Last Friday we had a time of contemplative sharing. We talked about Lazarus and the Rich Man (Luke 16:24-31). The message here is obvious. We are spiritual beings and our search for meaning or purpose in this life is more a spiritual quest than an endless physical or material pursuit. Although Lazarus the beggar had a down and out life on earth, he did right in the eyes of God. His reward was eternal rest in the arms of Father Abraham.
The Rich Man was less focused. He pursued the wrong things and ended up in Hades, tormented and in agony. No doubt he had a good life, showered in luxury unimaginable, and pampered by opulence only the hyper rich could afford. But like a game of Monopoly, once it comes to an end, when the buying stops and the dice have all been tossed, the pieces go straight back to the box. After death, the bible says, comes accountability and judgment. No one is exempted.
You will note that the conversation between Abraham and the Rich Man was intense and frighteningly detailed. And it took place in the spiritual realm. The only way Jesus could have related this narrative was because he saw far and beyond what the earthly sight could see. He casts his sight to the fringes of eternality and saw what most men either could not see or took for granted. As christians, we take this narrative as a factual encounter with a few important messages. One of them has been mentioned above. The other message, as discussed on Friday, is this: What defines you in this life?
Two points to note about the Rich Man: His first request was uncharacteristic of a man in perpetual torment and the second is that he had no name. Let me explain the first point first. This may sound trivial but the Rich Man's first request to Abraham was not: Let me out of here! Beam me up Abraham! I want to be in Heaven! I would suppose that a man in his shoes would have craved for immediate relieve and redemption. The Rich Man ought to have begged Abraham for a second chance. But he didn't. Instead, he asked Abraham's permission to allow Lazarus to quench his thirst with his pinkie.
Again, this may be easily explained by conjecturing that the Rich Man has been thoroughly briefed about the futility of seeking a general divine amnesty or pardon from God. That is to say, he knew his sentence is eternal without any chance in hell of a celestial parole. So, he yielded up in complete surrender of his fiery fate in Hades. This explanation is plausible. But maybe, there is another angle to it worth exploring. And exploring CS Lewis did in his book the Great Divorce when he himself related a story that happened in the spiritual realm.
CS Lewis book tells about a fantasy bus trip in the outskirt of hell. On one such encounter, an angelic being met a ghost man with a peculiar companion, a red lizard that was perched on his shoulder. This stroke the angelic being's curiosity and he went up to chat up with this ghost man. The angelic being offered the ghost man a trip to heaven but the ghost man was hesitant, very hesitant. He knew that to enter heaven he had to give up the red lizard on his shoulder and he wasn't pleased with that prospect. He was afraid that letting go of the red lizard means that he would die too.
But it was a precondition to enter heaven that was non-negotiable - the lizard just had to go. The ghost man then applied all forms of rationalization to persuade the angelic being to allow him to enter heaven with the lizard. The argument took some time and finally the ghost man decided with great reservation to let his lizard go. The moment he removed the lizard from his shoulder, it magically turned into beautiful stallion. The ghost man was also transformed into a real man. Together, he rode on the stallion and they galloped joyfully to heaven.
Earlier I asked, What defines you in this life? In the light of CS Lewis' tale, the same question could be couched as such: Do you have a red lizard on your shoulder? Do you have a signature sin that you cannot let go even though you know the cost of not letting go is grave and the reward of letting go is peace? Have you asked yourself lately why do you do what you do not want to do? What is holding you back to be what God has designed you to be? Going back full circle, do ponder on this question this holiday weekend, What defines you in this life?
I posed this question to you guys last Friday and there was contemplative silence as little tiny pins fell on our cerebral carpet. I fully understand that it is a challenge to answer this question because it cannot be answered in a haste, that is, without thought. I can presumptuously identify some "red lizards sitting on our shoulders" like pride, greed, lust, anger, fear envy, gluttony and sloth. It is essential for us to identify our signature sin, that is, the one sin that controls us, keeps us from soaring, imprisons us in a cage of mediocrity and advocates for its own self perpetuation. Yes, a sin, especially a signature or core sin can plead with us to allow it to become a life tenant in our spirit!
In fact, such a sin can sacrifice all other bad habits in our life in a bid to give us a false facade of repentance so as to avoid its own eviction. Ever felt an emotional relief after saying the sinner's prayer and thinking that you were truly set free from sin only to find out later that you had unwittingly gone back to that one sin you had disavowed at the altar? Beloved, that signature sin is your red lizard. It will not want to let you go. It finds in you a residence too attractive and comfortable to ever leave for another. Only you can identify it, smoke it out. Only you can set yourself free from it by the power of the Cross.
