Brown's Daily Word 3-30-11

Good morning, Praise the Lord for this last Wednesday of March. We will gather for our mid-week fellowship and study, beginning at 6 PM. The choir will meet at 7:30 PM. We are excited about our Wednesday Evening gatherings. It is great thrill to be with God's people to share a meal, to study the Word of the Lord, and to provoke one another to love the Lord and serve Him with our lives. During this Lenten season I take some to reflect on the Suffering Servant as it prophesied and portrayed in Isaiah 53. God tells us to “Behold” to give our complete attention to Jesus Christ, His Servant, because Jesus knows and does what is necessary to bring us back from condemnation into communion with God. Because of Jesus’ willingness to humble Himself to do God’s will, God exalted Jesus to the highest place, gave Him victory and made Him Lord over all. When earthly kings seek victory, when they seek to spread and secure their domain, they forcibly humble others and make others their servants. They never choose to be humble servants to achieve victory. C. S. Lewis portrayed this kind of dominance in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" as the White Witch, the self-proclaimed Queen of Narnia, humbled Edmund to serve her selfish ends to bring his sisters and brother so she could turn them to stone and secure her throne in Narnia. God says kings will shut their mouths because in Jesus they now understand what they never saw or heard. That is, humility is the way to victory. Humility is what the arm of the Almighty Lord looks like. Who would have believed that a little baby born in a stable with a feeding trough for a crib could deliver Israel from an oppressor stronger than Rome? Even John the Baptist needed God to reveal to him that Jesus was in fact the Savior of the world because Jesus did not look like a Savior. Jesus grew up like a shoot to be cut off. "He grew up like a root out of dry ground" and He came up for the purpose of dying. Jesus was poor. He did not have earthly possessions, power or glory. He was dismissed and rejected by people – considered worthless and unworthy of our attention. Jesus was a “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”. He endured such disfigurement and humiliation that He did not look like Himself; He did not even look human! For this reason mankind refused to believe that victory comes through humility and did not give Jesus a second thought but we hid our faces from Him. But God tells us to turn our faces to Him and pay the closest attention to Him. When you do you this you will understand that victory comes because Jesus was willing to come and sacrifice Himself and suffer for our sins. In Narnia, Aslan said that the White Witch has renounced her claim on Edmund’s life and the whole camp cheered. However, Lucy noticed that Aslan didn’t cheer but seemed deeply sorrowful. Aslan was planning on taking Edmund’s sins and bearing them for him. In a similar way, when we first see the pain and sorrows of Jesus we may think God was punishing Him for some sin He committed. That’s how dull our sins make our perception. In reality it is certain that Christ, who had no sin, was lifting up our grief and shouldering our sorrows and carrying them away from us as if they were His own to bear them on Calvary in our place. The White Witch scorned sacrificial love and said she would take all of Narnia including Edmund’s life; then she pierced Aslan to death. What she didn't know and what we need to know is that it was Christ who was pierced through violently until dead for our rebellions. Jesus was struck down violently so we would no longer be God’s enemy but would become God’s family. Jesus was scourged so healing might be available to us. God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for us so that in Jesus we might become the righteousness of God. In Christ, Brown http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP4JSVMBdZg Saturday evening worship service. Location: First United Methodist Church 53 McKinley Avenue Endicott Sponsored by the Union Center United Methodist Church, 128, Maple Drive, Endicott Saturday, April 2, 2011 6 PM Coffee Fellowship 6:30 PM Worship Service Worship Music: Aric Phinney and the worship team Speaker: David Hettinger