We will gather for
food and fellowship at Wesley tomorrow at 5:30 PM. We will meet for worship at
Union Center at 10:15 on Sunday and for Sunday School at 9:00 AM. We will
gather for worship at Wesley at 9:00 AM. The youth will meet with their
leaders for a very special time on Sunday at 5:00 PM. It will be a time of
great celebration and fellowship and a time of worship of Jesus.
It has been a long
winter . . . Praise the Lord Christmas has come (unlike Narnia, where it was
always winter and never Christmas). The winter is making way for a
spectacular spring. The Lord will visit the land and the valleys will blossom
again . . . the trees have started to dance and the birds do know their times
and seasons. They are praising the Lord with sweet songs of spring, as they are
indeed the harbingers of spring.
As yet one more sign
of the season, we will be setting our clocks forward one hour tomorrow night.
The daylight will stretch one more hour into the evening. How glorious is
that?
I am looking at a
verse from 1 John "This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our
faith." All of life is lived on faith, and every person has faith in
something. We open a can of food and eat it because we have faith that it is
not harmful to us. We get on a plane and sit back with assurance because we
have faith that the person who is flying the plane knows what he is doing. We
go to a doctor whose name we cannot pronounce, who gives us a prescription we
cannot read to take to a pharmacist we do not know. He gives us medicine that
we do not understand. Yet we take it, all on faith. In general, faith means to
trust someone else and that faith is at the heart of
life.
John, in his epistle, was talking about a particular kind of faith, which he described in 1 John 5:5. He who overcomes the world is "he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God." Christian faith is to put our faith in Christ. A faith in Jesus which causes us to believe in Him, talk to Him, walk with Him, and abide in Him -- that is the faith which is the key to overcoming the world.
I believe that faith makes the presence of God, the power of God, and the promises of God available to us. I read some time ago about David Livingstone, the great missionary to Africa, who was called back to London to receive an honor. He was presented the award before a great gathering of well-wishers. Someone asked him how he had been able to make it through when natives rose up against him and when the power of darkness seemed about ready to overwhelm him. He opened his well-worn New Testament and said, "let me share with you the verse that helped me make it through: 'Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the age.'" Because of our faith, we know that God is with us every step of the way, and the promise of His presence provides victory.
The power of God is ample, and it is available. Through faith, we plug into that power and it begins to move through us, providing victory, because "greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world" (
I believe faith reminds us of the plan of God. In Revelation, John described it when he said, "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ, and He will reign forever and ever" (
In
Christ,
Brown
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