Brown's Daily Word 1/1/16

 "My Lord, What a Morning".  Praise the Lord for the first Morning of the first day of 2016.  Praise the Lord for the way He has ushered us into the verge of another year of His love and faithfulness.  This was our first New Year's Eve in a new place and a new location.  One of the church members called me yesterday and told me  with great sense love and humor, that "Our Town is a Dry Town.  Please keep a very low profile".  Alice and I walked for over one mile in the coolness of the evening.  One of the blessings of Christmastide is that the days are beginning to get longer every day. . Walking and reflecting on the graciousness and the goodness of our Lord is blessing.  The streets are still lit with Christmas decorations.  People were strolling and heading to the local restaurants in celebration of New Year's Eve.  The festive and the celebrative spirit was in the air. Alice and I watched some of the New Years Eve Celebration at the Iconic Time Square in New York city.  They were announcing that over 1 million people had gathered there to celebrate and welcome 2016.  Light triumphs over darkness.  Righteousness rules over sin and evil.

    It is snowing here this morning.  It is gentle and friendly.  My wife, who loves snow, announced to me loudly that it might snow in the vicinity for several inches. We live near the Greek Peek Ski Resort.  The whole area comes alive during the winter season.  Once again the hills and mountains will come alive with the sights and sounds of snow and the snow lovers.

    We are going to my younger brother's house to celebrate the New Year's Day with some Indian Cuisine.  Our Children are all in their respective cities celebrating the day.  Our daughter Laureen was attending a Worship Conference in Kansas City, MO.  She was blessed to be there along with 20,000 others.  She will be flying back to Washington, DC today.  Jesus is Born.  All is well.

    How do you prepare for the New Year?  Here are some interesting New Year's traditions from around the globe:

• In Siberia it is tradition to dive into a frozen lake while holding a tree trunk, which is placed underneath the ice.
• In a traditional festival from Burma, people splash water on one another to start the New Year with a purified soul.
• Armenian mothers bake special bread which they knead with good luck and good wishes.
• In the Philippines homeowners open all their doors and windows on New Year's Eve in order to allow negative energy to leave and good energy to enter.
• Spanish tradition holds that eating 12 grapes just before the clock chimes midnight will bring good fortune for all 12 months of the upcoming year.
• One New Year's custom in Russia is to write a wish for the upcoming year on a piece of paper, then to burn the paper and place the ashes in a glass of champagne, which needs to be consumed right before the New Year is rung in for the wish to come true.
• Residents in Johannesburg, South Africa throw old appliances and furniture out the window, representing the old adage "out with the old and in with the new."
• Brazilians wear white clothing, a custom meant to bring good luck for the upcoming year. This is often accompanied by a trip to the beach to throw flowers in the sea while making a wish. 
      As we venture into 2016 I was looking at Psalm 37:23-24, "The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD, and He delights in his way.  Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down; For the LORD upholds him with His hand”.  All of us wonder what the new year will bring.  What will happen in 2016?  Since every detail of life comes under God’s control, we can remain confident and peaceful even when life itself seems to spin out of control. 
  
  
      Many of us are familiar with the name George Muller, of Bristol.  For over 60 years, George Muller oversaw a group of orphanages in Bristol, England, that provided food, clothing and personal care for over 10,000 boys and girls.  Here is the amazing fact: He never once took an offering, sent out a fundraising letter, or made an appeal for money. He depended on God for whatever was needed to support the work.  His diaries record numerous instances when they had no food and no money to buy food.  He would gather with his fellow workers to cry out to God for help.  On many occasions, the help came while they prayed—a grocer would come by with bread, cheese, meat and eggs so the children would have breakfast in the morning.  Mr. Muller proved in his own life that you can take God at his Word.  After he died, someone picked up his well-worn Bible and began to leaf through it.  Because Mr. Muller was an avid Bible reader, its pages were filled with jottings from his daily devotions.  Next to the words of Psalm 37:23, he had added two little words to the text: “The steps AND STOPS of a good man are ordered by the Lord.”  How true that is.  For the Christian the path of life is never an unbroken straight line to heaven.  We all go through “many dangers, toils and snares” on our way to the Heavenly City.  How good to know that our God ordains both the steps and stops of life.

  Happy and a very blessed NEW Year in Jesus.

