Brown's Daily Word 10/23/15

   Praise the Lord.  It is Friday.  Sunday is coming.  We are getting ready for worship of the Lord in His House with His people this Sunday morning.  Sunday School will meet at 10 AM and we will gather for worship at 11 AM.
The Lord blessed us with a fantastic Thursday.  The weather was fully "Indian Summer".  I love Indian Summer days.  "Sunshine Makes me Happy."  Here Comes the Sun."  These are all gifts of the Lord the Sun of Righteousness.  "I spent time with my younger brother and his family yesterday.  My brother and I drove around the countryside, just enjoying the way He decorates the Earth and paints  firmaments,  hills, and dales, mountains and meadows with His own paint brush.  He invites us to see How He crowns creation with His beauty and majesty.

“Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

    My youngest  niece, who was born in America the Beautiful, turned sweet thirteen this week.  Of all my brothers' and sisters' children, she is the only one born in America.  All of the rest migrated, along with their parents, to this country several years ago.  My nieces and nephews were all very young when they first landed in the land.  Some of them were just toddlers.  Now they are growing up.  Three of them are in college.  Two are in High School.  One is in middle school.  They are blessed with brilliant minds.  We praise the Lord for them.

    My wife and I are planning to welcome the youth into our home this coming Sunday at 5:30 PM for some spooktacular foods and games, along with some homemade cider and doughnuts.  All youth are welcome to come out for a sweet time.

    This morning I am reflecting on the story of queen Esther.  It has wonderful twists and turns, reversals and reckonings, insights and innuendoes, surprises and serendipitous moments.  The book of Esther is not only a great story about a great heroine, but it also is the story of a great people as it faces a great crisis.  It is one of those crises, common to Christians and Jews, which  we find very often in the Bible.  There have been numerous times in human history when those in authority have wanted to annihilate either the Christians or the Jews.  We certainly have found that in the history of the Jews, such as during the time of the Maccabees, or when Hitler where he wanted to have all Jews killed. Hitler killed 6 million Jews.  But persecution has not only been instituted against the Jews, but  Christians as well.  During the times of Emperor Nero and Domitian, and between the first and third centuries, emperors tried to exterminate the Christians as well.  When I was in  Russia few years ago I heard similar stories about Kruschev who said, “I will live to see the last Russian Orthodox priest die.”  There have always been people who wanted to kill Jews and Christians, so there are those critical moments when people have to stand up against the government who wants to kill them.  That is what the book of Esther is all about.  It has a great crisis within it.

    In the book of Esther, we have a great story with a great heroine experiencing a great crisis and we also have a great God in the midst of all of this.  It is interesting that the word "God", is not even mentioned in the book of Esther.  In this book we have to read between the lines and when we do this we see God working and weaving, entering and intervening in the lives of the characters of the story such as Mordecai, Haman, and Esther.  We sense that God is weaving and working in the twists and turns of this story.  We realize that a great God is involved.   

    It seems that it is always open season on Christians and Jews around the world. There is open and blatant persecution and oppression.   In the midst this we stand upon the promises of our Lord.  Those who have stood against the Lord and His people have come and gone.  Jesus reigns and He will reign for ever and ever

"Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever".”Revelation 11:15

 

In Christ.

 Brown

https://youtu.be/Y8R9ZPT2T-I

Brown's Daily Word 10/22/15

The Lord blessed us with a wonderful Wednesday evening gathering that was held in the church.  The church served a special meal with joy and, best of all, with a smile.  So many came ranging from the babies in their mothers' arms, to senior saints in the 80's.  Some came with their families.  Some came with their friends.  They shared the meal and lingered around the table to swap stories and to listen.  I had opportunity to listen to some people tell their stories how the Lord has been at work in their lives in joys, in sorrows, in trials, and in triumphs.  Many were telling  stories full of holy humor.  Praise the Lord for the church.  The church building is a welcoming place for neighbors and friends, where everybody is somebody and Jesus is Lord,

