Brown's Daily Word 2-24-14

     The Lord blessed us with an awesome and wonderful week.  We had our three grandchildren: Micah 8, Simeon 6, and little Ada 3, for almost a week. It was wild and crazy and full of pure blessings.  Micah is a beautiful young girl who has a great heart of a  servant.  On Friday morning, she prepared the pancake breakfast for all the family all by herself.  Simeon is all active and an outdoor person, who spent much tome snowboarding and sledding with our nieces and nephews.  Ada was her grandma's girl, talking and singing and playing in the snow.  They love Jesus and love sing praises of and to Him.  On our way back to Boston we stopped at the Pilot Gas Station near Albany.  The three grand children ran into the store singing both loudly and eloquently, "I am C, I am Ch....  I said Lord thank you. According to your Word it is out of the mouth of babes".  After arriving in Boston we discovered that Simeon's jacket was missing, so on the way back home we stopped at the same Dunkin Donuts and Subway restaurant, just to check the lost and found desk about Simeons brand new jacket.  Alice walked into the Dunkin Donut shop and in seconds she found Simeon's jacket on the table, in tact.  Praise the Lord for America the Beautiful. 

    The Lord blessed us with a wonderful day in His house yesterday.  The Lord gave us a spring-like weather, with promises of the warmer seasons ahead.  I am ready for Spring and  summer.  I am thinking of lakes and rivers, oceans and seas.  

    I have been privileged to visit the Holy Land several times.  Every time I have been there I have visited the Sea of Galilee where our Lord Jesus spent much of His time in ministry.  I also have made a point to visit the Dead Sea.  The Dead Sea is called the Dead Sea for a reason: it's dead.  It is the saltiest body of water on the planet, nine times saltier than the ocean.  It is so salty that no fish can live in it.  It is so salty that sailboats don't sail on it—and this is a big body of water, 10 miles by 50 miles.  If you look out over the water, you'll never see a skier.  The only people who like the saltiness of the Dead Sea are the  tourists to Israel, because they can bob in the Dead Sea.  It's impossible to sink in water that is that salty, so tour buses drive there, people don swimsuits, and they go bobbing.

    I have bobbed  in the Dead Sea.  It's a lot of fun until you try to rinse off the salt.  The Dead Sea is located in the lowest part of the earth.  Interestingly, there is fresh water flowing into the Dead Sea continuously.  The Jordan River and several other streams feed into the Dead Sea, but the Dead Sea has no outlet.  Because it has no outlet, the fresh water comes in and sits there idly, and the hot desert sun evaporates it all.

    There is a danger for all of us in becoming  Dead Sea persons.  A Dead Sea person is the one who on a regular basis receives fresh blessings, fresh resources, fresh provisions from the Lord from whom all good and perfect gifts come, but has no outlet.  It is written: "But just as you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness, and in your love for us — see that you also excel in this grace of giving.  I'm not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it with the earnestness of others.  For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich".  2 Corinthians 8:7 ff.

    Paul wanted the Corinthians to excel at something.  He was saying: You Corinthians are good at a lot of things but, unfortunately, giving isn't one of them, so I want to challenge you to put as much effort into excelling at generosity as you put into excelling at everything else.

    Sunita travels around the globe with her work.  She shares with me the evil of human trafficking today.  There was recently a big event held in Atlanta.  Forty thousand young people, mostly college students and Christ-followers, gathered for this big crusade to stop sex trafficking in our world today. They are excited about justice and caring for people who have become virtual slaves.  There are more slaves in the world today than in any previous time in history so these young people wanted to do something about it.  The CNN report was highly complimentary as they showed young people lifting their hands in worship.  They had these knockdown, drag-out worship times.  They listened to speakers who addressed the topic of trafficking.  Then they gave generously, selflessly, and sacrificially. . . and I thought to myself, Compared to their secular friends who never give anything to anybody but themselves, this is pretty cool.

    There's no greater joy than giving.

In Christ,

Brown

http://youtu.be/6_KXsMCJgBQ

Brown's Daily Word 2-20-14

  Praise the Lord for this day.  It is brilliant and almost balmy here in New York.  Thank you, Jesus.  The Lord blessed us with a wonderful Wednesday gathering.  The fellowship was sweet; the study of the Word was a great blessing.  I read some time ago that the average person has 10,000 separate thoughts each day. That works out to be 3.5 million thoughts a year.  At this rate, if you live to be 75, you will have over 26 million different thoughts in your lifetime.

