Brown's Daily Word - 12/7/16 - Personal prayer request

   Praise the Lord for the gift of this new day.  The Lord has blanketed the region with fresh snow that is glistening.  The snow lovers and the winter lovers are filled with great delight.  Alice has started decorating the house.  It is getting transformed into a Christmas house.  We are getting to celebrate the Advent and Christmas season by His grace.  We join you all around the corner and around world, singing, " O come, all ye faithful, joyful, and triumphant ... What child is this?... Joy to the world the Savior reigns...

    Many of you know that I have been battling my health concerns - prostate cancer - since 2005.  I had the first surgery in 2007 followed by radiation.  By His grace, the Lord gave me His grace and mercy to remain fully active in ministry.  He gave me grace to be involved in the ministry of our Lord around the corner and around the globe.  After serving full time for almost 40 years I retired and moved to Marathon, where I serve part time.  We have been blessed.  I had a surgery on my spine this past February followed by Radiation.  I had to have another surgery in the same vicinity this past October followed by radiation.  Now I am scheduled for chemo treatment which begins today at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton.  I am scheduled for a treatment every 3 weeks, for a total of 6 treatments.  Thank you all for your continued prayer.   Many of you have praying for me fervently and faithfully.  Our Lord God is into mystery big time.  We do not fully understand all about His ways and purposes. 

    Alice and I praise the Lord for you and join you in celebrating the wonder-filled and joy-saturated Advent and Christmas season.  May the Christ of Christmas propel us to dance like John the Baptist when he danced in his mother's womb.  May we be delightfully disrupted as the shepherds were, and come in haste to the manger of Bethlehem once again to adore the newborn King.  May we give selflessly and extravagantly as the wise men gave to the newborn King.  May Jesus pervade our homes, our hearts, and our hearths with His grace and glory.  May He pour upon us - and upon our children, our grandchildren, and the Church - His fresh anointing.  May He replace our mundane with His majesty, with His celestial.  May He somehow, by His touch, transform our ordinary into His extraordinary and our transitory into His eternal.  We are so blessed, so loved.  What a way to live!  What a way to serve! 

    "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."  Isaiah 55:9

    "And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose."  Romans 8:28

    "Some  trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God." Psalm 20:7 (ESV)

    "Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers them out of them all."  Psalm 34:19

    "When he calls to me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him.  With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation."  Psalm 91:15, 16

With much Gratitude.

   Brown

https://youtu.be/dy9nwe9_xzw

Brown's Daily Word 12/6/16

    Praise the Lord for the unshakable Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.  It is His Kingdom.  The Lord is eternal and everlasting.  We can stake our lives in Him, we can take refuge in Him, we can anchor our lives in Him.  His love never fails.  His mercy endures for ever.  One of my favorite passages says, "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.  Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this."

    Another of my favorites states, "And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever." Revelation 11:15

    In my college days I studied the British romantic poets.  Among my favorites was Shelley.  In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley penned the classic poem Ozymandias to demonstrate the arrogance of those who believe their earthly empires will last forever:

   " I met a traveler from an antique land
    Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
    “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
    Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away."

    Let us pause and ponder the irony of a statue in the desert, surrounded by nothing but the drifting sands.  When Ozymandias calls on the mighty to despair, he means that they should live in fear of his power, yet nothing remains of his vast empire but the scattered ruins of the stones that form a “colossal wreck” in the wilderness.  Those who think they are invincible should indeed despair, but for another reason entirely. That is, the mightiest empires will one day be brought to the ground.  Habakkuk 2:14 is, perhaps, the ultimate truth.  “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”  I am quickened with the fact of the Good News of Jesus our Lord spreading around the world like wild fire.. 

    When the Communists came to power in China in 1949, they expelled all the foreign missionaries.  Back then there were 700,000 Christians.  For decades no one knew what was happening to the church or if it even survived, but by 1980 there were at least 10 million Christians in China.  Today there may be as many as 100 million.  It is happening as it is written in Habakkuk 2:14 with its vision of the knowledge of the Lord spreading across the earth as the waters cover the sea.”  Nothing can stop it.  There is no power, no policy, and there are no experts  that can reverse what God is doing.”  The ultimate fulfillment of this verse awaits the return of Christ to the earth to establish his kingdom.  As we race headlong toward the final days of this age, we should not be surprised—indeed we should expect—that there will be an explosion of gospel preaching around the world with untold multitudes coming to Christ.

