Brown's Daily Word 1-11-13

Praise the Lord for this Friday. It has been mild and will be getting milder by this weekend. The snow is melting fast and furious. My wife has gradually been taking down some of the Christmas decorations, though some are still up. All our children and the grandchildren are planning to come home on the weekend of the 19th of January to celebrate my wife's birthday. We will also be celebrating our youngest granddaughter Ada'a second birthday, which occurs on the 16th of January. We are blessed and are very grateful.

In the church calender it is the season of Epiphany. Christmas begins with Christmas Day December 25 and lasts for Twelve Days until Epiphany, January 6, which looks ahead to the mission of the church to the world in light of the Nativity. The one or two Sundays between Christmas Day and Epiphany are sometimes called Christmastide. The Wise Men or Magi who brought gifts to the child Jesus were the first Gentiles to acknowledge Jesus as "King" and so were the first to "show" or "reveal" Jesus to a wider world as the incarnate Christ. This act of worship by the Magi, which corresponded to Simeon’s blessing that this child Jesus would be "a light for revelation to the Gentiles" (Luke 2:32), was one of the first indications that Jesus came for all people, of all nations, of all races, and that the work of God in the world would not be limited to only a few. The Church is called to focus on the mission of reaching others by "showing" Jesus as the Savior of all people.

In my recent trip to Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Japan, I was blessed to see the ongoing Work of the Gospel around the world that started in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. It is still continuing to reach, teach, preach, and heal in the Name of Jesus Christ, the Lord of the church.

During the season of Epiphany I love to read the stories of the missionaries who have gone before us. I get excited about Jesus our Lord and about His Kingdom work. One of the great missionaries of the 19th century was David Livingstone. He spent several decades in south and central Africa. Although he is known as a great explorer, and was the first known white person to travel across Africa, he was also a dedicated medical missionary and slave abolitionist. David Livingstone died in present-day Zambia on May 1, 1873 from malaria and internal bleeding caused by dysentery. He took his final breaths while kneeling in prayer at his bedside. Britain wanted the body to give it a proper burial, but the African tribe, who loved Livingstone dearly, would not give his body to them. Finally they relented, but cut Livingstone’s heart out and put a note on the body that said, “You can have his body, but his heart belongs in Africa!” Livingstone’s heart was buried under an Mvula tree near the spot where he died, which is now the site of the Livingstone Memorial. His embalmed body, together with his journal, was carried over a thousand miles to the coast, where it is was returned to Britain for burial at Westminster Abbey.

You may recall the story of when Henry Morton Stanley was sent by the New York Herald to find Livingstone. He eventually did find him, and we remember the memorable greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” By that time Livingstone had spent thirty years in Africa, and Stanley wanted Livingstone to go back to England with him, but Livingstone refused to go. Two days later Livingstone wrote in his diary: “March 19, my birthday. My Jesus, my King, my Life, my all, I again dedicate my whole self to Thee. Accept me, and grant, O gracious Father, that ere the year is gone I may finish my work. In Jesus’ name I ask it. Amen.” It was a year later that his servants found him dead on his knees.

On every page of Bible and in the annals of church history we read about remarkably dedicated followers of God. One such dedicated follower of God is Anna. Luke wrote about her when Joseph and Mary brought Jesus to the temple for Mary’s purification and Jesus’ presentation to the Lord. While Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were in the temple precincts they first met Simeon. We read about that encounter in Luke 2:25-35, immediately prior to the encounter with Anna in Luke 2:36-38. Simeon and Anna both testified to the true identity and mission of Jesus.

Luke said that as Anna was coming up at that very hour she began to give thanks to God (2:38 a). Anna was walking in the temple precincts. Her eye caught Simeon with Joseph, Mary, and Jesus so she walked over to them, and heard Simeon sing his song of praise about Jesus. Immediately she knew that Jesus was the promised Messiah, the promised Christ, and the promised Deliverer! She began to give thanks to God. Anna began to speak of him (2:38 b), that is, of Jesus. Jesus was the subject of her proclamation. She did not talk about her personal experience. She did not speak about the blessing that she received by seeing Jesus face-to-face. She spoke about Jesus.

The gospel is not about us. It is about Jesus. It is what God has done in the person and work of Jesus.

