New Year's message

This is my New Year’s message. It is entitled “6 stinking habits to get rid of”. I could have called it “6 stinking habits to watch out for”. But, this alternative title may imply that one has yet to be infected by any of the stinking habits and thus has to watch out for them. Should it be taken this way, then it is inappropriate. You see, most of us, I believe, are able to identify with some, if not all, of the stinking habits that I am going to list down for the simple reason that we are guilty of having committed them at some point in our life. So, there is nothing to watch out for as if it is coming our way like a flu virus. It should, with some urgency, be gotten rid of - like weeds or piled up garbage. So, here are the 6 stinking habits we should get rid of in the coming New Year. Or, if you like, habits to watch out for if you have yet to be infected by them.

1) Me-First habit. Let’s face it, this habit is the first sin of the created Universe. The story of the supremacy of self-interest is as old as Adam and Eve. The world’s system runs on this me-first philosophy. Politics is all about “how will this decision influence my poll rating?” Movie and music stars are all concerned about how popular they are to their fans. And even ministers of God sometimes fall into the trap of self-elevation at the expense of God-glorification. So, no one is exempted from this stinking habit Numero Uno. When we don’t get our way, or when others got their way instead of us, we sulk, sulk and sulk. Some sulk discreetly; others sulk publicly. One way or another, our attitude undergoes a vegetation transformation into a “bitter gourd”. Envy is one avenue this habit rears its ugly head. Deep inside, we can’t stand it if our neighbor is more successful than us. Somehow, some thing inside of us dies a little. Somehow, we get derailed by jealousy and rage. Apostle Paul once said that we should “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” (Rom. 12:15) With all honesty, it is easy to mourn with our neighbor. Misfortune invites willing and easy company. But, can we sincerely rejoice with our neighbor? For some, we seethe with envy when good fortune befalls on others and not us. Envy has its roots in self-glorification and that’s why we have to guard against this insidious habit. It’s easy to say at this point that we should put others first and ourselves second or a distant third. Words are like air molecules. They come and go like a draft. And we are usually unmoved by it. So, let’s go beyond words (although words would inevitably be used here). Let us hatch a murder plan. Let us plan the death of self. Let’s be self-killers. Paul calls it “self-crucifixation”. Jesus calls it “self-denial”. I call it “self-cremation”. Whatever you call it, I think you get the point. And the point is to die to self and to live for Christ daily. The process calls for daily discipline and a watchful spiritual eye to monitor our thoughts, our speech and our actions. If we resolve this coming New Year to make this important change, one little victory at a time, on a consistent daily rate, I am sure that by the end of next year, our life would then be deserving of the praise that comes from our God for it is written in John 5:44, “How can you believe if you accept the praise from one another, yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?”

2) Count your curses habit. This is the opposite of counting your blessings. This is a negative outlook. While the optimist sees the glass half full, the person inflicted by this stinking habit asks, “Where’s the glass?” People with his habit are generally grim-reapers or bad news harvesters. They are unable to see the positive side of things because they do not have enough faith to believe in it. They are prone to catastrophe-ize all events that have the potential to turn sour. They are blindsided by the negatives to even bother to accentuate the positive. As such, this is one habit that you have to eradicate because it determines your ultimate response to all situations you face in your life. Let us accept that bad things will happen, without giving us an advance notice. You cannot RSVP tragedies because they issue you no invitation or warning. But, just like there is immense power captured in a single atom, there is awesome strength embedded in one choice. Do not underestimate the choices you make on a daily basis. Where you are today is the result of the choices that you have been making all this while. You can therefore do a forensic tracing of all choices made thus far and each of these choices will add up to the sum of who you are and where you are today. Thus, from an atomic point of view, you can harness the power of free-choice by responding in a way that progressively brings you out of your trial instead of sinking you deeper into it. Negative thoughts darken the chambers of your soul. It drains your spirit and saps your resolve. Beloved, take charge of your life and deals positively with adversity. Do not surrender to your trials; remaining helpless in the sea of trouble. Instead surrender to God and put your hope in Him. Let God preserve your spirit, lift you up and deliver you out into the light. Remember, as long as your lamp continues burning, the darkness will make their timely retreat. So, this is the take-away lesson in regards to this habit: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Roms. 15:13)

3) The dog ate my homework habit. Did the dog really eat your homework? Or maybe, you didn’t perform well in school and you didn’t want to show your parents your poor results? So, we needed to blame the poor dog? This habit will make us a finger-pointing marksman. We are always right and the blame lies with everybody but ourselves. For people infected with this habit, saying sorry is truly the hardest word. It is as if saying sorry will bring about a full-blown emotional tumor. Let’s humble ourselves this coming New Year. Let us own up to our flaws. Let’s take personal responsibility for our actions. Stop passing the buck or blame. Let’s direct the interrogation lamp on ourselves and let God search our heart. For the heart is above all, deceitful. When something goes wrong, and it sometimes will, we have to look within ourselves to find the cause. Even when the fault lies with others, we cannot overlook the fact that we may have contributed to the failure. We have a part to play in a wrong turn, a misadventure or an accidental letdown. Take a marriage for example. Who can remain blameless in a fight, an argument or a separation? Any takers? I realized that a marriage can survive anything, any trial, if one spouse musters the courage to shock the other by admitting to his/her faults and saying sorry for it. A sincere apology after some quiet reflection may be the hardest thing to say but it is a definite step towards reconciliation. Basically saying sorry turns the attention on our flaws and this tactical change is crucial in keeping anger and unforgiveness at bay. Something magically lights up when we see the wrong in ourselves and this mindset will keep us from focusing zealously on the wrong of our spouse. When the focus changes, we will then be able to deal with our faults, to realize how our actions have hurt our loved ones, and to express genuine remorse thereafter. The next natural step after feeling the convicting sting of regret is to say “I’m truly sorry.” A wise man once said, “Few things are more powerful than having the common sense, wisdom, and strength to admit when you’ve made a mistake and to set things right.”

4) Leave it till tomorrow habit. This habit is self-explanatory. Although tomorrow will surely come, it is not a guarantee that we will accomplish what we need to do today by tomorrow. Beloved, do not have the delusion that tomorrow will be longer than today. In fact, logically speaking, if we leave what we need to do today till tomorrow, then the time we have tomorrow will be very much constraint, or limited. More work for tomorrow will mean less time to finish them. And less time to finish them will mean that we risk putting off tomorrow’s workload to the day after tomorrow. Well, I think you get the point. The heart of this stinking habit is procrastination. And we procrastinate for many reasons. We procrastinate because we are avoiding certain outcome out of fear. We procrastinate because we lack guidance, directions or goals. We procrastinate because we are plain lazy or self-indulgent. Or maybe, we are just too weak-willed, discouraged or disillusioned with ourselves to take the next step in life. Whatever the reason, this is a bad habit that we have to deal with directly. As there are numerous reasons for why we procrastinate, there are also varied solutions. For this letter, I will only single one out and that is: Seizing the opportunity! We will only walk down this corridor of life once and most opportunities will only knock once. If we do not seize them as they come by, we may have lost them forever. But in order to seize it, we will need to know what we want in life. What is our goal now? What do we wish to accomplish? What is our passion? Do we have an unfulfilled wish? What activity gives us the most joy? Take the first few days of the New Year to reflect on this. If something is worth doing, and is within our budget and ability, then stop putting it off to the next day, the next year or the next life. Beloved, let’s not live for the past but live for the future. We cannot change our past, our mistakes and our failures. We cannot change how people look at us for what we did in the past. The opportunities in the past have all passed; so stop allowing your past to plague your present and to limit your future. The aim is to start afresh and anew. The New Year is waiting for you to fill it up with meaningful goals. If you hear God’s voice calling you to make that commitment for change, then do it. God’s calling for you in the New Year is to embrace life, to advance forward, to take the risk, and to change lives. For it is said that, “when we choose to seize our divine moments, we create an environment where others are unleashed to fulfill their God-given potential.” So, let’s start a chain-reaction, initiate a transformation, and make a difference. And when the time comes for us to leave this world for good, we would have this anchored assurance that we have lived a good life, one that God and our children can be proud of.

