"This good day, It is a gift from you.
The world is turning in its place
Because you made it to.
I lift my voice
To sing a song of praise
On this good day".
The world is turning in its place
Because you made it to.
I lift my voice
To sing a song of praise
On this good day".
Praise the Lord for fabulous and
fantastic Friday. I woke up early this morning getting ready for the New
Day, praising Jesus for He is Sun of sky through the picture
window. The Eastern sky was colorful, displaying to the world the beauty
and grandeur of the rising sun that dispels the darkness awaking the earth with
new songs surrounded with the fresh grace of our Lord who is the Morning
Sun. I was looking at the Christmas cactus in full bloom as the
harbingers of Christmas.. Alice harvested almost a bushel of yellow
beans yesterday and spent some hours "snipping and snapping", and
watched "White Christmas" for the first time this year. It is
magical and sort of miraculous that we are gifted with fresh beans from our own
garden in mid-October. We met a neighbor at Alice's homestead in
Smyrna who shared with us some of his fresh turnips. He planted 4 acres
of turnips on August 1 for the deer. The crop is prolific. Praise
the Lord the Lord of the harvest for the way He replenishes the earth for the
good of His people. We are the undeserving recipients of His good gifts
from His generous heart and loving hands.
We are getting ready for worship this
coming Sunday. We will meet for Sunday School at 9:30 AM and for worship
at 10:30 AM, followed by a church-wide fellowship dinner at 12 noon.
There will be an assortment of signature dishes along with decadent
desserts and, best of all, a great and sweet fellowship. Jesus is
the host at every meal and we are His honored guests. We are planning for
an evening Hymn sing next Sunday, October 22. Praise the Lord
fir the great hymns of the church that we get to sing. The Hymn sing will
start at 6:00 PM, followed by a reception. We will be serving donuts and
apple cider. It will be a sweet gathering.
The Lord Jesus is the Resurrection and
the Life. In Him we live and move and have our being. He is the
author of life. He is the pioneer and the finisher of our
faith. He is the ground of our being. He is the Light in the
darkness. He is the hope for the hopeless. He is the eternal home
for the pilgrims, vagabonds, and wanderers without goal and aim. He is
the way the way the truth and Life. Knowing Him we have everything..
serving Him we have the joy unspeakable. In Him we have everything we
need for life and beyond this life and for godliness and
righteousness.
Some famous secularists—like Nietzsche,
Stalin, and others—thought it all the way through, and said that if there's no
God and afterlife, and if this world is eventually all going to turn in on
itself and disintegrate into a black hole of nothingness, then the only meaning
is to try and acquire as much power and pleasure in this life as possible.
As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, it would mean that "life is an empty bubble,
floating on the sea of nothingness." That is the logical conclusion according
to atheism.
The hinge on which all this turns one way or the other is
the resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus wasn't raised, then we have no historical
credible certainty in a bodily afterlife, future rewards, or hope beyond the
grave, and so we might as well just live for ourselves here. If he's not
alive, not only is the purpose and meaning for life just limited to the here
and now, but there's also no spiritual power that can come into our lives to
help us to change. Without Jesus' resurrection, there's no new life in
Christ. The only power available for us to change and improve would be in
ourselves. You think education is going to do the trick? D. L.
Moody once said that if you see a man stealing nuts and bolts from the railroad
track, and you send him to college because you want to change him, the higher
education is only going to give him the tools to steal the whole track. He
needs something more than education; he needs transformation. He needs a power
to come into his life from outside of him.
This is what we have in Jesus. If
Jesus is raised from the dead, we have the certainty that this life is not all
there is, and there's a purpose and meaning in life that transcends this life,
and there's a new spiritual power that can break into our lives to transform
us. Paul the rebel was apprehended by the Risen Lord,
the Hound of Heaven. Paul encountered the Risen and glorified
Lord. His life was transformed forever. The Risen Lord transfused
him with resurrection power and blood of the Lamb. Paul become a new
rebel with a cause. He became fearless and dauntless. He could
declare, "for me to live is Christ and to die is gain".
The Risen Lord deployed Paul for the sake of the Eternal Kingdom. In His
mission of proclamation and pepedagogic transmission Paul challenges
us, "Don't be deceived. It's not a sham. I saw Jesus
alive!" The owner exists; he owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Ps. 50:10), and
he's promised us that every sacrifice in his name will be rewarded
100-fold in the future. For Paul, the reason to invest in the future is
because there is a future. His future bodily resurrection freed him from
materialism and consumerism and only thinking of the here and now. All
the sacrifices were worth it because the Lord does care
what we do, and the rewards in that day are going to be so amazing that it is
going to be worth it all. That's why Paul admonishes and encourages
us, "Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let
nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord,
because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain" (v.
58). What you do in this life really matters—it carries over into the
next!
In Disney's The Lion King, Simba had run away; he was
trying to run away from his past, and he thought he'd just live it up, do his
own thing, just enjoy life, "hakuna matata," until Rafiki, the baboon,
showed Simba that his father Mufasa was alive. Mufasa appeared to Simba
in the sky and said, "Simba, you have forgotten me." Simba
said, "No, how could I?" And Mufasa said, "You have
forgotten who you are and thus have forgotten me. You are my son.
Remember who you are." He repeats it over and over: "Remember,
Simba, remember." It's the turning point of the movie, in
which Simba finally wakes up and remembers what his father had done for him,
that his father had sacrificed his life for him, that his father was
"alive," and that Simba was part of the royal family and had the
responsibility to live out the family name.
For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus was
meant to be like a spiritual alarm clock: waking us up to the truth of the
Gospel, of what Jesus has done for us and who we are in him. It's like
he's grabbing us by the collar and saying, "Look—wake up. Remember what
Jesus has done. He's paid for all your sins. He gave his life to
pay your debt, and he's alive." When you see his love, you realize
you don't have to run from your past. You can run to him with your past,
and when we trust in him, he'll not only pardon us, but he'll empower us.
A new power will come into our lives for change and transformation.
In Christ,
Brown
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