Aches and Praise Four Hundred & Four

June 7, 2019
 
Dear friends, 
 
Last evening I was working outside when an airplane flew overhead. As it was the 75th anniversary of D-Day, I thought about the freedom we enjoy in Canada, thanks to the heroic efforts of many men and women who served our country during the world wars. It is hard to imagine what they endured, but we enjoy so much because of their sacrifices.
 
 
Last month a different kind of anniversary was remembered. Fifty years ago, John Lennon and Yoko Ono stayed in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they sang  “Give Peace a Chance” accompanied by many admirers. Less than a dozen years later, John’s voice was silenced, as a gunman killed him outside his residence in New York City.
 
 
In his book “Who Is Jesus?” Greg Gilbert tells a story about another musician: “… as the man played a selection of classical music, over a thousand busy Washingtonians hurried by. One or two cocked their heads, clearly enjoying the sound, but no crowd ever formed around him … the musician himself didn’t look like much … but even so, if you stopped to listen, you couldn’t help noticing that this was something more than just another musician playing the violin for pocket change. As a musician, this guy was pretty amazing. One man even commented later ‘you could tell in one second that this guy was good.’”
 
 
Gilbert then explains who the musician was: “… it wasn’t just any musician playing the violin that Friday morning in the subway station. It wasn’t even a musician who was merely extraordinary. It was Joshua Bell, a thirty-nine-year-old internationally acclaimed virtuoso who normally plays in the most celebrated venues in the world, to crowds who respect him so much that they even stifle their coughs until intermission. Not only that, but that morning Bell was playing some of the most exquisite baroque music ever written, and he was doing it on a three-hundred-year-old Stradivarius violin worth an estimated 3.5 million dollars!”
 
Sadly, many people look at Jesus like those in the Washington subway regarded the renowned musician. They think that they have more important things to do than to stop and listen to the One who spoke the universe into existence. With all the voices clamoring for our attention, who are we listening to?     
 
   
Scripture for the weekend: “Pilate therefore said to Him, ‘Are You a king then?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” John 18:37 (NKJV)
 
Thought for the weekend: “As a watch must have a designer, so must our precision-like universe have a great designer. We call him God … the Bible declares that the God we talk about, the God we sing about, the God from whom all blessings flow is the God who created this world and placed us in it.” – Billy Graham (quoted in “The Evangelist” by Lewis A. Drummond)
 
By His grace,
 
 Steve                                                                                                                         

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