Brown's Daily Word & India update12-17-08

Good Morning,
Praise the Lord for this Holy Season. The world all around us longs for peace, and we as believers pray for peace as we anticipate celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace. The angel and the multitude of the heavenly host declared to the lowly shepherds, "Glory to God in the Highest and Peace on earth and good will to all men with whom He is well pleased". 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 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 is from instruments designed to kill into tools that are used in farming. They become instruments that support life. It is God who gives us the fruits of the field. It is also God who makes peace possible. The United States did not enter WORLD WAR II until after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Both civilians and service men alike remember that event. That day and that event marked a time in the history of our country when no one living at the time would ever forget where they were or what they doing when they heard the news 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 of the place known as Pearl Harbor became known as a battle cry. 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. Almost two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ was born in a town called 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 that He is 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). German theologian Karl Barth once said, "In Christ both creation and humanity are reconciled. Forgiveness and reconciliation are one in the same. For God forgives us of our sins through Jesus Christ." It was only through Jesus Christ that Jacob Deshazer, U. S. soldier and ex-POW, 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 into Japan that 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, years later, Jacob Deshazer and Mitsuo Fuchida ran into each other. It was a meeting that changed Fuchida’s life forever. He had been called to a courthouse as a character witness for war crimes. 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 the thirteen who went to investigate what had happened to Hiroshima, Fuchida was the only one who did not die from radiation. As Fuchida stepped outside the courthouse he saw a crowd around Jacob Deshazer. He noticed that Deshazer was handing out pamphlets of his testimony about how he had turned from hateful U.S. soldier and POW to a new creation in Christ (Second Corinthians 5:17). Paper was scarce, so many were lining the soles of their worn out shoes with these pamphlets. Fuchida took one and read its contents instead. 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 has already been won, but the victory that comes from Jesus Christ cannot be our victory until surrender takes place. Sometimes we have been guilty of carrying an axe to grind long for far too long, long after the initial battle or confrontation. 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 due to 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 our swords and spears so that Christ can reconcile us to each other and to God. We cannot proclaim God’s peace unless we have proclaimed it in our own lives. In Jesus our Saviour,
Brownhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpgaWm2pnNs