G.O.A.T. or S.H.E.E.P.

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”   Ephesians 2:10

Singapore will be celebrating her 50^th birthday in 2015. The winds of change are blowing and the choices we make will determine whether Singapore becomes a cancerous red dot that is doomed for destruction or a bright shining red dot that is a beacon of light in a dark world of greed, lust and pride.

Christians in Singapore have the awesome responsibility to become citizens of prayer. Our calling is to be faithful witnesses of the truth that we are the children of God. Not only are we fearfully and wonderfully made but we are God’s masterpieces, new creations in Jesus Christ, created for good works. We are called to be ambassadors of God's Kingdom. We are the imperfect instruments of God's perfect will through the power of the Holy Spirit so that peace will come on earth.

We need a spiritual revival so that we will not be individuals seeking to become G.O.A.T. – the Greatest Of All Time, but we will become people who are S.H.E.E.P. – Seeing Heaven Everyday in Every Person. When we die, what will count is the love we have sown in the hearts of others rather than the achievements we have attained.  Two years ago, I attended the funeral wake of a 96 year old lady and was touched by the testimonies of her grandchildren and great grandchildren of the love she had given them. It was a love that flowed from her faith in Jesus Christ. She left them with a wonderful legacy of God’s providential care for her and the family.

Og Mandino, who has been described as a most widely read and inspirational and self help author in the world, made the following observation in one of his books:

“If all our lives are truly plans of God, someone had better call a meeting soon to remind us, once more, what great miracles we really are.”

Indeed, the most wonderful secret is that there is a miracle in all of us – Christ in us, our hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). The problem is that we tend to focus on our pain, suffering, failures and defeats rather than the opportunities to grow in our knowledge of God and His perfect plans for our lives in such times. 

 We are all looking for answers outside of ourselves instead of cultivating the spiritual disciplines to help us increase our awareness of the presence of the Living Christ in our hearts. It is through the disciplines of devotional reading of the bible, prayer and meditation that we can learn to die to self so that we can be filled with the love of God. We need to cultivate these important habits to overcome the bad habits of consumerism, materialism and elitism.

The greatest miracle is not what we can achieve in our lives but what God is doing in our lives each day.  The writer in the Upper Room devotional on 2^nd September 2012 reminds us that “living for God’s purposes makes us holy, and we are all special in our own ways. God created each of us different, for a unique purpose.”

So let us encourage one another to be S.H.E.E.P. – Seeing Heaven Everyday in Every Person. 

Dancing With God

All of us have an inner longing for guidance from God. It has been noted that guidance stands for God-U-I-Dance. A writer in an Upper Room devotional shared a valuable insight of God's guidance from ballroom dancing. The role of the man in ballroom dancing is to empower the lady “to express beauty, elegance, and grace.” She was only able to enjoy the dance with a partner who is confident in leading and guiding her steps. Her experience with dancing led to realise that leading is not dominance. God does not want to dominate us but He wants to lead us with His loving Hands so that our lives will reflect His beauty and grace to a world that is dominated by fear and chaos.

Our other misconceptions about God's will and obedience also keep us from living our Chrisitan life with joy. David Robert Ord saw God's will as an invitation rather than as an imposition. God is our Divine Lover who invites us to join Him to bring love to our loveless world. God is not a tyrant king who is bent on making us do His will. Obedience is not trying to fulfill the commands of an authoritarian ruler but the discipline of paying attention to the presence of God's Holy Spirit within us. Our Christian journey is to be one of joy and peace. Our faith in our loving Heavenly Father is, in the words of David Robert Ord, to be the “launching pad for a life empowered by both reason and passion.”

Repentance is also not feeling sorry for our wrong behaviours but recognising that we have wandered away from God's presence and seeking to turn back to Him. Likewise, confession is not a recitation of our sins but confessing our helplessness and our need for God's grace.

While holidaying on a cruise ship in September, my wife and I were watching two girls teaching Cha Cha Cha. The steps were simple:

Backwards, Forwards, To The Right

Forwards, Backwards , To The Left.

