Brown's Daily Word 5/4/11

Good morning,
Praise the Lord for this new day. We will gather for our mid-week service this evening at 6 PM for soup and fellowship, Bible Study at 6:30 PM, followed by Choir practice.
Alice and I drove down to Washington, DC Monday afternoon for a very short visit with Sunita and Andy. I also had a regular visit with my doctor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD yesterday. We had a safe trip back home, though the last hour was very rainy and even displaying lightning. It was a Summer-like day in Washington and Baltimore, with the temperature reaching the low eighties.
I love the powerful passage that we find in 1 Peter 1: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith - of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire - may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” I Peter 1:3-9
Peter, who is also called “the apostle of hope,” encouraged all to trust in Jesus, live obediently in hard circumstances, and keep their hope fixed on God’s ultimate purpose of deliverance. I was reading about Dr. Jerome Groopman of Harvard. When he diagnosed his patients with serious diseases, he discovered that all of them were “looking for a sense of genuine hope—and indeed, that hope was as important to them as anything he might prescribe as a physician.” After writing a book called "The Anatomy of Hope", Groopman was asked for his definition of hope. He replied: “Basically, I think hope is the ability to see a path to the future. You are facing dire circumstances, and you need to know everything that’s blocking or threatening you. And then you see a path, or a potential path, to get to where you want to be. Once you see that, there’s a tremendous emotional uplift that occurs.” The doctor confessed, “I think hope has been, is, and always will be the heart of medicine and healing. We could not live without hope.” Even with all the medical technology available to us now, “we still come back to this profound human need to believe that there is a possibility to reach a future that is better than the one in the present.” In the Bible, “hope” means “certainty,” and the only reason it is called “hope” rather than “certainty” is that we do not yet possess it, although we surely will.“Hope” as it is described in 1 Peter 1 does not imply a wishfulness but rather a dynamic confidence that does not end with this life but continues throughout eternity. “Hope is one of the theological virtues,” C. S. Lewis said. “This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” Christians are promised a greater ability to function in life. Peter speaks of this as “a living hope,” and living means it is something that comes to us every day; it is something that is available all the time. In the New Testament we can see how these early Christians were filled with a constant sense of the presence of Jesus. Everywhere they went they did so with joy, optimism, and expectation. When we read the book of Acts we see that from beginning to end it has a ring of triumph. In Christ,
Brown
http://youtu.be/SCxUQqx2hPg
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, May 7, 2011
6 PM Coffee Fellowship

6:30 PM Worship Service
Worship Music: Jane Hettinger, Mary Haskel
Speaker: Dave Hettinger