Brown's Daily Word 3/1/17

    Praise the Lord for this first day of March.  It is going to be mild and beautiful.  It appears that the month of March makes its debut like a lamb in Spring.  I have not been posting any blogs lately since I have been traveling between Boston, MA  and Binghamton, NY for my doctors visits.  Thank you for praying and interceding.   The Lord has blessed with some amazing days filled with splendor and His majesty.  The Lord certainly has a sense of humor.  Over the weekend, in just 3 short days back to back, we experienced Summer, Springtime, and Winter.  Alice and I have been walking briskly and with jubilant feet gazing at the beauty of the Lord all around us.  The maple syrup producers of our area are busy producing  some of the best maple syrup in Central NY.  We have noticed that some of the Spring birds are returning back to the region with mirth and joy.  

    Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.  It is a somber day of reflection.  "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me" (Psalm 51:10.  Lent is a season that reminds us to repent and get our lives centered, our priorities straight, and our hearts clean.  This holy season offers us a new chance to say, "yes" to the Lover of our Souls who created us, who made us in his own image.  Lent is a season of hope and we go forth to love and to serve.  By God’s grace in Christ, we do not have to stay the way we are.

    Praise the Lord for His church around the corner and around the globe.  People of Jesus are entering the season of Lent marching towards Jerusalem with Jesus.  "And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.  And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him,  saying, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles;  and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise.”  Mark 10:32-34

    Praise the Lord for the multitude who will be planning for various special worship services as a part of their Lenten journey.  May Jesus be praised.  May He draw countless millions to a closer walk with Him during this Holy Season.  Our Church will be hosting community-wide dinner on Wednesday March 15.  A very special and seasonal dinner will be served  starting at 4:30 PM, concluding at 6:00 PM.  Plan to change your clocks one hour forward on the March 12, 2017

    We are planning for a Special Lenten Event on Saturday the March 25, 2017. There will be a very special meal prepared with much love which will be served at 6:00 PM in the Church Fellowship Hall, followed by a special dramatic presentation of "Simon Peter".  It will be presented at 7:00 PM in Sanctuary by Dr. James Geer Ph.D.  Dr. Geer is a distinguished professor of Mathematics at the Watson School of Engineering at Binghamton University.  He is also a deeply committed Christian and a faithful servant of Jesus.  He has been presenting "Simon Peter", a dramatic monologue of the bold, impetuous, disciple, since 1976.  All are invited to join us. You will be blessed and challenged.

    April 1 and 2, Saturday and Sunday, are the dates for the iconic Central New  York Maple Festival of Marathon, NY.  Mark your your calendars.  Our church is in charge of cooking and serving the Chicken BBQ.  Our church will be preparing close to 1000 BBQ chicken dinners.  We are thrilled.  Last year it was blast.  I was visiting with the families who were sharing the meal in the dining hall.  I met one young family and inquired where they were from.  They said that they read about the Maple Festival Event on Internet and they drove that morning from Brooklyn NY, 205 miles one way.  I said, "what a country".

    April 16, 2017 is Easter Sunday.  We will meet for Sunday School at 9:30 AM and glorious Easter worship at 10:30 AM.

    Saturday May 13 there will be a special banquet in honor of Moms.  All families and friends are invited.  Ron and Barb Barnes and the team are in charge of this Holy event.

    Sunday June 18 we will be recognizing Grads and Dads.  There will be a very Special Banquet served in celebration.  Denny and Lynda Randall and their team  are in charge of this event.

    Saturday, July 1, 2017 at 6:00 PM there will be a retirement party and celebration for my wife, Alice.  There will be a mega-reception at the Marathon Civic Center. You are all invited.

    I read about Mark Heart a fascinating and heart-warming story.  He is a Christian, a husband, a father, and an employee.  Like most husbands, fathers, and businessmen, he juggles these responsibilities and sometimes they come into conflict.  Sometimes he has to make difficult decisions about whether or not to be a good employee and do the things that his bosses ask of him, or to be a good husband and father and tend to things at home.  Just over a year ago, he had to make a decision along those lines.  He was scheduled to leave on a Sunday for a business trip, but his daughter had a doctor's appointment on the following Monday.  Because his wife also works, they were struggling to determine who would take her to the doctor.  Knowing his presence would be of great comfort to his daughter, Mark decided he would not go on the business trip. So, he wasn't sitting in seat 2A on flight 5191 as it took off from Bluegrass field on that early Sunday morning.  He wasn't on the ComAir airplane that was on the wrong runway.  He wasn't there when the runway proved too short for the airplane to get enough speed, crashing and killing everyone onboard except for the co-pilot.

