Brown's Daily Word 4-10-13

Praise the Lord for this Easter Season. In our Church calendar it is called Eastertide. Yesterday we taped our TV program for this Friday. I shared once again about the Easter event. Doubters are welcome at the empty cross and the empty grave and, best of all, before the Risen Lord. Last night I attended a special presentation by "Basically Bach Ensemble". They presented Bach's Cantata BWV 249 and selected movements from Handel's Messiah. It was anointed and powerful.

We will meet this evening for our Wednesday Evening gathering with a special meal at 6 PM . We will be looking at the passages of the Scripture that are part of the Handel's Messiah.

I am still reflecting on the Easter event. We are all Easter Christians. We are believers in Christ because of Easter event. Every Sunday is an Easter Sunday.

And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb . . . . As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, . . . he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; . . . he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." (Mark 16:2-7)

It is written in Mark that on that first Easter, women went to the tomb to pay their last respects to dead Jesus. To their alarm, the body of Jesus was not there. A "young man, dressed in a white robe" told them, "You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified? He isn't here. He is raised. He is going ahead of you to Galilee." Sometimes we wonder, why Galilee? Galilee was a forlorn, out of the way sort of place. It's where Jesus came from, but that's about its only claim to fame. Jesus spent most of His ministry out in Galilee, the "outback" of Judea, getting ready to go up to Jerusalem. All of Jesus' disciples seem to have been from Galilee. Jesus spent most of His time in Galilee getting His disciples prepared to leave Galilee and go up to the capitol city with Him. There, in Jerusalem, He was crucified and there He rose, but almost the moment He rose from the dead He headed back to Galilee. Nobody special lived in Galilee - that is, nobody except the followers of Jesus, who were people like us.

The resurrected Christ went back to and appeared before the very same ragtag group of people who had so disappointed Him, misunderstood Him, forsook Him, and fled from Him into the darkness. He returned to His betrayers and He returns to us. The risen Christ has come back to us. Therefore we live not alone. This is, indeed, very Good News. When we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, time and again we look up and realize that we're not walking by ourselves. When we come to some dead end in life, we look over the brink, into the dark abyss and, to our surprise and delight, there He is, awaiting us. We give up, give in, and come to a place of despair, only to find Him near to us.

A student, once asked to summarize all the gospel in a few words, responded: In the Bible, it gets dark, then it gets very, very dark, then Jesus shows up. In life, in death, in life beyond death, this is our hope. The risen Christ came back to us.

He is Risen,

In Him,

Brown

http://youtu.be/CYTQ6gpcuYA