Remember that you are dust and also a child of God

During the Ash Wednesday service at Queenstown Lutheran Church, Rev Lim Kim Hock marked my forehead with black ashes in the sign of the cross and said, "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." This brought to mind my hospice patients I had seen earlier in the day. It is so true that unless and until we come to terms with our mortality, we cannot live our lives meaningfully. In psalm 39:4 the psalmist cried out, "Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered - how fleeting my life is."

After the service, Rev Lim told us that we are not to clean off the cross but to let it fade away on its own. I was reminded of the Upper Room devotion for Ash Wednesday I had read earlier in the morning - that the cross is to mark us as members of Christ's family and to remind us of our responsibility to live as witnesses for Christ. I wondered if I would have the courage to go to work the next day with the cross marked on my forehead.

When I woked up the next morning, I came across the following passage from David Eckman's book, "Knowing The Heart Of The Father":

"By faith, we must confidently and transparently come into the presence of God the Father. Whether we are struggling with lesbianism or homosexuality or pornography or an eating disorder or a thousand other weaknesses, we bring those problems to the Father to be sorted out - because we believe He does not define His relationship to us based on our problems but on the righteousness provided by Christ."

Then, as I looked into the mirror, I found to my surprise, that the cross on my forehead has gone! This gave me the insight that true faith is based on what Christ has done for us on the cross and not what we expect God to do with our problems. David Eckman made the very important point that "God does not see us the way we see ourselves” and that “God is not evaluating us and giving us black marks.” God is patiently waiting for us to come to Him as His child.

Later that morning, I was further encouraged by the following prayer of Esher Shoshannah:

"Dear, dear Beloved Lord Jesus, my heart is overwhelmed by such thoughts. I overflow with joy and adoration for You. Cause me to see more and more of what You see in me. Cause me to grow in my surrender to You. Take out all things that do not please You. I love You too much to have anything knowingly come between us and disappoint Your heart! Thank You, Father for having set me in Your plan for my life,"

Thank God for the lesson this Ash Wednesday that I may be made of dust but Christ came to give me new life as a child of God.

Victims of success or Victors in suffering

The sudden death of Whitney Houston shocked the music world. Her death brings to mind the recurring refrain in Ecclesiastes that the human pursuit of success and happiness is all meaningless - like chasing the wind. When we march to the drum beat of the world we will end up becoming the victims of our very successes.

The good news is that Jesus came to make us victors over suffering in this world. His betrayal, death on the cross, and his resurrection has conquered evil, suffering and death. Christ’s death on the cross redeems us from our sinful natures. And His life in us as we surrender our lives to His Lordship gives us hope and strength in the midst of the trials, tribulations and pain of our human lives. We become victors in suffering and suffering is transformed into a glorious testimony of the amazing grace of God.

When we live our lives as victims, we are full of complaints and excuses. Our lives are filled with problems and difficult people. On the other hand, we can choose to live our lives as victors by learning to give thanks in all circumstances. As we do so, we will see our problems and difficult people as opportunities to grow the fruit of the spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.

We do not have to prove our worth through success and wealth in this world. We are already successful and wealthy and even more important, we are the precious children of God when we accept the gospel truth that God loved the world so much that He gave His one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but will have eternal life (John3:16)

We can face and overcome suffering when the truth that life is not about us but the Christ who is in us takes root in our hearts. Only then can will the truth that everything works for good to those who love God be real in our lives.

Sinful Saint, Saintly Devil or Redeemed Sinner

Last Sunday, we were visiting a friend in Taiping and she brought us to the Taiping Gospel Hall's service. The focus of the worship service was on Jesus as the Passover Lamb and the redeeming power of the blood of Christ. The Upper Room devotional for that Sunday morning was also about the effect of sin in our lives.

