The word of God in Hebrews 12:14 says ''Try to live in peace with everyone, and seek to live a clean and holy life, for those who are not holy will not see the Lord. As you are starting 2010 I encourage you to live a clean and pure life. I'm sure that if you beleive and trust in the Lord all yo failures,tribulations and sorrows of 2009 shall turn into testimonies. Happy 2010!! May the Lord richly bless you all!!
Amen!
"Let these sayings sink down into your ears: for the Son of man shall be delivered into the hands of men."
Read Psalm 150:1-6 1 Praise the LORD. [a]
Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty heavens. 2 Praise him for his acts of power;
praise him for his surpassing greatness. 3 Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,
praise him with the harp and lyre, 4 praise him with tambourine and dancing,
praise him with the strings and flute, 5 praise him with the clash of cymbals,
praise him with resounding cymbals. 6 Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.
Praise the LORD. The hymnbook of the Bible is the Book of Psalms, and the last psalm summarizes what God wants us to know about praise and worship. The Christian faith is a singing and praising faith. No other religion has praise and singing such as we have, because we have the song of the Lord in our hearts. The psalmist answers some important questions about praise in this psalm. Who is it that we praise? "Praise the Lord" (v. 1)--not the church, not the preacher, but the Lord. Our problem is that we often don't see the Lord. We look at gifts or lack of gifts from God. We say, "Why didn't the Lord do this, or why wasn't it done differently?" We don't really see Him. Let's get beyond the gift to the Giver. Let's get beyond the blessing to the Blesser. Let's praise the Lord. "Rejoice in the Lord," Paul said. "Again I will say, rejoice!" (Phil. 4:4). Where do we praise Him? "Praise God in His sanctuary; praise Him in His mighty firmament" (v. 1). What an interesting combination. When we praise God in church, it's just like the praise of the angels in heaven. In the sanctuary or wherever we are, let's praise Him. Why do we praise Him? "Praise Him for His mighty acts; praise Him according to His excellent greatness!" (v. 2). We praise Him for what He is and for what He does. How do we praise Him? With the sound of the trumpet, with the psaltery, the harp, the timbre!, the dance, the stringed instruments, the flute and the loud cymbals. The psalmist is saying, "Get the whole orchestra together. Find every instrument you can, and let's praise the Lord." Some people don't like that kind of praise, but we are commanded here to praise Him and to make a loud song to His glory. * * * All of nature is praising God today, but His people are prone to forget to praise Him. Ask yourself these praise questions of Psalm 150 and then meditate on the psalmist's answers. You have much for which to give praise. Bring joy to God's heart by praising Him. The sign that faces us as we arrive at the station says Spor 1. Let's see. I refrain from asking Lars this time--he must be weary of four weeks of my persistent questions about his language. In Norwegian o's are usually pronounced oo. Spoor. Related to the English word spoor? Of course: Track 1. It's time to leave my husband's hometown of Kristiansand. The station is mobbed with kids with backpacks. The mobility of the student generation astonishes me. When I was their age I dreamed of a trip to Norway. Of all the countries of the world, it was Norway I most longed to see. Surely an impossibility. But here I am, and here they are, hundreds of them, chewing gum, none of them looking particularly wonderstruck. Their bright orange or red or blue packs crowd the platforms and waiting room. They wear colored striped jogging shoes, blue jeans, nylon hooded parkas. A little boy with platinum-blond hair and apple cheeks eats popcorn while his mother buys the tickets. After a few fistfuls he carefully pours the rest on the floor. His mother turns, says something brief and mild, and walks out the door. He scoops a handful from the floor, stuffs it into his mouth, and follows her. We board the train. Immaculately clean, windows sparkling, reclining seats with footrests and plenty of legroom. Norway. The country that shaped my husband's childhood. He was like that little boy. His aunt, Tante Esther, showed me some snapshots of him at that age--the same round face, the same towhead. We have spent part of our time at Tante Esther's house, walking around the places of Lars' memories. We saw where the house and church once stood, saw the building where he, at the age of six or seven, plummeted over the bannister and down three floors on his head. We saw the park, the bakery, the bridge, the offices of Faedrelandsvennen, the newspaper he used to hawk on the streets. The rest of the time we were in a little cottage a few miles away on a beautiful inland waterway, Topdals Fjorden, where he fished many years ago with his uncle. The train begins to move. We are in a tunnel in a minute or two and pass through many more as we travel westward toward Stavanger across a series of lovely valleys (Mandal, Audnedal, Lyngdal--dal, I conclude must mean valley). Rivers, rocky mountains, broad green meadows, forests of spruce, aspen, birch, fir. Alongside the tracks I see bracken, buttercups, bluebells, lupine, and daisies as well as many bright-colored flowers I cannot name. Now and then we pass a small lake with grasses and water lilies growing around the edge. Moose country. I see a highway sign warning of a moose crossing. It is not long before the passengers begin opening up their lunches. A man and woman across the aisle hand buttered rolls to their two grandchildren. They squeeze mayonnaise, shrimp, and caviar pastes onto the rolls from tubes, and gulp down large-sized soft drinks, warm from the bottle. We watch the children, we smile, but they try not to look at us. You do not speak to strangers in Norway. Even Lars, open and friendly as he learned to be in Mississippi and Georgia, becomes Norwegian again, cautious, silent. The four hours pass quickly. The roadbed is well maintained, as everything in Norway seems to be. The ride is very smooth. Lars dozes. In the rocky pastures are sheep and cows. In the fields, curtains of hay drying on long poles supported at each end by X-poles. Stone walls separate the fields. There are brooks tumbling through deep ravines and broad, smooth rivers meandering through the valleys. Two children skip in the shallows of a pebbly stream. Again I see Lars, and his cousin Bj�rg, in the two children. We arrive in Stavanger in time to see the Queen Elizabeth II just leaving her moorings and being towed slowly between the docks and oil