ACCESS MINISTRY: Each time I took a break, I sharpened my axe

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Each time I took a break, I sharpened my axe

Lenten Devotional – Day 16

God’s Word: “If the ax is dull and its edge unsharpened, more strength is needed but skill will bring success. (Ecclesiastes 10:10)

Story: There's an old story told about two woodcutters who were in a forest. They were being paid commission for every log that they chopped. Both of them were ambitious and wanted to out do the other. One of the woodcutters spent all day chopping logs, without taking a break. He supposed that if he continued working, he would be able get more logs done than his rival.

The second woodcutter took a break every hour for five minutes. At the end of the day, he had taken ten breaks. The first woodcutter believed that he had outpaced his rival, but when it came to tallying the amount of logs that were actually chopped, the second woodcutter had the largest pile and earned more commission.

"How did you do that?" asked the first woodcutter. "How did you manage to chop more logs than me, with all those breaks?"

"Each time, I took a break, "answered the second woodcutter, " I sharpened my axe. It meant I could chop more logs than you in the latter part of the day."

Meditation: The same applies to what we do with our spirituality. If we're not taking time to sharpen our souls with prayer, Bible reading, and worship, then our connection to God becomes blunt, and our faith is almost useless in times of trial. In midst of all our busy-ness, we need to take time out to be with God, to focus on Christ, and to be re-sharpened by the Holy Spirit.

Quote: “The purpose of worship is to come before the Lord in obedience to praise Him, to hear from Him, to confess to Him, and to commit our lives to Him. Every worship service is to be an encounter with the Lord, transcending our feelings, desires, and even our abilities to perform.” – Gene Mims

Prayer: Lord Jesus, You are precious to us and we know that we need to strengthen our relationship with You. Help us today to make the right moves and take the right steps, which will enhance our faith and sharpen our souls, so that we may better serve You, and attract others to Your Kingdom. In Your Holy Name, we pray.

Amen.

Have a blessed weekend,

This week at San Francisco

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A careless words that killed famous Karen Carpenter

You’ve probably heard the expression, "Sticks and stones will break my bones. But words will never hurt me?" Is that true? No! It’s not! Proverbs 12:18 says "Reckless words pierce like a sword!" They hurt! Like a knife through the heart! And some of you are living in defeat and discouragement right now because of something someone said to you years ago! And you’ve never gotten over it!

Have you ever heard the singer Karen Carpenter? She sang "We’ve only just begun. To Live. White lace and promises." When she and her brother first started singing, one of the critics that covered the band referred to her as "Richard’s chubby little sister." And that comment demoralized her. From that moment on, every time she looked in the mirror, she said to herself, "I’m Richard’s chubby little sister." And she started taking drugs to lose weight. And she became bulemic. And anorexic.

I used to see her on TV when I was a kid. And I always thought she was a skinny minnie. But when she looked in the mirror, I guess she saw something else. She allowed those critical words to eat her up on the inside. And she died of heart failure at the age of 32. A tragic example of someone who was conquered by the careless words of another person.

ခ်င္းေတာင္းထဲကမိန္းမ

တဖန္ငါႏွင့္ေျပာဆုိေသာေကာင္းကင္တမန္သည္ထြက္ကာ၊ ယခုထြက္လါ ေသာအရာကုိေမွာ္ၾကည့္ေလာ့ဟု၊ င့ါအား ဆုိလ်ွင္၊ ထုိအရာကား အဘယ္အရာနည္းဟုငါေမးေသာ္၊ ထုိအရာသည္ထြက္ သြားေသာဧဖါျဖစ္သည္ဟု၄င္း၊ ထုိအရာ သည္တျပည္လုံးတြင္ သူတုိ ့အၾကံ အစည္၊ ျဖစ္သည္ ဟု၄င္း ဆုိ၏။ ခဲအခြက္ တဆယ္ ကုိလည္း၊ အထက္ သုိ ့ခ်ီးေျမာက္ျပီး၊ မိန္းမတေယာက္သည္ဧဖါထဲထုိင္ သည္ကုိငါ ျမင္ ၏။ ေကာင္းကင္တမန္ ကလည္း၊ ထုိမိန္းမသည္၊ ဒုစရုိက္ အျပစ္ျဖစ္ျပီး၊ သူ ့ကုိဧဖါထဲ သုိ ့ခ်ထားျပီး၊ ဧဖါအေပၚမွာ ခဲျပားကုိ တင္ေလ၏။ ------

------------- ထုိဧဖါကုိအဘယ္သုိ ့ ခ်ီသြားၾကသနည္း ဟုငါႏွင့္ေျပာဆုိ ေသာေကာင္းကင္တမန္ကုိငါေမးေသာ္၊ ရွနာ ျပည္တြင္၊ ဧဖါအဖုိ ့အိမ္ေဆာက္ျခင္ူငွါ၊ ခ်ီသြားၾက၏၊ ထုိျပည္တြင္သူ၏ ခုံေပၚမွာ၊ တင္ထားျပီး၊ ေနရာခ်ၾက လိမ့္မည္ ဟုဆုိ၏။

