Brown's Daily Word 6/17/16

    Praise the Lord for all the promises and possibilities we have in and through Jesus Christ our Lord, in whom all God's promises are "Yes".  We worship and serve the Lord, who is indeed is the God of Miracles.  As you all know I underwent a major surgery on my spine followed by radiation treatment.  My surgery was on the February 1, 2016, in Boston.  Thank you for praying fervently and faithfully for me.  I am doing well.  I was back in Boston a few weeks ago, at which time I had a very good report from the follow up visit.  I praise the Lord.  I have been deeply blessed. 

    I am back at serving the Lord.  This summer a small short-term mission team consisting of myself, our daughter Laureen, Andy (Sunita's husband), and their friends Rob and Lee (all from Washington, DC) is going to Orissa, India.  We are departing from the USA on the 27th of June.  We have been invited to conduct a summer camp for youth in Orissa.  This camp will be held in the Kanabageri Church, the church whereThis camp will be held in the Kanabageri Church, the church where I was nurtured and began to preach and teach in 1964 at the age of 16.    We are expecting several hundred youth for this camp meeting.  We had an amazing meeting and ministry with many of these young people in April, 2014.  We are excited to be  back with them once more.  A ministry team,  consisting some of former students,   is at work in preparation for this exciting summer ministry event.   We will be providing room and board for the participants.  Please pray for the team, for travel and for favor with Government officials.  Please pray that the Lord would bless our ministry and will bring forth a great harvest in His time.  The group will be returning back to the States on the July 8.  I will be staying on for a few days extra to visit family and friends.  I will be preaching on the 3rd, 10th and the 17th of July at various churches, twice each Sunday.  I will be visiting the Bishop and the various Christian leaders in the area.  This area  suffered severe persecution in 2008, when over 100 Christians were murdered.  70,000 Christians were made homeless.  The Lord of the church is restoring churches. This is one of the amazing stories of restoration and revival in modern Church History.  Please continue to pray for the team.  Thank you for your prayerful love and support.

    How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, "Your God reigns!" Isaiah 52:7

There are some things we will  never know during our lifetimes.  We cannot know all the answers to all the conundrums and enigmas of life.  I don’t know why God would withhold the fulfillment of perfectly noble dreams and ambitions from anyone, but sometimes He does.  There are times when we have to "fly in the dark" on some things.  We are called to live by faith, not by sight.  What I do know is that every moment comes to us pregnant with a divine purpose that we  may not be able to figure out this side of eternity.  These moments are fully understood by a God who transcends time.  Furthermore, we were made for eternity, so we will not understand everything in our temporal world.  Living with unfulfilled expectations is a part of life.  The issue becomes then, am I going to desperately grab for life or will I humbly allow the Lord, the maker of Heaven and earth and the giver of life, to bring life to me and fulfill my expectations if that is His will.  God makes life beautiful in His time.  Those who live surrendered to Jesus, the Risen One,  according to God’s time and schedule, will ultimately lead a life of beauty. 

    Today, let us allow the Lord to begin making something beautiful out of our lives.  May we find freedom from life’s expectations and failed expectations.  Beauty replaces the beast when life happens in His time.  He is the Alpha and the Omega.  Though His time not ours, now is always the right time to receive His Son. From there, life begins to get into rhythm with the divine Plan for our lives.  We grow up, learning to share, making friends, learning His character and His Truth, values that will guide us into a beautiful life.  We enjoy the natural things that God has given us to enjoy, rather than manufacturing a false-sense of joy through the accumulation of things.  The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

"He is no Fool who Gives what he Cannot keep to Gain that which he Cannot L-ose" Jim Ellioot

In Christ,

 Brown

https://youtu.be/T281lL_6e44

Brown's Daily Word 6/16/16

Praise the Lord for this new day.  The Lord has blessed us with some spectacular and stunning summer days.  He has blessed us with a humongous garden.  The diverse vegetable plants and flowers are growing sturdy and strong. Last night the Lord decided to water the garden - praise Him!  Some of the fruit trees that He has blessed us with are looking luxuriant.  I spent one day this week sharing lunch with some friends.  We have known each other since 1983.  They were married 40 years ago just one week after Alice and I were married.  This dear couple loves the Lord and they love to go on short term mission trips all over the world.  It was great time sharing and reminiscing the wonders of His love. 

    Sunita and her little daughter Asha are currently in Jerusalem.  They arrived there safely, and they will be traveling from there to Armenia in a few days.  Thank you for praying for them.  Praise the Lord for all the countless summer missionaries all over the globe and around the corner serving Jesus.  It is an exciting time to be alive and to be involved serving Jesus in His Kingdom. 

    Our church hosted a community wide summer dinner yesterday afternoon.  They served the seasonal menu consisting of BBQ chicken and all the salads, as well as a plethora if desserts.  It was a magnificent afternoon of great fellowship and sharing.

    I am reflecting from Philippians 4:4 , "Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice."  Paul’s words seem peculiar, as he wrote them from jail. Paul instructed   the church at Philippi to find joy in all things and to not worry.  In light of current events these words from the Apostle Paul can feel vapid or void, words simply read on a page and not fully taken to heart.  How can we find joy in the midst of deep suffering, in the presence of evil in our world.  Turning on the news can be a rather depressing.  From the massacre in Orlando to the murders in Paris, to the refugees flooding into Europe, our world has been confronted with rather sobering statistics of our human frailty.  The world has been confronted with a reality many of us are not willing to accept.  As Paul addressed the church in Philippi, he wrote with a clear sense of fellowship and affection from a very desolate place, sitting in a prison cell.  His desire was for the church to know and understand that in this world there would be suffering and to accept suffering with joy.  Paul was not off his rocker!  Rather, he understood that as Christians we are not exempt from the world’s suffering, which is inherent to human existence—but our faith and hope in God gives us an unusual perspective.  Christ entered a world wrought with human disparity and offered us hope.