    Mark's life has been different since that Sunday morning.  He has learned that those things which cause us great consternation and seem to interfere with our plans—those things that delay us from where we want to go and what we want to do—are sometimes the very things that give us life.  Sometimes God uses such things to spare us.

    But what about all the people who did make that flight?  What do we say about them?  What do we say to their families?  Was God absent on that flight?  Was God not as "in control" of their lives as he was Mark Heart's?  We never know when the delays of life will bring deliverance, but we also never know when God is going to allow things into our lives that are exactly the opposite of what we want.

    Adrian Rogers  one of my favorite preachers who  has entered the Church triumphant, said that man faces three problems: sorrow, sin, and death.  We can sum up every problem we will  ever encounter in one of these three categories. Just before going to the City of Jerusalem for Palm Sunday Jesus made a delayed visit to Bathany, the home of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha as it is recorded in John 11.  Jesus did  not come running when he first receives news of his friend's condition. He doesn't show up on demand.  Our  sovereign God who is in control stands in back of all things. This means sometimes he uses the things he allows as much as he uses the things he directs.  If God is truly omnipotent—if he can prevent things from happening, as well as he can cause things to happen—all things are laid at his feet.  And this means that sometimes we don't understand what he's up to.  We won't always be able to comprehend why he doesn't answer the prayer or why he doesn't show up when we want him to.

    The events in John 11 tell us that there are very dark days, even for the people whom Jesus loves dearly.  We learn that in his purpose and plan God doesn't always respond as we ask.  You and I cannot possibly comprehend why God allows things into our lives that cause us to cast ourselves on him, to come to the end of our own strength, so that we don't rely on ourselves.  Sometimes the very thing that we most want to avoid—the thing that we most dread—is precisely the thing that God uses to draw us to himself.

    To trust God's actions in the darkest of days, we have to understand his character.  It is written that Jesus loved Martha and her sister Mary, and Lazarus, so when we read that Lazarus was ill, we expect John to say Jesus dropped everything and rushed to Lazarus' side.  But that's not what happened.  Though  Jesus loved them, when he heard that Lazarus was ill he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.  I would say that was unanticipated!

    When we face similar circumstances, we tend only to get angry with God.  We forget that this world is not our home.  God's promises aren't all going to be fulfilled here.  There are Christians all over the world who are persecuted, who go to bed hungry, who don't have the comforts we enjoy every day of our lives.  This doesn't mean God loves them less.  It simply means that there is promise of a better world—that they are strangers and pilgrims on earth.  God will sometimes withhold, sometimes allow, sometimes take from us that which we love, that which we want and crave and hold and possess, if it's for our own good.  It's in his loving character to do so.

    When Jesus said to his disciples that it was time to return to Judea, they explained to him the danger present in such a move.  They insisted he would be killed.  Jesus responded with a question of timing, "Aren't there twelve hours in a day?  And when you walk in the day you don't stumble.  It's when you walk in the night you can't see."  What was Jesus saying to them?  He was urging them (and us) to walk in God's Word when we are stumbling our way through the darkest of days.

    You and I don't live strictly according to our own schedule, our timetable.  We live according to God's schedule and timetable, but we are not trusting God's timing when we're trying to make him conform to our timing.  When Martha and Mary realized that their brother was desperately ill, they sent for Jesus, assuming he would immediately drop what he was doing.  But he didn't do that.  He delayed. In fact, he purposefully let Lazarus die.  We know this because of what he tells his disciples: "This isn't unto death.  This is for the glory of God."  Jesus understands something we often forget: the death of our bodies is not really death.  The Book of Revelation speaks of a second death.  That's the one to fear.

    If we are going to trust God's timing, we have to walk in his Word, because in the light of his Word, we  can see that our Lord has His own divine timing.  He operates on a divine timetable, and we need to walk according to his schedule.

    There will come a day when our bodies are lifeless, laid in a grave, but the Bible teaches us that one of these days, the trumpet is going to sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall all be changed.