- (ဇာခရိ၊ ၅း၅-၁၁)

THAT ANOTHER MIGHT LIVE

About 6:00 A.M. on a Wednesday morning James Lawson of Running Springs, California (in the San Bernardino mountains) left home to apply for a job. About an hour later his thirty-six-year-old wife, Patsy left for her fifth grade teaching job down the mountain in Riverside, accompanied by her two children, five-year-old Susan and two-year-old Gerald, to be dropped off at the babysitter’s. Unfortunately, they never got that far. Eight and a half hours later the man found his wife and daughter dead in their wrecked car, upside down in a cold mountain stream. His two-year-old son was just barely alive in the forty-eight degree water. But in that death the character of a mother was revealed in a most dramatic and heart-rending way. For when the father scrambled down the cliff to what he was sure were the cries of his dying wife, he found her locked in death, holding her little boy’s head just above water in the submerged car. For eight and a half hours Patsy Lawson had held her beloved toddler afloat and had finally died, her body almost frozen in death in that position of self-giving love, holding her baby up to breathe. She died that another might live. That’s the essence of a mother’s love. And that is the essence of Jesus' love for us. He died so that we might live.

"For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit." (I Peter 3:18) That is what we remember at communion--Christ dying so that we all might live.

Power of reading the Bible

A young Colombian Girl who received a new testament in her school. She read the new testament until one day her father caught her reading it…and told her not to read it any more because it was full of lies and fantasy.. But the girl kept on reading until one day her father came home unexpectedly found her with the NT grabbed it from her hands and put it in his pocket. The father went off to work where he was a mining engineer. Several hours later sirens went off in the community there had been a cave in at the mine. The father was trapped in the mine. The rescue workers took 5 days to finally reach the men, but it was too late. All 31 men died including the father of this little girl Curiously, workers found the man clutching the NT between his praying hands. When they opened the front cover they read a note “To my daughter” Keep reading this NT, it is true and right, and I will see you one day in heaven. Then they turned to the back page where the father had signed the commitment card after having said the sinner’s prayer. But that was not the end of the story, Turning the page there were signed the names of the other 30 workers.

(This illustration came from the Gideons International)

God word is the only hope...

John Jay was a delegate at that first continental congress. At a very young age JAY was one of the smartest and most respected lawyers in the colonies. You may have never heard of John Jay before, but in the early history of U.S. government, Jay was responsible for single handedly averting a war with England through his diplomacy. It seemed that everything Jay touched turned to success. Then in May 1802 after 28 years of marriage his wife Sarah became very ill. As her condition became more serious, John and their children gathered at her bedside. When death came the famous and powerful father felt weak and defeated. With his children by his side he turned to the Bible for strength. and began reading I Corinthians 15, which concludes with this verse. "when the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true. "death has been swallowed up in victory, where O death is your victory? where O death is your sting? When he closed the Bible, with tears in his eyes he spokes to his children and assured them from God’s word, of the promised reunion they would all someday have with his Sarah. In times of crisis God’s word is the only hope that can bring true peace to our souls.

Music is truly wonderful!

Gordon MacDonald shared about a time when he and his daughter, Kristy attended the New Year’s Eve celebration at the InterVarsity Urban Missionary Convention in 1976. The night closed with a Communion Service. After the benediction, 17,000 students began to head for the arena portals and their buses for the trips back home. Someone in the crowd-not a song leader, but a worshiper—began the song “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord.” It is the one where the men sing a line and then the ladies echo back. Some 17,000 people stopped in their tracks and sang! They sang it over and over again without no song leader or musicians.

No one wanted to leave from the place that became holy ground. No one wanted to leave the sacred hour to memories. They just kept singing for a while. It was after some time of singing into the night when Kristy, who was only nine years old at that time, grabbed her daddy’s hand and spoke softly, “Daddy, this is what heaven is going to be like.” Mr. MacDonald felt that his daughter may very well be right. - By Terry Laughlin

The Welsh Revival

The world still feels the influence of the great Welsh Revival which flamed across the tiny country of Wales at the beginning of this century. But few remember just how this mighty spiritual movement began:

A Christian Endeavor meeting was in progress in a small town in Wales when a timid young Welsh girl arose. She was so nervous that she could utter only one short sentence: “O, I do love Jesus!” Then she sat down. The Lord used that earnest testimony to fulfill His own divine purpose. Spiritual fire came down on that young people’s meeting, even akin to Pentecost. Quickly it spread through that church, then through the little town, and on through the whole of Wales. Its influence was soon felt all around the world.

