Good morning,
Blessed be the name of our Lord, who is upon His throne. It is a great thrill to worship and serve Him. He is worthy of all our praise and adoration. He blessed us with a fantastic weekend. Our Saturday gathering at the First United Methodist Church for a banquet and the hymn sing was a great blessing. The Lord poured upon us His Grace and mercy. We had 12 various Chefs and cooks who prepared the meal. There were various international cuisines including Italian, Polish, Russian, Korean, Mexican and Indian. The foods were prepared with much love and served with much grace. It was shared with much joy. Praise the Lord for so many willing servants who were serving Christ with joy and obedience. The Hymn sing was majestic. The music of His saints filled the sanctuary. We selected 22 hymns out of the 50 most loved hymns. It was a soul-filled event and experience. The Lord blessed us with His presence during our worship services on Sunday morning. It was Boy Scout Sunday, where we celebrated the Scouting ministries. There was a luncheon reception after the 11.00 AM worship.
One of the readings for yesterday taken from 2 Kings 5. The chapter begins, “Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master… The man [was] a mighty warrior.” Notice the way Naaman is described. He was the TOP BRASS of Syria’s army. God also blessed his missions even though Naaman didn’t know God yet; “because of him the LORD had given victory to Aram.” Naaman had one problem. He had leprosy! Naaman’s condition of leprosy is symbolic of what we all suffer. Our leprosy is our sin. God, in his infinite wisdom and compassionate love, pursued Naaman to make him His own just as He pursues us so that we” might not perish but have eternal life.”
The exciting part is the way God pursued Naaman to bring him into the fold. God used a young Israelite slave girl, the very least in society to be a missionary. God worked through her trial of being captured and led away by foreigners. This slave girl could have said the same words to her captors that Joseph said to his recorded in Genesis, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” Truly that was the case for the slave girl, and it can be our experience too when we turn our bad situations over to the Lord. He will use our wretched experiences to His glory. I know it is a tempting for many people, especially young Christians, to think there’s nothing significant I can do for Christ because there is nothing special about me. But God again and again chooses the “least of these” to carry out his mission. Scripture gives us lots of examples.
God chose this nameless POW in Syria to be a missionary. She had a great passion and a deep concern for Naaman, who had to be depressed about his humiliating disease. She went to Naaman’s wife and told her, “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.” What great faith and courage she displayed. We can be sure that this girl had parents who saw to it that she received godly instruction. Otherwise she couldn’t have delivered her message with such knowledge and confidence. Her parents are to be honored for doing all they did to prepare her for the missionary assignment God had in store for her.
The next part of the story is equally amazing, how God did the work of convincing Naaman to listen to the little girl’s words. The slave girl did her part, neither timid nor hesitant about the message she delivered, and God convinced Naaman that he should take her seriously. He did and eventually he ended up right at Prophet Elisha’s door. But there was still a lot of work God had to do in Naaman’s heart. He was a proud man who probably wore lots of honors on his uniform and he had the expectation that he should be treated as someone special. He spelled out his expectations, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” He also expected that he could buy his healing. Verse 5 says he took “ten talents of silver, 6000 shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments.”
Naaman had to discover that you cannot pay for God’s gifts. The great salvation is free for asking and receiving. Ephesians 2:8 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works so that no one may boast.”
Elisha’s command to Naaman was very simple, “Go wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.” (v 10). All the glory had to go to God; it wasn’t Elisha’s power that healed. Seven times is a symbol to indicate the complete, perfect, cleansing that only God can accomplish. Very possibly the Lord did command him to take seven dips correlating with the seven deadly sins that we all wrestle with. Naaman, however, was reluctant. The Lord used the servants to encourage him to obey the command of the Lord given through His prophet Elisha.
Naaman was moved to obey, "screaming and kicking". It took time and a struggle. We know he argued but again God had servants in place to reason with him and help him move forward.
The exciting part is the way God pursued Naaman to bring him into the fold. God used a young Israelite slave girl, the very least in society to be a missionary. God worked through her trial of being captured and led away by foreigners. This slave girl could have said the same words to her captors that Joseph said to his recorded in Genesis, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” Truly that was the case for the slave girl, and it can be our experience too when we turn our bad situations over to the Lord. He will use our wretched experiences to His glory. I know it is a tempting for many people, especially young Christians, to think there’s nothing significant I can do for Christ because there is nothing special about me. But God again and again chooses the “least of these” to carry out his mission. Scripture gives us lots of examples.
God chose this nameless POW in Syria to be a missionary. She had a great passion and a deep concern for Naaman, who had to be depressed about his humiliating disease. She went to Naaman’s wife and told her, “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.” What great faith and courage she displayed. We can be sure that this girl had parents who saw to it that she received godly instruction. Otherwise she couldn’t have delivered her message with such knowledge and confidence. Her parents are to be honored for doing all they did to prepare her for the missionary assignment God had in store for her.
