Brown's Daily Word 10/3/14

    Praise the Lord for this awesome Autumn season here in the Northeast of the USA.  When you drive around the hills and the mountains, around the rivers and the rivulets, around the fields and pastures, around the lakes and the various water fronts you can see  the wonderful and breath taking beauty of the Lord , which is Technicolor displayed all around.  Praise the Lord for the way He transforms the created world in every season.  Praise the Lord the way He transforms our lives through His touch and by His grace.  Our lives without Christ are colorless, grim and gloomy.  Jesus makes them colorful.  Our lives without Christ are tasteless and meaningless.  Jesus, the maker of the best wine, makes our lives sweet and fermented.  Without Christ death rules in our lives.  Praise the Lord that when Jesus comes to our lives, He infuses us with new life, abundant and Eternal.. Blessed be His Name.   

    Our son-in-law, Tom Ross was involved in a bike accident as he was participating in a charity Bike marathon to raise funds for MS....  He is going in for surgery this morning.  Please pray for his full recovery and restoration.   

    We will meet for a church-wide fellowship dinner - a "soup swap" - this evening at 5:30 PM followed by a movie night at our Church Fellowship Hall.  Or, if you are unable to come out for soup and a movie, then join us for our weekly Television outreach this evening at 7 PM on Time Warner Cable channel 4.  We will meet for worship on Sunday at 8:30 and 11:00 AM at Union Center UMC and at 9:30 AM at Wesley UMC.  We will meet for the Sunday School hour at Union Center at 9:50 AM.  Plan to be in the House of the Lord wherever you might be this coming Lord's  Day...  May Jesus Christ be Praised and worshipped.  

    In his book Culture Making, Andy Crouch addresses the idea that Christians are to be transformational agents of cultural change when he says, "It is not enough to condemn culture.  Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture or to copy culture. The only way to change culture is to create culture."  We must be about transformation, and we must be about creating culture.  We are to be transformational agents in our culture and in the world.

    Transformation is at the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Paul also emphasized transformation in Romans 12:2 when he said, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."  Here, Paul's words direct us away from conformity and toward transformation.  What a mission!

    In The Message version of Romans 12:2, it says, "Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking."  The essence of this passage is the reality that we all will be shaped by something, and how we are shaped will affect the world around us for better or for worse.  We always should be mindful of how we are being shaped and how we are affecting the world.

    Paul went on to say, "fix your attention on God.  You'll be changed from the inside out.  Readily recognize what He wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you" (Romans 12:2).

    God desires to change us from the inside out.  We are changed by learning what God wants from us and by responding to it in obedience to His will. While the culture and the sinful world around us attempt to stunt our growth and keep us in sinful patterns of immaturity, our Lord,desires for us to be transformed more and more into the likeness of Jesus Christ, bringing out the very best in us.

    In 2 Corinthians 3:18, Paul wrote to the church in Corinth and explained the transformational work God was doing in them.  He said, "And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit."

    As we grow in our knowledge of the God of the universe, as our faces are unveiled to Him, we will see God's glory and be transformed more and more into His glorious likeness.  It is in this transformed state that we will begin to transform the world around us through His power and Spirit at work in us.  The Christian's mission and high call is to this glorious transformation.  We must realize, as Paul did, that transformation is at the heart of the gospel.  We must recognize that transformed people transform people and transformed people transform the world for the glory of Jesus Christ.

 In Christ,

  Brown

http://youtu.be/qOkImV2cJDg?list=PL-sSK_F73ZEBeuwO0fOl6TypsovXnXLgy

Brown's Daily Word 10/1/14

    Praise the Lord for this first day of October.  We had some strong winds and heavy rains around the area yesterday.  The Autumn leaves have started falling.  For us it was a very bright and beautiful day yesterday as Alice and I drove down to beautiful Baltimore, the Parlor City.  Laureen  drove up from Washington and met us there.  It was great to see her.  Later this week she is flying to Memphis, TN to spend some time with her friend Kelly.