—Thomas Rayner

Psalm 91

¹ Those who live in the shelter of the Most High
will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
² This I declare about the Lord:
He alone is my refuge, my place of safety;
he is my God, and I trust him.
³ For he will rescue you from every trap
and protect you from deadly disease.
⁴ He will cover you with his feathers.
He will shelter you with his wings.
His faithful promises are your armor and protection.
⁵ Do not be afraid of the terrors of the night,
nor the arrow that flies in the day.
⁶ Do not dread the disease that stalks in darkness,
nor the disaster that strikes at midday.
⁷ Though a thousand fall at your side,
though ten thousand are dying around you,
these evils will not touch you.
⁸ Just open your eyes,
and see how the wicked are punished.

⁹ If you make the Lord your refuge,
if you make the Most High your shelter,
¹⁰ no evil will conquer you;
no plague will come near your home.
¹¹ For he will order his angels
to protect you wherever you go.
¹² They will hold you up with their hands
so you won’t even hurt your foot on a stone.
¹³ You will trample upon lions and cobras;
you will crush fierce lions and serpents under your feet!

¹⁴ The Lord says, “I will rescue those who love me.
I will protect those who trust in my name.
¹⁵ When they call on me, I will answer;
I will be with them in trouble.
I will rescue and honor them.
¹⁶ I will reward them with a long life
and give them my salvation.”

The Day of Pentecost

The Holy Spirit Comes

¹ On the day of Pentecost all the believers were meeting together in one place. ² Suddenly, there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm, and it filled the house where they were sitting. ³ Then, what looked like flames or tongues of fire appeared and settled on each of them. ⁴ And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages, as the Holy Spirit gave them this ability.

⁵ At that time there were devout Jews from every nation living in Jerusalem. ⁶ When they heard the loud noise, everyone came running, and they were bewildered to hear their own languages being spoken by the believers.

⁷ They were completely amazed. “How can this be?” they exclaimed. “These people are all from Galilee, ⁸ and yet we hear them speaking in our own native languages! ⁹ Here we are—Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, the province of Asia, ¹⁰ Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and the areas of Libya around Cyrene, visitors from Rome ¹¹ (both Jews and converts to Judaism), Cretans, and Arabs. And we all hear these people speaking in our own languages about the wonderful things God has done!” ¹² They stood there amazed and perplexed. “What can this mean?” they asked each other.

Acts 2:1-12

What is BCANA?

BCANA stands for “Burmese Christian Association of North America” which comprises of twelve member churches across United States of America and Canada. It is an interdenominational and nonprofit religious organization with the purpose of building the Kingdom of God in North America and beyond. Here are current member churches of the association:

1. First Burmese Baptist Church of San Francisco

2. Burmese Christian Community Church of Silicon Valley

3. Oakland Burmese Mission Baptist Church

4. Adoniram Judson Memorial Baptist Church of LA

5. Burmese Christian Fellowship Church of LA

6. Kachin Baptist Church of Los Angeles

7. Myanmar Baptist Church of New York

8. Calvary Baptist Church , Washington DC

9. Oversea Burmese Christian Fellowship of Massachusetts

10. Oregon Myanmar Christian Church

11. Vancouver Myanmar Baptist Fellowship

12. Myanmar Christian Church of Metro Chicago

The association was born on July 30^th 1998 at beautiful Honolulu of Hawaii during “Asian American Baptist Pastors, seminarians, and lay leaders’ conference, sponsored by Asian Ministry of American Baptist Churches of USA. One of a Conference break times, Rev. Latt Yishey organized an informal meeting with Burmese pastors, and some lay leaders to envision together to form a Burmese Christian organization. Lawrence Chow was not there but he kindly prepared a draft by-Laws of organization. After prayerfully and carefully discussion, everyone unanimously agreed to form an organization named “Burmese Christian Fellowship of North America”. We met at Perry’s Smorgy Restaurant, Honolulu and it became the birth place of BCANA. Rev. Maran Yaw made a dedication prayer for our new born organization.

The participants at the first meeting were Rev. Latt Yishey, Allan Hla-Oung, and Su Hock Wu from First Burmese Baptist Church of San Francisco, (Rev. Wai Lin Naing) and Stacy Chou from Myanmar Baptist Church of New York, Rev. Dr. Yawba Lasaw from Kachin Baptist Church of Los Angeles, Rev. Maran Yaw from Calvary Baptist Church, and Rev. Zaw Wynn Tan from Oversea Burmese Christian Fellowship of Boston. Allan Hla-Oung was elected as Convener of the organization.