    Already most of us  have had well over 5,000 separate thoughts since we  got out of bed this morning.  We  probably have another 5,000 before you sleep tonight.  Then you will start all over again tomorrow.  Every one of those 10,000 thoughts represents a choice we  make, a decision to think about this, and not about that.  Suppose someone gave you $10,000 this morning and said, “Spend it any way you like as long as you spend it all before you go to bed tonight.”  You would be careful how you spent it, maybe even down and take inventory of what you could do with that much money. 

    How sad that we devote so much time to how we spend our money and so little time to how we spend our thoughts.  How sad that one seems so important and the other so trivial.  Our thoughts represent ourselves, our personalities.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Beware of what you set your mind on because that you surely will become.”  Norman Vincent Peale said, “Change your thoughts and you change the world.”  Henry Ford gave that truth a different spin when he declared, “Thinking is the hardest work in the world, which is probably why so few people engage in it.”  Then I ran across this perceptive comment, “Two thoughts cannot occupy the mind at the same time, so the choice is ours whether or not our thoughts will be constructive or destructive.”

    Change your thoughts and you will change the world.   "The choice is ours.” God gave us 10,000 thoughts today, but it’s up to us what we do with them.  2 Corinthians 10:5 says that we should “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”     

 "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." Philippians 4:8

 

In Jesus,
Brown
http://youtu.be/62J434N0w1c

Brown's Daily Word 2-19-14

    We are having a great week.  Our grand children from Boston, whom we call our "Fresh Air Kids", are with us for a week.  We are blessed and are having a wild week.  We will meet this evening at 6 PM for our mid-week fellowship and study.  We are planning for a special ministry with the children at 6:30 PM that will conclude at 7:30 PM.  The children and their families are invited to join us for a special meal at 6 PM.

    The reading for last Sunday, taken from Deuteronomy 30, was the last sermon Moses preached.  Michelangelo’s Moses is a towering figure, a powerful figure, an incredible figure, much larger than life.  Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses is enormous.  And, figuratively, so was Moses.  He seemed to be larger than life itself. As the Israelites were getting ready to enter the Promised Land, the land of Canaan, the people of the Lord had been in the wilderness for forty years.  Those who survived during the 40 year journey had experienced God’s majesty, Mount Sinai, the parting of the Red Sea, and the manna and the quail to eat in the wilderness.

    Moses foresaw that the people of God would be ensnared and brought down by the Canaanite religion in the land to which they were going.  They would be ensnared by the Canaanite people who sacrificed their children on altars, burned their children as sacrifices, practiced witchcraft and idolatry, and used cult prostitutes.  The people of God stood in front of Moses, east of the Jordan River, before they entered the Promised Land.  Moses was saying goodbye to them, as he gave his last sermon.  The Bible says he was 120 years old; that he was strong in body and his eyesight was still very, very sharp.  Moses stood before the people on the banks of the Jordan River,when he gave his farewell speech.  “Today, I am giving you a choice…between good and evil, between life and death, between blessing and cursing.  God is our witness.  I say to you: choose life.  Choose life.  Love the Lord your God.  Serve him.  Obey him.  Do his laws.  Be faithful to God, and then…it will go well for you in the land.”

    The Christian faith has always been a faith  of life.  Life is a good word, a core word, a key word.  Our Lord said in John 10:10, “I have come to give you life and give you life more abundantly.”  Jesus said, “ I am the bread of life.  I am the water of life.  I am the resurrection and the life.  I am everlasting life.”  The opposite of  Jesus is Satan who is the prince of death, the source of death, the essence of evil.  Jesus said, “I have come to destroy the powers of death and hell.”  The love of life is found in the first pages and the last pages of Scripture.  In the first pages of our Bible in the story of the Garden of Eden, we hear about the tree of life.  At the very end of the Bible, in the very last chapter of the last book of the Bible, we see that hell and death are thrown into the fire, and all that remains is the tree of life, for God is life, eternal life, everlasting life, immortal life, abundant life.

    In the first book of the Bible that the living God breathed life into Adam.  God gave Adam the first breath of life.  We human beings are sacred because we are made in the image of God and we have the sacred breath of God within us.   At the very core of our Christian heritage, from beginning to end, ours is a heritage of life. We are pro-life, because our Lord is pro-life. 

    The people of God were standing at the edge of the Promised Land, going into the land of Canaan, with all of its pagan degradation and child sacrifice, burning their children on altars, and cult prostitution.  God said to his people through his prophet Moses: “Today, I am giving you a choice…between life and death, good and evil, blessings and curses.  God is our witness this day.  Chose life.  Serve the Lord your God.  Love God.  Be faithful to God.  Obey God’s laws and … then…it will go well for you in the land.”

"Come to Jesus and live"

 In Him,

  Brown