Brown's Daily Word 3/18/16

Praise the Lord for this Friday.  We are just a week away from Good Friday.   Praise the Lord for this Holy Season.  We are getting ready for Palm Sunday worship and celebration.  We will gather for Sunday School at 10:00 AM.  Worship will begin at 11:00. This is our First Palm Sunday celebration at Marathon.  We are excited.  There will be a mega-Palm Sunday and Pre-Easter Banquet following the morning worship.  The banquet will be held in the church fellowship hall.  The menu will consist of Italian, Indian, and Mexican Cuisines, along with a plethora of desserts.  My wife has been following the NCAA March Madness (College Basketball).  She yells out when the teams that she is cheering on are winning.  Some of our daughters, though living away, are following their mother's lead as they cheer for many of the same teams.  We had our nieces and nephews come up for dinner. When they come here we get "Free Tech Support". 

    Once again plan to be in the Lord's House this coming Sunday as we join Him on His Triumphant Entry to Jerusalem on the First Palm Sunday.

    I recently came across a story as it was told by “Dear Abby” in a response to someone’s question.
    A young man from a wealthy family was about to graduate from high school.  It was the custom in that affluent neighborhood for the parents to give the graduate an automobile.  "Bill’ and his father had spent months looking at cars, and the week before graduation, they found the perfect car. 
    On the eve of his graduation, his father handed him a gift wrapped Bible.  Bill was so angry that he threw the Bible down and stormed out of the house.
He and his father never saw each other again.  It was the news of his father’s death that brought Bill home again. 
    As he sat one night going through his father’s possessions that he was to inherit, he come across the Bible his father had given him.  He brushed away the dust and opened it to find a cashier’s check, dated the day of his graduation - in the exact amount of the car they had chosen together.

    As I thought about this story, I couldn’t help but wonder how many people in this world have done the same thing to God - literally tossed aside a wonderful promise, because they didn’t understand it, or they didn’t believe that it was possible.  In our world, we are taught that; “if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.”  So many of us have been taken in by “empty promises,” that we are leery of anything or anyone that tells us we can have something for nothing.
THE WORLD SIMPLY DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY!

    God, however, never made a promise that He cannot fulfill.  The truth of the matter is, the world is full of empty promises, but God's promises are true.  We watch TV, and the advertisements tell us that we can be happy, rich, or famous, if only we purchase a certain product.  It doesn’t take long before we have been fooled enough to know that the world’s promises are empty.  God is different. Instead of promises full of emptiness, on Easter he gave us emptiness that is full of promise. 

    Let us think about the promises of Easter.  There are three, each of which is marked by something empty.  The marls of these promises are an empty cross, and empty tomb, and empty burial clothes.  It is the very fact that each of these is empty that assures us that God’s promises are real.  Jesus could not be contained by the cross, the tomb, or even his burial clothes, and so we can be sure of the fullness of God’s promises in our lives.

In Christ,

 Brown

https://youtu.be/qtU1c5JZf0k

Brown's Daily Word 3/17/16

 

    The Lord blessed with a wonderful Wednesday.  It was warm and beautiful.  I played hooky yesterday.  I had some friends come for lunch.  I fixed wild salmon and elk meat for curry.  It was wild.  Some very generous people living in Utah had sent me some Elk meat a few months ago.  One Russian friend had given me lots of wild salmon that he had caught.  Praise the Lord for the bounty of the earth the Lord lavishes upon us in every season.  We had a great time sharing the simple gifts and rich fellowship in Jesus.  Our church hosted a community dinner in the evening.  It is a great opportunity to welcome the friends and neighbors and share sweet fellowship of Jesus with them.  Our people prepared the dinner with much joy and served it with much grace .

 

    Please pray for our young teenage friend Natalie.  She was visiting Belize with her family and contracted Dengue fever,  She is being flown back to the States and going for hospitalization.  Natalie is beautiful teenager.  She belongs to the first Church we served in 1978.