The name has changed to “Burmese Christian Association of North America” (BCANA) when national leaders of Burmese churches (two delegates from each church) met at First Burmese Baptist Church of San Francisco on February 2000. Since then, God has blessed the organization with many blessings including “Youth & Young Adult Conference,” “Ministers’ retreat,” “new member churches,” and many opportunities to expend His ministry across North America. Detail story of BCANA’s activities will be presented at Biennial gathering this June.

New Member Churches are welcomed

Since Burmese churches have been rapidly growing across North America, we would like to welcome your church to join together with us to do the great commission of Jesus Christ locally and globally. Contact our secretary William for new membership information.

Upcoming events at FBBC San Francisco

Thank you for your contributions

We have a very successful fundraising and musical concert for Myanmar Cyclone Relief Fund on May 17th. Volunteer foodsellers gave their time and talents for many delicious dishes to satisfy people who came that evening. Musical concert was filled with compassionate feelings and concerns for the victims of Cyclone Nargis which severely hit Delta area and Yangon on May 2nd and 3rd. We have raised above $35,000.00 up to now and sent it to Burma already. We also commissioned four of our church members to go to Yangon and Delta area to help the victims and their families. They are at the fields now. Thank you all for your generous contributions for the relief fund. May God richly bless you.

You are invited to join with us to pray for our brothers and sisters in Burma. We will hold a special prayer service on May 10th 2008, Saturday evening 6:00 pm at First Burmese Baptist Church, 380 21st Ave. San Francisco, CA 94121.

We are continue accepting donation for relief fund to help the needy brothers and sisters in our beloved Burma. They are desperatly in deed of our prayer and support. Check can be sent to our church or bring on Saturday and Sunday services.

God will answer our compassionate prayer and will send His peace and comfort to our fellow Burmese people.

Holy Week: Friday

Friday. Trials, Crucifixion, Death, and Burial.

Jesus' third trial is held early in the morning before the Sanhedrin. The first three trials were before the religious authorities where He is found guilty.

Jesus is then taken before Pilate (the fourth trial) where He is found innocent. He is subsequently taken to Herod who also finds Him innocent (the fifth), and then back to Pilate who again finds Him innocent (thesixth) but relents under pressure, perhaps fearing an uprising.. He notes on the sign on the cross that His crime was being the King of the Jews. He
probably did this to avoid trouble with Rome (No king but Caesar).

About 9:00 AM. Jesus is crucified on a hill called The Skull outside the city. While we cannot know for certain it is likely that this is the site where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Issac. At noon, the sky becomes dark. In either case, the darkness is highly symbolic of the Father turning His
back on the one He had earlier called My beloved son. During that time the Savior experienced hell for us. Hell is to be utterly forsaken by God.

At 3:00 PM Jesus utters the most important words to believers when he cries with a loud voice: It is finished. The phrase literally means Paid in full The spotless Son of God became sin for us! Isa. 53:5,6. Jesus gives up His life and fulfills the typology of the Passover Lamb at exactly the
time the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple. The veil is rent in the Temple (Mk. 15:38). Jesus was on the cross 6 hours.

Jesus is laid in Joseph's tomb before the Sabbath began atsunset, or around 6:00 PM.

Thursday. Day of Preparation and Passover in the Evening.

On this day (and perhaps on the previous day) preparation is made for the Passover. Judas may have also utilized this time for his betrayal (Matt. 26:1-5; 14-16; 17-19).

The Passover is celebrated on Thursday evening in an upper room. Tradition has it that it was owned by Mark's parents. At the end of the Jewish feast, Jesus institutes the Last Supper (Matt. 14:12-26; Lk. 22:17-23).

The Last Supper is followed by the Upper Room Discourse (Jn. 13-17).

Sometime in the evening, after the Passover, Jesus and His disciples leave the Upper Room and go to Gethsemane, a place near the Mt. of Olives where it was a custom for Jesus to Pray (Matt. 26:36-460).

While in the Garden, Jesus is betrayed by Judas and arrested by the temple guards (Jn. 18:2-12).

The Trials begin. Before dawn Jesus is tried twice before Annas and then Caiaphas. Everything about these trials is illegal.

Holy Week: Tuesday

The Day of Controversy and Teaching in Parables.

On this day Jesus personally confronts the authorities and defends His claims to be the Messiah. The occasion for their questions was His violent action the previous day. Mark's gospel gives the most detailed account (Mk. 11:27-13:37).

The day ends with Jesus pronouncing a curse on the city and
announcing that the Kingdom will be taken away from the nation (explains the significance of the cursed fig-tree). See Matt. 23. On the return to Bethany the Disciples are loaded with questions.

Jesus stops at the Mount of Olives overlooking the temple, and gives the Olivet Discourse. See Matt. 24,25; Lk.21:5ff. The Olivet Discourse is a detailed prophecy largely about the coming destruction Jerusalem and the temple due to the rejection of Jesus as Messiah by the Jewish authorities.