Brown's Daily Word 4-28-08

Good Morning,
Praise the Lord for this good day, a gift from the Lord. I trust you had a great weekend of worship, rest, and renewal. Laureen came home and joined us for a an extended weekend. The Lord blessed us all.
Ferdinand Magellan was the Spanish explorer who led the first expedition to sail around the world. As he approached the tip of Argentina in the year 1520, he came to the region he named Tierra del Fuego (land of fire), so named because there were natives on the shore tending several large fires. As the great ships sailed past the natives, who had surely never seen nor heard of sailing vessels in their lives, they completely ignored the ships as though they did not exist. When Magellan and his crew landed, he learned that they had considered the ships unreal, an apparition, because they were so unlike anything they had seen before. Magellan’s experience with the natives of Argentina is a metaphor of modern civilization. We see sights around us every day that point to God’s presence and we dismiss them as unreliable, because they are beyond our experience in the world as we know it. We have kept ourselves from seeing and understanding the spiritual and supernatural world around us because of a fixed mindset that is unwilling to accept the concept of God. Jacques Monod expressed worldview of those like him who refused to see what is right before them, “Man must learn to live in an alien world that is deaf to his music and is as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes. . . . Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.” How sad it is that the people of earth are trying to discover their place on the planet and find where they fit in the universe, while avoiding the obvious, and refusing to put God into the equation. God is sailing by and they consider it a fantasy. They turn their heads away as they tend to the fires of their own existence. The problem with this is that our civilization is left with an empty and vacuous world devoid of meaning and purpose. When we avoid God, we miss the reason for our existence and all that he wants to do for us. We miss the warmth of his love, the completeness of his forgiveness, and thrill of his embrace. The author of the book of Acts tells us that the whole reason the world was created is that we might know God and have a relationship with him. Hear it again as he says, “God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27-28). We must realize that God is for us. God is not the angry avenger who is peering at earth, looking for wayward sinners whom he can condemn. He is not looking through a microscope for all of the wrong we do. He is looking at us in compassionate love. It is hard to get through to us that God is crazy about us. He is passionate for us. He is longing for us. He is wanting us. He desires us. He is calling us to himself that we might have a relationship with him. Here is what the atheist misses — living with the realization that they are loved by the Creator of the universe. They do not understand that at the heart of the universe is a heart that is throbbing for them. The same is true, for that matter, for those believers whose idea of Christianity is a list of obligations which we owe to God. There are many who have been poisoned by a toxic religion that has led them to believe that God is hard to please and impossible to satisfy. They see him as looking for their faults and recording their sins. They feel that He loads them with guilt and delights in their shame. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus says to us what he said to the woman with a shameful life: “Neither do I condemn you” (John 8:11). Jesus says to us what he said to greedy Zacchaeus: “Come down. I want to stay at your house tonight” (Luke 19:5). Jesus says to us what he said to the sinful woman who washed his feet: “Your many sins have been forgiven” (Luke 7:47). God is the father who runs out to welcome his sinful son home, and not only throws his arms around him, but throws a party as well (Luke 15:20). In the Old Testament book, the Song of Solomon, the relationship between God and us is compared to two breathless lovers who are full of passion for one another. In the New Testament he calls us his bride. He speaks with tender words calling us his beloved. In no other religion of the world do you find a God who is breathlessly in love with the people of the world. This passionate love never occurs in Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism. The amazing thing about Jesus is the intimate vocabulary he uses when addressing us. He calls us his little children. He also said things like, “I no longer call you servants. . . . Instead, I have called you friends” (John 15:15). I read about King David, whose sins were great, but who turned to God asking him to cleanse his heart. His passion for God became the fire that burns through the book of Psalms. He wrote, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1-2). I read about the woman who pushed through the crowd just so she might touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. I read about blind men who cried out for Jesus, even when people told them to be quiet. These are the people who came into a relationship with Jesus and had their lives transformed, because they were passionate for God. They found that relationship to be redemptive because they were changed. Their brokenness turned to wholeness. Their weakness became strength. Their failure turned to faithfulness. They learned obedience, not by trying harder, but by loving more. Love came before obedience. Brennan Manning said, “Jesus Christ did not come to make us nicer people with better morals. He came to transform people into better lovers. He came to make brand new people alive with the fire of God.” He knows every thought and imagination of our minds. He is aware of all the attitudes and intentions of our hearts, and still is passionately drawn to us. His knowledge of us pierces our souls, reveals our true self and loves us immeasurably. What a wonderful God we serve. This calls for a response on our behalf. We have been loved completely and we need to love completely in return. It is the only adequate response to a God like this. The Bible says, “You’ve had a taste of God. Now, like infants at the breast, drink deep of God’s pure kindness. Then you’ll grow up mature and whole in God” (1 Peter 2:2, The Message). The Bible gives this invitation: “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). I just read a magazine that carried the following story, “A recent promotion by H & R Block offered walk-in customers a chance to win a drawing for $1 million. Glen and Gloria Sims of Sewell, New Jersey, won the drawing, but they refused to believe it when a Block representative phoned them with the good news. After several additional contacts by both mail and phone, the Simses still thought it was all just a scam, and usually hung up the phone or trashed the special notices. Some weeks later, H & R Block called one more time to let the Simses know the deadline for accepting their million-dollar prize was nearing and that the story of their refusal to accept the prize would appear soon on NBC’s ‘Today’ show. At that point, Glen Sims decided to investigate. A few days later he appeared on ‘Today’ to tell America that he and his wife had finally claimed their million dollars. Sims said, ‘From the time this has been going on, H & R Block explained to us they really wanted a happy ending to all this, and they were ecstatic that we finally accepted the prize.’ Every time someone decides to accept God’s free gift of a relationship with him that he has been trying to give away, it is the same. He is ecstatic when we accept the prize. God loves it when there is a happy ending.
In Christ,
Brown