tankers out to sea. We board a hydrofoil for the trip to Bergen. There is as much noise and vibration as there is in a bus, and the narrow seats, twelve abreast, allow as little legroom. It is raining as we leave the docks. On all sides we see the monstrous dismembered anatomy of marine oil rigs. The man next to Lars points to the upturned feet of the one that capsized in the ocean some months ago, killing many men. The vessel threads its way through miles and miles of nearly treeless, forbidding-looking islands, barely discernible through the cold fog that wraps us round. The islands are rocks, massive and smooth, rising abruptly out of the sea with a rim of black three or four feet high above the tide line, topped by a band of white--salt? guano, perhaps? A little greenery struggles for life in a few protected places in the rocks. Is there ever any sun here? Who lives in these lonely places? There are very few houses. A man in yellow oilskins (only plastic, I suppose) passes us in a little outboard. His dog balances himself on the bow, ears flattened in the wind, muzzle lifted. It is a scene from countless paintings, evoking a strong sense of melancholy, of "Northernness." Latitude works, I am sure, secretly and powerfully within the personality of the artist. Also, it occurs to me, of my husband. Is this a clue to the deep reserves in him? At every port there are storage tanks: Norol, Esso, Shell. Tankers pass us, all sizes, coming and going to the North Sea platforms. People in tiny rowboats ride their wakes. The two children who were on the train with their grandparents are in front of us. They have started on a fresh round of rolls and pastes. A beautiful blonde teenage girl with heavily made-up eyes sits on the arm of the seat across the aisles, bouncing in time to whatever it is she is listening to on earphones connected to a black box held by her boyfriend. She is wearing a splotchy faded denim jacket covered with American obscenities printed in colored ink, Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, a T-shirt advertising Norwegian beer. She closes her eyes, rocks her head with the music, snaps her chewing gum. Then she speaks to her friend-- in Norwegian. Four old ladies sit in a row with shopping bags at their feet, clutching large pocketbooks, wearing the ubiquitous brimless hats of their age group. (Somebody told me Queen Mother Elizabeth made these popular. They were designed so that her subjects could see her face from all angles.) What are the old ladies talking about? I can hear them, but I cannot understand a syllable. It brings back the feeling of desperation in missionary days when a "sound barrier" stood between me and the Indians, a great chasm I could not bridge. Lars understands them. His ability to speak with perfect ease a language I am perfectly ignorant of fills me with awe. He laughs at this, of course. "An easy language." Here is a whole world where he is at home and I am a stranger. In the three-hour voyage there is no change of light. Clouds, gloom, yet we can tell that the sun has not gone down. At nine o'clock it is as light as it was at six. We stay in the Bibelskolen Sommerhotel in Bergen. On each bed are a pillow, a bottom sheet, and an eiderdown encased as a pillow is encased, a wonderfully cozy arrangement we have found wherever we have slept in Norway. Breakfast is a feast--bread, cheese, goat cheese, salami, tomatoes, pickles, corn flakes, hot rolls, marmalade, jam, coffee and tea, all you can eat, included in the price of the room. We wander around the open-air markets by the waterfront. They are filled with flowers, vegetables (one cauliflower costs five dollars), and oh, heavenly fish! Lars would rather smell fish than flowers. He cannot tear himself away from the beautiful clean rows of crab, shrimp, salmon, haddock, cod, and other varieties of seafood laid out on stainless steel. The men who sell them are no-nonsense types who wear rubber aprons and boots and wield wicked knives. We board another train for Oslo. The station teems with thousands more backpackers. In fact, it is difficult to find anyone dressed as we are in street clothes or carrying suitcases. We both feel foreign now. Again it is raining. We travel along a fjord where rock walls rise sheer above us. The spruces and firs drip with rain. The hay we see in an occasional small field is green and sodden on the racks. Now a rushing river with weirs, now a green meadow where a lone fisherman casts his line at the edge. Bluebells, larkspur, cowslips, wild raspberry. I wish someone would open a window so we could smell them. Dim, misty forests with open, moss-carpeted floors. No wonder Norsemen believed in trolls and hags! I expect to catch sight of them myself in this mysterious land. Suddenly we see, through breaks in the clouds, patches of snow on the peaks above us. Then the view is blocked repeatedly by tunnels and snowsheds. The Bergensbanen (Bergen Line) has two hundred tunnels, three hundred bridges, and eighteen miles of snowsheds, the brochure tells us. The country between Mj�lfjell and Myrdal is like the high bare country of the Andes or Scotland, a wild wasteland of snow, broken only where the wind has swept some of the black rocks clean. As we approach the lake at Taugevatn, where the altitude is over four thousand feet, a hiker moves slowly across the snow and two men in orange parkas huddle against the wind, mending a snowscreen. It is hard to realize it is July. Then down toward Oslo. Miles of river, farms, valleys, fields of green things and bright yellow oilseed rape. The sun comes out intermittently, bringing campers out of their blue or orange tents along the riverbanks. I will be glad when we board the plane tomorrow for London and Boston. I will soon be back at the desk in the corner of the bedroom, I hope a little humbler because, having seen a piece of Norway, I have received a little larger vision of God who made it and who loves and understands its people. New places of vision give me inklings of the magnitude of my ignorance--of the language, for instance, and of "things beyond our seeing, things beyond our hearing, things beyond our imagining, all prepared by God for those who love Him" (1 Corinthians 2:9 NEB). I hope that I will have as well a little larger heart to love and respect the Norwegian I live with, who baffles and excites, nettles and amuses, annoys and cherishes me. A world I have barely glimpsed is home to him. What other worlds are in him that I have not begun to suspect? What revelations of glory do I have to look forward to in the man whose meals I cook and whose laundry I do, when finally the image of God is fully restored? "Who knows what a man is but the man's own spirit within him? (1 Corinthians 2:11 NEB).