Unfortunately in our modern society we have, as the psychiatrist Karl Menninger pointed out nearly forty years ago, criminalized as well as medicalised sin. Consequently, the police and the doctors have taken over the place of the priests in dealing with some of the negative and destructive behaviors arising from the evil in our human nature which had previoously been called sins. The criminals in turn become the scapegoats that are to be sacrificed. Some aggressive, expensive, unpleasant, hurtful, and even obnoxious behaviors are seen as “illnesses.” Such illnesses are then defined as coping devices and an “automatically chosen lesser evil and an attempt to make the best bargain possible.”¹

For our spiritual health it is critical to see sin as the ‘stain” causing a block and breakdown in our relationship with our Heavenly Father. Jesus Christ died on the cross to remove this stain so that we can live a life of repentance and restored relationship with our Heavenly Father. But without repentance and confession, we are unable to remove our stain of sin.

Sin is more than the things we do or do not do. It is a state of being in which we are dead to God and living in the darkness of our human feelings, thoughts and actions. David Eckman makes the point that Jesus died not only to save us from sin but to deliver us from the chaos of our inner lives. In his view, the chaos caused by the domination of our inner life by unwholesome appetites, negative moods and selfish thinking is worse than cultural or family chaos.²

When we focus only on our salvation, we will be filled with anxiety about losing our salvation as we try desperately to live our Christian lives as sinful saints. We know we are called to be saints but time and again we fail to be as loving as we think we should be.

On the other hand, we may be tempted to become so self absorbed in our salvation that we may become saintly devils. David Eckman had encountered Christians with a self-focused faith who became a white-collar criminal or an expert at taking sexual advantage of women.³

But when we are alive to God, we are redeemed sinners on the way to recovery from our addiction to our appetites, moods and our faulty thinking. We are in the state of being in love - our appetites are directed towards a desire for God, we are filled with the love, joy and peace of the Holy Spirit and our minds are transformed and renewed towards seeking the will of our Heavenly Father.

We will be conscious of our sinful nature but we are set free by the power of the Holy Spirit to cultivate a loving relationship with God through the Living Christ in us. So let us encourage one another to live out the following words of the song, Just Let Me Say:

"So let me say how much I love you.

With all my heart I long for you.

For I an caught up in the passion of knowing

This endless love I've found in You

O the depth of love and forgiveness found

To be called a child of God

Just make me say how much I love You

O my Saviour, my Lord and Friend

Notes:

1. Karl Menninger, Whatever Became Of Sin, page 86-109

2. David Eckman, Knowing The Heart Of God 68

3. David Eckman, Knowing The Heart Of God, 74

Redeeming Evil

On our holiday in Bali over the Lunar New Year, we saw a Balinese dance - The Barong Kris Dance. It was a play which portrayed the battle between the good and evil spirits. The good spirit was personalized as a mythological lion called the Barong. It brought to mind the picture of Christ as Aslan the Lion by C.S. Lewis in the Chronicles of Narnia. The evil spirit was depicted as a monster called Rangda.

The battle between the good and evil spirits were played out in the life of a young man, Sadewa. His mother, Dewi Kunti, had promised to sacrifice him to Rangda. Through anger, the servants of Rangda kept the people in the life of Sadewa from having compassion on him and they brought him to the forest to be eaten by Rangda.

However, God intervened by giving immortality to Sadewa. This turn of events led Rangda to repentance and to ask Sadewa to redeem him. Sadewa then killed the Rangda and sent him to heaven. It was a beautiful message of how evil can be redeemed by the power of God's Love where there is a spirit of repentance.

Then a servant of the Rangda called Kalika came to Sadewa and asked him to send her to heaven too. When Sadewa refused, she became angry and she became a Rangda with great spiritual powers. To counter her powers Sadewa meditated and became a Barong, the good spirit in the form of the mythical lion. His followers then continued to fight the war with the Rangda. This story describes the Balinese mindset of how good and evil are locked in an endless struggle.

