Brown's Daily Word 5/1/15

Praise the Lord for this First day of May. Today we celebrate the birthday of our daughter, sweet Sunita. She was born this day in Barnes Kasson Hospital in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, surrounded by beautiful mountains and the spectacular viaduct. Sunita has grown to be sweet servant of Jesus and a woman of faith. We praise the Lord for her. She provokes me to follow Jesus and serve Him with joy. Alice baked chocolate chip cookies galore and homemade breads in honor of Sunita's birthday. I get to eat some of them. It is a gorgeous spring day here in New York. As far as I am concerned, the Spring season in New York is amazing, spectacular , better than anywhere else on earth. I wish you were here.
  Join us for our Friday evening television outreach this evening at 7:00 PM on Time Warner Cable channel 4. This morning I have been reflecting on the Book of Jude. The entire Book has 25 verses. The Epistle of Jude has only one chapter with 25 verses. Verses 24-25 together make one of the greatest doxologies in the New Testament. This declaration of praise teaches us that God is able to keep us when we cannot keep ourselves. Edward C. Pentecost wrote, “Here is the greatest theme of victory to be sounded, the highest note of praise and adoration possible, and the greatest assurance for the redeemed.” The doxology in Jude 24-25 teaches us to trust and praise the God who is able to keep us.
Jude 24-25 is one of the amazing New Testament doxologies that praise God for being able. “Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy.” The emphasis is on divine omnipotence — the inherent and infinite power of God. Jude did not remember when God was able in the past. He did not promise that God will be able in the future. This is real-time assurance. Whenever it is, wherever we are, whatever we need, our Lord is able. The first assurance of this doxology covers our entire Christian journey from earth to glory: “Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling.” The KJV says, “Now unto him who is able to keep you from falling.” The original is more emphatic. Stumbling precedes falling. God is able to keep us from falling on our face.
The world is a slippery place. The devil constantly schemes to trip us. Our sinful flesh is prone to trip, stumble, and fall, but or Lord is able to keep us from stumbling. Psalm 121:3 says, “He will not let your foot be moved.” Our Lord can keep us from falling into the error of sin and falling away from the faith. This is living hope which the Lord Jesus Christ offers the guilty, the dying, and the grieving. The only hope in the face of death is that God is able to present us blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. Great joy is more than personal happiness. It is a public celebration with singing, dancing, and shouting. This is what heaven will be like! Psalm 16:11 says, “You make known to me the path of life; in Your presence there is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
The Month of May has come with much beauty, and June will soon be upon us. This is a gentle reminder of our retirement gathering and celebration on Saturday, June 27, from 5 to 7 PM. It will be a blast and we will be blessed. We are serving a variety of foods, including Indian, French, Italian, and American. There will lots of music, time for stories and testimonies, and plenty of good times to go around. Best of all, you will get to meet our grandchildren, and they will make you laugh, so come prepared. They are nothing like the children we raised in the parsonage, but they bring us great joy.
  In Christ, Brown.
https://youtu.be/cH_LLGiE0f0

Brown's Daily Word 4/30/15

Praise the Lord for this new day.  It is brilliant and bountiful with the grace and mercy of our Lord.  I woke up early to watch the sunrise once again.  It is all calm and serene all around us.  The trees and bushes are close to full bloom.  We went to Syracuse yesterday to visit a young mom who is in for some tests.  We are praying for her.  She was doing well and so far all the tests have turned out to be negative.  She looked radiant with joy.  On the way to the city we saw  the countryside gorgeous with flowering trees and drove along some of the streets in the outskirts of the city, where the magnolias were in full bloom.  The sky was blue all the way. We came home rejoicing in the goodness and faithfulness of our Lord who makes all things colorful and beautiful in His time.  Last evening the Lord blessed us with another evening of sweet fellowship and Bible study.  There were moments of holy laughter and simple joy.  One of the women, a sweet servant of Jesus for whom  we have been praying, was in the study.  We all rejoiced with her and  gave thanks to the Lord for His tender mercies.  She has been ill and going through treatments. The Lord has blessed her with a beautiful mind and a brave heart.

