Brown's Daily Word 9/26/08

Good Morning,
Praise the Lord it is Friday. Praise the Lord, for Sunday is coming. One of my favorite days of the week is Sunday. On the Lord's day I want to be in His house to worship Him. I get a great kick out of worshipping Jesus, the Risen one, with His people those love Him. It's a kind of dress rehearsal for the things to come. Last Monday morning our grand daughter Micah called me and said, "Grandpa I went to church and Sunday School". Micah will be three years old in November. She, together with her brother Simeon and their parents, worships at the historic Park Street church in Boston. One of the surgeons I had for my surgery in Boston worships there. His wife is a Sunday School teacher there. What a way to live and a what a way to serve Jesus the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.
By the way, do you realize that we have less than three months until Christmas?
I recently read of a woman who wanted to go to jail. Maria Brunner is tired of her “lazy” husband and “demanding” children. Her husband is unemployed, so she supports their three young children by cleaning people’s houses. Even though Brunner’s husband is unemployed, he has managed to run up several unpaid parking tickets. In fact, the bill for them is almost $5,000. Mr. Brunner somehow kept the tickets a secret from his wife, but as the owner of the vehicle, she is responsible. She must spend three months behind bars in her town of Poing, Germany if she doesn’t come up with the money to pay for the tickets. But Maria says, “I’ve had enough of scraping a living for the family. . . As long as I get food and a hot shower every day, I don’t mind being sent to jail. I can finally get some rest and relaxation.” The police said that when they went to arrest Maria, “she seemed really happy to see us. . . and repeatedly thanked us for arresting her.” The article stated that while most people taken into custody cover their heads in shame, Maria “smiled and waved as she was driven off to jail.” We live in a very hectic, demanding world. We become over burdened, over- stressed, and overworked. Our Lord offers an amazing invitation, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:29-30). Most of us, however, go running from one thing to another without ever slowing down. We don’t just have tasks, we multitask. We don’t make time for God, time for relaxation, or time for our families. It is criminal that our children often have even more hectic schedules than we do. When our batteries are running out of power, we get edgy, impatient, and angry. We may not know what to do with all the explosive feelings inside. Praise the Lord for the Day of the Lord. It is the Day of Resurrection. It is the day for worship and celebration. It is the day to remind us that the Lord is in control, and that we are not. It is also a day to recharge, renew, and reinvigorate. One writer puts it well when he says, “Sabbath is taking a day a week to remind myself that I did not make the world and that it will continue to exist without my efforts. Sabbath is a day when my work is done, even if it isn’t. Sabbath is a day when my job is to enjoy. Period. Sabbath is a day when I am fully available to myself and those I love most. Sabbath is a day when I remember that when God made the world, he saw that it was good. Sabbath is a day when I produce nothing. Sabbath is a day when I remind myself that I am not a machine. Sabbath is a day when at the end I say, ‘I didn’t do anything today,’ and I don’t add, ‘And I feel guilty.’ Sabbath is a day when my phone is turned off, I don’t check my email, and you can’t get ahold of me” (Rob Bell in Velvet Elvis, pp. 117-118). The Bible says, “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience” (Hebrews 4:9-11). Not taking Sabbath is a setup for spiritual disaster. We lose touch with reality — socially, psychologically, physically and spiritually. Sabbath is not a luxury; it is something I need for survival. By doing less, we actually end up doing more. A bow that is always bent with the tension of the string will end up shooting far fewer arrows than one whose string is taken off for a time each day. If God came to give me life, I want to experience that life to its fullest. This pleases God. Jesus reminded us, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, the Sabbath was made for our benefit. Martin Moore-Ede, in his book "Twenty-Four Hour Society: Understanding Human Limits in a World That Never Stops", says, “Our most notorious industrial accidents in recent years — Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the fatal navigational error of Korean Air Lines 007 — all occurred in the middle of the night. When the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian A300 airbus killing all 290 people aboard, fatigue-stressed operators in the high tech Combat Information Center on the carrier misinterpreted radar data and repeatedly told their captain that the jet was descending as if to attack when in fact the airliner remained on a normal flight path. In the Challenger space shuttle disaster, key NASA officials made the ill-fated decision to go ahead with the launch after working twenty hours straight and getting only two to three hours of sleep the night before. Their error in judgment cost the lives of seven astronauts and nearly killed the U.S. space program. We ignore our need for rest and renewal at the peril of others and ourselves.” In the Gospel of Mark we read, “Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, ‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest’” (Mark 6:31). Hebrews 10:19-25 states, "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; and having an high priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;) and let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.
Wow!
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoxopsRSfdU
Modern Day Tribal Wisdom
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
In modern education and expanded government, however, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buying a stronger whip.2. Changing riders.3. Threatening the horse with termination.4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.5. Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.7. Re-classifying the dead horse as "living-impaired."8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.12. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.15. As a last resort, sell it on Ebay.