Brown's Daily Word 4/14/15

Praise the Lord for this Easter season. Alice And I spent some time with our grandchildren and their parents in Boston last week. The record-breaking snow has all melted. The Spring flowers and foliage are beginning to burst forth in the beautiful city of Boston. Our oldest granddaughter, Micah, is learning to play the fiddle. She played the hymn "Amazing Grace" for us. It was beautiful and sweet. Simeon is doing well in school. We were able to meet some of his teachers and friends. Simeon is mechanically wired. He is always busy making things. Ada, who is 4, loves to go to the Museum of Fine Arts to look at some of the pieces of artwork. She is very good at putting puzzles together ... 100 piece ones and more.
 Over the weekend I also went with one of my nieces, Sharon, to an open hose at the University at Albany where she has been accepted to study this coming fall.
 The Lord blessed with an amazing day yesterday. The temperature reached almost to 80 in our region yesterday. It was sunny and brilliant. The spring flowers have started blooming. Crocuses are in full bloom. The bees were fast and furious in collecting pollen for honey. The sights and sounds were so were sweet. I made a mega chicken barbecue on an open fire, burning all cherry wood. The chicken came almost perfect. Praise the Lord when He sends summer-like weather in Spring. We are the blessed recipients of all His manifold blessings.
  The Lord blessed us with a beautiful day last Sunday. I preached from John 20:19ff. In the midst of celebration and jubilation, in the midist of great joy and wonder, doubt is also at the core of the Easter event. “Some believed but others doubted.” So ends of the Gospel of Matthew on that note of doubt. On the one hand, we experience the grandest event in human history when Jesus our Lord rose from the dead. On the other, within the story of that exquisite event, we see the lurking of doubt in the shadows. The phrase "doubting Thomas" has become a common part of the English language. We find two moments in the gospels where we meet Thomas and on both occasions he was inquisitively asking questions.
 For example, one time Jesus was teaching about going to prepare a place for them, a heavenly mansion. It was Thomas who scratched his thoughtful head and asked, “Jesus, we don't know where you are going and we don't know the way.”
 The second story about Thomas is when ten disciples expressed wonder and amazement that the resurrected Christ had revealed himself to them, but Thomas didn’t go along with the others to say, “OK, that must be true. You all said so.” Instead he voiced his doubts when he said, “Unless I see him with my own eyes and touch his wounds with my own fingers, I will not believe.”
We are all at least somewhat like Thomas. We have questions, which we often express. Every Christian, at some time or other during our lives, have doubts, questions, and skepticism. That is the way that God wired us. He designed us “to ask questions, inquire, think, and sort out.” During our lifetimes, we will have many questions for God. There will be times that we are filled with questions and other times that our questions are few. There are varieties of personalities in this world, some of which have many more doubts and many more questions woven into their personality than other people have.
One particular theologian, Henry Drummond, has been helpful to me. He makes a distinction between a doubter and an unbeliever. A doubter is a person who searches for God and the godly life; the person is on a journey, a quest, a search to find God and the love of God.
 An unbeliever, however, isn’t searching for God but for the pleasures of this world. An unbeliever is searching for situations in life which will bring happiness.
 A doubter is a person who has a thousand questions for God; questions about life, love, God’s existence, purpose, the divinity of Christ and many other questions, but the unbeliever is apathetic to God and the “God question” does not really come up in his or her daily life.
A doubter is a person who struggles with God and struggles to live a godly life and struggles to find the purpose of life, but an unbeliever simply struggles to pay the bills, find a spouse, find a job, and find a house. That is all.
There are an enormous differences between an honest and questioning doubter and a secularized unbeliever who does not struggle with the “God question” and the divine dimensions of life. All Christians at some time during their life will doubt and question God, God’s existence, and God’s presence. Thomas was enormously skeptical of the news he heard about the resurrected Christ and he voiced his skepticism. At the close of the story, Thomas fell on his knees and said, “Christ, you are my Lord and God.” Jesus said, “Thomas, stop doubting and believe.”
 There is a time in all of our lives where God says to us, “It is time to stop doubting. It is time to move past your doubting. It is time to believe and experience the power of the Risen Lord.”
In the Book of Job, Job went on doubting, complaining and questioning God for thirty- eight chapters. God tired of Job’s doubting and said, “Be quiet Job. I am tired of your wailing and doubting. Be quiet and believe.”
Thomas, after all that questioning and doubting and skepticism, came to the time when he fell on his knees and he said. “My Lord and My God.” His were the words of a recovered skeptic. Amen. Jesus is Risen. He is Risen indeed.
In Him,
Brown
https://youtu.be/mFWQgxXM_b8