Praise, honor, and all glory belong to Jesus. He is the King of Glory and the Man of Sorrows who is acquainted with our grief. Praise the Lord for the mild beautiful weather in February. Yesterday I was talking to our daughter Laureen who lives in South Carolina. She was sharing that the temperature yesterday reached into the mid-seventies. According our daughter Sunita the temperature in Washington reached into the seventies. The cherry blossoms must be ready to burst. Praise the Lord for the way He decorates His wonderful world in the blooming garb of spring.
I was watching a program from Israel yesterday, which was showing the spectacular and brilliant spring in the Holy Land. The Almond trees are in full bloom. Spring has overwhelmed even the desert, causing a magnificent bloom of variegated flowers and shrubs. Jesus is the author all beauty.
Alice and I walked yesterday in the late afternoon. We can see the grass and the tees are getting ready for spring foliage. Our neighbors and friends have been busy with the collection of maple sap to make the best syrup.
We left Boston this past Tuesday. We had some car problems on Monday afternoon. The Lord provided for our need abundantly. We drove back to New York Tuesday afternoon as scheduled. It was a nonstop trip except for stopping for gas near Albany. The snow had fully melted in Massachusetts. The Mass Pike was dry and smooth. We felt like the Lord was going before us as the pillar of cloud. As we were nearing Binghamton we drove toward an amazing sunset. It was a very prolonged sunset. Maybe it was the Pillar of fire with which the Lord blesses us all in the journeys we take on earth. We saw along the highway that there were herds of deer grazing and frolicking carefree and unafraid. We also came across large flocks of Canadian geese hovering over the landscape, surveying it all with watchful eyes.
I get notes and comments from time to time from you all. I praise the Lord for each one of you. I received a letter from a man whom I had last seen in September, 1991. I had officiated in his wedding, an outdoor event. The setting was brilliant and the bride and groom looked splendid. He wrote me to ask about the written materials that I used during their Pre-marital counseling. The study and our meetings made deep and lasting impressions on his life. He and his wife are the parents of two children, a boy and a girl. The son is getting serious about getting married. The father, who is the president of a company, wanted to offer the written materials to him. The best part of the interaction is that he and his family are deeply involved in their local church. Their entire family is planning to go on a short term mission trip to Africa. Praise the Lord for the untold millions who are involved in the mission of our Lord Jesus Christ around the corner and around the world. In the words of John Ellerton of Cambrdge,
“We thank Thee that Thy Church unsleeping,
While earth rolls onward into light,
Through all the world her watch is keeping,
And rests not now by day or night.
While earth rolls onward into light,
Through all the world her watch is keeping,
And rests not now by day or night.
“As o'er each continent and island
The dawn leads on another day,
The voice of prayer is never silent,
Nor dies the strain of praise away.”
The dawn leads on another day,
The voice of prayer is never silent,
Nor dies the strain of praise away.”
In a world that is confronted with senseless violence and bloodshed, the church must be engaged to preach the Good News to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of our Lord.
As we journey with Jesus to Jerusalem during this Lenten season let us reflect on our sin that made it necessary for Christ to go to the Cross. In his marvelous book, “The Screwtape Letters”, C.S. Lewis wrote, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. [The devils] themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician," a secularist or a fanatic, "with the same delight." The Bible clearly declares the reality of sin that caused Jesus to be born and demanded that He die for our sins. This is clearly and pre-eminently a matter of the heart, that springs from within. Jeremiah 17:9 states, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
In Ephesians 6, the apostle Paul said that our most significant struggle in life "is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers ... authorities ... [and] cosmic powers of this present darkness" (Eph. 6:12). A similar theme recurs 10 other times in the Epistles and Revelation ends the Scriptures with the declaration that the conclusion of history will involve a final confrontation between God and Satan.
Oxford professor Austin Farrer once said, "When we speak of evil we are speaking of the same spirit of perversity alive in every sin—a spirit that could look the glory and blessings of God full in the face, and still say 'To [blank] with you; I'll go my own way!'"
There is a story of a little girl who was berated by her mom for pushing her brother to the ground and then spitting on him. "The devil made you do that, girl," her mama said. "I'm not so sure, Mom," the little girl replied, "The devil might have made me push him down, but I thought of spitting on him all by myself!"
There is clear empirical evidence that there exist bacteria and viruses that, though invisible to the naked eye, can nonetheless interact with the chemistry of the human body and mind with terribly adverse affects. It seems willfully ignorant to dismiss the possibility that there may exist other even more insidious entities—spiritual parasites— that we do not yet have the instrumentation to validate scientifically. We can take God's Word at face value when it says that a supernatural evil exists. Evil wants to leave our life looking like that of the Gerasene man known as Legion whom Jesus met one day by the shores of Galilee. He was a person without love, cut off from meaningful connection with others. Having lost the capacity to think clearly
evil wants to leave us lonely, restless, miserable, and despairing. Evil's ultimate aim is to destroy humanity altogether, to so obliterate the image of God in us that we become like many pigs plunging over the edge of the abyss (v.13b).
Evil is very real, say the Scriptures. Like Keyser Söze, this Adversary is remarkably intelligent and cunning. He is out to destroy the image of God in us, but there is a final truth the Bible seeks to impress on us and which it is our mission to go tell to the world. Evil can't stand before Christ. The apostle John put it this way, "The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world" (1 John 4:4). "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy," says Jesus. Let us turn our eyes upon Jesus the King, the one who as that great spiritual knight, Saint Paul, reminds us is "far above all rule and authority, power and dominion" (Eph. 1:21). Turn to him who commands the power of heaven to help us win that territory back and support others in this battle, as we come before God in prayer.
Brown
Brown
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