    In my book, the Lord must love women - He made so many of them.  I am thinking about the woman at the well that we read about in John 4.  She wasn’t looking for Jesus.  She wasn’t out searching for the Messiah as Nicodemus was.  She was just out living life.  She was out getting her bucket of water from the public well. She wasn’t especially looking for God or wanting to walk the godly life.  Yet, when she wasn’t even looking for it, Jesus said: “I would like to give you some living water.”  Although she didn’t even ask for it, Jesus offered her the very best gift in the whole world at a time in life when she really needed it.

    Jesus does the same for you and me.  We may not be looking for the living Lord. We may be just living life, day by day.  Yet, to us who are living life just day by day, Jesus says, “Whoever believes in me, I will pour into him, (into her), the living water, and out from his heart shall flow rivers of living water.”  Christ makes the same offer to you and me, whether we are looking or not.

    Where do the rivers of living and loving water come from?  They originate in Jesus, the source of living water.  The story of the Samaritan woman at the well is one of the best stories in the whole Bible.  It is the story of a woman who was a five times loser who was not even looking for God.  Jesus offered her what she really needed, not a lecture, but the living water.  He offered her what she really needed and she couldn’t live without and Jesus does the same with us.  Amen.

In Christ,

 Brown

https://youtu.be/s4l2yY2r95g

Brown's Daily Word 4/29/15

Praise the Lord for this wonderful Wednesday.   I am in my study and the morning sun is beaming through the window, piercing through the budding Rhododendron bush which has grown to gigantic proportions and is budding profusely.  This tree was planted along other flowering trees about 20 years ago. They were just saplings then.  They have grown to be giants.  Soon they will be blooming with variegated color. 
    It was brilliant day yesterday.  I walked for 2 1/2 miles.  I saw cardinals singing sweetly along with all kind birds praising the Lord, praising indeed the Lord of this beautiful world.  We will meet for our Wednesday evening gathering for fellowship and study at 6:00 PM followed by choir practice at 7:30 PM.

    The enormity and the beauty of God’s creation is one of the ways that he displays his glory.  Francis Collins is a scientist who has all sorts of credentials. He is a world famous scientist, but he used to be an atheist.  After a long period of searching, which included grilling a pastor and reading books by C.S. Lewis, Collins finally came to Christ after watching the beauty of creation.  This is Collin's description of that life-changing encounter:

I had to make a choice.  A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account.  On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance.  As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over.  The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)

    King David spent the years of his youth in the fields and hills of Judea.  His heart was tender towards the Lord and towards the things of the Lord.  His heart was filled with gratitude, wonder, and praise.  He wrote some powerful Psalms of faith.  He could agree that a thing of beauty was joy for ever".  One day, as he was wandering under the vastness of the starry night, he composed Psalm 8. 

"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?  Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.  You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas."

    Despite our miniscule size in the greater universe,  there is something utterly unique about us.  David was pointing this out in Psalm 8.  If you created a continuum of every creature that’s ever been created, from bacteria all the way up to angels, we would be right next to angels.  We’re not even far below, the psalmist says.  Out of all that God has created, it is men and women alone who have been made in his image and crowned with glory and honor.  We have a unique role within the universe.  We have been given dominion over all that he’s made.  Out of all that God has created, God is mindful of us.  He cares for us.  This caused David to worship, and it causes me to worship too.  What an amazing God we serve.  We live on something as inconsequential as a speck of dust compared to all that God has created, and yet he has chosen to crown us with glory and honor.  He has made us in his image.  He is mindful of us, and He cares for us.

    Drawing this together leads us to worship.  The praise of the weakest Christian is more powerful than the strength of God's most powerful enemies; it leads us to worship.  When we see the vastness of what God has created, including the beauty and the bounty of the Milky Way, and we experience awe of the vastness of the universe, it makes us want to worship.  When we realize that out of all that God has made, he has focused on us, it makes us want to worship.