5) Life’s like a box of chocolates habit. When Forest Gump uttered this now famous line in the self-titled movies many years ago, no one knew exactly what he meant except that life is generally unpredictable because you never know what you’ll get. My own interpretation of this winsome line is his: life is not limited to the perceptual confines of our five senses. In my view, life is more than what our eyes can see, what our ears can hear, and what our hands can touch. Atheists who use science to call for the end of religion has this to say to sound off the death knell, “the materialist universe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” (Richard Dawkins) We must guard against such thought because it is one-sided, dogmatic and tainted. Atheists’ scientists will not admit that science cannot explain a lot of things. The beginning of the universe (or cosmos) is still a mystery, an impenetrate-able one. The erratic and at the same time synchronized behavior of a pair of subatomic particles are another mystery that still escapes rigorous scientific observation. The theory of neo-evolution has yet to close the gap between us and our next primate cousins. The link is still missing. Neuroscientists are still unable to come up with a coherent concept of our consciousness, our experiences and our varied emotions, and questions about how is it that the whole of our personalities is much greater than the sum of our parts still remain largely unresolved. Even an activity as simple as reading, involving various integral section of the left hemisphere of our brain, is immensely complex. How the words on a page get registered on our retinas and processed at the back of our left hemisphere (occipital temporal poles) and converted into perceivable meaning that can move us to tears are too complicated for anyone to fully understand. So, life is full of mysteries. What we cannot see doesn’t mean it does not exist. Some of these mysteries will never be solved and we have to accept that someone out there knows and holds the answer. Maybe, we are not created to solve them all. Maybe, we have to admit our limitations. Maybe, the universe is created to be enjoyed and not to be dissected into discrete parts for research. And without faith, and a sense of awe, we can never fully embrace life and enjoy what life has to offer. A famous theologian once said, “He who enters the sphere of faith enters the sanctuary of life.” Indeed, the parallel thought for this is: And without faith, it is impossible to please God.

6) Grudge bearers habit. Of all the bad habits listed above, this is the most vicious and condemning. I have learned that we have to travel light in this world. Carrying a grudge and nursing it will only burden us in our life’s journey. We have to let go and let God deal with our hurts, our pains and our disappointments. In this life, we are sure to get hurt. Our loved ones may betray us. Our close friends may abandon us. Our pastors may disappoint us. No one is perfect. So, we need to come before God this New Year and surrender all our hurts and pains. Beloved, forgiveness breaks the curse that binds us to a life of bitterness and retributive rage. Forgiveness is an act of love. No one is so unlovable who doesn’t deserve our forgiveness. There is always a quality in others that is redeemable and we can always focus on it to forgive them. It is said that forgiveness breaks the chain of causation because he who forgives another, out of love, takes it upon himself the consequences of what the other person has done. As such forgiveness always entails a sacrifice on the part of the person who chooses to forgive. Whatever the injustice or the pain caused to us, we can surely pray for the spirit of forgiveness to take charge of our spirit and to do a purifying work to remove the hurts and pain of the act from our memories. With the passage of time, and with a submitted heart, we can slowly but surely extend the hand of forgiveness; even to those who are least deserving. We can do this because God has forgiven the worst in us. Let me end this letter with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr, “We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”

Beloved, these are the 6 stinking habits we should eject out of our system. Pray for strength to deal with each one of them at your own pace and time. If we move forward from here and resolve to change ourselves for the better, I trust that in the years to come, we will be more authentic Christians, living the life we have always wanted.

Here’s wishing you all a blessed, victorious New Year 2010.

Friday;s Recap (111209)

Dear Cell, let me caution you first: this letter is not a letter about answers. It is in fact a letter generating more questions than answers. Answers to what, you may ask. Well, answers to all the questions you have about God, His existence, His love and His power. For those of you who attended Cell last Friday, the discussion was a challenge to our faith. The challenge was this: How do people come to the conclusion that there is no God or that God is cruel and sadistic? How do you answer them? Let’s go for the jugular. Professor Richard Dawkins, an atheist extraordinaire, will take the first shot at our religion with this shockingly invective quote, “God is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloody thirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicial, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously, malevolent bully.” When you finally come exhausted after poring through the Oxford dictionary to find the meaning of those big, long words, you can take this rabid quote as the signature, all-compassing mantra for all non-believers with a religious axe to grind. It is like a convocational pledge, a national anthem or an initiation oath-taking for the hot headed atheists, the narrow-minded agnostics and the vindictive free-thinkers.

But, the implied question yesterday was this, does Dawkins have a point? Maybe not the whole spiteful load of it. But the undertones and sentiments behind his quote are unmistakable. Without misquoting Dawkins, I think we can say that he is of the view that there is no God. Or, at least the probability of His existence is so marginally negligible that it is as good as taking it as a generally accepted and universally sensible confirmation that there is no God. Period. And you don’t need to be a Professor to share this sentiment with Dawkins. You can be a preschooler and still be able to identify with him. A year ago, my son, who was only six years old, casually asked me this question, “Daddy, how come God can hear us, and we cannot hear God?” Of course, this is not exactly an expression of doubt by a young boy but it is the cornerstone of all theological questions about the existence of God. It always starts innocently enough and, if left on its own to fester, it can grow into something catastrophic for the devout Christian parents, possibly leading to a renunciation of one’s faith. So, we as Christian parents have a sacred duty to fulfill and that is, to protect our children from the pernicious thinking that comes with Dawkins quotes. But how do we do that? Do we have better answers to offer that will annihilate all doubts?

Honestly, when Jezer asked me that question, I took it quite seriously. I thought it was too early for him to challenge me in that way, so nonchalantly, so disarmingly and so innocently. But of course, I knew Jezer didn’t realize the full theological weight behind that question. But I knew as the years roll by, when he grows older and wiser, the question will be less innocent, less amiable and maybe more confrontational. The older Jezer will want an intellectually satisfying answer and expect me, as his father and a cell group leader, to give it to him.

At this stage, many religions have come forward to offer their answers to a variant-form of the same question posed by Jezer. When the tsunamis struck South East Asia and took the lives of fathers, mothers and young children alike, altogether 250,000 lives were taken that fateful boxing day of 2004, the religious journalist, Gary Stern, went around mosques, temples, churches and secular communities to scout for answers and he wrote a book about it entitled, Can God Intervene? His question was simple enough but the answers were far from simple. He started off with this, “Is the mystery of God’s role in the tsunami any different than the mystery of God’s role when one innocent person suffers?” The question makes two presumptions about God. First, God has a role in all the natural disasters in this world, whether man-made or otherwise. Second, God’s role was and is and will always be a mystery, largely unexplained and situationally obscure.

Well, the theologically correct answer is that there is no difference. God is equally mysterious in both situations. There is no way to know why natural disaster happen in a place and time we least expect it to strike and take away so many innocent lives and why an individual has to suffer unexplained illness without any fault on his part. If it is a mystery, it will always be a mystery and explaining it fully will only take away the mysterious elements out of it, thereby making it a known fact rather than a mystery. Of course, telling my son that it is a mystery will do little to sate his intellectual appetite. He would want to know why it is a mystery. Or, is it just another tactic Christian parents employ to avoid answering the question?

