The Lord blessed us with one of the
ten best days yesterday. Alice and I walked about four miles in the evening.
We are getting ready for worship. I praise the Lord that He gave me His
amazing grace as I started preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord 50
years ago. It has been an amazing and thrilling journey and pilgrimage. I have
seen the wonders and blessings of the Lord, which are indeed too numerous to
recount. Praise the Lord; He has blessed us beyond belief.
I love to read the life of Paul.
Wherever he went and preached, great things and crazy things happened. When he
entered a city and proclaimed the gospel, things turned upside down. It is
spectacular to look at the life and witness of Paul. Whatever happened to Paul, he had been set free by the Lord Jesus and
that is the reason Paul was free indeed. He had no fear of living and he had no
fear of dying. Jesus Christ, the Resurrection and life, had taken hold of his
life. Paul could say, "for me to live is Christ and die is gain". During the Holocaust, in one of the concentration camps,
Betsy Ten Boom famously said to her sister, Corrie Ten Boom, shortly before she
died, "There is no pit so deep that Christ is not deeper still."
Martin Luther said, "We pray for
silver, but God gives us gold instead." We don't realize it, but often we're
praying for silver. God has gold for us instead. In other words, though we
pray for something good, God chooses to give us something great. Whenever God
says no to us as we craft our own life plans, it is because He wants to say a
greater yes to us. He has better plans, bigger plans.
A couple hundred years ago, a ship
carrying a bunch of people left England, bound for the New World to start a new
life. These people had great plans, but the ship entered a huge storm,
hurricane-force winds, huge waves. Everyone was in the hold of the ship,
trembling and afraid, scared and sick and throwing up, and tossing back and
forth. One brave guy came out of the hold to see what things looked like on the
deck. It was pitch black, but by a little bit of light from the moon, he saw
the waves and the boat tilting back and forth. Then he caught a glimpse of the
captain, holding the wheel. The captain looked back at the brave guy and gave
him a little smirk. Then the man went back down into the hold of the ship, and
he said, "I've seen the face of the captain; he is smiling. All will be
well."
In His Grace and Mercy.
Brown
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