This dance gave me a deeper understanding of three important aspects of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Firstly, emotions such as anger, greed, lust and pride are the channels through which evil possess us and turn us into devils. In the bible, we have the example of Cain killing his brother Abel. Psalm 4:4 teaches us:

"Don't sin by letting anger control you. Think about it overnight and remain silent."

The apostle Paul also warns us not to let anger give a foothold to the devil (Ephesians 4:27).

Secondly, we need to see evil as being the opposite of life - it has been noted that evil is "live" spelled backwards. When our actions and desires are motivated by our egos, they can become channels for evil. It is only in the surrender of our desires for the higher good and the dying to self that we can live in the Kingdom of Heaven in the here and now.

So we see the first Rangda being redeemed when it surrendered to Sadewa. On the other hand, Kalika became another Rangda when she demanded to go to heaven on her own terms.

This helped me to appreciate the description of "dead works" by Ralph Shallis as the "repugnant attempts of our old nature to "buy off" God or impress men with the assumption that we are really worth something. They are the bitter fruits of our ego's effort to appear something other than we are. They stem from pride and self-interest, not from sacrificial love."

Good works, on the other hand, are "the mature and spontaneous flowering of the life of the Spirit within us, the expression of our new-found love for God. We cannot be "secondhand" witnesses of Christ. Ralph Shallis makes the point that all we can say to the world about Jesus is what we actually know of him in our experience. We don't have to work up or "manufacture" our witness. As we witness courageously to the simple and limited experience of Christ in our lives, the Spirit of truth will give power to our feeble witness.

Thirdly, we need to remember that the battle against evil belongs to God and He has already won the victory through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. One of the powers of the Rangda in the Barong Kris myth was his power to get the followers of the Barong to turn their kris swords on themselves. But the Barong protected his followers with a spell to protect them against the sharp kris swords. Likewise we can be thankful for the breastplate of righteousness of the spiritual armour of God in the spiritual warfare with evil. Our righteousness is from our faith in the redeeming work of Christ on the cross.

We all have the potential for good or evil - we can become saints or devils. God has given us the free will to choose for this is the essence of Love. The good news is that Jesus died and rose from the dead to give us the power to surrender our wills and seek the perfect will of our Heavenly Father. We will then experience the joy of salvation - living like it is heaven on earth.

The bad news is that we can refuse God's gift of salvation and choose to live our lives on our own terms and in our own ways. We can seek to do our own will and run the risk of evil forces turning us into devils through our greed, lust and pride. The temptations by the evil one will lead us through our sinful nature to a hell on earth.

We are called to be soldiers of Christ to redeem the evil in our world. So let us join Charles Wesley in singing the hymn, "Soldiers of Christ Arise":

"From strength to strength go on,

Wrestle, and fight and pray,

Tread all the powers of darkness down

And win the well-fought day:
Still let the Spirit cry
In all His soldiers, "Come!"
Till Christ the Lord descend from high,
And take the conquerors home.”

The Love Languages Of God

At my nephew’s wedding last week, we sang the hymn, O Perfect Love. It is a hymn that paints perfect love as the love that transcends all human thought and a love that knows no ending. Perfect love is the love that is seen through the perfect life of Jesus Christ. It is the love empowers us with patient hope and brave endurance as well as the childlike trust that does not fear pain or death. It is the love that gives the joy which brightens earthly sorrow and the peace which calms all earthly strife.

Unfortunately, we have a distorted view of love - we define love in terms of our feelings and what others will do for us. We are like caterpillars crawling and seeking for love to satisfy our bodily desires. But God wants us to be transformed into butterflies who will be His agents to pollinate the world with His agape love.

We need to reframe our picture of love – to see love as God’s desire for us to make the best use of our lives. He has created us in Christ Jesus to live lives filled with good works that He has prepared for us to do (Ephesians 2:10). But before we can make a difference with our lives we need a transformation of our inner life. We need to experience God’s love so that His love can be in us and flow through us to others.