    We will meet for our Wednesday Evening gathering for fellowship and Bible study at 6:30 PM following a special meal at 6 PM.  The adult choir will practice at 7:30.  Dr James Geer, Ph D, will be presenting "Martin Luther" on Sunday, October  19 at 7 PM at the Union Center United Methodist Church, 128 Maple Drive, Endicott, NY 13760.  Those of you who live in the area please join us.  Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Church, used a man named Martin Luther as the harbinger of the Protestant Reformation in the Church.  During the Protestant Reformation, there were some salient  foundations which were described as the five solas. Sola is the Latin word for alone.  We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.  The Bible alone has the unique authority to speak about these things.  All of this is done to the glory of God alone. 

    The core foundation "Christ Alone", extends back to the Gospels and to the early church.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me." The early church took this to heart.  In the Book of Acts, Peter was testifying before the Sanhedrin, the high Jewish court in Jerusalem. There Peter was interrogated about a man whose legs  had been healed.  They wanted to know how this miracle happened, how this man was saved.  Peter answered: "It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed."  He then went on to say, "Salvation is found in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved."

    This is solus Christus—salvation in Christ alone, healing through Christ alone, redemption through Christ alone, the kingdom of heaven coming to earth through Christ alone.  This has been a core, must-have confession for the church's entire history.

    This statement is offensive in the corrosive, corrupt, and confused culture of today.  (But it was equally offensive to the legal, moral, and religious authorities of Jesus' day.)  The claim that Jesus is the only way of salvation sounds arrogant or narrow-minded.  Unfortunately, Christians can frequently be arrogant and narrow-minded.  We can make wrong judgments about others without truly knowing them. We can be self-righteous.  But the church has not confessed salvation in Christ alone for 2,000 years in order to be smug, arrogant, or narrow-minded.  We confess this belief because we know who Jesus is.  Jesus is unique.  There is no one like Jesus.  There is no one who can do what Jesus does. 

    Jesus finds us in dark and messy places, like the midst of doubt and depression. He finds us in places filled with sin and shame.  He alone offers us new life, new purpose, new destiny.

In Christ,

 Brown

http://youtu.be/bxL6fRdnHkM

Brown's Daily Word 9/29/14

    Praise the Lord  for His unfailing love and His amazing grace.  He blessed us with a super summer like weekend.  It is like mid-summer every where yo go., but with the beautiful exception that the autumn colors are getting  exotic and spectacular.  The Lord blessed us with joyful Sunday.  Alice and I walked for miles by the banks of one of  the rivers nearby that runs alongside one of the beautiful parks of our city.

    It was great to be in the House of the  Lord yesterday with His people joining His church around the corner and around the globe.  I preached from Exodus 16.  Back a chapter in Exodus, we see the people of Israel singing and dancing by the shores of the Red Sea.  They then enjoy a mini-stretch of Paradise in a pretty place called Elim, surrounded by 12 springs and 70 Palm trees.  But the march toward redemption could not stop there.  A trek through the wilderness had to come first and no sooner did this journey begin than we find in Exodus 16 a near-reverse portrait of the celebration and joy of the previous chapter.  Sounds of timbrel, singing, and dancing have been replaced with sounds of muttering, grumbling, murmuring, and complaining.  Suddenly Egypt loomed on the horizon of their imaginations and transformed itself into a kind of deluxe resort.  The hunger in their bellies tricked their minds into remembering nothing about Egypt except  bountiful meat dishes and all other side dishes.  They complained to Moses, who  told the people that really they are complaining directly to Lord God himself.   Then the Lord God, who is mighty and merciful, heard the people but curiously enough did not speak a harsh word here.  In fact, at this early stage in Israel's desert wanderings, God did not seem to blame the people for being hungry for some good food.  

    God knew that the wilderness was a place of death.  In the Bible the wilderness usually gets described through the very same Hebrew phrase used to describe the pre-creation chaos in Genesis 1:1.  In Genesis, God moved in to the midst of  chaos to create cosmos but then sin came and chaos made a comeback.  Some of the good creation barriers that God set into place to protect and nurture human life eroded.  Nowhere in the Old Testament (or the New Testament) can this return of chaos be more clearly seen than in the desert wastes.  The wilderness was the place where the devil ran wild, where demons howled, and where human life was threatened from every quarter.