    Praise the Lord for the sights and the sounds of the Lenten season.  There are some sounds that we do not hear very often.  One of them is the sound of a rooster crowing.  I grew up with the sounds of Rossters every morning back in the village in Orissa, India.  We did not have watches or clocks to remind us of the time.  There were no alarm clocks to wake us with the new dawn.  The roosters would crow every morning a first, second, and then a third time -  invariably - without failure.  By the time the rooster crew the third time it was morning.  We in our modern context  can hear almost anything, but you would probably have to go to a zoo to hear a rooster crowing.  We have all the sounds that go with modern life —cars and buses, trains and trucks, sirens and whistles in abundance.  In a crowded city you can hear kids yelling, music blaring, cash registers ringing, and planes roaring overhead but it is unlikely that you will ever hear a rooster crowing.  On one of my visits to the Holy Land we were staying in the old City of Jerusalem.  I was stunned and surprised to hear a rooster crow early in the morning.

    If most Americans heard a rooster crowing tomorrow morning at sunrise, they would hardly know what to do.  Roosters don’t belong in urban settings.  They belong out in the country where they can sound forth just before dawn and wake the sleepers with the news that a new day has come.  God made roosters to serve as trumpets of the morning, to signal that a new day has come.  They rouse sleepers from their beds and remind the kids to get up and milk the cows.  It is quite an unforgettable sound

    Peter knew all about roosters, having grown up in the rural area of Galilee and was used to the daily singing of the rooster chorus.  He had heard roosters crowing since the day he was born.  The sound was completely familiar to him. The rooster’s crow meant, “Wake up!  Get up!  A new day is beginning!”  Over the years he had probably heard that sound a thousand times or more, but of all the crowing of all the roosters, one had the greatest impact.  One Friday morning in Jerusalem the rooster crowed, and Peter would never forget it.  As long as he lived, it was a scar on his memory.  He told the story so often that it was written down four different times—once by Matthew, once by Mark, once by Luke, and once by John.

    The story itself was repeated over and over again by the first generation of Christians.       Peter had denied Christ to a servant girl.  Not to the high priest.  Not to a soldier. Not to anyone important. But to a menial maid.  I

 The words of Jesus. Matthew, Mark and Luke all stress that when the rooster crowed, Peter remem-bered the words of Jesus, “Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.” It was this memory more than anything else that brought Peter back to God. Not only had Peter fallen, he had fallen after his vain boasting. It had happened just as Jesus predicted. Those words—spoken in love—had lodged themselves deep within the crevasses of Peter’s mind. So much had happened in those few hours that Peter had forgotten. But at the opportune moment, he remembered what Jesus had said.   

It is true that Peter was loud, profane and vulgar that night. It is also true that underneath it all he loved Jesus and was there in the courtyard—with all his faults—keeping an eye on him. At heart Peter was a good man who failed to live up to the best intentions of his heart.

Satan often attacks us at the point of our strength, not the point of our weakness. After all, had not Peter boldly said, “Even if everyone else deserts you, I will never desert you?”
But when Satan attacked, it came so suddenly, so swiftly, so unexpectedly that the “bold apostle turned to butter.” By himself Peter is helpless. In the moment of crisis, Peter fails in the very point where he pledged to be eternally faithful.

  Our Lord,  allows us to fail in order to strip away our excessive self-confidence. Never again would Peter brag on himself like he did that night. Never again would he presume to be better than his brothers. Never again would he be so cocky and self-confident. All that was gone forever, part of the price Peter paid for his failure in the moment of crisis.

It is a good thing that the Lord allows this to happen to us. By falling flat on our faces we are forced to admit that without the Lord we can do nothing but fail. The quicker we learn that (and we never learn it completely) the better off we will be. Failure never seems to be a good thing when it happens, but if failure strips away our cocky self-confidence, then failure is ultimately a gift from God. It is called the sacrament of failure. There is hope for all of us—the best of us, the worst of us, and the rest of us.

In Christ,

Brown

https://youtu.be/nllfVcVdwCI

Brown's Daily Word 3/15/16

Praise the Lord the Lord of all seasons who is ushering in the season of Spring  with all its beauty and splendor.  The Church of the Risen Lord is getting ready for  Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and the Victorious Resurrection Sunday.   The Church, belonging to different cultures and traditions around the corner and around the globe, is preparing to celebrate this season with all colorful festivities.

