Brown's Daily Word 12-3-07

Good Morning.
We had our first real snow fall today. It is beginning to look like Christmas. The Old Testament reading for today was taken from Isaiah 2.
I would like to ask to pray for Linda Ayer a sweet servant of Jesus our Lord. She is going in for a brain surgery Monday morning at 7.30 AM. Please pray that the Lord would guide the hands of the surgeon and that the Lord indeed would perform a great and mighty miracle in Linda. His name would be glorified and exalted. May the Lord and the Prince of Peace who brings to us His divine healing would pour upon Linda His anointing and total healing.
Isaiah 2:1-4 gives us a wonderful picture of God’s peace. Verse 4 poetically states that the weapons of war will be transformed into items that are constructive. Swords will be beaten into plowshares. Spears will be beaten into pruning hooks. At that time, nations will no longer train their militaries for war any more. The transformation of these weapons as instruments designed to kill are transformed into tools that are used in farming. They become instruments that support the ways of life.
It is God who gives us the fruits of the field. It is also God who makes peace possible. Therefore, as the Bible tells us "man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4). Physical food nourishes our bodies, but the word of God nourishes our souls. There is a true story of two men who were divided by war, but later united through Jesus Christ the PRINCE OF PEACE (Isaiah 9:6). They surrendered their swords and spears so that they could emotionally and spiritually be transformed into plowshares and pruning hooks.
December 7 is Pearl Harbor Day. The United States did not enter the war until after WORLD WAR II until after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Both civilians and service men alike remember that event. That event marked a time in the history of our country when no one living at that time would forget where they were or what they doing when they heard the news of that day on December 7, 1941. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described that day as a day that would live in infamy. Those who were not living at that time have learned about the events of that historic day from the history books. From the moment that Pearl Harbor was bombed onward, the name Pearl Harbor became known as a battle cry.
The Japanese at that time were obviously eager for battle when they made their unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese provoked the situation when they made their attack. Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U. S. was not even involved in World War II except for one exception. The only involvement that the U. S. did have prior to their entry into World War II (that I know about) as a small group known as the Flying Tigers (they were also known as the American Volunteer Group or AVG for short). They were a group of American pilots who fought for the Chinese against the Japanese.
For the Japanese, Pearl Harbor was a victory. Years before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there was a young Japanese boy by the name of Mitsuo Fuchida who, at the age of three, aspired to become a national hero like the Japanese national hero Admiral Togo who had at one time destroyed the Russian fleet in a surprise attack. Years later Mitsuo Fuchida became the equivalent of the modern day American TOP GUN in Japan. It was Mitsuo Fuchida who led 360 Japanese planes in the attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. Look at the the results of their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor...
Updated reports in 1991 suggested that there may have been as many as 5 Japanese submarines that were involved in addition to their 360 planes
- 2,403 Americans were killed
- 1,178 Americans were wounded
- Of the 18 American ships that were present, 11 were sunk, (8 battleships, 3 cruisers)
- 347 American planes were destroyed

Over two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ our Lord was born in Bethlehem. Far too many times we make light of the significance of this fact. Jesus is the PRINCE OF PEACE (Isaiah 9:6). The name "Jesus" means Savior (Matthew 1:21). Jesus is our Immanuel which means God with us (Matthew 1:23). He died in our place as the sacrificial lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29). Jesus’ blood is the blood of the New Covenant (Jeremiah 31: 33-34, Hebrews 8:10-13).
German theologian Karl Barth once said that in Christ both creation and humanity are reconciled. Forgiveness and reconciliation are one in the same. The reason that they are related is that if two or more parties are at odds with one another, then reconciliation cannot take place without the element of forgiveness. The truth of the matter is that we ourselves do not deserve the forgiveness that God gives us through Jesus Christ. It is a unmerited gift called grace. It was only through Jesus Christ that Jacob Deshazer, U. S. soldier and ex-POW, that he (Jacob) was able to get rid of his hatred for the Japanese. Jacob Deshazer had just finished flight school when he heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As a result, Jacob began to hate the Japanese with a Passion. He had an axe to grind, a score to settle. In fact he was so hot with passion that he even volunteered for a bombing mission in Japan. The mission was known as the "Doolittle mission". While he was on that mission, he ran out of fuel. Shortly thereafter, he was captured by the Japanese. The next 40 months of his life were spent as a POW. 34 of those 40 months he spent in solitary confinement. One day, he saw a fellow POW die of starvation that enraged him all the more in his passionate hate for the Japanese. However, instead of building on that hate any more, he reflected on the idea of how he once heard that Jesus Christ could turn hate into love.
He spent the next few months begging for a Bible. Finally his captors got him one. After his conversion, he would pray for his captors even when they beat him. Obviously, through Jesus Christ, God had changed Jacob’s axe to grind and his score to settle into a cross to carry as a disciple of Jesus Christ. God had emotionally and spiritually turned his sword and spear into a plowshare and a pruning hook.
One day Jacob Deshazer and Mitsuo Fuchida ran into each other. This meeting was one that changed Mitsuo’s life forever. He had been called as a character witness for war crimes at a court house. He had been sent as an investigator to Hiroshima and back to Tokyo along with twelve others after the atomic bomb had been dropped in Hiroshima. Of those thirteen who went to investigate what had happened to Hiroshima, Mitsuo was the only one who did not die from radiation. Mitsuo stepped outside the court house as he saw a crowd around Jacob Deshazer. He noticed that Deshazer was handing out pamphlets of his testimony from hateful U.S. soldier and POW to a new creation in Christ (Second Corinthians 5:17). Paper was scarce. Therefore, while others were lining the soles of their worn out shoes with these pamphlets, Mitsuo took one and read its contents. As a result, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. He, too, had allowed God to emotionally and spiritually turn his sword and spear into a plowshare and a pruning hook.
The spiritual battle had already been won. Yet, the victory that comes from Jesus Christ cannot be our victory until surrender takes place. Sometimes we have been guilty of having an axe to grind long after the initial conflict between us and the other parties or party had lost it’s fire. We do not have to bear arms to find ourselves fighting with God and each other. All we have to do is refuse to be the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9) that Christ has called us to be as His disciples and we will discover that we have allowed the devil to get a toe hold for his bidding as trouble makers who will in the end only keep biting and devouring one another until we have destroyed each other (Galatians 5:15 paraphrased). If these two men who were enemies as a result of the war that they fought in can become brothers in Christ, then why is it so hard for some of us to do the same? The reason it is hard might be because we have not been willing to surrender those swords and spears so that Christ can reconcile us to each other and God. We cannot proclaim God’s peace unless we have proclaimed it in our own lives.
God wants to make us at peace and have us reconciled to Him and others that we may have been at odds with which is why He gave us the most wonderful gift in Jesus Christ. Let God have our swords and spears so that He can turn them into plow shares and pruning hooks so that we may find at last that peace and goodwill that He wants all of us to have.
In Christ the Prince of Peace.
Brown