This gave me an insight about dancing the Cha Cha Cha with God:

Repentance is taking a step backwards followed by Confession which is taking a step forward. To the right reminds us that Jesus is Lord. We then take the step forwards through self examination followed by the step backwards into the world with a prayer to be the instruments of God's redeeming grace. And we take the step to the left as we praise the Lord. And so we can have a rhythm of Cha Cha Cha in our devotional life as follows:

Repentance – Confession- Jesus is Lord.

Self examination – Prayer – Praise the Lord

We are created to be the vessels of God's love and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in God. Nothing can fill our deepest desire for God. So let us pray that God will teach us to dance with Him so that our lives will be filled with passsion instead of apathy and resignation. Let us delight in the Lord so that we will pay attention to the desire to be windows of God's love and grace and not to be mirrosr of our selfish wants and needs.

Dying To Live

There are times when we find ourselves living lives of quiet desperation. We may feel like we are slaves living futile lives in an unpredictable and uncaring world. We feel unloved and we yearn to be loved. This leads us to become addicts to anything that will satisfy our hunger for love. We feel helpless and like Paul, we find ourselves doing the things that we do not want to do and unable to do the things that we want to do. We struggle with guilt and we wonder, as Paul did, “who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?” (Romans 7:18-19). We are physically alive but spiritually dead.

At such times some people, like the actor Robin Williams, are driven to seek suicide as a way out when they cannot find any meaning in life or are overwhelmed by their problems. Harry Emerson Fosdick drew attention to the truth that every person, sooner or later will find themselves in a “valley of decision” where the “death-wish” and the “life-wish” confront each other.

At such times, we are tempted to give up on life as a defeated person instead of seeing ourselves as God’s masterpieces in the making. But the good news is that we can use our difficulties, problems and limitations to become a new creation in Christ. We can be “dying to live” a life of redeeming love.

Dr. Tien-Sheng Hsu, a Taiwanese psychiatrist found that the root cause of cancer in his patients lies in their lack of self-acceptance and self-worth. He encouraged his patients to see cancer not as a death sentence but as a turning point for change in their outlook on life. He asks his patients to reflect on the following questions:

“If you do not work hard now;

if you do not live to certain standards;

if you do not live for the sake of other people;

if you do not care much about peoples’ opinions of your behavior,

what will you do?

Can you accept your own setbacks and non-endeavour?”

He defined failure as a form of success. Failure has been described as the runway to success. Dr. Tien makes the point that a temporary failure does not mean that a person is worthless. Unfortunately our modern society encourages only success and equates failure with being worthless. But life is full of ups and downs. When we accept only success but not failure, we will be very unhappy people.

We are all imperfect with a tendency to fall in our spiritual walk. To grow spiritually, we need to take Steps 1-3 of the Twelve Steps and live a lifestyle of repentance. We can acknowledge our helplessness with the hope that Christ is our Redeemer. Christ came to set us free from guilt that keeps us in slavery to sin and death.

Living a lifestyle of repentance is not paying attention to ourselves and trying to improve ourselves by our self effort. Such an exercise will only lead to an obsession with ourselves instead of “getting ourselves off our hands.” The objective of repentance is to increase our self-awareness and learning to accept ourselves as being imperfect but with the potential to be perfect as children of God.

The blood of Christ set us free to live as the children of God with the freedom to love ourselves and to love others as ourselves. We will not live up to the expectations of the world when we are seeking the perfect will and agape love of God for our lives. The discipline of repentance helps us to reflect on our lives each day to ask God to show us the attitude of self-criticism, the tendency to blame others and our hidden fears that we need to overcome each day.

Repentance is not feeling sorry for our misbehaviors. It is the coming to our senses that we have turned away from God and how much we are in need of His mercy and grace. It is acknowledging that we are spiritually blind and in need for healing for our spiritual blindness.

Jesus started his ministry with a water baptism by John the Baptist. This is the acknowledgment of the sinfulness of our human nature. The sense of guilt is more than our disobedience to God's laws - it is the consequence of sin in our human nature. The good news is that through baptism we have the means of grace to live a new life in Christ that is free from guilt.