Here, the atheist’s answer would be the easiest and even most tempting. In the book, Gary interviewed David Silverman, who is the national spokesman for American Atheists, and his answers were the most rational of them all. “If you combine benevolence with omnipotence and all-powerfulness, you can’t have natural disaster…Either God sent the tsunami, which means he is not a nice guy, or he didn’t know it was going to be there, so he’s not omnipotent, or he couldn’t stop it, which means he isn’t all-powerful. You can’t get all three. If you think about it, natural disasters disprove most religion, especially Christianity.” What is even scarier is that Silverman became an atheist when he was only 6 years old (my son’s age) when he said, “I realized that God is fiction. I kept asking questions and getting non-responses.” Silverman did not stop there. His religion bashing was most frightening and vitriolic with this conclusion in the book, “(Silverman) thinks most people are atheists. They innately understand that life doesn’t make sense and that no one is in charge. But they pretend to be believers so they don’t have to face the truth. They don’t want to deal with it, so they pretend that they believe in the invisible, magic man in the sky. That’s why when you challenge them on it, they get so defensive, angry or withdrawn. Prayer is a form of self-hypnosis so that people can convince themselves they’re not going to die. A natural disaster is a shot of reality. People doubt mythology when they’re confronted with reality.”

Well, my only wish is that my son is not as “enlightened” as Silverman was when he was six years old and took a path wholly different from mine.

At this juncture, I can get a little creative with my answers. I can tell my son what Reverend Tony Campolo once said. Basically, Campolo conceded that God was not in control of everything. He said that God limited His power by personal choice. It was the same choice He made when He sent His son to be slaughtered by His own creation. By sending Jesus, God made a conscious choice to limit His power by not interfering when Jesus was scorned, whipped, bound, tortured, ridiculed, misjudged and crucified. The bloodied, wretched and dejected face of Jesus at the cross was the epitome of God’s self-imposed restraint of power. It was therefore for a greater purpose that God had tied up his own hands. It was for universal salvation that God chose to turn his face away from Jesus at Calvary. As for the tsunami and all such natural disasters, I can tell my son that God chose not to act because that was the only way we could experience the full plethora of what we humans constantly clamor for, that is, “freedom of expression, will and choice.”

Take a personal example in this case. If I want my son to grow and mature, to learn from his mistakes and be independent, I would have to let go and let him do things his way sometimes. I cannot be controlling him 24-7. I cannot be telling him what to do, how to do it and why he should do it the way I would do it. For example, I cannot tell my son who he should love, how he should run his adult life, and what career path he should take. My son just has to muster the courage to take that first step on his own and sometimes suffer the consequences arising from his own personal choices. Furthermore, it is not on every occasions that the adage “Father knows best” is fully applicable. I could be wrong about things, misjudging them, or just being careless about it. So, my son should be left on his own to grow and mature. By extension, this example, however imperfect, is the same reason why God left us alone at times to learn, grow and mature. In other words, God cannot be chaperoning us all the time. By analogy, we will have to spread our wings on our own and take flight at our own pace. So, don’t expect God to be holding on to both our wings and flapping them for us. This will only ground us further instead of lifting us up.

And by leaving us alone, this will inevitably result in some hurt and pain in our lives as we face life’s challenges head on.

Of course, this explanation suits us fine when we are talking about pains of life that bring about our growth. There are many lessons to be learnt from failures. Many people are invariably stronger, wiser and more resilient after a financial or business debacle. But how do I explain to my son about meaningless and pointless sufferings in this world. Surely, God shouldn’t restrain His power to help when an innocent wife is crying out to Him for healing from Aids which she got from her unfaithful husband. Yesterday, we talked about a little Thai girl sold into the brothel at a tender age of 12. When they raided the brothel and entered into her tiny squalid room, they found many prayers for help scrawled on her wall – most of them were left unanswered by the one person who has the power to help. She had suffered so much despite her constant, daily cry for help. It is therefore tempting to ask, Where was God when she was forcibly taken by greedy mercenaries and sold like a cheap chattel to be repeatedly violated by perverted, STD-infected men, thereby ruining her life for life?

At this point, if my son is intuitive enough, he will pester me with these questions: Why can’t God be more discerning and discriminating about his choices to limit His power? Can’t He protect the innocent, defend the weak and make a way for the sincerely earnest without compromising the integrity of our free will and choice? Can’t a perfect God strike a perfect balance between divine intervention and humanity’s freedom of will?

Maybe, I should change tack or strategy. In respect of natural disasters, I should look at my son eyeball to eyeball and tell him that there is a scientific reason why tsunami happens. It is call shifting plate tectonics. I should tell him that there are several plates in this world holding continents and countries together. There are the Indo-Australian plate and the Eurasian plate. And when these dynamic plates shift or move violently, they cause natural disasters. There is therefore nothing divine or devious about it. As such, we do not throw a few manslaughter charges at these huge geological moving plates and pronounce them guilty. How about cancer? Maybe I can tell my son that cancer works almost the same way – sometimes they strike because of man-made choices in the food they take and the lifestyle they adopt and sometimes because of blind random genetic mutation without assigning any blame, and sometimes both are contributing causes.

In fact, another way of looking at it is that cancer is the disease of the rich, well-off and long-lived. You see, during primitive times, the mortality rate is usually high and many died young. By dying young, they were spared the pain of contracting cancer because cancer is generally the disease of the relatively old. When we age, our cells become more unstable and they tend to mutate and these harmful mutation multiplies or metastasizes, causing the dreaded cancer. So, in biological terms, there is always a trade-off; that is, the good and bad in all things. It is generally a blessing to grow old. But in growing old and enjoying the fruits of old age, there are also the despicable weeds of old age and they come in the form of neurological decay like dementia or genetic haywire like cancer or vascular entropy like stroke.

In like manner, in geological terms, the earth we live in is the only planet, as far as the human telescope can capture, that can support a bio-diversity of life. We live in harmony and peace on this planet because the conditions are just right for us and all other living organisms. It is somewhat like a beautiful Garden of Eden on Earth except for some expected trade-off like earthquakes, tsunami, volcano eruptions and hurricane. In other words, in order for the majority of us to live, some unfortunate minority will inevitably perish in a way that seems unfair, cruel and mysterious.

Lastly, my son should know that no action stands alone on its own. There are ripple effects for every action sowed. One man’s policy may result in another’s tragedy. If a mother chooses to smoke, she risks a miscarriage, or worse, her child may bear the consequences of her actions. If a man seeks easy and quick profit, he may sell his young daughter to a man three times her age for a price. If the leader of a nation gives in to peer pressure and chooses to engage in war with a country for the flimsiest of ideological reason, we can expect a lot of civil casualties, resulting in future recriminations and revenge, and the cycle of violence can go on and on without stopping. So, there you have it, causes and effects are part of the reason why sufferings are so prevalent in this corrupt world.

In the end, I should know that my adult son will not be completely convinced by the above answers; because they appear to generate more questions than answers or more heat than light.

So, when that day of reckoning draws nigh, when my adult son ever come to me for answers, I would have to tell him what I told you guys all these years, “Son, I can’t give you an intellectually satisfying answer to your question, but I can give an emotionally fulfilling one.”

Let me share with you this passage from the book God on Mute authored by a church-planter Pete Greig.

“A story is told of the Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he was imprisoned by Stalin in a Siberian gulag. One day, slaving away in sub-zero temperatures, he finally reached the end of his endurance. Discarding his shovel, he slumped onto a bench and waited for a guard to beat him to death. He’d seen it happen to others and was waiting for the first blow to fall.

Before this could happen, an emaciated fellow prisoner approached Solzhenitsyn silently. Without a word of explanation, the prisoner scratched the sign of the cross in the mud and scurried away. As Solzhenitsyn stared at those two lines scratched in the dirt, the message of the cross began to converse with his sense of despair. “In that moment, he knew that there was something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that the hope of all mankind was represented in that simple cross. And through the power of the cross, anything was possible.” Picking up his shovel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn slowly went back to work.”