    There is more, because hundreds of years after David wrote this psalm, God Himself became a man and lived on this speck of dust that we call planet Earth.  Not only was He mindful of us, not only did He care for us, but He became one of us.  In His infinite love He offered up His life for us so that we could be made right with Him.

"O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!"
In Christ,
 Brown
https://youtu.be/knuHDPbE5es

Brown's Daily Word 4/28/15

Praise the Lord for the glorious morning.  I woke up early to watch the sunrise.  The trees were still and tranquil.  The birds were flying gently, almost in a prayerful mood.  The grass seemed silent yet vigorously green.  Now the sun is risen in the eastern sky.  All is beautiful.  The daffodils are blooming with much beauty and triumph after a long winter.  The forsythia bushes are blooming along all the driveway and the fruit trees are coming out  of a long season of dormancy.  In the world, full of wars and rumor of wars, earthquakes, and violence, the Lord reminds us to "Be still and know that I am God".   The sunshine will be abundant and brilliant today and we all can say is: "when morning gilds the skies. . ."
    One of my favorite Psalms is Psalm 92.  "The Lord is King, and hath put on glorious apparel; the Lord hath put on His apparel, and girded Himself with strength.  He hath made the round world so sure, that it cannot be moved.  Ever since the world began, hath thy seat been prepared: thou art from everlasting.  The floods are risen, O Lord, the floods have lift up their voice; the floods lift up their waves.  The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly; but yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier.  Thy testimonies, O Lord, are very sure: holiness becometh thine house for ever" (Psalm 92).

    The meaning of this Scripture is fully realized in Christ our Lord.  Jesus’ ministry began with His creation in awe of Him, as a star obediently guided Gentiles to His manger-throne-room.  In His earthly ministry, the wind and the waves obeyed Him. At His crucifixion, Christ’s creation reacted to the Creator being crucified by the Created and turned dark at noon, trembling from within the bowels of the earth.  At His glorious resurrection, creation received a sign of hope: Because Christ is raised from the dead, then the world, long held under the dominion of sin and its wretched consequences, is now liberated and moving with undeterred certainty to its own resurrection.

    Jesus Christ is the glorious King who is Risen and who reigns.  The world points out that there is a new world on its way.  Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) remarked, “A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death.” Christ, the resurrected King of the Universe, has given us hope that the world, including our world, our dreams, our lives, our intuitive longing for eternity, is headed for total redemption.  A new world is now on its way.  The trees of the fields clap their hands, and the sound of the great waters breaking against the shore raise their voices, “The Lord is King.  A new heaven and a new earth has been inaugurated with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  Everything has changed.”



    “Your testimonies are sure, and holiness adorns Your house, O Lord, forever and ever more.”  The psalmist grounds all that he has said in the very Word of the Lord.  He is King in His radiant wear, resurrection, world, and all of creation because of His Word.  God spoke creation into being with His Word.  God announced redemption would come and proclaimed resurrection by His Word. Christ was raised from the dead by the Word of the Lord.  His Word is our ultimate proof of it all.

In Christ,

Brown

Brown's Daily Word 4/27/15

Praise the Lord  for a very blessed weekend.  Sunita and Andy and their children spent the whole week with us.  Janice and Jeremy and their children came down for the weekend from Boston.  It was a full house.  Janice, the family photographer, took lots of time sorting out the family photos going back (at least) to  1978, reminiscing as she sorted.  It was refreshing to look back over life spent in the last 4 parsonages, Gibson, Lounsberry, Nichols, and Union Center.  Jeremy and Andy spent a day cleaning and sorting the garage, with contents from over the years.  Our grandchildren were able to entertain each other, playing outside and indoors.  Micah was of particular help with her cousin Addie.  They had seemingly boundless energy.  Grandmom and Grandpa were abundantly blessed to share the time with them.  It was a rich, bountiful, and beautiful weekend.