    Praise the Lord, for the Lord has filled the Bible with so many wonderful stories of redemption, love, faithfulness, and kindness.  The Bible is full of so many inspiring and transforming short stories that depict and demonstrate the character and nature of our God, which can be transmitted to His people who are called by His name and redeemed by the blood of the Lamb.  These stories of the people of God and their redemption story have been told throughout history.  They have been told by parents, grandparents, teachers, preachers, evangelists, and missionaries through  the ages.  I love the Book of Ruth.  It is the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz.  It is a romance.  It is a love story.  It is a story of deep love  between people.  This story is woven together in a seamless, beautiful whole.  It is one of the most beautiful short stories in the whole of the Old Testament.  It is a love story between an older woman and a younger woman, more specifically  between a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law.  It is also a love story between an older man by the name of Boaz and a young widow by the name of Ruth.  Above all, it is a love story between God and his people who are going through all these disasters. 

    Many disasters happen in the book of Ruth, and as these disasters happen the question is not, “What is the meaning of suffering?" or, "What is the meaning of all this suffering which is happening to so many people?”  That is what the book of Job is about.  That is NOT the question here.  Rather, the question here is, “What is the meaning of love and loyalty in the midst of all the disasters of life?”

    Today, we don't have to stretch our memories very far to think of disasters.  We hear of not just one disaster, but three or four or five disasters happening in a row. it is one of those situations in which there is disaster after disaster, all in the same year.  So it is in the book of Ruth.  Then comes the best part of the story.  “So Boaz took Ruth home as his wife.  And the Lord blessed them.  Ruth became pregnant and had a son.  And the women said to Naomi, 'Praise the Lord.  The Lord has given you a grandson today to take care of you.  May the boy become famous in Israel.  Your daughter-in-law loves you and has done more for you than seven sons.  And now she has given you a grandson who will bring new life to you and give you security in your old age.'  Naomi took the child, held him close and took care of him.  And the women of the neighborhood named the boy, Obed, and they told everyone a son has been born to Naomi.  Now Obed became the father of Jesse and Jesse became the father of (King) David", and in the New Testament, King David was in the family tree of Jesus our Lord and Savior. 

    The  story of Ruth is a great story.  The greatest line in the story is this, I beg you not to leave me.  For where you will go, I will go.  Where you will live, I will live.  Your people will be my people.  Your God will be my God.  Where you will be buried, I will be buried.”  This encapsulates the faithfulness and grace of our Lord .

 His Faithfulness never ends.

  In Him,

  Brown

https://youtu.be/FBJJJkiRukY

Brown's Daily Word 10/21/15

    Praise the Lord for another brand new day.  We live beside Main Street in our town, and soon after 4:30 AM the tractor trailers begin rolling past.  I get up, knowing that the day has begun praising the Lord for a new day and praising Him for the rest of the night.  It is going to be another wonderful day.  I heard from one of our friends in England about one of the missionary couples that served  in our area when I was a boy in the early sixties of the last century. . . the wife died. She was faithful servant and witness for Jesus.  I remember her as one always dressed up working alongside her husband, serving the Lord together.  Her husband was educated as an Engineer but came to India as an evangelist and church planter.  I was blessed and impacted by the ministry of these dear servants of our Lord.  

    Alice and I attended a high school girls' soccer match yesterday afternoon.  The girls from where Alice teaches won the match.  It was an Indian Summer afternoon.  We got to meet many of the parents and grandparents of the students, along with some of the local athletes. I was reminded of my high school days where I played soccer.  Best of all I loved to watch some of the State soccer championship games played in our high school soccer fields.  I recall on one occasion the British missionaries men's soccer team played against the faculty team of our high school.  It was fascinating.  The Missionary team played with "much Grace".

