayer, becoming specific, confident, and bold. We become absolutely convinced God will answer in the way that we seek. We feel a level of faith and enthusiasm that we have never before experienced. There are times , when we ask, seek, and we knock…but God is silent. The thing that we want does not materialize. When this is the result, our zeal is crushed and we wonder what happened. We ask ourselves and God, “Is it worth it?” “Did I do something wrong?” “Does God even hear me?” “Does He care?” In 2 Corinthians 12 we read about Paul's self- disclosure, and how the Lord said no to him.
No one knows for certain about the nature of Paul’s "thorn in the flesh", though there has been extensive speculation about the nature of his affliction. Paul prayed 3 times for God to relieve him of his affliction. Yet, when trouble comes, it comes with a purpose; God doesn’t waste suffering (McBirney). Despair is suffering without meaning or hope ( Viktor Frankel). We need to realize that for our own good, God’s answer is sometimes “no”.
Perhaps it is better for us if we not know the exact nature of Paul’s difficulty. Then we can fill in the blank with whatever hardship we are personally encountering and begin to see God’s purpose in our pain. We can take our burden to the Lord and leave it there. Paul was not advising us to stop praying after asking 3 times, but simply to accept God’s response, realizing there’s a bigger plan that what we can perceive.
The Lord kept Paul in touch with his limitations. Paul had been given extraordinary revelations. It would not have been surprising if Paul started thinking a bit too highly of himself, taking credit for his own success, so he was given the blessing of a handicap. Paul’s affliction kept him from relying on himself, and kept him trusting the Lord's power. God’s answer to Paul is the same answer that He gives to us today. That is, His grace is sufficient for any human weakness. How is “grace” the remedy for pain? Perhaps grace leads us to learn from our limitations. Phil Yancy wrote, “Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of us.” We can’t “fix” our pain; only God can do that. However, we can grow from our experience.
The Apostle Paul said that the messenger of Satan was “buffeting” him. In other words, he was pounding or beating him. Earlier Paul uses this same word buffet to describe how he had to deal with himself. In I Corinthians 9 Paul said he had to buffet himself, to keep his desires under control. Sometimes, in order to say “yes” to God, we have to say “no” to ourselves. Paul explained back in chapter 1, “We comfort others with the same comfort we have received from the Father of compassion.”
Our hardships make us better qualified to offer comfort. Before we can dry another’s tears, we must learn to weep. How could we ever experience the comforting power of God without first being uncomfortable? We don’t respond to human pain with detachment; we respond out of our own wounded-ness. Henri Nouwen called those who comfort out of their own pain the "Wounded Healers". Oswald Chambers advised, “When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else when you get into the light.” God’s love is never measured by our physical comfort. In studying of the lives of famous Christians, we discover that many led troubled lives, filled with conflicts, persecution, and disabilities. Yet they rose above their circumstances and remained faithful. They could have easily been bitter, broken and resentful, but they remained close to God through it all. We may suffer broken relationships, broken promises, and broken expectations, but we don’t have to become broken people. Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional.
When God doesn’t seem to be saying anything, rest your confidence on what God has already said. - “When darkness seems to hide His face, I rest on His unchanging grace. In every high and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the veil. His oath, his covenant, his blood support me in the whelming flood. When all around my soul gives way, He then is all my hope and stay. On Christ the Solid Rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand.” “The Solid Rock”
In Christ the Solid Rock,
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol8JOH1rAxk
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