Brown's Daily Word 6-3-11

Good morning,
It is Friday now, and Sunday is coming. Pray for our Friday evening television outreach this evening on Time Warner cable channel 4 at 7 PM. We will gather for Saturday evening worship with a dinner at 6 PM, fallowed by the worship at 6:30 PM. Our friend, Pastor Terry Steenberg, will be preaching. We will gather for Worship Sunday Morning both at Union Center and Wesley. This coming Sunday is the Ascension Sunday. I will be preaching from Acts 1, "This Same Jesus".
It is going to be a fantastic day here in New York. The rhododendron bushes are in full bloom in front of the parsonage. They look so brilliant and so glorious. Thank you Jesus.
I am so blessed to have put my faith in Christ Jesus from the very early days of my life. Christ and His church have been vital part my life and the life of my family. A pastor told the story of his introduction to Christ, to his calling in life, and to the Church. He was raised in a family that did not attend church. His father was a loving, but hardened man, and they didn’t have a lot of money. When he was a young boy he (the pastor) used to deliver papers.
Well, one of the customers on Bob’s route was a Methodist Minister, and one day when Bob came to ring the man’s doorbell to collect his paper money the minister said to him, “You know Bob, I was wondering. You know I’m the pastor of the Methodist Church down the street. And we don’t have anyone to hand out bulletins on Sunday mornings. I wonder if you’d be willing to come hand out our bulletins?”
Bob was astonished. He had never been in a church before, let alone handed out bulletins, but he was honored that this nice man had asked him to do this so he decided he would give it a shot. In the end, this invitation to hand out bulletins at the Methodist Church turned out to be the changing point in Bob’s life. He met and was befriended by the dear saints of the church who loved him, took him under their wing, became his family, and taught him the love of Jesus. Bob ended up going on to seminary, and from there had a lifelong ministry of loving others into God’s kingdom.
Bob, and many others like him, have put their full trust in the Lord, given their complete lives to Him in service and have found more out of life than they ever could have imagined. Because of this, they have also lived their lives to pass on this fullness of life to others. These people are saints of God.
After hearing Dr. Tim Keller read from Isaiah 25 during our Wednesday Evening study, I have been going back to the passage repeatedly. The passage from Isaiah is a description of the great celebratory banquet which will take place at the end of time, a feast hosted by the Lord of Creation, at which all those who have heard the call of God in their lives and have accepted that call by giving their lives to Christ will be. It will be held at a holy place, the mountain of the Lord: the place where God dwells. In that day, all the saints will say together in eternal celebration: “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”
There is a heavenly celebration, but there is also an earthly celebration for those who have been born of God through the blood of Christ. For we are here together, brothers and sisters in Christ, the kingdom of God here on earth.
Believe it or not, if we have given our whole lives to Jesus Christ, we are saints of the Most High God, and we are kin to all who are running the race with us, who will run the race after us, and who have run the race before us.
In Hebrews chapter 12, we are told, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes upon Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” Every time we worship, we celebrate our kinship with Jesus Christ, Who endured the Cross for our sake, and we celebrate our kinship with the saints in our midst and the saints who have gone on before us.
The sacrament of Holy Communion connects us with the communion of all the millions of saints. Communion is a powerful experience in feeling connected by the body and blood of Christ; it is a great antidote for loneliness, lostness, and loss of identity. It reminds us of the race we are running, why we are running it, and it gives us a foretaste of the Great Eternal Celebration that is to come! May this be on our minds and in our hearts as we come to the Lord’s Table this coming Sunday.
In Christ,
Brown
http://youtu.be/9NADzKAEunM