We do not have to die physically to live spiritually. We can die to self through the baptism of our suffering so that we may be reborn to a new life in Christ. We can live our lives as the children of our loving Heavenly Father seeking to bring honour to His name. This is the zoe life.

THE JOY OF A SURRENDERED LIFE

We live in a world that glorifies independence and self-sufficiency. Rugged individualism is the idol of our modern society. As a result we fear old age as it is seen as a time of weakness and dependency. We live in denial of the reality that all of us will grow old and all of us will die – sooner or later. We cling on desperately to live the life of our own making and miss out on the life of wonder that God wants us to live.

Life is unpredictable, uncertain and full of surprises. Until we face this reality, we will be fearful of changes and angry when things don’t go the way we want them to go. We miss out on the joy of living a life with God – when we can turn our problems, our weaknesses and suffering into opportunities to experience God’s power and grace.

To seek a life with God we need to let go of our tendency to cling to the things that we think will give us independence and control over our lives. Only then will we be able to welcome the changes that come our way and turn our struggles and difficulties into times when we seek God’s grace to let go and to let God have His perfect way with us.

Our sinful nature drives us to seek God only when we have problems that we cannot solve or when we think we need supernatural help for achievements that will glorify ourselves. Billy Graham reminds us that becoming a Christian means that God will provide for our needs according to His standard which is higher than ours. We should not expect Jesus to make us rich or healthy or give us whatever our hearts desire. We are to exchange our will for His good, acceptable and perfect will.

God created us as creatures with a free will so that we can grow in love. We have the freedom to choose between good and evil as well as between the good and the best. But our sinful nature keeps us from choosing the best that God wants for our lives. This is why we need to live a life of surrender. A life of surrender is not a life of defeat – a resigned acceptance of God’s will for our lives. A life of surrender is a life of victory – a life of adventure that is seeking the perfect will of our Heavenly Father by receiving the wonderful gift of the Holy Spirit so that our minds will be transformed and taken captive to the mind of Christ.

To live a life of surrender is a commitment to seek the transformation of our minds and to be a living sacrifice. We are not thinking creatures that are in control of our feelings. We are feeling creatures who driven by our unconscious thoughts. Much of our conflicts with one another arise from our involuntary and instant reactions when someone press our emotional red buttons. Hence we need to become more aware of our feelings which are the signals and barometers of our distorted thinking.

God’s blessings are so abundant every day that we take them for granted. We complain about our inconveniences and disappointments instead of giving thanks for the many small blessings we have each day – the time we have with our family and friends and the food and homes that we have. We can thank God for the difficult people that we encounter as they drive us to seek God’s grace. We can thank God in difficult times as the dark nights of our soul draw us to a deeper experience of the God’s abiding Presence. We can even give thanks for cancer when we see cancer not as a death sentence but a messenger to number our days so that we will gain a heart of wisdom.

But it is no simple task to live a life of surrender. First of all we need the grace of God to deliver us from our slavery to our egos so that we will live a life of repentance. Secondly, we need the Holy Spirit to search our hearts as we live a life of self-examination and confession. Thirdly, we need to enthrone Jesus as Lord so that we will live a life of obedience. Finally, we need to live a life of prayer so that we will abide in Christ and be His Body to a suffering world.

PRIDE - THE SPIRITUAL CANCER OF OUR SOULS

The greatest and most common sin that all of us are guilty of is PRIDE. Pride blinds us to the truth that we are all trying to live as mini-kings in our ego kingdoms of me, myself and mine. Pride keeps us from searching our hearts so that we will come to God with a desperate desire for Him to change our hearts. We worship God not for Who He Is but what He can do for us. We live our lives as slave kings trying to please the King of all kings instead of living as the children of our Heavenly Father with Jesus enthroned as King in our hearts.

In his sermon on chapter four of the book of Daniel, pastor Jason Lim drew attention to the heart beat of the spiritual cancer of pride – “I did it” & “I deserve it.” We see the success of our lives and our children as the fruit of our tireless efforts and we look forward to enjoying the fruits of our success in retirement and old age. The world entices us to focus on our wants and our narcissistic desires so that we become blind to the needs of so many others in the world around us.

