Brown's Daily word 9/21/09

Good morning,
Praise the Lord for this new day. I trust that you had a very blessed day yesterday, "the Lord's Day", in worship, fellowship and witness. Sunita returned back to Washington, DC yesterday. She missed her flight in Dubai, so she returned on a different flight - one that routed to JFK, in New York City and then flew to Washington around 11.30 AM yesterday. We praise the Lord for her safe return back to Washington. Thank you for praying for her. Laureen arrived in Los Angeles safely last Friday. She is in a rehearsal camp with the Continentals for a week before they start their fall concert tour.
The Gospel reading for yesterday was taken from Mark 9: 33ff, where Jesus our Lord and his disciples were on a journey and they passed through Galilee. As they walked along the way, Jesus was aware that some of his disciples were arguing among themselves. When they reach their destination, he asked them why they were arguing, but the disciples keep quiet. Of course they kept quiet. They were spiritually mature enough to know that what they had been talking about was inappropriate and that Jesus would not approve. They had been arguing about which of them was the greatest.
Jesus turned their world – and ours – upside down by saying, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.” If we want to have real greatness – not the kind the world gives, but the kind God recognizes -- we need to learn to serve. This goes against the grain of what our society teaches. We as humans always have the desire to be first. We want to have our way, and for most our will and our personal needs are most important!
Jesus said that he who seeks to be the greatest needs to become the last and must be the servant of all. Most of us do not want to serve other people. We want to be served. We want someone to wait on us hand and foot. We think very highly of ourselves.
I read several years ago about the Titanic. One of the things that struck me most among all of the stories of the night the Titanic sank were those stories of the engineers. They knew better than anyone else about the dire condition of the ship, that the ship was sinking, and that they were going to die. They could have deserted their posts and tried to find room on a life boat, but they stayed below keeping the engines working so that the ship would have electrical power. They knew the longer the ship had electrical power the better the chances were that another ship would find them and come to the rescue. They also realized that as long as the electrical power was working and the lights were on, fewer people would panic. That is a sense of service your rarely find in this world today.
A story is told about Mother Teresa. A visitor to her hospital in Calcutta saw her tending to the cuts and bruises of a frail and impoverished AIDS patient. The visitor admitted to her, "I’d never do that for a million dollars!"
Mother Teresa answered, "Neither would I. But I do it for Jesus for nothing."
To become great in the eyes of the world you must be successful in business, become rich, and have the best house and the best car. But in the eyes of God, greatness comes to us when we put our own needs aside and serve someone else.
In our New Testament lesson, Jesus invited a noisy little kid over to where he sat with his disciples. He put his arms round the child and said something along the lines of, "You know something, If you can recognize the rights of a little child like this, if you can welcome and receive what he can teach you, then you’ll be doing the will of God, then you’ll be coming near to greatness, then you’ll be a hero. Whoever receives one child like this in My name receives me; and whoever receives Me does not just receive me, but Him who sent me".
The child Jesus embraced stands for all people who are not held in high regard, all those without a place, and all those without a voice. Jesus is telling us to serve and embrace those people who do not count in our lives.
Jesus reached out to a seemingly worthless child who had no power, no rights, and no voice, and said, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me."
This is true greatness. It is not how much money you make, how your business takes you all over the world, how many titles you earn, or how highly you are regarded that makes you great. What makes you great in God's eyes is your ability to reach down to the lost, the least and the last.
In Christ,
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x2IpLSfqp8