    Brown

https://youtu.be/jGarfDEVWDs

Brown's Daily Word 12-22-15

Merry Christmas to you, all our family and friends around the corner and around the globe with whom we are linked through grace and love of Jesus.  It is going to be the warmest Christmas Eve in the Northeast Region of America the beautiful.  We spent a few days in Boston last weekend with our grandchildren and with their parents.  It was a  treat.  We treasure the times and moments we get to share and celebrate with our grandchildren.  We will be spending Christmas Eve with our church family in worship and celebration. The worship service on Christmas Eve will be held at 6:30 PM.  We are spending Christmas day with our family.  Thank you all for your love and affection that you have embodied in the forms of gifts and many other blessings. Thank you for all the love shared with us over the years.      

 

    I will not posting any blogs for next few days.  I will be busy playing with our grandchildren.

 

    In C.S. Lewis' book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis takes us to the land of Narnia.  When Narnia is living under the authority of the witch, it is "always winter, but never Christmas." Can you imagine how discouraging that would be to a child?  Still, there are people today who are living in a winter, and Christmas never comes to them.  What joy could be theirs if only they would allow Christmas to come to their hearts!

 

    Every year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is displayed, beneath the great Christmas tree, a beautiful 18th century Neapolitan nativity scene.  In many ways it is a very familiar scene.  The usual characters are all there: shepherds roused from sleep by the voices of angels; the exotic wise men from the East seeking, as Auden once put it, "how to be human now"; Joseph; Mary; and the Baby.  All are there, each figure an artistic marvel of wood, clay, and paint. There is, however, something surprising about this scene, something unexpected here, easily missed by the casual observer.  What is strange here is that the stable, the shepherds and the cradle are set, not in the expected small town of Bethlehem, but among the ruins of mighty Roman columns.  The fragile manger is surrounded by broken and decaying columns.  The artists knew the meaning of this event: The gospel, the birth of God's new age, was also the death of the old world.

    The Herods of the world know in their souls what we perhaps have passed over too lightly: God's presence in the world means finally the end of their own power. They seek not to preserve the birth of God's new age but to crush it.  For Herod, the gospel is news too bad to be endured.  For Mary, Joseph and all the other characters it is news too good to miss.

 

    “Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.” 
― G.K. Chesterton,

    

    "I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on their journeys."  CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol

 

 

        "To an open house in the evening Home shall men come,
        To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome.
        To the end of the way of the wandering star,

        To the things that cannot be and that are,

        To the place where God was homeless"  G. K. Chesterton

 

Pastor Brown

https://youtu.be/1fuLJ8rtXzM

Brown's Daily Word 12/18/15

   Hallelujah what a Savior that was born on that glorious first Christmas to save us, to deliver us from our sin and bondage.  Here we are, just a week away form Christmas day.  May Jesus the Christ of Christmas quiet our hearts and still our souls as we prepare to celebrate His birth.  May He shine on us with His glory.  May He make all "the rough places plain" in our lives and in our homes.

    In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the character Edmund Pevensie personifies gluttony, the sin of excessively using things, normally associated with the appetite, and, in effect, making one's belly the god he serves (Phil. 3:19).  This is just one of the sinful areas in his life.  Jadis, the White Witch, exploits Edmund's weaknesses when she meets him in a snowy wood, offering him a warm drink and Turkish Delight, his favorite candy.  From the first bite, he is hooked, for each "piece was sweet and light to the very center and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious."  As she pumps him for information regarding his brother and sisters, he readily replies, driven by an insatiable hunger for more and more Turkish Delight.  "At first Edmund tried to remember that it is rude to speak with one's mouth full, but soon he forgot about this and thought only of trying to shovel down as much Turkish Delight as he could, and the more he ate, the more he wanted to eat, and he never asked himself why the Queen should be so inquisitive" (p.32)….

    Edmund's gluttonous desire has deadly ramifications…. While Edmund is saved by the intervention and intercession of Aslan, (the Christ figure in the story)  the cost is deadly to the latter.  Lewis' point in emphasizing Edmund's gluttony, (one of the seven deadly sins), is to illustrate vividly the effects of sins in general and this sin in particular; over-indulgence blinds us to the truth, turning us inward, making us slaves to our own insatiable desires.

    May the newborn King make us generous in giving, passionate in worship, zealous in service, and radical in our hospitality.  We are so blessed and privileged to celebrate His birth once again.  He emptied Himself and came that we might be full; He became a servant to make us a royal priesthood. 

    This comes to you with our deep love and gratitude to all of you for your love and affection over the years.  Let us once again join our hearts and minds to sing glorious carols and triumphant hymns, so that Satan might tremble and flee away, and the world might know once again that the Savior reigns. Amen and Amen.

 In Jesus our Lord.

  Brown

https://youtu.be/HPydOWczIQE