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.