In His promises,

Brown.

https://youtu.be/e8HgAVenbUU

Brown's Daily Word 2/21/17

    King David, the man after God's own heart, praised God saying, "Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all." (I Chronicles 29:11)  Once we acknowledge the majesty and might of our Lord God, we can live in freedom under His authority.  We can serve Him with abandon, worship Him with Joy, and invest in His Kingdom with great hilarity. 

    The Lord blessed us with an amazing, Spring-like weekend.  I can but think about the touch of Spring "clothed in the blooming garb of Spring".  The Lord blessed our gathering on Saturday evening with His very presence.  The banquet was both bountiful and beautiful.  The meal was prepared with much joy and served with much gladness.  There were desserts galore.  When we place our five loaves and two fish in His hand, He multiplies them every time so that there are always twelve baskets full left over.  There was a full house, which was reverberating with laughter.  We could sense the warmth and fellowship in Christ, which is always sweet.  The music following the dinner was sweet and heart warming.  People lingered there, sharing in the after-glow of the evening.  The Lord blessed us in His House on Sunday, in worship, witness, and fellowship.

    Alice and I have walking in the late afternoons.   Each day we can go our a little later than the day before.  The sun is getting stronger and daylight is lasting longer.  We are grateful for the Master's touch all around. 

    I have been blessed by the witness and testimonies of many wonderful men and women who have abandoned themselves in the ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ. One of those witnesses is Chuck Colson, who was blessed with keen mind and warm heart.  I had met him in person a few years ago at a conference, and was deeply blessed.  Chuck Colson told story after story of men in prison who had committed crimes, but who came to Christ and were thoroughly converted.  No one would have guessed that some of these men would be devout followers of Christ one day.  One such story was the account of a man named Danny.  Danny had been a fighter, and he was in prison for murdering a man named John Gilbert.  While Danny was in prison, someone gave him a Bible, and as he read it, he found himself being attracted to the Jesus he was reading about. 

    Colson tells his story: “The more Danny felt drawn to Jesus, the more he saw himself in a new light.  He was used to comparing himself to the guy on the next bar stool, and that way he usually didn’t look so bad. But when he compared himself to Jesus, he started to feel afraid.  This man Jesus, who never raised his fists, scared him as nobody else ever had.  He also read the passages about people being ‘cast into outer darkness,’ where there was ‘weeping’ and ‘gnashing of teeth.’  Danny knew something about darkness... Lying on his bunk at night, Danny began to review his whole life, horrified by the person he had become.  He saw himself living for his next drink, his next coke party; he saw himself using women.  His last girlfriend had been good to him, but he would have thrown her away for the next quarter ounce of coke.  In fact, he probably had. 

    "That next Sunday, when the guard called out for people who wanted to be let out of their cells to attend chapel, Danny shouted, ‘Cell 16.’  But he sat like a stone through the service, hearing little.  He was there to ask a question.  Afterward, he approached Chaplain Bob Hansen and asked him if the passages he had read about outer darkness were really about hell.  ‘Yes,’ said the chaplain.  ‘Then I’m in big trouble,’ Danny said.  ‘When you get back to your cell, get on your knees by your bunk,’ said the chaplain.  ‘Confess your sins to God, and pray for Jesus Christ to come into your heart.’  Danny did just that.  In his cell, he knelt, confessed that he was a sinner, and asked Christ to be his Lord.  As he did, he kept remembering horrible things he had done, and the memories brought both pain and an eagerness to be forgiven.  Talking to God seemed like carrying on a conversation with someone he had missed all along without knowing it.  He could almost hear God replying through a silence that echoed his sorrow and embraced it.  Danny not only felt heard, he also felt understood, received.  He slept that night. And every night afterward.”

    Eventually, Danny was released from prison, got married and had five children. He then graduated from Wheaton College and was ordained.  He went on to work with troubled kids in Boston, and then was offered a job as prison chaplain.  He had been very far from the Father, but turned around and began to work in the Father’s vineyard.

    C.S. Lewis, in his book "Mere Christianity" said, “Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable.”  But he understood that was the result of a naturally inquisitive mind.  He then went on to say, “...but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway.  That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods where they get off, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.  Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.”