Beloved, Jesus is all we need and all we have to give to my children. He is the spiritual legacy to our loved ones. In their short life on earth as compared to the eternity that awaits, our children’s faith will surely be tested and it is of no practical use to tell them that God, like a tall dark charming prince in a shining armor, will come to their rescue every time they cry for help like a damsel in distress. Do your children a favor and don’t mislead them by telling them God is some kind of a celestial Arnold Schwarzenegger, forever arming himself with machine guns, readying to aid us, and perennially sprouting the catch-all phrase, “I’ll be back.” Your children will not be immune from troubles and troubles have no eyes sometimes. They do not choose who will be their next unlucky victim. They just strike when the biological, geological and made-made clock is up. But with every storm, comes the sunshine. By the same token, with every sunshine, lurks a storm. As long as we are on earth, living our lives in human flesh, limited by these mortal bodies, we are vulnerable to life’s challenges, however unfair they may be.

Ultimately, when the storms of life come, when our lives are being tormented by circumstances beyond our control, we can choose to echo these haunting words of the atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell:-

“We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and to emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness. But it is a voice of one drowning; and in a moment the silent returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful; the unhappiness of most people is very great.”

Or, just maybe, we can turn our eyes upon Jesus and cry out to Him with this sincere prayer.

“Abba, Father, I know all this stuff about Your love in my head, but my heart gets hard to it and I’m tired. Please do whatever You’ve got to do (and I mean whatever) to unclench my fists. Pry open my eyes so that I can see Your tears and soften my heart so that it moves me deeply. I don’t understand why You don’t just answer my prayers, but I do choose to trust that You have heard me, that You actually do care and that You’re somewhere out there on my case. Abba, Father, thank You for all the ways You have blessed me. I honestly don’t know what I’d do, where I’d be or even who I’d have become without You. Abba, Father, I am going to try to trust You today. Amen.”

Beloved, the choice we, or more relevantly, our children will make will ultimately depend on how we have been living our Christian lives in their eyes. Let’s send a clear message to them. Let’s live out our faith so that when our children face their own crisis in life, they can always think about how we overcame ours and draw strength and courage from it to overcome theirs.

Have a meaningful Christmas with your loved ones.

Friday's Recap (271109)

Dear Cell, last Friday we tried to thaw our hearts from the frigidness of indifference. If the purpose of life is to live life with a purpose, then indifference or apathy is the antithesis (opposite) of living life with a purpose. The worst conviction in life is to have no conviction or to be “convicted” by nothing. When asked the question, are there things that I keep feeling inner promptings to pursue? some of us could not come up with anything. It was a literal blank slate or tabula rasa. Worse still, we have become tabula Teflon. Let me explain this description.

We all love to cook, or at least love to eat what is cooked. We are familiar with the cooking material Teflon. It is a flat plastic found at the base of a frying pan that prevents burnt food from sticking to the pan. It is of course easier to fry where nothing sticks to the pan. But in the lingo of conviction, that description is far from being a compliment. The sad thing is that for some of us, nothing really sticks in our hearts. We attend church services, belt out worship songs, listen to sermons and offer ourselves to the ministry but our hearts remain like tabula Teflon, where nothing seems to influence our thoughts and actions. We are drifters, spiritual vagabonds, going on life untouched, unfeeling. Some of us are consciously aware of this insidious form of apathy but choose to add more apathy to apathy by doing nothing about it. In the end, questions like what would I do if I knew I had only six months to live? When my life is over, what will I be glad I did? What do I really do well? come unstuck from our hearts and we pass away conviction-less.

For these people, the hardest thing to do is to make new-year resolutions. Their resolutions are never fulfilled because they only pay lip-service to these goals. If goals are dreams with a deadline, then these people are dreamers for life. They do not feel the urgency of their goals and they remain unaffected and unmoved by their dreams to take that all-important step to make a difference in their lives. This brings me to the point of this letter. The opposite of indifference is to make a difference and this is where we have to take a spiritual retreat from the busyness of our life, the hustling and bustling, the toiling and feuding, and reexamine the beliefs that we have accumulated all these years as a Christian. For some, we need to do an overhaul of our belief system, to weed out the clutters, and to look at our Christian life from another perspective.

Yesterday, we talked about the struggles of Abraham and his son, Isaac. We all know the story. To put it bluntly, it is a story about child-sacrifice. But what made it even harder for Abraham to offer Isaac as a human sacrifice was the contradictions in God’s promises to him. Imagine, being told by God that you are going to be the Father of a great nation, and your descendents will be as innumerable as the stars in the nocturnal skies, and having the faith and endurance to wait until you are over a hundred years old before the promise came to pass when your ninety years old wife gave birth to your one and only heir to the throne. Then, imagine further that when your precious boy reaches puberty, the same divine creator commanded you, in no uncertain terms, to slain your beloved son to Him as a sacrifice. Well, I guess on that fateful day, witless Abraham was speechless and poor Isaac was clueless. But was “capricious God” heartless?

Beloved, I have a confession to make: I used to think that He was. God was playing with Abraham’s life, toying with Isaac’s and getting a twisted kick out of it. I used to think that God was exploiting Abraham for his own pleasure, making a drama out of a poor soul’s life and enjoying every inch of it. God’s command to sacrifice Isaac was tantamount to telling a cancer patient that his cancer is in remission only to laugh out loud later with these words, “Gotcha? Just pulling your leg!”

Allow me to sidetrack. This week I have learned that knowledge without conviction is arrogance or ignorance. And conviction without knowledge is fanaticism. Let me deal with the first part only: Knowledge without conviction is arrogance or ignorance. Beloved, I count myself as reasonably knowledgeable. I am a voracious reader. My interest ranges from politics and world affairs to economics and even history of witchcraft and pagan religions. But all that knowledge without conviction is true ignorance. Why? Because when the heart remains untouched, the mind can only know and not truly experience. There is therefore a big difference between merely knowing and living out what you profess you know. The former is self-aggrandizing. The latter is life-transforming. The Bible reserves the worst rebuke for the former class of Christians, “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power.” (2 Tim 3:1-5)

In short, Christians who do not practise what they believe have a “form of godliness” but do not have the power that comes with it. In my view, that is true ignorance, that is, an ignorance devoid of the power to change oneself and others around him.

With this in mind, let’s go back to Abraham. Although I openly admired Abraham’s faith to follow God’s commands all the way to Mount Calvary, I secretly doubted God’s goodness and His sense of fairness. How could God make such a macabre request that ran completely and directly opposite to his promise to Abraham? I came to this view because I only knew God from what I’ve read about Him in the Bible and had therefore failed to experience Him and His love in a personal way, with conviction. This is where what I’d said earlier applies fully: Knowledge without conviction is true ignorance.

When I opened my heart to the ministering power of His spirit, I gradually understood to a certain extent the significance of God’s command to Abraham. I came to see the sacrifice of Isaac in a whole new light or perspective. In other words, I finally realized that it is not so much about the “blind faith” or the tough faith of Abraham, or the tragedy of Isaac’s sacrifice. The moral of the story goes deeper than that. It is about Jesus and God’s compelling love for us. You see, most atheists would read this account and judge God as having murder in his heart or at least, charge God with attempted murder or murder by hire (using Abraham as his personal assassin). My counter is this: If God had wanted to murder Isaac, he would have either done it himself (which is much quicker and less messy) or get Abraham to sneak up to Isaac when he was asleep and plunge a knife into his heart. But God did neither. And here is the message.