    All of this is what the angel had in mind when he told Mary that “of his kingdom there will be no end.”  Even in lands caught up in the religion of Islam, Jesus is reaching out to rescue the lost.  There are millions and millions in the world today who are gripped with the thought that the kingdom of God is the greatest thing in the world, and that one thought has revolutionized their lives and reoriented their values.  Kingdom issues are at stake.  That’s the only possible explanation for the way they live.

In Christ,

 Brown

https://youtu.be/76RrdwElnTU

Brown's Daily Word 12/5/16

   I love Christmas carols'. We join the countless millions around the world singing these timeless carols with gusto and  fervor. "Joy to the world, the Savior reigns .Let men their songs employ. ..While fields and floods, Rocks, hills and plains,Repeat the sounding joy,     Repeat the sounding joy , Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy"  "   If there is a single word that describes what Christmas is all about, it’s the little word “joy.”  Several of our favorite Christmas carols mention it: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come,” “O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,” “Shepherds, why this jubilee, why your joyous strains prolong?” “Good Christian men, rejoice, with heart and soul and voice,” “Joyful all ye nations rise, join the triumph of the skies, with th’ angelic host proclaim, ‘Christ is born in Bethlehem.’”  Humanly speaking, however, it’s not always easy to feel joyful.  William Willimon, Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, says that joy can be a challenge to the Church.  But is the all of grace.  Due to the amazing grace that came down at Christmas we are showered with the Joy of Jesus at Christmas and in all seasons. 

       It is written in Luke 2:8-10: "And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.  An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.  But the angel said to them, ‘‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.  Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord."  

    There is a quote from Rev. Willimon that seems to put this passage in perspective: “Christmas is a delightful disruption of the way things normally go.”  I like that phrase “delightful disruption” because it catches the spirit of Luke 2.  One moment the shepherds were tending the sheep in the middle of the night and the next they being scared by an angelic choir.  To some this may not be what they think of as delightful, but it is definitely a disruption.  The angel came with “good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”  The good news is encapsulated in verse 11, which says, “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.”  If you are looking for Christmas joy, look into this single verse.  

    I love the phrase simple and yet profound—"born this day in the city of David.”  The city of David is not Jerusalem—it’s Bethlehem, which is about 5 miles south of Jerusalem. 

I have been to Bethlehem a few  times.  Bethlehem is called the “city of David” because David grew up there along with his father Jesse and his seven brothers (  1 Samuel 16:1-3) for the story of David’s selection as the king who would replace Saul).  In fact, David tended sheep in the fields outside the village just the shepherds were doing the night the angel appeared to them.  The Lord of wonder and majesty disrupted the lives of those humble shepherds.  The lives of the shepherds were characterized by the mundane and the ordinary.  They saw the brilliant light and heard the songs of the choirs of angels, and their lives were transformed.  They came in haste and saw Jesus, the newborn king. 

    There were countless witnesses of Jesus who have been propelled by the wonder of it all and filled to the brim withe joy unspeakable. . . the Joy of Christmas.  Often our lives are saturated throughout the year with the mundane and with the ordinary, but once again we come to the season of Advent and Christmas.  Christmas ushers into the world  and into our lives  the Joy and the wonder of Christmas.  May we all be disrupted with joy, saturated in the wonder of it all, and bathed in the glory that came down wrapped in the person of Jesus our Lord.  May we all be stunned withe Joy of Jesus once again.

    A Russian countess accepted the Lord Jesus as her Savior and was open about her testimony.  The Tsar was displeased and threw her into prison.  After 24 hours with the lowest level of Russian society, in the most miserable conditions imaginable, he ordered her brought into his presence.  He smiled sardonically and said, “Well, are you ready now to renounce your silly faith and come back to the pleasures of the court?”  To his surprise, the countess smiled serenely and said, “I have known more real joy and more real happiness in one day in prison with Jesus than I have known in a lifetime in the courts of the Tsar.”  She found out what was the real way of joy.

In Jesus our  Lord,

Brown

https://youtu.be/30OaM6b48k8