    One of the fascinating and intriguing Biblical stories I heard as a young boy, told to us by my uncle who was wonderful story teller, was the story of Jacob wrestling with the Lord  on the edge of the Jabbok river. . . The story of Jacob wrestling with God is a story that has been told over and over again in homes and churches and around campfires through the generations.  The key to this whole story is the  name Jacob, which means cheater, manipulator, little liar, cunning, and slippery.  These are people who will cheat you if given half a chance, and that is the story of Jacob.  In fact, there are three wonderful stories about Jacob and his cheating and these stories demonstrate how and why Jacob deserved to be named cheater or masterful manipulator.

     One night Jacob had a wrestling match with God.  Jacob had been cheating people his whole life.  He had cheated his brother out of the inheritance, cheated his brother from receiving his father’s dying blessing, cheated his blind father, and tried to cheat his Uncle Laban.  His whole life he had been cheating and manipulating people.  His whole life he had been clever and cunning and that night, in that wrestling match with God, God touched him in such a way that he was changed.  There and then God gave him a new name Israel, which means, let God rule.  Any time in the Bible, when a person was given a new name, it was a sign of a dramatic and enormous change within that person.  Jacob, indeed, underwent this enormous change from being Jacob to being Israel, from being a cheater and manipulator who was both cunning and clever to being a person who finally let God rule in his life.  This is what the New Testament, Jesus, and the Kingdom of God are all about.  The kingdom is God in any place and any heart in which Jesus  rules.

    I am sure that sometimes each of us wrestles with God at night, and sometimes it goes on for a night or for a week or for a month or for a year, and slowly we get through that process of wrestling with God.  Our Lord God, if he wanted to with all his power, could pin us down in the blink of an eye, slam us to the floor, and stomp on us.  If God wanted to, He could pin us down and make us believe and obey.  But that isn’t the way our Lord  wrestles.  He  wrestles in such a way that we slowly surrender our lives to him.  We put our hands in his hands, and God begins to lead us on a path of righteousness, of right relationships.  That is the way that God wrestles with us.  God does not bash our hands down with his mighty power and pin us.  Rather, God allows us to put our hands in his and we begin to walk together.  That is the way God wrestles with us.  At times He figuratively "breaks our hip", so that we can learn to walk not on our own power,  but always leaning on Him.

    We all go through that fundamental transition in life.  The issue is whether or not I will continue to be a self-centered, cheating, cunning, manipulative person or whether I will finally let God rule.  Who will rule in my life?  Myself, like Jacob, or God?  We spend a lot of time on the banks of our Jabbok River.  We wrestle about things we are doing wrong.   We may wrestle about whether to have a child or get an abortion, whether to move into a retirement home or remain in our house, whether to go to college or enter the workforce.  We wrestle with illness and death, whether or not this chemotherapy is going to work or the possibility of radiation. We wrestle with whether or not we will be alive tomorrow or not and how we plan our future estate and future economic years.  We all wrestle with a lot of things in life.  There is no doubt that we wrestle a lot, spending a lot of time on the banks of our Jabbok River but beneath all of these wrestling matches is the question, Who is going to win?  Who is going to rule  my life?  Myself?  Jesus?  Who rules in your life?  Are you a Jacob or is your name Israel?  Amen.

In Jesus,

Brown

https://youtu.be/eoCC1NjIHPE

Brown's Daily Word 10/20/15

Praise the Lord for this new day.  It will be getting warmer here now since the first snow of October is past.  We are getting ready for our Wednesday gathering when the church hosts a community wide dinner for friends and neighbors tomorrow at 4:30 PM.  The Church will be serving chicken and biscuits, applesauce, and a delicious dessert.  The church will be open for Release Time on Thurdsay afternoon. . .  we are praying for the Lord to open doors that many children may come.

    I have been pausing and pondering lately on the majesty and beauty of the Lord demonstrated and displayed in all of His  creation.  I am so blessed and so overwhelmed by the colors and fragrances of the autumn season.  Indeed, we all can say creation is so luxurious, so lavish, so excessive in its generosity.  Creation reflects the luxuriousness of our God., the lavishness of our Lord, the excessive generosity of our God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, and it is freely given.  The word grace means gift, and all of this is freely given.  In fact, it is freely and excessively given.