The next part of the story is equally amazing, how God did the work of convincing Naaman to listen to the little girl’s words. The slave girl did her part, neither timid nor hesitant about the message she delivered, and God convinced Naaman that he should take her seriously. He did and eventually he ended up right at Prophet Elisha’s door. But there was still a lot of work God had to do in Naaman’s heart. He was a proud man who probably wore lots of honors on his uniform and he had the expectation that he should be treated as someone special. He spelled out his expectations, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” He also expected that he could buy his healing. Verse 5 says he took “ten talents of silver, 6000 shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments.”
Naaman had to discover that you cannot pay for God’s gifts. The great salvation is free for asking and receiving. Ephesians 2:8 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works so that no one may boast.”
Elisha’s command to Naaman was very simple, “Go wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.” (v 10). All the glory had to go to God; it wasn’t Elisha’s power that healed. Seven times is a symbol to indicate the complete, perfect, cleansing that only God can accomplish. Very possibly the Lord did command him to take seven dips correlating with the seven deadly sins that we all wrestle with. Naaman, however, was reluctant. The Lord used the servants to encourage him to obey the command of the Lord given through His prophet Elisha.
Naaman was moved to obey, "screaming and kicking". It took time and a struggle. We know he argued but again God had servants in place to reason with him and help him move forward.
Some of us have also had battles with self and Satan until we finally surrendered to Christ. God had to work with us, even get our attention in an attention-grabbing way until you finally said, “yes, I’m ready to go all the way in humble, total obedience". Naaman waded into the muddy water, ducked down 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 times. He must have been muttering under his breath, “Forget this, I’m making a fool of myself.” The devil was probably telling him, “Now it’s time for you to take charge, walk right out of that water and go home! Nothing has happened yet and it won’t.” But Naaman didn’t stop until he completely obeyed God’s command through Elisha to make SEVEN ducks in the Jordan River. On the seventh dip he was totally transformed. “So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.”
He was born anew, born again, born from on high. He was made clean inside and out! Then Naaman received God’s gift of insight, rejoicing and commitment. Here are his words, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel. . . “For your servant will no longer offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god except the LORD.” (vv 15, 17b)
He received insight, “Now I know. He received faith to believe what he spoke and then he received the will to make a commitment, “For your servant will no longer offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god except the LORD.”
How about you? Naaman’s story is all of our stories; each one of us is somewhere on his time-line from being a sick lost sinner to becoming a new man, committed and following a new Master. Where are you on this time line? Are you giving thanks like Naaman did at the end of his journey because of what God has done in your life? And have you, like Naaman, committed yourself to worship no other god but the LORD alone? If not, today is the day to do so. That seventh time in the water is the completion of the perfect will of God. There are to many of God’s people that are throwing up their hands and calling it quits after the first few times under their circumstances.... tragically there are some that walk away from God’s very best after six times down. Because of discouragement and fear they leave the waters of God, one small step away from the greatest victory in their life.
May God give each of us the faith he gave Naaman to go all the way in total obedience to his command. Naaman obeyed and then experienced radical transformation and made a life-time commitment to worship only the LORD God. God is waiting for us to take one step of faith into the waters of obedience. The victory is ours for the taking.
He was born anew, born again, born from on high. He was made clean inside and out! Then Naaman received God’s gift of insight, rejoicing and commitment. Here are his words, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel. . . “For your servant will no longer offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god except the LORD.” (vv 15, 17b)
He received insight, “Now I know. He received faith to believe what he spoke and then he received the will to make a commitment, “For your servant will no longer offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god except the LORD.”
How about you? Naaman’s story is all of our stories; each one of us is somewhere on his time-line from being a sick lost sinner to becoming a new man, committed and following a new Master. Where are you on this time line? Are you giving thanks like Naaman did at the end of his journey because of what God has done in your life? And have you, like Naaman, committed yourself to worship no other god but the LORD alone? If not, today is the day to do so. That seventh time in the water is the completion of the perfect will of God. There are to many of God’s people that are throwing up their hands and calling it quits after the first few times under their circumstances.... tragically there are some that walk away from God’s very best after six times down. Because of discouragement and fear they leave the waters of God, one small step away from the greatest victory in their life.
May God give each of us the faith he gave Naaman to go all the way in total obedience to his command. Naaman obeyed and then experienced radical transformation and made a life-time commitment to worship only the LORD God. God is waiting for us to take one step of faith into the waters of obedience. The victory is ours for the taking.
In Christ,
Brown
Saturday, February 18. 2012
Praise and Worship Service
First United Methodist Church, Endicott .
Sponsored by Union Center UMC
6 PM Gathering - Coffee - Fellowship
6:30 PM Worship
Music: Laureen Naik
Speaker: Rev Earle Cowden
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