Brown's Daily Word 3-24-08

Good morning,
Happy Easter. Jesus came, He saw, He conquered death and He is alive forevermore. Indeed, Christ is risen. The Lord blessed us with a wonderful Easter day yesterday. It was a glorious morning. I woke up around 2 a.m. and saw that the moon was bright and brilliant. All was calm and all was beautiful and the Lord blessed us throughout the day in Worship and in fellowship. Indeed, "better is one day in Your house than a thousands elsewhere. Praise the Lord for the way Jesus is the resurrection and the life. All the glory and victory belong to Him. We serve a risen Savior, who is in the world today. We wish you the joy of the risen Savior and the power that comes along. Happy Easter.
Joyce Hollyday tells the story of a schoolteacher who was asked to work with children in a large city hospital. Another teacher, knowing that she had been assigned to the hospital, called and requested that she visit a child who had been in her class. The teacher took the boy’s name and room number, and was told by the teacher on the other end of the phone: “We’re studying nouns and adverbs in class now. I’d be grateful if you could help him with his homework, so he doesn’t fall behind the others.” What the teacher did not realize was that the boy was in the hospital’s burn unit. She was unprepared to find a young boy horribly burned and in great pain. But she knew that if she fled from the room that it would frighten the boy, and so she began somewhat awkwardly, “I’m the hospital teacher, and your teacher sent me to help you with nouns and adverbs.” The boy was hardly able to respond because he was in so much pain. It seemed so senseless and heartless that the teacher could hardly force herself to go through the lesson. But the next morning a nurse on the burn unit asked her, “What did you do to that boy?” And before the teacher could say anything, the nurse said: “We’ve been very worried about him. But ever since you were here yesterday, his whole attitude has changed. He’s fighting back; he’s responding to treatment. It’s as if he has decided to live.” Later, when the boy had recovered somewhat, he said that he had completely given up hope until he saw the teacher. He realized something very important. He said: “They wouldn’t send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a boy who was dying, would they?”
The message of Easter is that we are going to live. There is hope for us. Jesus came to us, not to perform last rites, but to give us life. God would not have sent Jesus to rise from the dead if we were going to die and stay in the grave, now would He? We will need the lessons He came to teach us. Life may have wounded us, but Jesus came to heal us. He said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). Easter tells us that life is not over; the story has not ended; the best is yet to come. This is not the end, it is the beginning. What is ending is the night, the confusion, the dysfunction. What is beginning is the day, the solution, the answer. Jesus’ triumph over death has opened the door to eternal life and eternal joy into the despair and hopelessness of the world, Jesus came. One day He entered a garden as He commenced His work to restore the breach between the human family and God. From the garden He made His way to a tree. He would die on that branchless, barren tree, and as He died, He would hold out the gift of eternal life with nail pierced hands. The tree is no longer hidden or barred from us. This was made possible by Christ, for as the Bible says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree’” (Galatians 3:13). But this forgiveness was not merely a legal transaction, its intent was that we should be new people. Hear the words of Scripture which say, “He himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by His wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24).
The tree of life appears in the first and the last books of the Bible. In the first book, access to the tree of life was lost. In the last book it is restored. We read in the book of Revelation: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2). Later it says, “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city” (Revelation 22:14). The work of Jesus Christ on the Cross reversed the curse and condition of mankind. The Bible recognizes the connection between Adam and Christ, when it says, “For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:17).
But Jesus did not stay on the Cross, and neither did He stay in the grave. The apostles said, “We are witnesses of everything He did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed Him by hanging Him on a tree, but God raised Him from the dead on the third day and caused Him to be seen” (Acts 10:39-40). And if His death was effective in its power to give life, how much more was His resurrection? The Bible puts it like this: “For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through His life ” (Romans 5:10). That is to say, His resurrection Life.
When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on what we celebrate as Palm Sunday, the children and crowds shouted His praise waving the palm leaves in their hands. Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke Your disciples ” But Jesus said, “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:39-40). On Easter morning the stones did cry out. The stone was rolled away and the stone grave cried out: “He is not here He is risen." When that stone was rolled away, it opened the door to the future. Paradise was opened again, and the path was made possible by Jesus’ victory over death. Death came because of the transgression of Adam and Eve in the garden. God had said, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17). But they did eat, and the process of death began in their bodies. But through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, eternal life is now available to each of us. The Bible says, “If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit, who lives in you” (Romans 8:10-11). Without the resurrection of Christ there is no hope, no future, no forgiveness, no heaven. The apostle Paul wrote, “If Christ is not risen, your faith is futile, you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:16).
Dr. Joseph Haroutunian was from Armenia. In 1940 he was brought to McCormick Theological Seminary to teach systematic theology. A friend of his once suggested that he change his name, saying: “Your name is difficult to pronounce and difficult to spell — it could hurt your professional career. Why don’t you change your name to Harwood or Harwell or something like that?” Dr. Haroutunian asked him, “What do those names mean?” His friend answered, “Well, nothing. They’re just easier to remember.” Dr. Haroutunian said, “In Armenia, when my grandfather was baptized, they named him Haroutunian which means ‘Resurrection.’ I am Joseph Haroutunian and I will be a son of Resurrection all my days.” That is the same privilege which can be ours. We can be sons or daughters of the Resurrection. The promise of the open tomb is ours. You may have never heard of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, but in his day he held a great deal of power. He took part in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was editor of the Soviet newspaper, Pravda, and was a full member of the Politburo. He wrote books on economics and political science. The story goes that in 1930 he took a journey from Moscow to Kiev to address a large audience on the subject of atheism. As he talked, he spoke against Christianity using insult and argument. He spoke for an hour, and looked out over the crowd, absolutely sure that he had crushed any remnants of faith among the audience. “Are there any questions?” he asked smugly. There was an appalling silence until one man slowly walked to the platform and then stood behind the lectern next to the communist leader. He looked over the crowd gazing to one side and then to the other. Suddenly he raised his voice and shouted the ancient greeting known well in the Russian Orthodox Church: “CHRIST IS RISEN ” And from the great crowd there arose a deafening response: “HE IS RISEN INDEED ”

Doubt always loses.Faith always wins. Because Jesus lives!

Brown


Do you realize that the only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we're kids? If you're less than ten years old, you're so excited about aging that you think in fractions.



"How old are you?"

"I'm four and a half."

You're never 36 and a half ....You're four and a half going on 5.



You get into your teens; now they can't hold you back.

You jump to the next number. "How old are you?"

"I'm gonna be 16." You could be 12, but you're gonna be 16. Eventually.



Then the great day of your life; you become 21.

Even the words sound like a ceremony.

You BECOME 21....Yes!!



Then you turn 30. What happened there? Makes you sound like bad milk. He TURNED; we had to throw him out. What's wrong? What changed? You BECOME 21; you TURN 30.



Then you're PUSHING 40....stay over there. You REACH 50.



You BECOME 21; you TURN 30; You're PUSHING 40; you REACH 50; then you MAKE IT to 60.



By then you've built up so much speed, you HIT 70.

After that, it's a day-by-day thing. You HIT Wednesday...



You get into your 80's; you HIT lunch, you HIT 4:30. My Grandmother won't even buy green bananas. "Well, it's an investment, you know, and maybe a bad one."



And it doesn't end there....



Into the 90's, you start going backwards. "I was JUST 92."



Then a strange thing happens; if you make it over 100, you become a little kid again. "I'm 100 and a half."