Brown's Daily Word 9-27-12

Praise the Lord for this new day. The Lord blessed us with a wonderful Wednesday gathering for food, fellowship, and study. During the evening I received a telephone call regarding the sudden death of Christodas Tandi, my brother-in-law Hemant Tandi's older brother in Orissa India. We were all shocked and saddened on his sudden death. Our family here had spoken to him just day before. He was doing well. He loved Jesus and served Him with great joy and zeal. He labored tireless in His Kingdom. John Wesley used say, "Our people die well". Indeed who those love Jesus and serve Him die well and enter in to the Joy their Master and Lord.

One of the most exciting Christian writers of our day is N. T. Wright, a bishop in the Church of England who has retired recently. I love to read his books. Since the 1990’s, he has taken on in public debates and in books those who question the historical reality and ultimate importance of Jesus rising from the dead. He has challenged the lies some of the phony scholars who are interviewed on The History Channel and on the PBS program Religion and Ethics. (Bishop Wright will be speaking at Princeton later in October. I am planning to attend his lectures.) Bishop Wright wants Christians to challenge the general godless world view in Britain and North America that distorts the message of Resurrection. The resurrection of a believer is absolutely about believers participating in the New Life in the Resurrected Lord Jesus. Bishop Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope, helps us refocus to emphasize that heaven can be experienced now in this life as well as after death. Jesus’s Resurrection is not only about eternal life with the Risen Lord after death, but it is about joy and hope now!

Here are some quotes from Bishop Wright to challenge and encourage us:

"Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about when it proclaims ‘May Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’
What we have at the moment isn't, as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end. The Resurrection completes Jesus bold announcement of the inauguration of God's kingdom NOW in and through Jesus. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God's kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven. The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in His Son, Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.
The point of the resurrection is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die; what you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it. What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less ugly or a little more bearable. They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom."

May we all be infused by the Resurrection realty and hope in Christ and may we all be propelled live day by day in confidence, knowing that Jesus came, He saw, and He conquered. Blessed be His Name.

Brown
http://youtu.be/CYTQ6gpcuYA

A Special Saturday Evening of Praise and Worship

Saturday September 29, 2012

Location: First United Methodist Church,
53 McKinley Avenue, Endicott, NY

Sponsored by Union Center United Methodist Church.

5:30 PM Community Dinner

6:30 PM Praise and Worship

Special Music by: "Treasure" Praise and worship band

Soloist: Emma Brunson

Preacher: Pastor Marshall Sorber