God deliberately made Abraham walk Isaac all the way up to the hills of Moriah. The journey took a back-breaking three days. As we are aware, this is the same hill that Jesus would be sacrificed at Calvary two thousand years later. The walk was painful for Abraham. But it was even more painful for God. For God knew in advance that He would restraint Abraham’s hands from taking Isaac’s life, but He will not restraint his own hands from taking his beloved son’s life at the Cross of Calvary. This is the pain that God had to go through when Abraham took the walk with Him to the hills of Moriah. It was a lesson that God didn’t want Abraham and any of us who reads this painful account to forget. And the lesson is this: whilst Isaac’s life was spared, Jesus’ life was not.

When God stopped Abraham from taking Isaac’s life, He commended him for his faith and said, “…Now I know that you fear (love) me since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” Beloved, are we able to say back to God in the face of Jesus’s gruesome death on the cross these same words, “…Now I know you (love) me since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”? If love is action, not mere words, then God has indeed proved his love for us by offering Jesus as a sacrifice for our salvation and freedom.

This then is the crux of the message of Abraham’s story. God is trying to demonstrate His love for us in the most personal, comprehensible and humane way. His call for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac was to allow us to experience vicariously the compelling love God has for us. And the only way to experience it to the closest degree possible is for us to imagine the pain and agony of taking something that is precious to us, something that we cannot live without, and giving it away completely and irretrievably in the same way that God had allowed Jesus to be killed by His creation. In the end, it was men who had murder in their hearts, not God.

When God put Jesus, His only son, on the cross, He only had us in His mind. The compelling, overriding mental preoccupation for God was how to reconcile us back to Him once and for all. God made the calculation, the agonizing deliberation, when he walked with Abraham and Isaac to the hills of Moriah and deemed it worthwhile to offer his most prized “possession” in exchange for us and us alone. Beloved, doesn’t this make us reconsider our faith a little? Doesn’t this make us want to take our faith more seriously?

At this juncture, God is asking us this question: Can I walk with you, son or daughter? God wants to take this walk with us to the Hills of Calvary. He is asking us to bring along our most prized possession in this journey. He is asking us whether we are prepared to do what Abraham did. That is, whether we are prepared to offer to Him what we have mistakenly thought was indispensable in our life in exchange for a lifetime of blessing that will more than compensate what we will be giving up. In other words, are we willing to give up our material possessions, our career, our successes, or all our earthly idols, for God and trust that God will in return bless us manifold? This is of course a tough question and a difficult challenge and it is very personal to those who will, at some point in their Christian life, face with the existential compulsion to answer it.

Our earthly idol may be money or the love of it. It could be the insatiable appetite for earthly titles, fame and possessions. Like the rich young ruler, Jesus issued the same challenge to him and we all know the sad outcome in Luke 18:22. The rich young ruler lacked the one thing that was required for him to follow Jesus. This was the same one thing that was lacking in the life of Martha. For the rich young ruler, it was his wealth. If he had followed Jesus, he would not have lasted long because his heart was somewhere else.

As for Martha, it was her busyness that kept her from enjoying a rewarding relationship with Jesus. It is said that we all live in a rat race of ever-increasing desires for success and wealth, an ever-descending spiral for fame and self recognition, and an ever-expanding circle for love and companionship. And yet, after achieving all that we have aimed to achieve, possessing all that we have set our mind to possess, we are still no closer to finding a sustaining, lasting peace in our hearts. There is still something lacking, something that just doesn’t feel right. I know this not so much from personal experience but from reading the honest and sincere confessions of wealthy people who have attained all that society has to offer to them. Most of them are still incurably unsatisfied and endlessly striving for the next new thing that would give them an interim sense of peace, hope and security. Alas, all is but a mirage and nothing could truly give them an anchorage of peace, hope and security. Beloved, what is the one thing that you lack, or the one thing that you are unable to let go?

The irony about the rat race metaphor is that ultimately, when we finally have it all, that is, everything that others could only dream about, we are still nothing but a “rat” in the race. To transcend that, to rise above the “rat” metaphor, we need to take that all-important walk with God to lay our earthly idols on the sacrificial altar. It is at this altar that God will whisper these words to us, “If you put me above everything, I will put you above everything.”

Let me end with this quote that coincides with the theme of this letter from the writings of a renowned philosopher, “There once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”

Have a warm, meaningful December holiday.

Friday's Recap (131109)

Dear Cell, last Friday we talked about “hot air balloon” Christians. These are Christians whose words are louder than their actions. They make many promises but do little to fulfill them. They are blank-cheque Christians whose bank balances are as empty as their claims. We should be mindful of them lest we become like them. Talk is indeed cheap. Action is golden. GK Chesterton once wrote, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and not tried.” The worst label you can hang on a Christian is the word “hypocrite.” It basically costs little to be a hypocrite. Nothing much is expected of you as a hypocrite. The only requirement to qualify as one is to never cease to not practise what you preach. It is therefore easy to be a hypocrite but difficult to be authentic. That is why the words of GK Chesterton are so haunting for us as Christians living in a world where the temptation to inaction, the seduction of indifference, and the lull of personal convenience are so strong and irresistible.

Sadly, the life of Jesus is a life of great personal challenge and none of us should take it lightly and for granted. When Jesus made the personal call to carry the cross and follow him, he is not inviting us to live a life of smooth sailing, conveniences and luxury. It is not an invitation to treat, a call to pleasure or an offer for lifetime enjoyment. The cross is heavy not so much to the body but to the spirit and the soul. The weight comes in the form of a genuine heart transformation and not a change of external circumstances. Let me explain. Jesus did issue a promise to us. This promise is that we will have abundant life and have it more abundantly when we believe in Him. But what is this abundant life? What does an abundant life entail? Does it mean a life of exceeding wealth, good health and success guaranteed?

Well, this is the shocker…it encompasses much more than that. An abundant life is more than wealth and health. It is more than material success. But here is the qualification. What I mean by “an abundant life is more than wealth and health” is that we may not necessarily be wealthy and healthy by becoming a Christian. But, and here’s the cruncher, we are more than wealthy and healthy when we truly experience a genuine heart transformation. Many Christians do not see it this way because it is so unattractive and unappealing. Where is the "bait" for evangelizing to a non-believer by telling him that a Christian will have trouble just like anyone else? What’s the catch for a non-believer if we tell him that there is just as much chance that he will die poor as he will die rich? Or he will die young? Or he will die under the randomized hand of cancer, heart attack or stroke?

Beloved, I am a Christian realist. Another name for a Christian realist is “Beatitudians”. My faith is based on the reality and profundity of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermons of the Mount (Matthew 5:3-10). If you take the time to read these few verses, you will note that Jesus had specifically reserved a list of blessings for those who demonstrate certain qualities in their Christian life. Some of these qualities are a broken spirit, a mournful soul, a humble heart and a desire for righteousness. These are the qualities that Jesus said will be the recipients of his Father’s blessings. In fact, there is even a blessing reserved for those who are persecuted for righteousness and the blessing is spelt out as the gift of God’s eternal kingdom of heaven. The ultimate reward is our eternal rest in heaven (Matthew 5:12). So, where are the blessings for getting rich, being famous, living a long life? There are none and they are secondary to those blessings listed by Jesus in the Sermon of the Mount.

Of course, I am not against wealth and good health. On the contrary, I believe that Christians are just as entitled to them as non-believers. But, what I am against as a Christian realist is the unbalanced sermonizing that wealth and good health are the inalienable entitlements of all Christians and if we do not have them in the long haul, then there is something terribly wrong with us. This message is contrary to what Jesus has taught us in the Beatitudes. We should not forget that wealth and health are not synonymous with faith. The truth is, I have heard of and seen many wealthy good Christians living to a ripe old age as well as poor ones dying young. If you read about the history of Christian martyrs in China, you will see true faith in action, some of whom had given their lives in sacrifice to God with nothing to their names – not a nickel, not a dime. They died admirable deaths, suffered nobly in the face of torture, and lived without wealth or chattels, many whose names will never be known or documented, except in the Book of Life.

