Brown's Daily Word 6-27-11

Good Morning.
The Lord blessed us with a beautiful weekend. It was great thrill and a blessing to be in the House of the Lord yesterday joining His people around the globe worshipping Him and praising Holy Name. I just got an e-mail from Sunita. She and Andy are in Albania, with Sunita's work. Albania is the birthplace of Mother Theresa. Sunita shared that Albania is a stunning country. The people are beautiful. She is meeting people who are on fire for Jesus. Sunita and Andy will be in the Balkan States for three weeks before heading to India Sunita shared that she is meeting there in Albania people who are involved in Intercessory prayer.
God is sovereign, but he has chosen to make the prayers of the people part of the exercise of his will. Author Eugene Peterson says, “While conflicts raged between good and evil, prayers went up from devout bands of first century Christians all over the Roman empire. Massive engines of persecution and scorn were ranged against them. They had neither weapons nor votes. They had little money and no prestige.” [Reversed Thunder] But they did have prayer. And that prayer helped shape the course of history.
Scholar Craig Keenan referred to Daniel, “whose prayer becomes the battleground for angelic powers greater than the earthly rulers affected by them while the leaders of empires rise and fall as little more than pawns in the hands of a sovereign God.” [Dan 10:13, 10:20-12:3]
We often fail to see the effects of our seemingly insignificant lives. For instance, who would have thought that the future of Israel lay in the desperate prayers of Samuel’s mother Hannah, who thought herself a failure because she couldn’t give her husband a son? I don’t know exactly how it works, no one does, but somehow the wheels of God’s grand design are greased by the prayers of the saints.
Throughout the world there are bands of committed Christians who come together on Fridays, the Islamic holy day of prayer, to pray for the gospel to penetrate the Islamic world. Reports abound of Muslims being converted through dreams and visions even in “closed” Islamic countries.
There is a story of Polish slave laborers working in munitions factories for Germany toward the end of WWII being bombed by allied planes. Some were killed, more were wounded. Yet, they prayed for the planes to return, again and again, as often as necessary, until the Nazis were defeated. God will end history on one great final day, but He is Lord of history even now.
God is just. Natural disasters are not just random events, and our ability to predict them is not at all the same as the ability control them. It is God who controls the events of nature, and the notion that he does not use them as judgments is contrary to reason and to Scripture. Natural disasters are normal, but they are not random. They are acts of a just and sovereign God who gives us more warnings than anyone could possibly have a right to expect. Every act of God that we see is sent by our merciful and loving God as a reminder of who is in charge, and of whose justice will prevail.
One of my favorite OldTestament scholars, Walter Kaiser, said a few years ago, “North American society is headed for destruction and judgment. And we had better believe it’s coming, because there is no sign that repentance is near. It is coming, or else God is a liar and his word is not true. The prophet’s message must be preached again today.” [The Old Testament in Contemporary Preaching]
When we hear the words of main-line Protestant spokesmen saying "Peace, peace," when there is no peace, [Jeremiah 6:14] let us look again at the acts of God in the world around us and remember that God is still just. He has not changed.
In Christ,
Brown
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