Dr. Gary Chapman, a marriage counselor, has written about the five love languages – Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Physical Touch, Receiving Gifts, Receiving Gifts and Acts of Service - to help couples understand how they can show love to one another. God is our Divine Lover and we need to understand and appreciate the five “love languages” of God’s love.

Firstly, the bible is the means by which God gives us His Words of Affirmation. Too often we study the bible for information instead of meditating on the scripture and let God reveal His Love to us.

Secondly, prayer is the Quality Time that God wants us to spend with Him. But we see prayer as merely a time to present God with our requests or confessions. Prayer is a time of being with God and sharing with Him our hurts, fears and concerns. It is a time to be still and to listen for His loving guidance and wisdom.

Thirdly, although it is not possible to feel God's physical touch, the Holy Communion reminds us of the broken body of Christ as well as His precious blood to wash away our sins. As we eat the bread and drink the wine in the Holy Communion, we can reflect on how much God loves us for Christ died and rose from the dead to open a new and living way for us to come before the throne of God. (Hebrews 4:16, 10:20).

Fourthly, we have been given the gifts of the Spirit to help us in our struggles, suffering and temptations in our daily lives. We can see our difficult times as opportunities to receive the gifts of the Spirit. In fact, we are to give thanks IN our struggles for they are the soil for us to bear the fruit of the Spirit.

Finally, we have the church as the Body of Christ to give as well as to receive acts of service. The early disciples provided their world with their practical example of love by sharing and caring for one another (Acts 2:44, 4:32).

The Love of God is the essence of life. We can draw nearer to God's love through prayer, bible meditation, the Holy Communion, acts of service and receiving the gifts of the Spirit. May the Perfect Life of Christ in us empower us to share the Perfect Love of God with others in the power of the Holy Spirit as we celebrate the new lunar year of the dragon.

The Power & Wisdom of the Gospel

Recently I saw a Christian patient whom I was encouraging to stop smoking. He told me that he cannot stop smoking as nicotine is his life. He had been deceived by the evil one and in bondage to his addiction. He was also afraid of dying.

I felt led to remind him of the truth that Jesus, and not nicotine, is our life. The good news is that we have been crucified with Christ and that it is no longer we who live but Christ. And when Christ is our life, to die is not a loss but our gain. Furthermore, we can do all things through the strength of Christ who is in us.¹

How true it is that "a change in one's lifestyle doesn't bring about salvation." But salvation will always bring about a change in one's lifestyle. It is only by leading others to Christ that their morals and lifestyle will ultimately change. For the root cause of all the problems in our society is sin - our separation from the love of God.²

Last Sunday was the day in the liturgical calendar when we remembered the baptism of Jesus. In his sermon at Queenstown Lutheran Church, Rev Lim Kim Hock posed the question, "Are we missing something?" He drew our attention to the important truth that we have been baptized in the name of Christ and have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit.

His message together with my encounter with my patient opened my eyes to the truth that we will live without the power to love and face suffering and without the wisdom to overcome evil when we do not fully grasp the gospel truth of Christ crucifixion, death and resurrection. We will struggle with our weaknesses and sins when we do not fully appreciate what our baptism in Christ means.

David Eckman made the point that we need to see the emotionally significant events in our lives from God's perspective through the cross of Christ.³ It is only when we do so that we will be able to understand what it means to be crucified with Christ, to be alive in Christ and to live by the power of the Holy Spirit.

If we live by the truth that we in fellowship with Christ's suffering, it will change our attitude towards the pain and suffering we face in our lives. If we have experienced the reality of our baptism that we have died and buried with Christ, this will empower us to overcome the temptations of this world and the evil one. If we believe that we have been raised with Christ and are new creations in Him, we will seek to discover our new life in Christ.

Like a seed planted in the ground, the dying to our old self does not occur overnight. Like a pupa that is in the process of being transformed into a butterfly, we need time for our spiritual formation. So let us remind ourselves of God’s great salvation as we sing Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Love divine, all loves excelling”:

“Finish then thy new creation; pure and spotless let us be.

