Praise the Lord for this third
Wednesday of July. The Lord of heaven and earth has engulfed the region with an
amazing Air-conditioning system. It is cool and sunny, and best of all it
is brilliant. Some of the tomato plants in our garden have grown to be over 5
feet. We have several variegated pepper plants that are blossoming and bearing
the fruit. All kinds of vegetable plants look vigorous and luxuriant. Blessed
be the name of the Lord. The Church grounds look luscious green as the
trees dance with the gentle breeze. The sunset was amazing last evening. Our
Lord makes all things glorious in His time.
We will meet for our
Wednesday Evening gathering at 6 PM with a special meal followed by Bible
Study.
I had an e-mail from dear
servant of Jesus asking to pray for her adult son who is battling with drugs.
She is asking prayer for him. There are so many around the world and around the
corner battling with so many addictions and so many forms of bondage, and are
wasting their lives. A life is a terrible thing to waste.
In his life saving book,
Don't Waste Your Life, John Piper recounts a story his
father often told in his days as a fiery Baptist evangelist. It is the story of
a man who came to saving faith in Jesus Christ near the end of his earthly
existence. Piper writes:
The church had prayed for this man for decades. He was hard and resistant. But this time, for some reason, he showed up when my father was preaching. At the end of the service, during a hymn, to everyone's amazement he came and took my father's hand. They sat down together on the front pew of the church as the people were dismissed. God opened his heart to the Gospel of Christ, and he was saved from his sins and given eternal life. But that did not stop him from sobbing and saying, as the tears ran down his wrinkled face—"I've wasted it! I've wasted it!"
By the grace of God, even a
life that is almost totally wasted can still be redeemed. As the Scottish
theologian Thomas Boston once said, our present existence is only "a short
preface to a long eternity." If that is true, then the man's life was not
wasted after all; he was only just beginning an eternal life of endless praise.
Regardless, why wait even a moment longer before starting to serve Jesus? We
have only one life to live. Let us not waste it by living for ourselves when we
can use it instead for the glory of God.
In Christ,
Brown
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