    The wilderness was a place of death, but it was also the path the Israelites needed to take, toward life in the Promised Land.  According to one commentator,  "in the heat of the desert there would be many occasions when the very hope of the Promised Land would shimmer like no more than a desert mirage even as the people's faith would erode like the shifting sands while their dreams tattered along with their tents in the scorching desert winds."

    The people of the Lord, loved and blessed by the Lord, begin to grumble and complain just as all of us do.  It is as if it is in our DNA.  This was not what they signed on for, and what they were enduring certainly did not resemble a land of promise.  They needed to know if it was possible that God was with them in this dreadful place, and on this occasion God seemed only-too-happy to comply by showering the people with provisions.

    In the  the midst of it all, in Exodus 16:10 we encounter what may well be one of the most startling and vivid verses in the whole Bible, one that should be written in large letters upon each one of our hearts.  Because the people of Israel were hurting and hungry they were, no doubt, afraid.  Their suffering was getting bad enough that many turned back toward the west, back toward Egypt, back toward what had been, for better or worse, their home.

    It is thrilling to read verse 10.  The Lord God himself gently took the people by the shoulders and turned them around, away from the west, away from Egypt, and eastward toward the harsh and terrible wilderness.  But what did the people see when they looked toward this place of death?  They saw "the glory of the Lord!" WOW!

    They looked into the hard times of life and that is where they saw God!  They were not to look for God back in Egypt.  Yet, when peering toward the place of death, they saw glory.  They would see this glory in the wilderness new every morning through the manna.  God would feed his people bread from heaven even though they themselves were not in heaven but in a kind of living hell on earth.   For some reason the wilderness would be the cradle in which God would nourish and nurture his people toward a deeper faith in the Lord.

    God showed his glory in the wilderness to foster dependence and trust.  In the hard times of life, all our normal supports get knocked out from underneath us.  If the people were going to go on, it would be only and ever because the Lord was with them.  That's why they couldn't stockpile the manna.  if our retirement portfolio is fat and rich and full and in fine fiscal shape, how much time do we  devote to praying about such a thing?   It is fascinating and faith-building to read  that in In the wilderness God showed his glory to Israel morning by morning so that there would ideally never be a day when anyone had cause to doubt why he or she was alive.  We tend to think of the manna as only a gift, but God sees it mostly as also a test.  Will they, can they, rely on God?  

    Nobody wants to suffer.  I do not like suffering.   All things being equal, the Lord God did not create us to suffer, either.  God did not launch Adam and Eve into Eden with the promise of hunger and want, but in the post-Eden world, sickness, want, hunger, loss, and death are realities. That is not good news but there is some good news, some comfort to be found in the thought that those things do not force God to abandon anyone. 

    None of us purposely moves out into the wilderness, but sometimes we get cast out into it anyway and the question then becomes, "Now what?  Sometimes it is easy to  get  trapped in pain and so hurtle ourselves into a lifelong deep bitterness.   It is also very feasible that by trusting the Lord in and through understandable laments and weeping to look for the glory of the Lord, that it may just be revealed to us even here, in this hellish place of death and sorrow.   

    This is a hard world of war, rumors of war, terror and violence.  It has recently become a world of killings and beheadings, brutality and barbarism.  There are no pat answers, no easy solutions, no quick escape routes out of the desert wastes where we sometimes find ourselves.

    Jesus has been to the wilderness.  He was there for 40 days and for 40 nights.  He defeated the enemy there.  When we end up in our wilderness Jesus meets us there in that terrible place.  It is still a disorienting place.  The demons still howl into our ears there and we may well discover all kinds of reasons to question our faith, wish for a change, or just generally to turn back westward, back toward "Egypt," whatever "Egypt" may be for us. 

    It is then that the Spirit of Jesus turns us eastward, toward the suffering, and may in the end somehow and against all odds reveal to us the glory of the Lord.   We don't need to deny the reality of hurts in life.  We don't need to let suffering have the last word on everything, either.  But if by the grace of God we can discover the love of Jesus made the more vivid to us even in the wilderness, then we may yet find a reason to give glory to God as he leads us along to that better country.

 In Christ,

 Brown

http://youtu.be/0nJ6wQpLmuo