    When Paul asked the church to be considerate in all they were to do, the words are to serve as a reminder to be aware of those both inside and outside of the church.  As Christians we are called to respond to the brokenness we experience in our world.  “Remember, the Lord is coming soon.”  These words can often take on an end times revelation, interpreted as an expectant event, not yet occurred. Paul was not asking the church in Philippi (and therefore us as well) to simply bide our time and wait for Christ to come.  He was challenging Christians to be present in the world, to be mindful of all things, and to answer in a way that acknowledges Christ to all.

    As a Christian, we are called to respond to the world’s question of “Where is God?  Where is your God when bad things happen?  Where is your God when people die and terror grips the heart of a nation?  Where is God when we suffer?” In a world of uncertainty, we do not know the events that are coming, we cannot anticipate what tomorrow will bring, we can simply respond to the now, and find contentment and peace in knowing Christ is near.

    Anywhere a Christian is, then God’s presence should be evident as well.  Difficult situations yield an opportunity for Christians to step into the brokenness of the world and offer the declaration of hope, not simply to those who are easy to embrace or those who are in need but to our adversaries as well.  “When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?  The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’” (1)

    Matthew’s gospel sheds a renewed sense of “Christ is coming soon” to a world shrouded in darkness.  The strength and ability to walk into a distraught world cannot come from our own abilities, rather we must fully accept our weaknesses and propensities, allowing God to be the stabilizing denominator of our lives.  If we tried in our own might to meet all of the needs of our world, we would end up worrying ourselves to a point of incapacity.  Instead our response should be to love our enemies, to pray for the persecutors, to offer compassion, to bring about a distinctive narrative of grace, mercy, and hope, which in turn develops a deeper reliance on God’s promise.  His promise to always be with us.

    His promise to be all we require.  We need to be a people, as Christians, who pray for the Kingdom of God to be ushered in, and live like it already is.

In Christ,

Brown

https://youtu.be/cxa2ZDDyRlI

Brown's Daily Word 6/14/16

Praise the Lord for this new day with which the Lord has blessed us.  I woke up this morning before the morning doves and the other morning birds, and I am  praising the Lord for another day in His Kingdom, full of His promises and His tender mercies.  The Lord blessed us with a super Sunday, the Lord's day.  He blessed us in worship with His presence and His Joy. We welcomed the graduates and Dads with great Thanksgiving and praise.  There was a mega-reception with a great banquet following the worship service.  Jesus, the host, prepares the table before us.  The table was extravagant and overflowing, and running over with his love.  Our friends Ron and Shawn prepared the BBQ chicken on a real wood fire early Sunday morning.  Every thing was ready with almost full perfection before the morning worship.  The men and women of the church served with joyful hearts and jubilant feet.

    I spent some time visiting some family and friends yesterday.  One of the saints of the church whom I visited is 89 years old.  He lives in his own house.  Two of his daughters live very near to him.  He loves the Lord and he loves the people of the Lord.  He and his wife accepted Christ while watching the Billy Graham Crusade that was telecast from the Madison Squire Garden in NY City decades ago.  He and his wife served the Lord faithfully during their married lives.  His wife has gone to be with the Lord.  His wife and he have been a source of great blessings to us and to the church.

    Our daughter Laureen spent the weekend in Philadelphia visiting her niece and her sister Jess.  Sunita is flying to overseas today with her work.  She is taking Asha with her.  Please pray for them.

    Our Lord Jesus was a wonderful story teller.  Indeed history is His Story.  He tells two "lost and found" stories in the Gospel according to St. Luke, chapter 15, one about a lost sheep and another story about a lost coin.  The Scribes and Pharisees, the most religious people of our Lord's time on earth, came up to Jesus one day, and Jesus, knowing their attitude towards the outsiders, the lost, told them this story:  There once was a shepherd who had one hundred sheep, but one got lost, and so the shepherd left the 99 to find the one.  Jesus told them a second parable.  There was a  woman who lost a precious coin, not just any coin, but the most precious coin that she had. She swept and swept that house ever so carefully, looking for that lost precious coin.  God is deliberate and careful as our Lord  searches for the precious lost.  Our God comes after us when we are lost.  Our God is like a shepherd who searches diligently for a lost, precious, sheep; our God is like a woman who searches carefully for her lost precious coin.  Every so often we may think that God has given up on us, that we are so persistently sinful that God has finally given up on us, that our character defects seem to be so inescapable, that God finally gives up on trying to get through to us.  This story, however, tells us clearly of God’s forever wanting to find us.  Indeed, our Lord Jesus came seeking and finding that which was lost... He gave His life as a ransom.

    I love the poem, Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson.  It goes like this: I fled Him down the nights and down the days I fled Him down the arches of the years I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind, and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes I sped and shot precipitated Adown titanic glooms of chasm-ed fears From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. But with unhurrying chase and unperturb-ed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat — and a Voice beat, More instant than the feet: “All things betray thee who betrayest Me.”  “..... with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace; with constant speed and divine instancy.  .....And a voice, more persistent than the feet, spoke and said:  You are my precious one.  I will not let you go.”  Yes, that is the way God is.  He is so persistent, so diligent, so untiring in his pursuit of us when we are lost. "For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."Luke 19:10

In Christ,

 Brown

https://youtu.be/QYCJ8EvkGCs