I hazard a guess that the Rich Man's red lizard was his riches. You will note that he has no name. In the narrative, Lazarus was known as Lazarus and Abraham by Abraham. But the Rich Man had no first or last name. He was simply known as "the Rich Man". I believe that Jesus deliberately left his name out to make a point. And the point was: The Rich Man was defined by riches, by money, by wealth. The Bible did not say that he was evil, malicious or conniving. It merely says he was rich. Wealth defines him and nothing else. What defines you?
Are you known as the Rich Man to God? Or the Materialistic Man or Woman? Will you still be known by your first name when you die? Will Michael still retain his name as Michael when he dies or will he be known as the Impatient Man? Yes, that is one of my controlling sins. To be exact, it is the Anger Man. I'm very much work in progress. How about you? Are you known as the Greedy Man? The Gluttony Man? The Egoistical Man? Please take a moment to think about it.
There is a very scary verse in the Bible that reads, "Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanliness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator..." (Roms 1:24). Imagine, God giving you up to your desires! You could be serving, giving and worshipping in church and in the public eye and yet you die a man or woman with a red lizard still on your shoulder. The prospect, my beloved, is awfully grim and disquietingly scary.
Maybe the Rich Man did not want to go to heaven. Maybe he knew that going to heaven would make him the least of them all considering that he had spent his life forsaking the things that truly matter. Maybe he prefers the torment of Hades rather than the uncertainty of heaven. At least in Hades, he is still known as the Rich Man. His wealth defines him and it is one red lizard that he cannot let go. This is the greatest tribute to human freedom. We are free to choose our ultimate destiny - heaven or hell. CS Lewis noted incisively, "There are only two kinds of people - those who say, "God's will be done" or those to whom God in the end says to them, "Your own will be done." All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice, it wouldn't be Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it."
Let me end with this thought. We are called to be radical Christian, pulling out the sins that have grown roots in our spirit. God calls for radical transformation; not superficial conversion. But still, it is a process. This much has to be stressed. Don't expect overnight change. The comfort here is that God has not given us up to our desires since we are still very much attuned and sensitive to His presence and reality.
Beloved, take this road with God to radical transformation. Grow in maturity with Him. In the book Signature Sins, the author Michael Mangis gave this invaluable advice about spiritual maturity, which aptly closes this letter to you, "Spiritual maturity means coming around to the same struggle but from a better vantage point. One of the advantages of a long-term relationship in spiritual direction is that others can see more clearly than we can see how much we have matured. They can reassure us that although our sins may be the same, our cyclical journey is moving ever upward."
Have a fantastic holiday weekend!
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Recap on Friday for Children
Hi parents,
Just a little recap.
The children were taught about how God cares.
Ishmael was in the desert crying as he was thirsty and God provided a well for him.
God even promised Abraham that he would look after Ishmael.
Teach your children to always look to God for hope and strength for the day.
Memory verse for the past few weeks :
The Lord is faithful to ALL His promises. Psalms 145:13
Have a good weekend
Just a little recap.
The children were taught about how God cares.
Ishmael was in the desert crying as he was thirsty and God provided a well for him.
God even promised Abraham that he would look after Ishmael.
Teach your children to always look to God for hope and strength for the day.
Memory verse for the past few weeks :
The Lord is faithful to ALL His promises. Psalms 145:13
Have a good weekend
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Friday's Recap (101008)
Last Friday we shared about the spiritual realm. On all things spiritual, we had a general empowering consensus. We believe that we are made up of spirit, soul and body. On this, we lack no biblical support. Read 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and you will discover that we are basically spiritual beings. 1 Corinthians 3:16 talks about us being the temple of God and God’s spirit dwells in us. And the defining scripture is 1 Corinthians 15 wherein we are told that we will one day be raised as spiritual being. There is therefore a wealth of scriptures on this point.
But to the rabid skeptic, using the bible for support is a non-starter. The bias is obvious. Christians using the scripture to support their case is like Hitler relying on Mein Kampf to support his case for anti-Semitism and Aryan supremacy. For your info, Hitler wrote Mein Kamf. The voluminous book represents Hitler’s most perverted justification for the horrid war that he had started. So, the atheists and secularists rail at our scriptural justification of the spiritual realm. It is thus a lost cause to them to quote Ephesians 6:12 about principalities and power when the only power they see is scientific naturalism.