Let us see thy great salvation, perfectly restored in thee:

Changed from glory into glory

Till in heaven we take our place,

Till we cast our crowns before thee,

Lost in wonder, love and praise.”

References:

1. Galatians 2:20, Philippians 1:21, 4:13

2. Greg Laurie – Beyond, page 24

3. David Eckman – Becoming Who God Intended, page 159-160

Perfect Submission, Perfect Delight

2012 is the year that some have predicted will be the end of the world. For me, it started with two birthday celebrations - a birthday of a church and a birthday of a friend. But these celebrations were followed by the funeral of the wife of an old friend on the second day of the new year.

On the third day of the new year, I encountered three women suffering from cancer and an elderly relative in hospital who expressed their wish to die. I realised how badly we need the unspeakable joy of the Holy Spirit in a world that is becoming more and more depressing for more and more people. We need the secret of finding joy in the midst of sorrow and suffering.

The first day of 2012 was a Sunday and I was led to attend the worship service of Charis Methodist Church. It was their 23rd church anniversary and they renewed Wesley's Covenant Prayer during the service. It was the Prayer that I had ended the year 2011 with in the watch night service at the HV Preaching Point of Barker Road Methodist Church about 12 hours earlier. Wesley's Covenant Prayer thus assumed a special significance for me in the new year of 2012:

"I am no longer my own, but Yours.

Put me to what You will, rank me with whom You will;

put me to doing, put me to suffering;

let me be employed for You or laid aside for You,

exalted for You or brought low for You;

let me full, let me be empty;

let me have all things, let me have nothing;

I freely and heartily yield all things to Your pleasure and disposal. And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, You are mine, and I am Yours. So be it. And the Covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in Heaven. Amen.

At the Charis Methodist Church anniversary service, Bishop Robert Solomon spoke on "The Covenant to be Faithful." As he shared the lessons from the book of Nehemiah of how quickly and easily the Jews had made and broke their covenant with God, I was initially convicted by the feeling of being “double condemned” if I fail to live up to the covenant I had made at the end of 2011 and at the beginning of 2012.

However, Bishop Solomon made the point that Jesus came to give us a new covenant. This gave me a fresh insight which freed me from the guilt and shame of not being able to keep my covenants like the Jews in the time of Nehemiah. Our human tendency is to make and break covenants and resolutions. But the Good News is that we have a faithful and loving God who is our Heavenly Father.

We may break our covenants but God will never break His covenant to draw us back to His love. Wesley’s Covenant Prayer is therefore not a ritual we perform in order to become saints. It is a prayer of surrender to the Lordship of Christ so that we can live as the children of God.

The Covenant Prayer is the fruit of the spirit of repentance. Repentance is not just feeling guilty and being remorseful - it is to experience the sorrow of God so that we will be touched by His everlasting Love. Only then will Wesley's Covenant Prayer be "the response of a heart that has fallen in love with the God who reveals Himself in Christ."

2012 may not be the end of the world but it can be the end of my limited personal perspective of the world and life. It is only when I die to my egoistic self that I will be able to live my life from God's perspective. Sufferings, sorrow and difficulties will then become opportunities to die to self and to be more alive in Christ. Only then will I be able to face any storm and tribulation in the New Year with the unspeakable joy of our Lord and His peace which is beyond human understanding.

The following words of Fanny Cosby in her hymn, Blessed Assurance, comes to mind:

“Perfect submission, perfect delight.

Visions of rapture now burst on my sight.

Angels descending bring from above,

echoes of mercy, whispers of love.”

Perfect delight comes from perfect submission. God wants to draw us closer to Him so that we may hear His echoes of mercy and whispers of love. May we find perfect delight in our lives as we encourage each other with Wesley’s Covenant Prayer in this New Year.