Brown's Daily Word: Brown's Daily Word 4/29/15

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Brown's Daily Word 4/29/15

Praise the Lord for this wonderful Wednesday.   I am in my study and the morning sun is beaming through the window, piercing through the budding Rhododendron bush which has grown to gigantic proportions and is budding profusely. This tree was planted along other flowering trees about 20 years ago. They were just saplings then. They have grown to be giants. Soon they will be blooming with variegated color.
    It was brilliant day yesterday. I walked for 2 1/2 miles. I saw cardinals singing sweetly along with all kind birds praising the Lord, praising indeed the Lord of this beautiful world.  We will meet for our Wednesday evening gathering for fellowship and study at 6:00 PM followed by choir practice at 7:30 PM.

    The enormity and the beauty of God’s creation is one of the ways that he displays his glory. Francis Collins is a scientist who has all sorts of credentials. He is a world famous scientist, but he used to be an atheist. After a long period of searching, which included grilling a pastor and reading books by C.S. Lewis, Collins finally came to Christ after watching the beauty of creation. This is Collin's description of that life-changing encounter:

I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)

    King David spent the years of his youth in the fields and hills of Judea. His heart was tender towards the Lord and towards the things of the Lord. His heart was filled with gratitude, wonder, and praise. He wrote some powerful Psalms of faith.  He could agree that a thing of beauty was joy for ever". One day, as he was wandering under the vastness of the starry night, he composed Psalm 8.

"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas."

    Despite our miniscule size in the greater universe, there is something utterly unique about us. David was pointing this out in Psalm 8. If you created a continuum of every creature that’s ever been created, from bacteria all the way up to angels, we would be right next to angels. We’re not even far below, the psalmist says. Out of all that God has created, it is men and women alone who have been made in his image and crowned with glory and honor. We have a unique role within the universe. We have been given dominion over all that he’s made.  Out of all that God has created, God is mindful of us. He cares for us. This caused David to worship, and it causes me to worship too. What an amazing God we serve. We live on something as inconsequential as a speck of dust compared to all that God has created, and yet he has chosen to crown us with glory and honor. He has made us in his image. He is mindful of us, and He cares for us.

    Drawing this together leads us to worship.  The praise of the weakest Christian is more powerful than the strength of God's most powerful enemies; it leads us to worship. When we see the vastness of what God has created, including the beauty and the bounty of the Milky Way, and we experience awe of the vastness of the universe, it makes us want to worship. When we realize that out of all that God has made, he has focused on us, it makes us want to worship.

    There is more, because hundreds of years after David wrote this psalm, God Himself became a man and lived on this speck of dust that we call planet Earth. Not only was He mindful of us, not only did He care for us, but He became one of us.  In His infinite love He offered up His life for us so that we could be made right with Him.