    We (our church) will be hosting a community wide dinner tomorrow, Wednesday the 16th of March.  The dinner will start at 4:30 PM and will conclude at 6:00 PM.  The main menu will include corned beef and cabbage.  The students will gather at the church Thursday the 17th of March at 2:15 PM for Release Time.

    We will gather for worship on Palm Sunday at 11:00 AM, followed by a Palm Sunday dinner reception for all at 12:30 PM.  The dinner will include, Aunthentic Italian, Mexican, and Indian Cusine.  Praise the Lord that we get to celebrate His grace and His love.

    I have been reflecting  this morning on 1 Peter 2:21-25.  In the Christian life, there are  two possible  ways to grow.  One is through people, the other is through pain.  It would be hard to find a more important principle than this.  Sometimes we grow through the influence of others.  We sit at the feet of teachers, friends, mentors, disciplers, pastors, and gifted leaders who show us the way forward.  Sometimes growth comes in the formal setting of a classroom.  More often it comes through informal settings.  “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens  another ". (Proverbs 27:17)  We learn much from books, but we learn more from life, and the best kind of teaching is up close and personal.  The most effective lessons are learned life on life.  We learn a little from a distance, we learn more as we draw closer, but we learn the most when we are face to face, when we spend time with Jesus in prayer, worship, service and witness.  Mark 3:14 says that Jesus called the 12 apostles “that they might be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach” (ASV).  First they must be with him, and then they will be sent out to preach. So one way we grow is through people.

    The other way we grow is through pain.  Sometimes the pain comes because of the sadness of life.  Cancer may strike,  or we may share in the pain of a loved one who suffers greatly.  Pain is often undeserved, yet it comes to us anyway and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward”  (Job 5:7 ESV).  Sometimes those sparks ignite into a raging flame that threatens to consume us.  No one is exempt.

    Again, there are two possible ways to grow.  One is through people and the other is through pain.  Sometimes the worst kind of pain comes from other people. God has so ordered the moral universe that pain that teaches us the lasting lessons of life.  Poet Robert Browning put it this way:

    I walked a mile with Pleasure,
    She chattered all the way,
    But left me none the wiser
    For all she had to say.

    I walked a mile with Sorrow
    And ne’er a word said she;
    But oh, the things I learned from her
    When Sorrow walked with me!

   

     As we contnue in the Lenten Journey with Jesus our Lord we dicover that sometimes following Christ might lead us on to the path of suffering and the Cross.  Jesus our Lord declared, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me". .First Peter 2:21-25 spells out what it means to follow Christ.  “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth’” (I Peter 2:21-22).

    According to Peter, following Jesus means that sometimes we will suffer even when we have done nothing wrong.  The greatest honor for any Christian is to be like Jesus.  When we suffer unjustly, we share in a tiny portion of what happened to him.  Though he did no wrong, he was betrayed, tried, denied and crucified. Though he never sinned, he was hated by the power brokers who plotted to kill him.  The same thing will happen to us.  People close to us will disappoint us, and some will turn against us.  “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly” (I Peter 2:23).

    There is an old Hymn called “Footprints of Jesus.”  The first verse and chorus go like this:

    Sweetly, Lord, have we heard Thee calling,
    Come, follow Me!
    And we see where Thy footprints falling
    Lead us to Thee.

    Footprints of Jesus,
    That make the pathway glow;
    We will follow the steps of Jesus
    Where’er they go.

    Often the footprints of Jesus lead directly to the cross.  We are called to follow those bloody footprints even though they lead to mistreatment by the world. —"He entrusted himself to him who judges justly.”  In our day we hear a lot of talk about claiming our rights.  Ironically, most of our problems stem from claiming our rights.  But the Bible turns that upside down.  we are not to think of our rights first, but we are to think of others first.

    “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.  For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (I Peter 2:24-25).

