Brown's Daily Word 2/17/18

Praise the Lord that it is Saturday and Sunday is coming.  It is a very sweet Saturday here in our church this day as our church is hosting a Sweetheart Banquet.  The banquet is scheduled for 6:00 PM today.  The church is preparing and fixing a very special menu with sumptuous and delicious entrees and diverse decadent desserts.  There will be special music following the banquet.  We have so many reasons to celebrate and rejoice and to taste the good things of the Lord and feast on His abundance and generosity.  We will gather for Sunday school tomorrow at 9:30 AM and for worship at 10:30AM.  Plan to be in the house of the Lord to worship the Risen Savior.  May Jesus the Lord of the church bring about a great outpouring of His Spirit and anointing and great revival accompanied by a great harvest in the world.    

 

We had some face time with our grandchildren Addie and Asha yesterday, along with their mommy Sunita in Washingtton . Gabe was in school.  Addie loves chicken curry.  Asha loves mangoes.  Sunita told me that Asha had two and a half mangoes one day last week.  (She is not quite two and half years old).  They are all going to Florida next week for a short vacation.  Asha is wearing her swim suit all the time and talking non-stop of going to the beach.  Sunita was sharing with me that Gabe has a new student in his class who is a young girl, a miracle child.  Her mom is a US Congress woman.  During the pregnancy it was discovered that her baby had severe high risk complications.  She was advised for abortion. The mom and her husband refused the doctor’s advice and through much prayer and medical intervention the baby was born at full term, but she was born without kidneys.  Her dad gave her one of his kidneys.  She is a beautiful winsome girl.  Praise the Lord for committed Christian parents who have the courage and audacity to follow Jesus in the face of extreme adversities.  Somehow Jesus comes and gives us the victory.

 

Men and women of deep faith, self-abandon, and extreme courage make it easy for others to believe in Jesus.  Somebody once said that the saints are those who make it easier for others to believe in Jesus.

 

The early church was incredibly generous with its time, its energy, and its material resources because the church knew what Jesus had done for them, and they believed what he said about centering their lives in his kingdom.  They shared their resources inside and outside of the church.  They helped the needy and took care of orphans and widows. They tended to the sick, and as they did that, they won more people to Christ.  In the early fourth century the emperor known as Julian the Apostate came to power.  He hated Christianity and wanted the empire  to revert back to paganism.  That goal was nearly impossible to accomplish because by that time the church was so widespread and so generous that it was touching most of the people in the empire.  At one point Julian became so frustrated, that in a rare moment of honesty he said, "Those Christians not only feed their own poor but they feed ours as well."

 

The early church realized that storing up possessions on earth is silly because it all gets left behind, so they centered their lives in God's kingdom and gave generously to all in need.  This is the call of God on us as well.  May Jesus, the Lord of the Church, ferment our lives to be generous, sacrificial, energetic, enthused and fervent.  May He provoke us to live with gratitude and serve Him with gladness.  See you in church.

 

Brown 

https://youtu.be/8MfBQ30Ta9w

Brown's Daily Word 2/16/18

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.

 

“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.”

 

 

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

 

 

 https://youtu.be/E3ExMwj9Efw

Brown