Brown's Daily Word 10/20/15

Praise the Lord for this new day.  It will be getting warmer here now since the first snow of October is past.  We are getting ready for our Wednesday gathering when the church hosts a community wide dinner for friends and neighbors tomorrow at 4:30 PM.  The Church will be serving chicken and biscuits, applesauce, and a delicious dessert.  The church will be open for Release Time on Thurdsay afternoon. . .  we are praying for the Lord to open doors that many children may come.

    I have been pausing and pondering lately on the majesty and beauty of the Lord demonstrated and displayed in all of His  creation.  I am so blessed and so overwhelmed by the colors and fragrances of the autumn season.  Indeed, we all can say creation is so luxurious, so lavish, so excessive in its generosity.  Creation reflects the luxuriousness of our God., the lavishness of our Lord, the excessive generosity of our God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, and it is freely given.  The word grace means gift, and all of this is freely given.  In fact, it is freely and excessively given.

    The Apostle Paul experienced and saw the riches of God’s grace, the riches of his mercy, the lavishness of His  generosity, and he was overwhelmed by it all.  In fact, he used words like lavish, abundant, and immeasurable.  Throughout the whole book of Ephesians, as in no other book in the Bible, we experience the mood of Paul’s exhilaration 

This same lavishness of God is expressed in other places in the Bible.  I love to preach and teach from the Gospel of John chapter 2 - the miracle of turning water into wine.  Jesus made 180 gallons of wine for that wedding.  180 gallons.  Imagine your wedding with 180 gallons of wine.  That would have been a whole lot of extra wine.  Excessive.  Extravagant.  Exuberant.  In other words, lavish.

    I also love the miracle of feeding the 5000.  I call this miracle a fish fry.  Jesus fed the 5000, not including women and children who were there.  That’s a lot of people, 5000 people plus.  Yes, Jesus blessed and broke two loaves of bread and five fish.  It does not sound like enough for 5000 but each of those people ate until they were full and then there were twelve baskets of leftovers.  WOW!  Jesus was excessive, extravagant, with plenty of food remaining.  In one word, lavish. 

    Such is the nature of God.  Our God is lavish in his love, lavish in his mercy, lavish in his riches of goodness showered upon us every day.  God is not stingy or frugal.  You and I may be stingy and frugal, but in the Bible and the book of Ephesians, we hear of God’s lavish and generous grace to us. 

In Jesus,

 Brown

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