    The Lord blessed us with a wonderful day in the Lord's House yesterday.  The reading for yesterday was taken from Psalm 23.  It was "Good Shepherd Sunday".  All the hymns and music were based on the particular theme.  The message made reference to Isaiah 53:6, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on his servant the sins of us all.”  I would like to compare us as human beings to sheep.  We human beings are vulnerable to the wolves of life.  We know that our lives are essentially and intrinsically vulnerable to death, disease, and injury.  We know that life is infinitely fragile and easily broken and hurt.  Life is easily shattered. Suddenly, it can happen via a car accident or a debilitating disease that strikes a person living in our home.  It may be that everything was going so well last week, and this week it has all changed.  Yesterday was glorious and today is tragic.  You and I know are well aware of the twists and turns in the pathways of life.  We are vulnerable to disease, accidents, and all kinds of disasters, enormous disasters, that suddenly shatter our lives with almost no warning.

    Sheep are known to be stupid animals.  Human beings are compared to sheep, and yet the Bible declares that "You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.  You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet".  The Lord has made many to be brilliant and intelligent people, though some of the most gifted, talented, and brilliant people think that there is no God.  They think they are gods, but they make some of the dumbest decisions with their lives.  Some of beautiful people decide to abuse the bodies with drugs and thereby destroy themselves.  Some of the athletes earning millions of dollars go bankrupt, because they make dumb financial decisions and poor life choices.  It is like sheep we are prone go astray and make stupid decisions time after time.

    Another characteristic of sheep is that they tend to wander away from their shepherd.  Likewise with human beings, we wander away from God and do not fully realize what we are doing.  I know very few human beings who have said: "I don’t believe in God.  I don’t believe in Christ.  I renounce God and Christianity and therefore I am going in a new direction with my life."  That rarely happens.  Instead, human beings drift away from God, drift away from Christ, ever so slowly, losing the closeness and deep faith that they once had.  Then, one day, after months or years, they wake up and say, “Where is God?  Where is Christ?  What happened to the faith that I once had so many years ago?” 

    Another characteristic of humans that likens them to sheep is that not only are we vulnerable to the wolves of life and not only are we herd animals who follow the crowd, but we human beings do not have strong homing instincts.  When sheep get lost, they do not find their way home.  A dog living can be placed twenty or thirty miles from his home and that dog will find its way home.  A dog has a very strong homing instinct.  A sheep has absolutely none.  A sheep when it is lost, does not find its way back home.  Somebody has to go out and find that sheep and bring it back.      

    One of the great deceptions of life and one of the great pretenses of life, is that we are not sheep.  Some think they are strong, self-reliant men or women, who can control their own life and destiny.  They think they do not need a shepherd.  Yet, we need a good shepherd who will provide with provisions and  protection.  If we are sheep, the greatest need for us is to have a shepherd.  God provided a shepherd for us in the person of Jesus Christ.  

    A personal relationship is formed between the good shepherd and the sheep. The shepherd knows the name of the sheep and Jesus Christ, the good shepherd, knows our name.  Christ knows us personally, our names, and the sound of our voices.  Jesus, the Good and Winsome Shepherd, leads us to  green pastures and still waters.  The good shepherd, Jesus, also leads us in the paths of righteousness for his name sake.  Christ leads us into a right relationship that pleases God.  There are relationships that please God: relationships with Christ, with our spouse, with our children, our grandchildren, our friends.  The last place that the good shepherd leads us is to the cross where it all becomes very strange as the shepherd becomes the sheep.  The lamb of God is led to the slaughter and  killed on our behalf, and his blood cleanses us from all sin.  It is all so very strange to the mind that the good shepherd leads us to the cross only to become a lamb and be sacrificed for our sin.

In Christ,

  Brown

https://youtu.be/ZIUCRXMM4pE