Luke said that Anna spoke about Jesus to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem (2:38 d). Anna believed that God was going to send a Deliverer, someone who would redeem his people from their sins. Having seen Jesus she knew that God was doing exactly what he had promised centuries before. May we likewise all be propelled to love and serve Jesus in this new year , with zeal and fervor.

Soon after graduating from college, Jim Elliot wrote in his diary: “God, I pray Thee, light these idle sticks of my life that I may burn for Thee. Consume my life, my God, for it is Thine. I seek not a long life but a full one like You, Lord Jesus.”
In Christ,

Brown

http://youtu.be/KyWOIKCtjiw

Brown's Daily Word 1-10-13

Praise the Lord for this new day. Our Wednesday Evening gathering was a blast. The food was sumptuous, the fellowship was sweet, and the study was both provoking and challenging. We have started, "40 Days of Love ", by Rick Warren. It is 6 week study series.

I have been looking at Romans 12: 9 ff. It is written: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers...”
I believe this life-style is called a sacramental life-style. This is what it means to be a living sacrifice. Mary Welchel puts it this way: “At the beginning of my day I literally go through the parts of my body and relinquish each of them to Gods service for the day. ‘Lord, here are my feet. May I walk as Jesus would walk, go where you want me to go.’
“There are places I wouldn’t go because Jesus wouldn’t go there, places that cause me to compromise my stand for Jesus. But that’s probably the easy part of having feet that are living sacrifices. Such feet will take me to places I might not think of going otherwise. I’ll go to people who need me, places of worship, places to minister to others.
"'Here are my hands, Lord. I give them to you so that what I do with them will bring honor to you.’ Hands that are given to God will be busy servant hands, doing things for others. Nothing is too menial, nothing too hard, nothing beneath them. It may mean waiting on someone who is sick, or mopping a floor, or running errands for others.
“‘Lord here are my eyes; I want to see as you see. Here are my ears; may I listen to what you would listen to. And Lord, I give you my tongue. I ask you to control all the words formed by my tongue, that they may be words of help and healing. Lord, my brain is yours; I want to think your thoughts. Here’s my heart, Lord, Put into my heart your love and compassion for all the people I will see today.’
“Presenting the parts of my body individually to God each day is one of the best way I have found to prepare myself for the day ahead, because it reminds me I am not my own, I was bought with a price. And therefore, my body, every part of it, should be a living sacrifice all day long every day.”

“So then, my friends, because of God’s great mercy to us, I appeal to you: Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to God’s service and pleasing to God. This is the true worship you should offer. Romans 12.

In Christ,

Brown

http://youtu.be/iPeVIuRjUi4

Brown's Daily Word 1-9-13

Praise the Lord for this wonderful Wednesday. We will gather for our mid-week fellowship, study, and sharing starting with a sumptuous homemade dinner at 6:00 PM, followed by Choir practice ast 7:30 PM. One of my verses for this new year is "Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4) I desire to love the Lord and walk with Him, serving, loving, worshiping, giving, and receiving. It is my desire to glorify Him and enjoy His goodness, His grace, and all the blessings which the money cannot buy.

"I want to be where You are,
Dwelling in Your presence
Feasting at Your table,
And surrounded by Your glory
In Your presence,
That’s where I always want to be
I just want to be,
I just want to be with You"

Henri Nouwen was a Roman Catholic priest and intellectual who spent many years teaching at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. He was at the acme of his career and the center of the intellectual world. He had written several books and was known all over the globe. He was a priest in his fifties when he asked himself the question: “Did becoming older bring me closer to Jesus?” He said that after twenty-five years in the priesthood he found himself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied with “burning issues.” He further said, “Something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger. I began to ask myself whether my lack of contemplative prayer, my loneliness, and my constantly changing involvement in what seemed most urgent were signs that the Spirit was gradually being suppressed.”
In his success he had fallen prey to three temptations: to be relevant, popular, and powerful. He began to pray for God’s direction in his life, and God led him to become the chaplain at Daybreak Community called L’Arch. Daybreak is a home for mentally handicapped adults. He wrote, “So I moved from Harvard to L’Arch, from the best and the brightest, wanting to rule the world, to men and women who had few or no words and were considered, at best, marginal to the needs of our society. It was a very hard and painful move... After twenty years of being free to go where I wanted and to discuss what I chose, the small hidden life with people whose broken minds and bodies demand a strict daily routine in which words are the least requirement does not immediately appear as the solution for spiritual burnout.”
But it was at L’Arch where God began to deal with him spiritually and free him from the temptation to always be on the cutting edge of culture. Through that experience he found a new freedom to be the man Jesus wanted him to be. His prayer life returned, and with it a renewed awareness of the presence of Jesus in his life.
Some of us have lived long enough, and read enough of history to realize that the burning issues of one age are the irrelevant topics of the next. We can be a part of “The Church of What’s Happening Now,” or we can be a part of the eternal Kingdom of God where the issues never change and people’s needs are always seen as the need of the human heart. Jesus said, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Henri Nouwen wrote, “Too often I looked at being relevant, popular, and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations.” Jesus’ simple question to us is, “Do you love me?”

