Brown's Daily Word 5-28-09

Good morning,
This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Sunita flew out on Monday evening to Burundi, Africa, on an assignment for her work at World Vision. She, along with some of her colleagues, have gone for ten days. She sent us an e-mail that she arrived safely in Burundi after a long flight, but her luggage was missing en-route. Sunita gets a great thrill in serving the Lord by serving His people. I get excited about Jesus and His Kingdom when I talk to Sunita.
The Lord blessed us with a blessed Mid-week service of fellowship, study and prayer yesterday evening. The Lord calls us to a life of spiritual discipline so that we might renew our friendship with Jesus in a deeper way every day.
One of the prayers in the liturgy of the church says, “Most merciful God we confess that we have sinned against you and our neighbor. We have taken great benefits with little thanks and we have been more ready to insist upon our rights than to see the needs of others. Have mercy and forgive us, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.” Andrew Carnegie, the multimillionaire, left $1 million to one of his relatives, who in return actually cursed Carnegie because he had left $365 million to public charities and had cut him off with just one million. It is sort of like the young boy who was walking down the street with his mother. They met a neighbor on the street, returning home with a bag of groceries. The neighbor gave the boy an orange, and the mother said to her son: “And what do you say to the nice man?” Looking at the man, he held out the orange and said, “Peel it!” Yet, the boy is no different from us when we take great benefits from God with little thanks. The good news is that Jesus comes to us with mercy and grace, and does not see us as we are, but as we could be. He blesses us and is gracious toward us when we recognize his goodness — and when we do not. The Bible says, “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:10-14).
In His Grace,
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EfejDF85QI