Praise the
Lord for this awesome Autumn season here in the Northeast of the USA. When you
drive around the hills and the mountains, around the rivers and the rivulets,
around the fields and pastures, around the lakes and the various water
fronts you can see the wonderful and breath taking beauty of the Lord , which
is Technicolor displayed all around. Praise the Lord for the way He transforms
the created world in every season. Praise the Lord the way He transforms our
lives through His touch and by His grace. Our lives without Christ are
colorless, grim and gloomy. Jesus makes them colorful. Our lives without
Christ are tasteless and meaningless. Jesus, the maker of the best wine, makes
our lives sweet and fermented. Without Christ death rules in our lives. Praise
the Lord that when Jesus comes to our lives, He infuses us with new life,
abundant and Eternal.. Blessed be His Name.
Our son-in-law, Tom Ross was involved in a
bike accident as he was participating in a charity Bike marathon to raise funds
for MS.... He is going in for surgery this morning. Please pray for his full
recovery and restoration.
We will meet for a church-wide fellowship
dinner - a "soup swap" - this evening at 5:30 PM followed by a movie night at
our Church Fellowship Hall. Or, if you are unable to come out for soup and a
movie, then join us for our weekly Television outreach this evening at 7 PM on
Time Warner Cable channel 4. We will meet for worship on Sunday at 8:30 and
11:00 AM at Union Center UMC and at 9:30 AM at Wesley UMC. We will meet for the
Sunday School hour at Union Center at 9:50 AM. Plan to be in the House of the
Lord wherever you might be this coming Lord's Day... May Jesus Christ be
Praised and worshipped.
In his book Culture Making, Andy Crouch
addresses the idea that Christians are to be transformational agents of cultural
change when he says, "It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient
merely to critique culture or to copy culture. The only way to change culture is
to create culture." We must be about transformation, and we must be about
creating culture. We are to be transformational agents in our culture and in
the world.
Transformation is at the heart of the Gospel
of Jesus Christ our Lord. Paul also emphasized transformation in Romans 12:2
when he said, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind." Here, Paul's words direct us away from conformity and
toward transformation. What a mission!
In The Message version of Romans
12:2, it says, "Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into
it without even thinking." The essence of this passage is the reality that we
all will be shaped by something, and how we are shaped will affect the world
around us for better or for worse. We always should be mindful of how we are
being shaped and how we are affecting the world.
Paul went on to say, "fix your attention on
God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what He wants
from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always
dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you,
develops well-formed maturity in you" (Romans 12:2).
God desires to change us from the inside
out. We are changed by learning what God wants from us and by responding to it
in obedience to His will. While the culture and the sinful world around us
attempt to stunt our growth and keep us in sinful patterns of immaturity, our
Lord,desires for us to be transformed more and more into the likeness of Jesus
Christ, bringing out the very best in us.
In 2
Corinthians 3:18, Paul wrote to the church
in Corinth and explained the transformational work God was doing in them. He
said, "And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are
being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from
the Lord, who is the Spirit."
As we grow in our knowledge of the God of
the universe, as our faces are unveiled to Him, we will see God's glory and be
transformed more and more into His glorious likeness. It is in this transformed
state that we will begin to transform the world around us through His power and
Spirit at work in us. The Christian's mission
and high call is to this glorious transformation. We must realize, as Paul did,
that transformation is at the heart of the gospel. We must recognize that
transformed people transform people and transformed people transform the world
for the glory of Jesus Christ.
In Christ,
Brown
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