I sincerely believe that the quality of our faith as a Christian is in the changing of our character for God, that is, to be more Christ-like, to seek after His righteousness, and to live with a pure heart. Ultimately, the goal of a life well-lived for God will be one where we are able to profess these words with conviction, “Whatever to my profit, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in Him.” (Phil. 3:7-9). I guess our disappointments in Christian life come from unmet expectations and these unmet expectations are a result of pegging our hope to better circumstances rather than a better character. We must come to a point to accept that things are not going to change for the better just because we are believers. It is just plain wrong to expect problems to magically disappear, sickness to vaporize, and relationships to be restored upon our petitioning them to God. Well, I am not saying that our problems will remain unresolved when we do petition them to God. But I am saying that we are not in heaven yet and we cannot expect bad things to go away instantaneously just because we pray against them.

As a Christian realist, our hope is not in the reality that our life is going to be a bed of roses. In all probability, it will not be. We are all going through our own personal struggles to live an authentic Christian life. At the cell, we identified four inner struggles we all face. The first struggle is the overcrowding of our soul and the common refrain here is this: “I’m too busy”. Indeed, our busyness distracts and disrupts us from other worthy pursuits in our life. In our busyness, we have forgotten what is important and what is not. In our busyness, we have subconsciously surrendered all control and aspects of our life to our work. In the end, we have no time for God. Once we were firebrand for God. Now, we are drenched charcoal. When we have little time for God, we reduce our religion to the practice of what CS Lewis call, “parachute theology”. Our religion now becomes like a parachute strapped to our back. And we will never bother to use it unless and until a crisis strike. For some, they may even bring their unopened parachute to their grave.

This parachute theology also reduces our relationship to God into a commercialized one. We gradually treat our religion as a transaction for self-benefit. God then becomes a Santa Claus character. Soon, we will come to God expecting more from Him rather than offering ourselves to Him. God then becomes the God of our wants who is at our beck and call. Patrick Morley, the author of Seven Seasons of the Man in the Mirror, wrote, “There is a God we want, and there is a God who is. They are not the same. The turning point of our lives is when we stop seeking the God we want and start seeking the God who is.” Beloved, this is what we must guard against: To see God as a vending machine rather than a passionate Creator who deeply desires our communion with Him. It is time to take time in our own hands and reprioritize our life. We control our time; we determine our focus. We must make an effort to return to God and to develop a relationship with Him instead of treating Him as just a dispenser of good gifts and nothing more.

Our second struggle is that of the cynicism of the mind and the customary complaint here is, “I doubt”. We all have doubts; at one time or another. By doubting, we are actually admitting to God that we are trying to understand Him through our limited, finite human mind. Alas, no one can fully understand God, or comprehend His ways, His mind and His plan. I have my doubts too. But such doubts are even greater when I remove God out of the equation and place my trust on science to offer the better answer to our existence and our origin. Science alone does not have the better answer. Science can only answer the “how” and not the “Why”. Science alone cannot answer questions pertaining to the meaning of life and how we came about. It may be within the province of science to tally up the physical laws of this world but not the “law” of love and the “rules” of human creativity and consciousness. Surely, science cannot encapsulate all of a person’s rich personal experiences into a formula or an equation.

In the end, all my atheistic searches lead me back to the open arms of my savior and to His assurance that He will one day give me a full account of everything so as to reconcile all my doubts with full understanding.

The third struggle is the paralysis of the will and it comes with this usual utterance, “I can’t”. Beloved, we have altogether lost a sense of divine urgency in our pursuit of all things spiritual. We need to take a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday grinding and start to ask ourselves these questions: What really matters to us? What would we really like to accomplish? What legacy would we like to leave behind? Until we can answer them and answer them with conviction, we can stop making or renewing new-year resolutions because we will never fulfill them. Without an underlying motivation for our actions, all our new-year resolutions will just remain as wishful thinking and die stillborn. We have to seek out our first love for God and renew our passion before we can live an exemplary and victorious life. This is our basic Christian responsibility and to settle for anything less is to squander our opportunities for growth in our Christian walk. At this point, a relevant saying comes to mind, “In order to reach the moon, it makes a difference which way you point your rocket, up or down.” By the same token, in order to live a victorious Christian life, it matters where you direct your efforts, towards a sustaining and rewarding relationship with God or to go the opposite way. Although it is merely one choice away, it would be the greatest and toughest choice you will ever make in this life. So, press hard for it.

The last struggle is the primal wounds of the heart and the typical expression is “I’m hurt.” All of us are hurt in some ways. For some, our emotional wounds are still unhealed and bleeding. There are just too many things we do not understand about our hurts, and why they should come at such a bad time and stay with us for so long. We sometimes blame ourselves for our pain. At other times, we even blame God. There is just no one-size-fit-all answer to all our pain and sufferings. Our pain is individually felt and personally experienced and we will have to meet God on this very individual and personal level. In other words, we just have to deal with them on our own; confronting God for assurance and asking for strength and peace to carry us through.

Recently I read a story told by DL Moody that inspired me to look at our personal sufferings from a fresh perspective. It is hoped that the story below will make you see your trials differently and imbue in your spirit the strength and hope to brave through your own afflictions.

“Dr Andrew Bonar told me how, in the Highlands of Scotland, a sheep would often wander off into the rocks and get into places that they couldn’t get out of. The grass on these mountains is very sweet and the sheep like it, and they will jump down ten or twelve feet, and then they can’t jump back again and the shepherd hears them bleating in distress. They may be there for days, until they have eaten all the grass. The shepherd will wait until they are faint that they cannot stand, and then they will put a rope around him, and he will go over and pull that sheep up out of the jaws of death.

“Why don’t they go down there when the sheep first gets there?” asked Moody.

“Ah!” he said, “they are so very foolish they would dash right over the precipice and be killed if they did.”

Moody then concludes this story by saying,

“And that is the way with men; they won’t go back to God till they have no friends and have lost everything. If you are a wanderer I tell you that the Good Shepherd will bring you back the moment you have given up trying to save yourself and are willing to let Him save you His own way.”

Beloved, God is saving you in His own way. Perhaps you should let go now and let God rope you up from your abyss. Cease struggling to break free from your trial with your own strength and learn to rest in the saving arms of the Good Shepherd.

Have a restful week ahead.

Friday's Recap (301009)

Dear Cell, last Friday we discussed about unscriptural convictions and then we examined its undesirable impact and influence. Predictably, we got carried away and started to go into the heart of what is currently wrong with Christianity and how we personally felt about it. Of course, we are not qualified socio-religious commentators or ecumenical (whole Christian Church) pundits. But our discussion did shed some light into the disturbing dark side of beliefs. We talked about how a famous mega-church pastor once told the media that he wished he had a Holy Ghost machine gun so that he could use it to hunt down his enemies (here means his critics). No matter what faith or religious background you come from, that statement would surely send shivers and chills down your spiritual spine. It is just a wrong statement, morally and spiritually. The televangelist should have known better but somehow bad taste and bad judgment got the better of him.

Then, we talked about false prophets, people who used the name of God for self-gain and self-popularization. Basically, God’s name was used by them for their own sake and not for His kingdom. Of course, false prophets come in varying sizes and degrees. Jim Jones and David Koresh are unmistakable examples of false prophets. Their warped doctrines and egregious deeds say it all about their egomaniacal personalities.

