Brown's Daily Word 5-31-07

Good morning,
It is going to be very warm and even hot here in the southern tier of New York. It is going to be 88 F today. It is 88 F in Moscow Russia and 107 F in New Delhi, India today. You think it is Hot here?
We are getting thrilled and propelled about the NYPENN Franklin Graham Festival with Hot Live concerts with bands like Third Day, Point Of Grace, Sonic Flood, Tree 63, and Building 429. (All seats are free.) It all begins Next Friday, June 8 at 7 p.m. It will be held at the Event center of the epicenter of Binghamton University. We are trusting and praying that the Lord of the harvest is going to bring about a great harvest for His Kingdom, which is eternal and celestial.
I read with great interest about the recent building boom of sky scrapers all over the world. The tallest building is found in Kuala Lumpur. The other tallest buildings are found in Taipei, Shanghai, New York and Chicago. The first skyscraper ever to be built was called the Tower of Babel, and that is recorded in the Bible. It is also a story of gross stupidity brought about by pride. This was early in the history of the world when the population of the world was relatively low, and the people of earth had learned a new technology: the making of bricks. Using bricks instead of rocks they could build a much larger structure. They found a great plain called Shinar where they could live, and decided to build a tower there. They believed they could build a tower that would reach to the heavens, perhaps to prove there was no God watching over them after all. With biting irony the Scripture says, “But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building” (Genesis 11:5). Their tower hadn’t reached heaven at all, in fact, God had to “come down” to “see the city.” The whole purpose of the building of the tower was that they would be unified by one grand achievement. They had one language, and the plan was to gather everyone to live in the same place to accomplish great things. They did not want to be scattered, they needed everyone to work together. But in the end, God reversed their plan and scattered them over “all the earth.” He confused them, giving them different languages so they could not understand each other. They wanted to be independent of God, but God reminded them that was not possible. The tower, intended to bring people together, was the tower that scattered people and drove them from each other. Alienation from God results in being alienated from others. Now their language, instead of being the same, all sounded like babbling — thus the name Babel. The place became known as Babylon — a city associated with evil throughout Scripture. Even text messaging is no match for trying to communicate with someone with whom you have a misunderstanding. Words and language become almost incomprehensible, since what you mean by a word is not what the other person means by the same word, and every word is filtered through one’s own emotions. Never have we had more means of communication, and never has communication been more difficult. The curse of the tower of babel is still with us. However, the day of Pentecost began the reversal of this process. The tower of Babel had seen the proliferation of languages, with the resulting confusion and the division of the human family. Pentecost, with its many languages, began to see people united through a common understanding. At Babel God drove people apart to thwart evil, at Pentecost he brought people together to inaugurate righteousness. The tower was a symbol of our rebellion against God; Pentecost united people who were seeking God, and the Holy Spirit actually came to live in them. “The God up there” became “The God in me.” The people at the tower of Babel wanted to “make a name for themselves.” The people at Pentecost wanted to glorify the name of God. After the tower of Babel people could no longer work together to create a kingdom for themselves. At Pentecost people began to work together to establish God’s kingdom on earth. Babel was the imposition of human will; Pentecost was the acceptance of God’s divine will. Babel was bad news; Pentecost was good news. After Babel, people spread out over the earth in mutual hostility and alienation. It was every person for themselves. After Pentecost the people spread through the inhabited world to serve God and to live in love and fellowship. Pentecost is Babel reversed and undone. Babel was God’s judgment on the people who tried to unite against Him. Pentecost was God’s blessing in bringing people together people from every race, nation and language to live as one under God. Pentecost is God ending the chaos and confusion of Babel and bringing about new understanding. The message of people of Babel was: “We are gods!” The message of the people of Pentecost was: “We are God’s.” What Pentecost is saying is that God is not far away. We do not have to build a tower to get to him. He is Emmanuel, God with us. He is our eternal contemporary.Pentecost reverses Babel. One of the most dramatic examples of this is the life of William J. Murray. Murray is the son of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the famous atheist who was responsible for the Supreme Court ruling which removed prayer and Bible reading from public schools in the United States. He tells in his book, My Life Without God, about living in a home where there was constant rage and violence. His mother could not keep a job because of her frequent angry outbursts. She never married either man who fathered her children, and lived with her parents and brother in a small row house in Baltimore. Murray’s grandmother read Tarot cards, his grandfather was engaged in illegal activities, and his uncle kept stacks of pornography in his room. William Murray was told by his famous mother that since there was no God, nothing was really right or wrong. She taught him that the most important things in life were food, drink and sex, and he took her advice and fully indulged himself. But in 1980 he sought help for his drinking problem through a Twelve Step program. It was his first encounter with anyone who talked about a loving God. Yet, this loving God had no name. He read a novel that told the story of Luke in the New Testament. It talked about Luke’s relationship with God and finding God’s love. There began to be a stirring and yearning in his heart for that kind of experience, but he had no idea how to come into contact with this God. Then one evening, on January 25, 1980, as he was sleeping in his apartment in San Francisco, he says that the Holy Spirit came upon him and told him to seek the truth in the Bible. That was the one place he had never looked before, for that was the very book his mother had removed from our nation’s schools by her lawsuit in 1963. Murray states that the true reason for his mother filing the suit was her deep personal hatred for followers of Christianity. He told how his mother’s zeal against Christianity was so great that it had “taken over her life and rendered her incapable of seeing other people (himself included) as anything but either enemies or people who agreed with her every ideal.” But Murray committed his life to Christ and has never looked back. O’Hair called her son a traitor and cut off all communication with him. Murray experienced the love of God he was longing for and now goes all over the world telling his story. He is the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition in Washington, D.C. Pentecost reversed the Babel in his life. That is the purpose of Pentecost: To give new purpose. To change chaos and confusion into understanding. To turn us from rebellion to love and obedience through the power of the Holy Spirit. To turn despair into hope. To bring a new love into our hearts that wants to reach out to God and others. This Pentecost Sunday brings the invitation to receive the power of the Holy Spirit. In Christ,
Brown