We forget that life is not about us. True life is all about the Love of God that Jesus Christ died to reveal to us. God has sowed the seed of love in our hearts but it has not germinated or bore fruit in our lives. Our hearts are like a pathway, a rocky ground or a garden full of weeds. The circumstances of life  - good or bad - reveal the condition of our hearts in our responses to them. Are our lives bearing thorns for others or the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control?

The most critical step of changing our lives so that we can become the persons that God wants us to be is the act of humble submission and the total surrender of our mini-kingdoms to our Almighty God. But the God of Love will not demand our surrender. He is not a despot King who overcomes with the love of power but our Divine Healer who uses our adverse circumstances and the difficult people in our lives as His chemotherapy for the spiritual cancer of pride. He is our Divine Lover who woos us with the power of love and is patiently waiting for us to come to our senses so that we will turn back to Him.

But even as we do so, we need to recognise that there is a war within our hearts between our desires and God’s desires for us. The good news is that the battle does not belong to us but to God. As soldiers of the Cross, we are to simply stand firm with the armour of God and let Him use us as His instruments of healing and change in the world within us and around us.

We need our hearts to be filled with God’s love so that we can speak the truth in love and to bear one another’s burdens. Rebecca Van Noord makes the very important observation that community is not just to meet our social needs but for us to challenge and encourage one another to live for God. It is when we take rebuke graciously and seek forgiveness from God that the bond of community is forged. On the other hand, when we rebel or when we are sensitive or prideful, rifts will be created in the community.

We cannot love our neighbour as ourselves if we do not first love God above all else. Paul Tripp drew attention to the truth that “our willingness to gossip, to live in anger, and trim the truth reveals something deeper than a lack of love for people. It exposes a lack of true love for God.”

Our love for God is often conditional on what God can do or what He has done for us. We also feel that God’s love for us is conditional on our obedience and good deeds. However, a true love for God and the steadfast Love of God is rooted in what Jesus has done for us on the cross. We are to love God unconditionally even if we are not delivered from the fires of our afflictions.

We also need to believe that God loves us unconditionally even though we may be unfaithful and disobedient. The Blood of Christ has washed away all our sins. It is only our pride that keeps us from opening our hearts to receive the resurrection power of Christ and the love of God that is revealed through Christ Jesus our Lord. May the words from Psalm 57:9-11 fill our hearts with joy this Easter:

“My heart is confident, O God.

My heart is confident.

I want to sing and make music.

Wake up, my soul!

Wake up, harp and lyre!

I want to wake up at dawn.

I want to give thanks to you among the people, O Lord.

I want to make music to praise you among the nations

Because your mercy is as high as the heavens.

Your truth reaches the skies.”

From Prison To Paradise

The season of Lent is a time for self-examination, repentance. It is not a time to feel guilty but to come to our senses and see our spiritual blindness, understand our spiritual deafness and feel our spiritual deadness. It is a time to reflect on our journey home to our Heavenly Father. Our love for Jesus may drive us to our knees but it is our cross that will bring us down to our face to become totally humble, repentant and dependent on God.

We try too hard to be Christians. We can become an irritant to others or even shoot our fellow Christians who are hurting instead of helping them. We become Job comforters trying to save others instead of leading them to Jesus Christ as their Saviour. We try to carry our own cross instead of crying out to God for help to carry our cross.

The crosses we face in our daily lives are not to punish us but to train us and to draw us to an even closer intimate relationship with God as our Heavenly Father. On the other hand, we can become enemies of the cross when we fail to understand what it means to deny ourselves or to die to self. We forget that we are soldiers of the Cross but the battle is not ours but the Lord’s. We are called to be followers of Christ and not to be masters of our destiny.

We are on an exciting journey to live in heaven in the here and now. A young doctor who was dying described dying as the greatest adventure of his life. We need to encourage one another to see old age as the greatest and final adventure of our lives.

Autumn is a very beautiful season and winter is a season of wonder when we see God colour everything beautifully white in a snowfall.  When we face losses in life, we are in the autumn of life. When we become dependent and our lives become enveloped with the snow of a terminal illness and we become dependent and bedbound, we are in the winter of life.