But the Bible has a broader definition of a false prophet and 2 Peter 2:1-3 gives us a good footing on this, “But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them…Many will follow their shameful ways and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up.” This is a sobering warning for Christians to keep watch and pray for people I label as “Jesus-less Christians”. And the only way you can tell them apart from the rest is the fruits that their life and ministry bear. Jesus said that it is by their fruits that you shall know them and indeed there is no better way. When in doubt about a person or a ministry or even a church, the best advice is to take the “wait-and-see” approach.

In the meantime, we do our part to suspend all judgments and keep our noses clean until such time when all that really matters are revealed. We must trust that our God is the God of truth and truth like a flooding light in pitched darkness cannot stay hidden, covered or suppressed for long. All you need is a crack or a leak in the character or ministry and the shaft of light will pour forth and expose the corroded structures. When that time comes, we can all taste the fruits for ourselves and see whether it is sweet or rotten.

What is sad about the emergence of all these false prophets and teachers is that they thrived richly and grandly under our consummeristic culture. It is like oxygen to them and their ministry. And when they thrived, they also bred in the hearts and minds of their congregants the message that self-satisfaction is better than self-sacrifice, convenience is better than conviction, and prosperity is better than poverty. There is in fact no easier, more convenient and more seductive evangelistic bait than a religion that does everything for you, costs you nothing, is readily available at your beck and call and comes with a lifetime warranty of an eternal bliss. This is what some churches are peddling or selling to their congregation. Beloved, our faith has been commodified. It has been packed, branded and marketed in return for profit like any secular businesses in this world. I think the label “McChurch” describes it well.

Like McDonald, some churches are growing both locally and internationally. They have global networks, branches, offices, and headquarters. They own large estates, private amusement parks, shopping malls, grand mansions, getaway resorts, private companies, a stable of luxury cars, and lots and lots of cash and investments. I think a famous quote (attributed to a former Chaplain Richard Halverson) expresses the cultural phenomena best, “In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then, it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.”

What’s wrong with all these ownerships?

Let’s be clear about one thing. God owns everything, the “here and now”, the “there and beyond”. All that our eyes can see and cannot see, God owns it all. Who is therefore the real owner of this created world? God is and He will forever be. So, we should never forget who is the real Owner. (the operative word is “never”) CS Lewis, with his characteristic wit, once wrote, “He who has God and everything has no more than he who has God alone.” Indeed, God is all we ever need; everything else is costume jewelry. Having said this, I issue you this challenge: Can you come to a stage whereby you can, with a lifted spirit, sing this hymn to our God, “…turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of this world will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace,” and mean every word of it? Beloved, this is not a personal call to poverty and to sell all your earthly possessions. But it is a call to stewardship. We may own all things on paper, like title deeds, shares certificates and promissory notes, with our names on them; but we mentally attribute true ownership to God. We become His stewards, tending to His gardens, managing His investments, and preserving His properties. We dedicate all that we have to God and use them for the expansion of God’s kingdom. We practise what I call Christian Capitalism, using our wealth responsibly to bless others first and in turn be blessed by them.

Beloved, the risk of having more in this world, that is, bigger houses, bigger bank accounts, bigger cars, bigger ambition, bigger reputations, bigger accomplishments, is the risk of not having enough. I trust that all of you are and will, in one way of another, prosper in your own time and in your own way. Some of you will progress faster than others in your career, gain more in material blessings, and be recognized for your accomplishments. Money is of course important; but to the same extent that balance and contentment are equally important, if not more. There’s a saying that if you want to see a person’s true character, give him power. If you want to see the effect in double quick time, give him absolute power. This applies, with equal force, with money. Of course, we all know that money doesn’t corrupt. Money is amoral. That much is agreed. But it is not money that we should be worried about; it is the money-handler and his corruptible intentions that should be guarded against.

Here, the words of former Chaplain Richard Halverson deserve another full quote, “Jesus Christ said more about money than any other single thing because, when it comes to a man’s real nature, money is of first importance. Money is an exact index to a man’s true character. All through Scripture there is an intimate correlation between the development of a man’s character and how he handles his money.”

Jesus had warned us repeatedly about money in his short lifetime on earth because it concerns our soul and spirit. His admonishment to the rich young man was the hallmark of his many teachings (see Luke 18:18). No one should doubt the sincerity of the rich young man on his desire to follow Jesus just like no one should doubt that he was extremely wealthy. He was also a perfectionist, I guess. He listened and obeyed every commandment in the Old Testament since he was a rich young boy. So, he was both a say-er and a doer. By any standards, he was a “good Christian” way ahead of his time. Yet, we know that he was not shortlisted to join Jesus’ ministry because he had self-disqualified himself.

Although his attitude towards everything in life passed with flying colors, his attitude towards money flopped big time. In the end, he just could not envision a life following Jesus without wealth. I think CS Lewis’ adage above does not apply to him – he wants both God and everything. His attitude is such that wealth is inseparable with life. One cannot live without the other. Sadly, I think the rich young man had missed Jesus’ point altogether. I like to think that Jesus did not literally want him to sell everything and give them all to the poor – at least not immediately or in the near future. If I may be allowed to engage in some scriptural adventurism, I would like to think that Jesus wanted the rich young man to experience a change of heart first before he proceeds with a change of behavior. For it is with a change of heart that we can truly be transformed for good and forever. Borrowing the words of Confucius would be proper here, “Wherever you go, go with your heart?” I guess if the rich young man were to follow Jesus, he would have left his heart behind – a heart for all his wealth.

Beloved, what is your attitude towards money? Is it your master or your servant? Of course, at this stage, most of us do not have enough to allow it to lord over us. But it is not in the quantity that counts; it is in the quality. We can have a heart of avarice or greed without having a lot of money. We can secretly strive for personal fame and recognition on the pretense of doing good and performing charity. We can camouflage blind ambition as human aspirations and progress. You therefore don’t need money to be corrupted; you just need an un-surrendered, rebellious heart. Matthew 6:21 puts it best, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.”

So, let’s go back to McChurch. Here are some of the rotten fruits that these false prophets or teachers frequently produce to mislead their gullible flock (and the central theme in all their teachings has to do with self-enriching on a grand scale either in terms of gaining more money or more fame)

1) False Promises and False Hopes. Many of them will tell you things you want to hear and, because you want so much to hear them, you more readily and more easily believe them - hook, line and sinker. Many sincere Christians have become easy target for the outlandish, unscriptural promises coming out from the mouth of these false shepherds of God. Now, I want to be brutally honest with statistics here. There have been claims of resurrections, growing of amputated limbs, and healing of terminal cancer, among other dreaded diseases. There is even a ministry that specialized in a program called “Raise the Dead”. However, statistics do not lie. These so called “miracles of God” were, for reasons unbeknownst to most, always anecdotal, after-the-facts, and poorly documented.

When confronted for objective verification, these faith-healers were unable to reproduce the same miracle in the eyes of an impartial public and, to save face, they never failed to give lame excuses for their inability to “conjure” up a miracle; as if God only works miracles under spotless and pristine conditions. I am submitting that there are reasons to doubt the claims made by them not so much because of a lack of proof but of a lack of character and integrity. You shall know them by their fruits. The lives of these false prophets say it all. Most of the time, their ministries are about money; the more the merrier. Fame and recognition comes at a close second. One international televangelist even threatened the public that if they held back their seed money from him, his god would charge them 20 percent (interests) and take it away from them through tragedy!

Another went to the extent of blackmailing his congregation by telling them that if his ministry does not raise 1.5 million dollars by a certain deadline, his god will take his life! Imagine being forced to give by the threat of death. Still another told his congregation that he once visited heaven and saw Jesus personally and yet, at another point in his life, he testified that he had allowed demons to possess and take control of his body, thrashing it from one wall to another! You just can’t help but squirm in confusion about such unbiblical baloney.