Simply, scientific naturalism is empirical proof or testable evidence of what you claim exists. If Christians tell them about faith, they want us to show it directly, or at least indirectly. They want tangible proof like proving electricity and subatomic particle. If Christians tell them about spirit and soul, they want us to demonstrate where such realm resides in our brain or heart. If Christians tell them about the real presence of God, they snort in utter disbelief. To them, God is definitely not provable and therefore, to speak of him as a real person is hallucinatory or at best, wishful thinking.
Can we convince the atheists that we are more than the sum of our parts? Can we persuade them to at least consider that our body, our brain, our heart are physical agent of our spirit? Let’s not kid ourselves. We cannot persuade them if persuading means presenting empirical, touchable, documented proof of all things spiritual. So, don’t waste time arguing with them - don’t insult your own intelligence.
Hebrew 11 already settled that debate long time ago. That passage states it beyond doubt that faith is beyond natural evidence. Faith is heart-felt; not scientific data. Faith is experiential; not empirical. Faith is personable; not verifiable. So, let us let dead dogs lie. Let’s move on to another type of “proof” I call personal relating. Last Friday, I shared a true account of a boy named Thomas. His story is related to us by a neurosurgeon from Harvard, Allan J Hamilton MD, who wrote the book “The scalpel and the soul”.
Thomas’ story is a tragic story. He met with an unspeakable accident when he was playing with friends. That accident changed him and his family forever. One day, he climbed up a high tension line to enjoy the city from atop. Unfortunately, he fell and his shirt got stuck in one of the high voltage towers. He then reached out to grab the power line. The moment he touched the power line, thousands of volts scorched his tiny body. Thomas shook convulsively and his clothes caught fire.
From there, he fell 100 feet down like a flaming meteorite. When the firefighters came, Thomas was burnt beyond recognition. Dr Allan described him as such, “Of Thomas, there remained little that was not burned. Only the usual small patches of intact skin remained in the axillae(armpit), groin, and the folds of certain joints. It seemed as if every bone had been broken. Nearly all the soft organs were damaged and bleeding. No one held much hope the boy could survive. Mercy dictated that dying might have been gentler.”
Thomas’ father couldn’t take the sight of his son’s body and suffered a heart attack. He died later. As for Thomas, the verdict couldn’t get any grimmer. He was practically a skinless little 10 year old. He desperately needed new skin to prevent infection in his bloodstream, which would lead to a terminal, sceptic coma. In a cruel twist of the plot, Thomas’ new skin was to be his late father’s. Dr Allan and his team then painstakingly slice off the skin of Thomas senior and quilted it onto Thomas junior. It was literally one skin for another. The skin harvesting and transplant were heart wrenching for Dr Allan to say the least.
At first, Thomas did not respond well to the operation. He was still in a critical condition. When all hope seemed to flicker, a nurse banged on Dr Allan’s office and stammered, “It’s Thomas…he’s…he’s trying to talk.” Dr Allan rushed to Thomas’ bedside and pulled a tube out of his mouth. Thomas’ first word was, “What happened to my father?” Dr Allan decided to lie. “Nothing has happened to your father, Thomas. He’s just fine.”
Thomas then replied that he saw his father. His father was just standing at the end of his bed. He even greeted his father and attempted to wave at him. It was one of those unexplained, unscientific moments that freaked out the hospital staff. When Thomas was told that his father had died three days ago, the boy said softly, “That must be his ghost then that’s waving back at me.”
The above is what I meant by “personal relating”. Looked at critically and rationally, there is no way to prove the account. Non-believers would dismiss it as anecdotal and sketchy. True, there is no way to prove that Thomas’ father appeared in a non-dimensional form to him that day. Just like there is no way to prove that Jesus resurrected as claimed in the Bible. Although most historians accept Jesus as a historical character, they reject his deity claim and his resurrection. Unless we can wind back time, none of us would be the wiser.
But to those skeptics out there, one must bear this in mind: the absence of evidence is NOT the evidence of absence. Just because there is no evidence verifiable by the skeptic to prove the existence of God doesn’t mean that we have to abandon our faith in it. There is just too much in this world that it is not knowable and it is just too much for anyone to say that what is not knowable does not exist.
At this point, I anticipate the atheist’s next question: Why not then suspend all belief until sufficient evidence for God is presented? This is what I call the agnostic’s default position. The atheist is basically saying: Be an agnostic and wait for God to show himself. My answer? God has already shown himself. “Proof” of His existence is everywhere.