    The Apostle Paul experienced and saw the riches of God’s grace, the riches of his mercy, the lavishness of His  generosity, and he was overwhelmed by it all.  In fact, he used words like lavish, abundant, and immeasurable.  Throughout the whole book of Ephesians, as in no other book in the Bible, we experience the mood of Paul’s exhilaration 

This same lavishness of God is expressed in other places in the Bible.  I love to preach and teach from the Gospel of John chapter 2 - the miracle of turning water into wine.  Jesus made 180 gallons of wine for that wedding.  180 gallons.  Imagine your wedding with 180 gallons of wine.  That would have been a whole lot of extra wine.  Excessive.  Extravagant.  Exuberant.  In other words, lavish.

    I also love the miracle of feeding the 5000.  I call this miracle a fish fry.  Jesus fed the 5000, not including women and children who were there.  That’s a lot of people, 5000 people plus.  Yes, Jesus blessed and broke two loaves of bread and five fish.  It does not sound like enough for 5000 but each of those people ate until they were full and then there were twelve baskets of leftovers.  WOW!  Jesus was excessive, extravagant, with plenty of food remaining.  In one word, lavish. 

    Such is the nature of God.  Our God is lavish in his love, lavish in his mercy, lavish in his riches of goodness showered upon us every day.  God is not stingy or frugal.  You and I may be stingy and frugal, but in the Bible and the book of Ephesians, we hear of God’s lavish and generous grace to us. 

In Jesus,

 Brown

https://youtu.be/k6B_jYtjvME

Brown's Daily Word 10/19/15

Praise the Lord for this blessed and beautiful day.  He blessed us with a bountiful weekend.  Friday was sunny and stunning.  The hills and dales, the fields and meadows, were colorful and brilliant, displaying the wonders of the Lord's creation during this autumn season. 

 

    On Friday I drove to see one of  the men of the church.  He was bird watching from his sun room when I drove in.  He asked me to come in and offered a chair.  When he asked if I could stay for some time I said, "YES".  He told me that he built the house that he is living in.  He built a large pond by the house and stocked it with lots of fish.  He shared wit me that he and his wife were founding members of "Marathon Maple Festival" which draws in over 30,000 people every year.  As one of the maple syrup producers of the area he produces around 500 gallons of maple syrup.  He shared about how the Lord has blessed him beyond measure over the years.  His ancestors came to North America on the  Mayflower and he lives in the farm that goes back to some of his ancestors.  He shared that He is blessed to have over 12000 acres of beautiful land in Central NY.  Most of his children and grandchildren live on the family land.  He has planted lots of trees including many fruit trees. 

    

    He said he would like to take me on a ride around his property, and I obliged, thinking that it might take 10 to 15 minutes to go around the property.  So we drove around the farm and he showed me where his children and grandchildren live.  While driving we stopped by so that I could meet them.  Then he kept on driving and showed some of the neighboring farms.  One of the dairy farms is large, milking over 500 cows.  Then he kept on driving to show me some of the Amish farms, and some nearby ponds, lakes, and rivers.  I thought we were done.  As he drove he told me that he was the Highway superintendent for 30 years, and that he had built most of roads.  He kept on driving and pointing to each house, each farm, each road.  Then he kept on driving out of town to the neighboring county.  We stopped at one of the natural springs that dispenses pure spring water 24/7.  The US Army Corps of Engineers has installed some pipes so that people can easily collect the water.  We stopped to taste the water.  I lapped at the fountain.  The water was sweet and pure.  I told him I used to lap from the  mountain springs in India.  Then our sojourn continued.  He took me to the house where he was born, where his dad worked and raised the family.  We also stopped by his sister's house. 