It is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.
| The Uproar Demetrius Caused in Ephesus | |||||
NOT ALL PEOPLE in Ephesus believed in Jesus when they heard Paul's preaching and when they saw the miracles he performed in Jesus' name. Many still went to the great temple of Diana to worship the image of that heathen goddess, which they believed that had fallen from the sky. Those who could not go to the temple of Diana everyday wished to have an image of the idol in their homes. And heathen worshipers who came from other lands wished also to carry away with them a likeness of the huge idol which stood in the beautiful temple of Ephesus. Not because this idol was pretty, for Diana was not at all pleasing to look upon, but because they worshiped her they wished to have her likeness in their home. There were men in that city who knew how to make small idols like Diana with silver. These men were called silversmiths, and they grew rich selling idols to those who wished to buy. One of these silversmiths was named Demetrius. When he heard about the preaching of Paul and about the great miracles Paul performed in the name of Jesus, he became uneasy. Every day he listened to hear more news about this new teaching. And every day he grew more restless; for he feared that soon all the worshipers of Diana would begin to worship Jesus. Demetrius was not so greatly disturbed in his mind because he loved the goddess Diana--not that! But he loved the money he received from those who bought images of the goddess. He feared that soon the people would no longer care to buy the images he made, and then he would receive no more money from them. He could not make images of Jesus to sell, for Paul taught that his God was not to be worshiped as an idol, of silver and gold, or other material. After Demetrius heard that many people had burned their expensive magic-books because they believed in the Jesus whom Paul taught, he became much excited. Calling together his friends who also were silversmiths, he told them about his fears. He warned them about the danger their work was in Paul's preaching. "Not only here in our city," said Demetrius, "but in almost all Asia Minor this Paul has been turning away people from the worship of the goddess, by declaring they are no gods which are made with hands. Not only is our work in danger of falling to nothingness," he continued, "but the beautiful temple of our goddess will soon be no longer visited and admired by people from other lands." Now all the silversmiths became excited, and they began to cry out, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" Through the streets they ran, crying these words, and other people followed. Soon the whole city was stirred by the excitement, and some caught two of Paul's companions, and dragged them into the theater. Paul heard what had happened, and he wished to go to the rescue of these faithful companions, but his friends refused to let him do this. They feared the people might tear him in piece if they found him. For two hours the excitement raged; many people did not even know what it was all about, and yet they joined in the cry, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" Finally the clerk of the city stepped up before the people and motioned for them to be quiet. He then reproved them for their foolish conduct, and told them they were in danger of being punished for the uproar they had made. He said that Demetrius and his fellow workmen should not use this means to bring charges against Paul and his friends, for they should handle such matters according to the law of the land. Concerning Paul's two companions who had been dragged before the mob, he said, "These two men had not robbed churches, nor spoken evil of our goddess." He then dismissed the assembly, and sent them all home. Paul had been intending to leave Ephesus even before the uproar was made, as he wished to visit the churches in Macedonia and Greece and then return again to Jerusalem. Now he bade the Christians good-by and sailed for Macedonia. Here he visited the saints in Philippi, where he and Silas had been treated so shamefully and imprisoned, and where God had caused an earthquake to open the prison doors and loosen their bands, setting them free. No doubt the jailer and his household were glad to see this brave preacher of Jesus Christ once more. Passing though Thessalonica and Berea, where he had preached the gospel before, he went on to Greece. For three months he stayed with the Christians in this country, then he prepared to return for the last time to Jerusalem. Before starting he learned that his enemies, the Jews, were planning to catch him and take his life so instead of taking ship and sailing directly to Syria he returned by the way he had come. And thus he escaped once more from the hatred of his foes. |