Pastor Timothy Keller, who wrote the book, The Reason for God, called these proof “clues of God”. The clues are in how the universe came about, how the natural forces of gravity, electromagnetism and nuclear forces collaborated in a complex cosmic dance to birth earth, and how we “evolved” to be us. These are questions pointing to something more complicated than what science at the present moment can offer. Sir James Jeans once said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” And we all know an idea comes from a thinker. The thinker, I propose, is God.
Using CS Lewis’ analogy, we can think about God as a playwright and we the characters in His play. It is therefore not possible for us as His characters to know all about the playwright. God can choose to reveal Himself by personal revelation but we cannot pop out of the pages of the script to study God in the same way epidemiologist study germs. In our physical bodies, our understanding is limited. We therefore have to accept this not from a position of ignorance but from a position of humility.
Another way to put it is to see God as the sun. Borrowing from CS Lewis’ words, he wrote “I believe in God as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
Pastor Tim explained it this way, “Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn about it. You can’t do it. It will burn out your retinas, ruining your capacity to take it in. A far better way to learn about the existence, power and quality of the sun is to look at the world it shows you, to recognize how it sustains everything you see and enables you to see it. Here then we have a way forward. We should not try to look into the sun as it were demanding irrefutable proofs of God. Instead we should look at what the sun shows us.”
Therefore we can learn more about God from his word, from looking at his creation, especially studying how unique, special and different we are from all other creation. This is where I depart from the default position of agnosticism. Like the sun, God has shown me his reality not from a collection of conclusive proof but from an assortment of conclusive clues. And Thomas’ honest, unvarnished account of his sighting of his father is just one of those clues.
Let me end with this: God makes sense of it all. God makes sense of the birth of the universe. God makes sense of our coming about. God makes sense of why we feel, think and act the way we do. God makes sense of why we aspire, why we seek truth, why we yearn for meaning, and why we love. Apart from God, nothing explains it quite that well.
On this point, CS Lewis deserves another quote, “You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.”
So, putting it singlishly, God is like kaya, He makes gardenia taste so good!
But to the rabid skeptic, using the bible for support is a non-starter. The bias is obvious. Christians using the scripture to support their case is like Hitler relying on Mein Kampf to support his case for anti-Semitism and Aryan supremacy. For your info, Hitler wrote Mein Kamf. The voluminous book represents Hitler’s most perverted justification for the horrid war that he had started. So, the atheists and secularists rail at our scriptural justification of the spiritual realm. It is thus a lost cause to them to quote Ephesians 6:12 about principalities and power when the only power they see is scientific naturalism.
Simply, scientific naturalism is empirical proof or testable evidence of what you claim exists. If Christians tell them about faith, they want us to show it directly, or at least indirectly. They want tangible proof like proving electricity and subatomic particle. If Christians tell them about spirit and soul, they want us to demonstrate where such realm resides in our brain or heart. If Christians tell them about the real presence of God, they snort in utter disbelief. To them, God is definitely not provable and therefore, to speak of him as a real person is hallucinatory or at best, wishful thinking.
Can we convince the atheists that we are more than the sum of our parts? Can we persuade them to at least consider that our body, our brain, our heart are physical agent of our spirit? Let’s not kid ourselves. We cannot persuade them if persuading means presenting empirical, touchable, documented proof of all things spiritual. So, don’t waste time arguing with them - don’t insult your own intelligence.
Hebrew 11 already settled that debate long time ago. That passage states it beyond doubt that faith is beyond natural evidence. Faith is heart-felt; not scientific data. Faith is experiential; not empirical. Faith is personable; not verifiable. So, let us let dead dogs lie. Let’s move on to another type of “proof” I call personal relating. Last Friday, I shared a true account of a boy named Thomas. His story is related to us by a neurosurgeon from Harvard, Allan J Hamilton MD, who wrote the book “The scalpel and the soul”.
Thomas’ story is a tragic story. He met with an unspeakable accident when he was playing with friends. That accident changed him and his family forever. One day, he climbed up a high tension line to enjoy the city from atop. Unfortunately, he fell and his shirt got stuck in one of the high voltage towers. He then reached out to grab the power line. The moment he touched the power line, thousands of volts scorched his tiny body. Thomas shook convulsively and his clothes caught fire.
From there, he fell 100 feet down like a flaming meteorite. When the firefighters came, Thomas was burnt beyond recognition. Dr Allan described him as such, “Of Thomas, there remained little that was not burned. Only the usual small patches of intact skin remained in the axillae(armpit), groin, and the folds of certain joints. It seemed as if every bone had been broken. Nearly all the soft organs were damaged and bleeding. No one held much hope the boy could survive. Mercy dictated that dying might have been gentler.”