In such times, we have a choice – to see our lives as half empty or half full. We can try desperately to live as mini kings in our kingdom of one or we can ask God to deliver us from our prison of self and bring us into His kingdom of Heaven so that we can live in paradise in the here and now.

Heaven and hell are not just places we go after we die. It is a condition of our lives in the here and now. C.S. Lewis made the point that “hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others.” He reminds us that “it is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell - in each of us there is something growing, which will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

We are all addicted to the desire to have control over our lives, over others and our world. We forget that God's ways and not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts.  We have been brainwashed into trying to please God through our actions instead of cultivating an intimate and loving relationship with Him. It is our image of God that is distorted and in need of change.. The gospel is that Christ came and died on the cross to draw us back to our true identity as the children of God.

The gospel of Christ is the timeless truth in truthless times – that God loves us and sent His only Son, Jesus Christ to die on the cross so that we can be fully human and to enjoy an intimate relationship with God as our Heavenly Father in the here and now. In order to do so, we need to be Christ centered and to be Christ centered,  the Cross of Christ must be the centre of our lives.

The primary struggle of human beings is not about finding a purpose in life but reclaiming their identity as children or God. It is seeking to return to paradise and being at home with our Heavenly Father from the prison of our egos. There is a spiritual battle between the kingdom of self and the Kingdom of Heaven deep within our hearts. The good news is that the battle belongs to the Lord. The bad news is that we keep trying to fight the battle in our own strength. Our focus is on the tiny picture of our lives instead of seeing life from the big picture of God’s love for us and the world.

During this season of Lent, let us examine how we are living out the tiny picture of our lives instead of the big picture of God’s amazing love for us.

Lent - Facing Death To Live Well

We are all enslaved by the fear of death. We are spiritually sick and our souls are dying. But we are living in denial or blinded by our anger that our needs and wants are not met. John Welshons very perceptively describes our human condition as follows:

“Our cultural aversion to recognising the truth of our mortality is rooted in a psycho-emotional laziness that encouraged us to go to sleep in the first place.”

He quoted Don Juan on the transformative power of facing the reality of our own mortality:

“You don’t have time…. You fool!....Whatever you’re doing now may be your last act on earth….There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute… You have no time, my friend, no time. None of us have time.”

Weshons rightly noted that the above statement is not rooted in pessimism but in truth. We read in Psalms 90:12:

“Teach us to number each of our days so that we may grow in wisdom.”

In James 4:14, we read:

“What is life? You are a mist that is seen for a moment and then disappears.”

On Ash Wednesday the ritual of placing ashes on the foreheads of the worshippers is a celebration and reminder of our human mortality:

“Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”

Such reminders are so important as we live in a culture that avoids talking about death and so many of us are not prepared for it.  It is sad that so often we need to face a terminal illness before we begin to look at life differently, to change our priorities in life and to treasure each day and each moment of our lives.

 John Welshon rightly noted that one can live to be one hundred years old and still be confused, frustrated and embittered. On the other hand, one can die at the age of ten feeling fulfilled and complete. In the final analysis, it is not how long we live or even how well we live but how we have been the channels of God’s love and grace.

Lent is a season to draw close to God, to look at our lives and to identify our weaknesses. This is not a practice to make us feel sorry for ourselves but to recognise our need for the resurrection power of Christ. In a Charlie Brown cartoon, Linus told Charlie Brown, “Nothing goes on forever. All good things must come to an end. After some thought, Charlie Brown asked, “When do the good things start?”

It dawned on me that good things start when we come to terms with our deaths. Only then will we begin the journey from the prisons of our fear of death to the paradise of God’s eternal love. Unless we learn to die to our egocentric ways of thinking, we cannot be alive to God and to live in the Kingdom of Heaven in the here and now.

Lent is a time to reflect on the hindrances in our lives – greed, pride, lust, sloth, anger and other negative feelings that keep us from experiencing the presence of the divine in our daily lives. We also need to face our guilt and doubts that make us hide from God. 

Many of us are  “dying” for a life of happiness. Some of us are in the process of dying and need to prepare for a life beyond the grave. But all of us need to learn to die to self in order that we may truly be alive in Christ.