 

    He kept on driving on the high ways and byways pointing out the owners and dwellers, the builders and farmers, and the growers in the area.  After almost two hours he drove past our house and back to his house.  I thanked him, prayed with him, and came home after picking up my car.  The moment I got home dark clods moved in and it began shower.  I was nervous during the part of the trip because  my newfound fellow traveler and driver is 90 years old.  I said, "Lord Jesus add some those years, and energy to my life".

 

  The Lord blessed us with beautiful time in His house yesterday.  It is exciting and thrilling to worship the Living Lord and to declare His majesty and all his tender mercies.  We spoke to our daughter Laureen, who is in Washington, DC.  She led  worship at the David's Tent at the Mall in Washington this past Saturday.  She was blessed and honored.  We had our first snow yesterday.  My wife Alice was thrilled and excited.  She has already started listening to her Christmas music.  All is well.

    

    This week I read again the story of Telemachus.  You can find it in Chuck Colson’s book Loving God, pp. 241-243.  It’s a true story about an Asiatic monk who lived during the early part of the fifth century.  One day, as he was tending his garden at the monastery, he felt God calling him to go to Rome.  He had never been there and had no idea why God would want him to go.  But the feeling grew stronger until Telemachus knew he must make the long journey.  So he set out across Asia Minor and caught a boat for Rome.  After many days he landed and made his way to the Imperial City.  When he got there, he found that the city was in the midst of a great celebration.  The Romans had just defeated the Goths.  Telemachus still had no idea why he had come but he noticed great crowds moving through the streets toward the famed Coliseum.  He followed the crowds and thought to himself, “Perhaps this is the reason why God has called me here."  It turned out that the crowds had gathered for the gladiator contests.  That meant that men would fight against men on the arena floor until only one man was alive.  Then the wild animals would be let loose to devour the body of the dead gladiators.  It was a violent, bloodthirsty sport.  The crowds had come to watch the action.  At length, the gladiators marched in, saluted the emperor and shouted, “We who are about to die salute thee." 

 

    Then the games began.  Telemachus was shocked.  He had never seen such a thing.  But he knew that he could not keep silent while men killed each other for entertainment.  In a flash of blinding insight Telemachus knew what he must do.  He ran to the perimeter of the arena and cried with a loud voice, “IN THE NAME OF CHRIST, STOP!”  The crowd paid him no heed.  He was just one voice among thousands.  So Telemachus made his way to the edge of the arena and stepped onto the sandy floor.  There he was, rushing here and there, dodging the gladiators as they thrust at each other.  He cried out again, “IN THE NAME OF CHRIST, STOP!"  The crowd began to cheer, thinking perhaps that he was part of the entertainment, like a clown at a rodeo.  Then he blocked the vision of one of the gladiators causing him to narrowly avoid a death-dealing blow.  Suddenly the mood changed and the crowd became angry.  “KILL HIM!  KILL HIM!  KILL HIM!"  The gladiator he had blocked took his sword and struck Telemachus in the chest. Immediately the arena floor turned sandy red from his blood.  The little monk fell to the ground and as he died, he cried out for the final time, “IN THE NAME OF CHRIST, STOP!" 

 

    Then a strange thing happened.  A hush fell over the arena.  All eyes were focused on the still form in the crimson sand.  The gladiators put down their swords.  One by one the spectators left their seats and emptied the Coliseum.  Historians tell us that was the last gladiatorial contest in the Roman Coliseum.  Never again did men kill men for entertainment in the arena.  When Telemachus died, the gladiator contests died with him.  Think about that story for a moment.  Was Telemachus a man of faith?  Yes.  Did he obey God? Yes.  Did he have his doubts?  Certainly.  But he acted on the belief part without regard to the consequences.  Living by faith, in the end, meant dying by faith.  But he made a difference in the world.  The strength to live and die for Christ is as much a miracle as being delivered from the lion’s den.

 

    Lord Jesus make us dangerous and courageous.  AMEN.

 

   In Christ,

     Brown

https://youtu.be/tI1LgfkF8J8