Thomas’ father couldn’t take the sight of his son’s body and suffered a heart attack. He died later. As for Thomas, the verdict couldn’t get any grimmer. He was practically a skinless little 10 year old. He desperately needed new skin to prevent infection in his bloodstream, which would lead to a terminal, sceptic coma. In a cruel twist of the plot, Thomas’ new skin was to be his late father’s. Dr Allan and his team then painstakingly slice off the skin of Thomas senior and quilted it onto Thomas junior. It was literally one skin for another. The skin harvesting and transplant were heart wrenching for Dr Allan to say the least.
At first, Thomas did not respond well to the operation. He was still in a critical condition. When all hope seemed to flicker, a nurse banged on Dr Allan’s office and stammered, “It’s Thomas…he’s…he’s trying to talk.” Dr Allan rushed to Thomas’ bedside and pulled a tube out of his mouth. Thomas’ first word was, “What happened to my father?” Dr Allan decided to lie. “Nothing has happened to your father, Thomas. He’s just fine.”
Thomas then replied that he saw his father. His father was just standing at the end of his bed. He even greeted his father and attempted to wave at him. It was one of those unexplained, unscientific moments that freaked out the hospital staff. When Thomas was told that his father had died three days ago, the boy said softly, “That must be his ghost then that’s waving back at me.”
The above is what I meant by “personal relating”. Looked at critically and rationally, there is no way to prove the account. Non-believers would dismiss it as anecdotal and sketchy. True, there is no way to prove that Thomas’ father appeared in a non-dimensional form to him that day. Just like there is no way to prove that Jesus resurrected as claimed in the Bible. Although most historians accept Jesus as a historical character, they reject his deity claim and his resurrection. Unless we can wind back time, none of us would be the wiser.
But to those skeptics out there, one must bear this in mind: the absence of evidence is NOT the evidence of absence. Just because there is no evidence verifiable by the skeptic to prove the existence of God doesn’t mean that we have to abandon our faith in it. There is just too much in this world that it is not knowable and it is just too much for anyone to say that what is not knowable does not exist.
At this point, I anticipate the atheist’s next question: Why not then suspend all belief until sufficient evidence for God is presented? This is what I call the agnostic’s default position. The atheist is basically saying: Be an agnostic and wait for God to show himself. My answer? God has already shown himself. “Proof” of His existence is everywhere.
Pastor Timothy Keller, who wrote the book, The Reason for God, called these proof “clues of God”. The clues are in how the universe came about, how the natural forces of gravity, electromagnetism and nuclear forces collaborated in a complex cosmic dance to birth earth, and how we “evolved” to be us. These are questions pointing to something more complicated than what science at the present moment can offer. Sir James Jeans once said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” And we all know an idea comes from a thinker. The thinker, I propose, is God.
Using CS Lewis’ analogy, we can think about God as a playwright and we the characters in His play. It is therefore not possible for us as His characters to know all about the playwright. God can choose to reveal Himself by personal revelation but we cannot pop out of the pages of the script to study God in the same way epidemiologist study germs. In our physical bodies, our understanding is limited. We therefore have to accept this not from a position of ignorance but from a position of humility.
Another way to put it is to see God as the sun. Borrowing from CS Lewis’ words, he wrote “I believe in God as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
Pastor Tim explained it this way, “Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn about it. You can’t do it. It will burn out your retinas, ruining your capacity to take it in. A far better way to learn about the existence, power and quality of the sun is to look at the world it shows you, to recognize how it sustains everything you see and enables you to see it. Here then we have a way forward. We should not try to look into the sun as it were demanding irrefutable proofs of God. Instead we should look at what the sun shows us.”
Therefore we can learn more about God from his word, from looking at his creation, especially studying how unique, special and different we are from all other creation. This is where I depart from the default position of agnosticism. Like the sun, God has shown me his reality not from a collection of conclusive proof but from an assortment of conclusive clues. And Thomas’ honest, unvarnished account of his sighting of his father is just one of those clues.
Let me end with this: God makes sense of it all. God makes sense of the birth of the universe. God makes sense of our coming about. God makes sense of why we feel, think and act the way we do. God makes sense of why we aspire, why we seek truth, why we yearn for meaning, and why we love. Apart from God, nothing explains it quite that well.
On this point, CS Lewis deserves another quote, “You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.”
So, putting it singlishly, God is like kaya, He makes gardenia taste so good!
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