2) False visions. Seeing vision and dreaming dreams are one of the main operandi modus of these self-styled faith healers. One pastor claimed to have been to heaven and he saw Jesus. He described Jesus as having the loveliest brown eyes he had ever seen; very much like those of Bambi’s. Jesus was also radiating with many colors and one of them that shone the brightest was pink. He also saw the apostle Paul and he described him as short, bald and monk-like.

Another pastor claimed to have numerous out-of-body experiences and one of them took him to a place where he was having a discussion with Jesus. In the middle of it, a demon monkey leapt out from nowhere and created a racket. After a while of monkeying around, the pastor took control of the situation and commanded the demon monkey to shut up in the name of Jesus. Then, what’s most disturbing were these alleged words of Jesus to the pastor, “If you hadn’t done something about that (demon monkey), I couldn’t have.” Imagine Jesus, the one who overcame life and death, was completely helpless until the pastor took charge! Beloved, I am not denigrating dreams and visions. I believe there are authentic visions like that of Jesus’ transfiguration. What I am against are dreams and visions for its own sake, in particular, for self-glory. To see through these fake imaginings or illusions, we have to constantly pray for discernment and spiritual maturity.

3) False Guilt and Fear. I believe that true guilt and fear lead to a heart of conviction and true repentance. The Bible says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This is the fear that draws us closer to God. But the guilt trip and fear that the false prophet plant in the hearts of his congregations are of a different nature altogether. A pastor once told his church that any pastor who does not accept what God had told him would “fall dead in the pulpit”! In another incident, the pastor’s wife doubted what she saw in a service when a woman levitated from an altar and stood in mid-air dancing. Immediately, the pastor’s wife was “slain” by the Spirit of God and was glued to the floor. She writhed in pain for a while, struggling to stand up. However, all her efforts were in vain until she acknowledged that she was wrong.

Sadly, there are many out there who are held spellbound by these false prophets and their cultic sway. Most of them elected to stay compliant in their respective ministries because they were afraid of spiritual reprisals when they leave. Some of them were even stunted in their faith through guilt. Thanks to the twisted teachings of the so-called shepherds of God, they repeatedly blame their circumstances and their sickness on their lack of faith and trust in God. These helpless souls are literally at the mercy of their spiritual leaders and the latter continues to subjugate them by injecting guilt into their spiritual veins with one hand and dangling false hope with the other. In the light of this, one can identify with these words from the mouth of a non-believer, “Religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.”

4) Lastly, False Teachings. One pastor admitted that he regularly visited grave sites of dead evangelists in order to assimilate the “anointing’ from their bones. He also said that the Holy Spirit once told him that women were originally designed to give birth out of their side! Although these pulpit ramblings seem silly and ridiculous, there are some teachings that are serious enough to warrant some attention and addressing. A pastor once preached this, “Do you think that the punishment for our sin was to die on a cross? If that were the case, the two thieves could have paid your price. No, the punishment was (for Jesus) to go to hell itself and to serve time in hell separated from God.” Well, I didn’t know the two thieves were “God’s begotten children” and part of the Trinity! Anyway, Jesus said it was finished at the cross and not in hell. His victory and our salvation were secured when he died on the cross. The idea that Jesus had to serve in hell like a common prisoner before we can be saved is a dangerous idea and, if we do not take care of what we listen, such ideas can grow wings, distort the truth, and derail our spiritual walk.

Another false teaching is the prosperity teachings so popular among the charismatic circles. One pastor claimed that Jesus wore designer’s robe, lived in a big house, had a rich ministry, and rode on a brand new donkey. Another pastor barked, “…the reason why I drive a Rolls Royce is because I’m following in the step of Jesus.” Well, with such cheap sloganeering and racy advertisements, who wouldn’t want to be a Christian?

As an aside, I can understand why this is so from a limited perspective. In life, all of us, with no exceptions, want to prosper both physically and professionally. We want the best for ourselves and our families. Who doesn’t want promotion, increased salary, recognition, power, and health? If we are honest enough, we will admit that we want it all; if possible, as soon as possible. And there is nothing wrong with wanting it all per se. Well, I will not deal with the issue of money and our heart since I have already dealt with it at length previously. At this point, I just want to balance things up. I want to give you a realistic credit and debit of life’s accounting. In essence, Jesus never promised us a rose garden. But He did promise us a garden Gethsemanes when He said, “In this world you will have troubles. But, behold, I have overcome the world.”

Somehow, there is something insidious and patently wrong with the hundred-fold prosperity message. Those prosperity preachers who exalt the goodness of God and promise that for every seed money sent to them, God would bless the giver a hundred fold back, are terrible economists. Picture this: if everyone were to give to these money-leeching ministries, holding nothing back, and what was promised to them (that is, a hundredfold return) was fulfilled without exception, then, imagine the chaos in the world economy! There will be runaway, hyper-inflation with prices of goods and services skyrocketing to the economic stratospheres! Too much money chasing after too little goods would mean that a loaf of bread may very well cost a million Singapore dollars and we will have to wheel-cart bundles of cash all the way to the mall just to buy a bottle of milk. I guess such promises are just too far removed from reality to be believed and yet many were nevertheless hook-winked by the “hundredfold” bait just like many were fleeced by the Madoff scheme. I can also guess that the only one enjoying the hundredfold return is the one who made the empty promise in the first place. It is therefore the spiritual con-artists who are laughing their way to the banks.

In the last cell, I shared about one scripture that convicted me deeply when I was a new Christian and it still holds great important to me today. The relevance of this scripture to my message will become clear soon enough. John 12:24 puts it eloquently, “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” Beloved, this is the heart of the message. This is Jesus’ message and His legacy for all true believers. The credit and debit of life’s accounting is based on this scripture. The credits to being believers are this: our life is transformed from darkness into his marvelous light. We are saved and our eternity is secured. As long as we trust in God, we will always have this hope and this hope is powerful enough to carry us through life, even through the toughest of times. This is the good news. Empowered by this news, we then live our life with faith, hope and love. We live our life as if on borrowed time and do our best in all our endeavors. Prosperity may come our way when we live for Christ. We may become successful. We may have lots of money and real estate. We may have good health and a strong, united family.

Or we may not. We may suffer illnesses, some even life-threatening beyond our control. However hard we try, our family may break up because of a prodigal spirit. Our career may careen off track and temporary poverty becomes our lot. We may experience early death in a family or sorrow too painful to speak of. So, don’t let the prosperity preachers take reality away from you. Don’t let them wind you up with false hopes and empty promises. Our hundredfold blessing has already been given to us at two points in history: one was when Jesus died in our place and another when He went before us to prepare our mansion. Beloved, don’t give your blessings away to the spiritual con-artists and sell away your birthrights.

In life’s interim, Jesus’ message is this: Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. Beloved, we cannot be a blessing to others if we do not let go of the blessing we hold in our hands. We are “seeds to be planted” and are of no use to God’s Kingdom if they remain above ground. But to plant them in God’s soil, metaphorically speaking, is to give of ourselves to Him completely. Our surrender is what is required of us in exchange for an abundant life; not necessarily in wealth and health. But in a definite victory that Jesus experienced two thousand years ago, that is, a victory over life unceasing strivings, over life’s pain and sorrow, over the sting of death, and of the enduring assurance that God is good and He will make all things good again in the end, be it in our lifetime or in the life to come.

On this note, I will let 1 Peter 2:21-23 (The Message) bring us home,

“This is the kind of life you’ve been invited into,

the kind of life Christ lived.

He suffered everything that came his way so you would know that it could be done,

and also know how to do it, step by step,

“He never did one thing wrong,

Not once said anything amiss.”

They called him every name in the book and he said nothing back.

He suffered in silence, content to let God set things right.”

Have a hundredfold week ahead!