In Christ,

Brown

http://youtu.be/psEGRkf3Nww

Brown's Daily Word 1-8-13

Praise the Lord, for He is the King of all nations and the Lord of all. I was in a local store yesterday. There two sales associates were in a deep religious and theological discourse. One guy was telling the other guy that they had a great Sunday. They celebrated the feast of the Three Kings. His wife is from Mexico and she goes out of her way to celebrate all religious holidays, he said. He likes the celebration and the feasting part of it. He was saying that he did not really fully understand about the Magi and the gifts they brought to Jesus. I just joined the conversation and said that the wise men, called the Magi traveled a long way to come to Jesus and worship Him. Their lives were changed.

We don not need to travel a long way to worship Jesus. We can give our lives to Him. We can put our faith in Him and worship Him even now. It is written that the wise men found Mary and the baby in a house, and it was there that they knelt before him and offered their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. (2:11) It is written further, "Being warned in a dream that they shouldn't return to Herod, they went back to their own country another way." (Matthew 2:12)

To our modern ears, that sounds pretty lame: If I-81 closed, take Highway 11. No big deal. Remember, however, that travel wasn't that easy back then. There were trade routes to follow, and to venture off the beaten path was to do so at great peril. For the magi to take a different trade route might well mean that they had to go hundreds of miles out of their way to get back home.

The Good News is that God is faithful through the changing circumstances of our lives. The bad news is that we experience God's faithfulness only as we let go of our rebellious spirit and conform to His will. As the magi were led home in a new direction, the Lord will lead us home, but it's apt to be a different journey than we had expected, with lots of twists, turns, and detours along the way.

After the magi left, Joseph had another dream. This time the angel warned him to get out of Bethlehem because his son's life was in danger. Like the Pharaoh who vowed to kill the baby Moses, Herod was going to kill all the Hebrew boys two years old and younger. So, "He (Joseph) arose and took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt, and was there until the death of Herod." (Matthew 2:14-15)

Joseph kept his family in Egypt for some time, until Herod the Great died. Then he brought them back to Bethlehem, only to find out that things were worse under Herod's son, Archelaus. So he took them on to Nazareth. It is probably safe to say that none of this fits into Joseph and Mary's plans of getting married and living happily ever after. From the moment of the angel's first annunciation, their life would turn out far different from anything they could have expected.

We stand at the threshold of a new calendar year. None of us knows what twists, turns and detours lie ahead and what effect they're going to have on our lives. Life is full of changes. Some we choose, such as moving to a different location or starting a new job. Some we do not, such as experiencing the death of a loved one, the failure of a marriage, or the devastation of a storm. Just when we think things are going our way, the rug may be pulled out from under us and everything gets topsy-turvy. We certainly are not the first to face the uncertainty of the future. Like those who've gone before us, scripture beckons us to look to God to order and provide. The Psalmist writes, "The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid?" (Psalms 27:1)

Our Lord Jesus declared: "Therefore don't be anxious, saying, 'What will we eat?' 'What will we drink?' or 'With what will we be clothed?' For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first God's Kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore don't be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day's own evil is sufficient." (Matthew 6:31-34)

It is also written: "In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:6-7)

In Christ,

Brown

http://youtu.be/hXsiWoyjw60

Brown's Daily Word 1-7-13

Praise the Lord for this new year full of our Lord's promises, paved with His amazing grace, unending love, and fathomless mercy. It is great thrill to know that Jesus is the center of History. He is the Alpha and Omega. The future belongs to those who belong to Jesus Christ.