In Christ,

Brown

https://youtu.be/FBJJJkiRukY

Brown's Daily Word 2/18/17

"Amen!  Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God for ever and ever!  Amen."  Revelation 7:12. 

 He blessed us with a wonderful week.  Our daughters Laureen and Sunita visited us this week along with our youngest granddaughter, Asha.  They all live in Washington, DC, but drove over 300 miles to come and spend sweet and  joyful moments with us.  We praise the Lord for each one of them.  They are indeed wonders of His grace and love.  Asha is almost 18 months old, and she is charming and inquisitive.  We watched with her the train as it passed through our town twice each day.  We also sat with her, watching some mega-trucks, luxury campers, and tour buses as they passed by our house every day.  She was mesmerized and moved as she saw an Amish buggy pass by us unhurried and unafraid.  Asha wanted the horse to return and kept softly saying, "neigh" to ask us to get the horse back.  As we sat by the picture window of the house we saw all the scenes and heard the sounds of life all around.  We had wonderful moments sharing, listening, and reminiscing the wonder working grace of our Lord in our lives over the decades that have gone by.  Though the temporal has come and gone, His love remains and His Faithfulness never ends. 

    While we were together we watched the movie, "Brooklyn", a wonderful heart-warming story of legal Irish Immigrants who immigrated to Brooklyn, NY in the fifties.  The movie reflects and deflects the hopes, the fears, the battles and blessings, the tears, the trials and triumphs, the conflicts and resolutions, and the joyful endings of dreams that have come true in the land called America the beautiful.  It is the story of untold millions of legal immigrants who came to the shores of America and made the country their home.  My girls also watched an episode of Downton Abbey.  It was all beautiful and winsome. 

    I woke up early this morning, waiting for the sunrise.  It is going to be a wonderful Saturday.  It appears the Spring Season has made an abrupt landing.  It is all beautiful.  Alice and I walked for over a mile under a strong warm sun last evening.  It was beautiful and refreshing.  A friend stopped by the other day and said that he has seen flocks of robins that have returned back to their natural habitat here in the North.  We rejoice and celebrate the beautiful moments of every season.  

    We are gearing up for a great evening of Family Fellowship and Fantastic Foods this evening at the church.  Our chefs and cooks are preparing Italian, Mexican, Indian, and Swedish cuisine along with desserts galore.  The dinner will be served at 6:00 PM, followed by and an evening of concert.  We will meet for Sunday School tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM and for worship at 10:30 AM tomorrow, the Day of the Lord.  Plan to be in the house of the Lord wherever you might be.  Jesus is praised.  He is exalted.

    One of the fascinating and provocative encounters that Jesus had is found in John 4.  He met a woman who had come to a well in the middle of the day to draw water for her family.  He conversed with her about water but, when we go beyond the obvious, Jesus was not talking about drinking water; he was talking about life. He said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.  Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14).  Jesus invited her to come to him as the source of the water of life.  Her pathetic efforts to make life work had done nothing but disappoint her and break her.  She had ruined her life and the lives of others as well.  Her life was indeed a broken cistern. She was alienated from her community, her family, and herself.  All the life had leaked out of her and she was desperate and hopeless.  Then Jesus came into her life.  He offered her more than water; he offered to give her life in all its fullness. When that life began flowing through her it became a bubbling stream, and she could not keep quiet about what God had done for her.  She began telling all her friends and neighbors so that many others began to drink of real life as well.

    Blaise Pascal once said, “Human beings are peculiar in that they pursue ends they know will bring them no satisfaction, gorge themselves with food that cannot nourish and with pleasures that cannot please.”  There are many people like that today.  They settle for pretend relationships and they look for intimacy in wrong places.  They have what C. S. Lewis called, “incommunicable and unappeasable want.”

     We can try to make our lives work by our own effort, or we can ask God for his presence to fill our lives.  When Jesus invades our lives when He intrudes into our inner sanctum, something beautiful something wonderful happens.  We can affirm and claim that He is everything.  He is essence of our lives.  He is the Alpha and Omega - the Beginning and the End.  When He is in charge, He he makes all things refreshing and beautiful.  C. S. Lewis said, “The only thing Christianity cannot be is moderately important.”  It cannot be just one of the many things on your list.  It IS the list or it is nothing.

In Christ,

Brown.

https://youtu.be/mZGzu6oI9b4