In Christ,

https://youtu.be/e8HgAVenbUU

Brown's Daily Word 3/14/16

Praise the Lord for this new day the Lord ushered in so that we might rise up and follow Him, love Him, serve Him, and worship Him.  He blessed us in His House in worship, witness, and fellowship.   It is a thrill and a a great blessing to worship the Lord indeed.  During the lazy hours of Sunday afternoon some friends took me to a sugar shack.  This is the place where maple syrup is made.  It is a mega-operation.  I was able to meet the owners and the operators along with the family members, including some beautiful children.  We tasted the fresh maple syrup straight from the machine.  In the evening Alice and I walked around the Village Green and past the local park, and we stopped to talk to the operators of another sugar shack.  It was all sweet and aromatic.

The Gospel reading for yesterday was taken from John 12.  Jesus was in Bethany, just two miles away from Jerusalem, the place of His crucifixion on Good Friday.  In John 11 Jesus had raised Lazarus from the death.  There had been a great commotion and conspiracy in the city,  to crucify Jesus.  In John 12 we read that Jesus was unafraid and unhurried.  He was in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.  In fact, He came there as a guest  and took over, becoming the host instead.  He was in charge, the Christ in every crisis.  In this narrative  Jesus received the most generous gift Mary could offer to Him.  Jesus, the great giver, became the most generous receiver.  In so doing, He teaches us to be  generous givers and how to become grateful and winsome receivers.

  Mary instinctively recognized the coming death of Jesus though the men who were present had no clue.  They were concerned about  the money.   Death was the white elephant in the room no one was talking about, even though the smell of death was so very present, but when Mary anointed Jesus with the perfume that is normally reserved for burial, death was acknowledged.  No one could deny or pretend they didn't know what that perfume was for.   As hard as they tried to keep death in the closet, Mary’s act brought death out into the open.

Just as quickly, however, the present smell of death was overpowered by the smell of the perfume.  The smell of death was strong, very strong; but the smell of all that perfume was even stronger.  It filled the entire house, and it smelled wonderful.  It was much, much better.  When I was in the Sugar House yesterday the smell of the sweet syrup was overwhelming and strong.... overpowering, and it reminded me of how the scent of the perfume would have permeated the air.

The smell of death, while real and present, is not the end of the story.  Death is not the end of the story.  God’s love pours out upon us like the perfume from Mary’s bottle.  It’s stronger than death, and God doesn't just pour out a little.  We get a lot more than a drop or two placed strategically in the right spots on our bodies.  We get the whole bottle.  We’re bathed in it. 

Though Mary's loving actions were noted by all who were there, Judas didn’t think it was right.  Judas thought that Mary, pouring out the whole jar of perfume, was behaving recklessly.  What she did was extravagant, ridiculous, and foolish.  It was as extravagant as the man who searched for his lost sheep, and when he found it, threw a huge party.  It was as ridiculous as the woman who searched for her lost coin, and when she found it, spent more than it was worth to throw a huge party.  It was as foolish as the father who gave his son his inheritance, and watched him leave forever; the father who, when his son finally came to his senses and returned, threw for his son a huge party.

A more sensible and reasonable thing to do would be to portion out the perfume, use a small amount, and hold some back for later.  That perfume may have represented Mary’s life savings.  It may have been her retirement account, yet she gave it all.  She poured it all out on Jesus’ feet.  She did this, I believe, in recognition of the fact that Jesus was likewise giving his all.  He wasn’t holding anything back.  He was giving it all, his whole life, for her and for all of them.  In fact, His gift, His sacrifice, was for the world.

Deep down inside of me, in the most inner part of my being that I often do not even acknowledge, there is a yearning to live as Mary lived, to not hold anything back.  I want to give my all to Jesus, to God, and to the world, to show love recklessly, without abandon, to be extravagant in generosity, ridiculous in showing gratitude, and foolish in celebrating life.  I long to pour out every last drop for my Lord, my Savior, the one who does so much for me, to care more about honoring my Lord and serving him, and less about my own selfish interests.  I want to give freely, and be free of the anxiety and worries that hold me back.

This story, like most stories in Scripture, presents me with a choice:  which path do I want to follow?  The path of measured restraint, or the path of giving to the Lord,  my all?  The path of Judas, or the path of Mary?

 In Christ,

   Brown

https://youtu.be/EYfBZnMve_E