The Lord Blessed with wonderfully in His House with His people by His presence as we joined untold millions around the corner and around the globe in worshiping the Newborn King. In the church calendar it was the Epiphany Sunday yesterday, the time of the coming of the Magi, the Wise Men to Jesus. “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” With those words, Charles Dickens began his epic novel, “A Tale of Two Cities.” Such words find a powerful echo in Mathews account of the visitation of the Magi..
For the best of times, we are able to look to the story of the magi. Just few days ago, our thoughts were on Jesus in the manger. Then we found him visited by shepherds, men of little status whose working lives were such that they lacked the ritual cleanliness to be fully participating members of Israel’s religious life which meant in effect being outsiders. Now we read about the gentiles, the foreigners from far away country taking a journey to worship Jesus. Our Loving God makes every effort to reach every person who is far away from Him. In this case God used the star to reach pagan Gentile magician/astrologers in order to bring them to Christ.
The first mention of these wise men is when they arrive in Jerusalem, the Jewish capital. The book of Matthew says, “Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, "Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him." The wise men were on a mission, to find the newborn king of the Jews and worship him. What is fascinating about these men, is what they have to teach us about how God makes every effort to reach every person no matter how far away they are from him.

First, we have to remember these wise men were likely Gentiles, not Jews, who had come seeking the king of the Jews. The Jews thought the promised Messiah was for the Jews, not the Gentiles. In fact, all the first followers of Christ were almost exclusively Jewish. The Christ was supposed to deliver them from their sins. He was supposed to deliver them from their oppressors, and yet the signal to the wise men was that God was calling them as Gentiles to the Christ.

Second, they did not even share the religion of the Jews; they were Magi, which was a combination of a learned scientist and cultic astrologer. They knew science as well as magic. They were the academia of their time, but they were still magician/astrologers, which were practices God specifically had forbidden for his people.
This tells us that God never abandons anyone. There is never anyone too far gone. If God can reach pagan Gentile astrologers, he is still working on people who we may think are too far away from Him. God never gives up on anyone and he uses whatever means he can to help lead them to Christ. In this case God sent them a message using an astronomical event, a star, as a signal to them that they needed to search for the child born as king of the Jews. God used a language they understood. Perhaps if an angel had appeared to them as it had to the shepherds, it would have been misinterpreted, but God knew the best way to reach astrologers was through a star. God used the star as a way to bring the Magi to Christ.
Not everyone is raised in the church. Many don’t know church language, and they don’t understand their need to seek out Jesus. We are sometimes baffled as to why people do not participate in church. Many times it’s because they have no foundation, it was not part of their upbringing. They don’t know they are supposed to seek him, and so God comes in ways they can understand, making it relevant to them. God came in the flesh so that He could be like one of us. Think of a person whom you believe to be too far gone, someone you think will never come to Christ as their Savior. Remember that God continues to love them and is still working on them; He wants to bring them to Christ.
The Gentile kings found Christ and worshipped Him and offered to Him the gifts gold, frankincense and myrrh. They continued to remain open to God. God gave them a message in a dream. They were men whose job it was to interpret dreams, so God spoke to them again in a way they would understand, in a dream. They recognized this dream as a message from God and they obeyed. God instructed them not to go back to tell Herod, because God knew that Herod was making plans to try to kill this King of the Jews.
God wants us to be open to the leading of his Holy Spirit. He may not always lead throug a dream, but God still speaks to us in other ways, such as through Scripture and through prayer, to lead us away from danger and to stay focused on his plan.

Praise the Lord for the Wise Men, the Magi, who came to Jesus and worshipped Him. They stand in the long history of those intellectuals, scientists, and astrologers who made a long Journey to Jesus and have found Him to be their Lord and Savior.
Bishop J. C. Ryle said of these men, “We read of no greater faith than this in all the Bible. It is a faith that deserves to be placed side by side with that of the penitent thief. The thief saw one dying the death of a malefactor and yet prayed to him and called him ‘Lord.’ The wise men saw a newborn babe on the lap of a poor woman, and yet they worshipped him and confessed that he was the Christ.”
In Christ,

Brown

http://youtu.be/c-Jkktpp9QI