Life is bittersweet

“And since we are His children, we are His heirs. In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share His glory, we must also share His suffering.” Romans 8:17

Life is bittersweet for we are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. St Paul in his letter to the Romans draws attention to a very important truth – that if we are to share God’s glory, we must also share the suffering of Christ. Enjoying the rights and privileges of being the children of God and heirs of His Kingdom comes from living out our responsibilities to honor God’s Name and to do His will on earth as it is in heaven.

Shaun Niequist described bittersweet as “the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a sliver of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness.” She noted that it is only when one has faced some kind of death and has our heart really broken – the loss of a beloved, broken dreams and fractured relationships – that one can appreciate the gospel of death and rebirth.

Ron Dunn rightly described the mystery of good and evil as the mixture of good and evil. We "idealize life" when our faith is based on our thinking that "if God is really working in our lives, nothing but good will come down." When our lives become stormy, we tend to react like the disciples who found Jesus sleeping at the back of the boat when they encountered a fierce storm. In our despair, we cry out, "Lord, don't you care that we're going to drown?" (Mark 4:35-38).

But the good news of Easter is that by the power of the Holy Spirit, we will be able to face the trials and tribulations of life with the peace that is beyond human understanding. We will be like Peter who was able to sleep even though he was fastened with two chains between two soldiers waiting to be tried and put to death (Acts 12:6).

All of us will have both sweet and bitter times in life. The question is how we are living through such times. We can become addicted to the sweet times and seek to make our lives sweeter even at the expense of others. Or we can celebrate our sweet times with thanksgiving and use our blessings to be a blessing to others.

We can live in fear of bitter times and let our bitter times turn us into bitter persons – we can be like Naomi who changed her name to Mara when she felt that God had made life very bitter for her (Ruth 1:20). Or we can build our lives on the Rock of Christ so that we will be prepared to face the storms of life. Only then will our faith not collapse like a pack of cards in the storms of life. Instead, in bitter times we can pray as Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane:

"My Father! If this cup cannot be taken away unless I drink it, your will be done. (Matthew 26:42)

Hannah Whithall Smith lamented that "it really would seem as if God's own children were more afraid of His will than of anything else in life….. If we but for one moment get a glimpse into the mighty depths of His love, our hearts would spring out to meet His will and embrace it as our richest treasure; and we would abandon ourselves to it with an enthusiasm of gratitude and joy that such a wondrous privilege could be ours."

True faith is not about what we believe in but about the faithfulness and everlasting Love of God. We will never be able to understand God’s ways but we can hold fast to our belief that His ways are far beyond anything we can imagine (Isaiah 55:8). The devil will seek to convict us of our unfaithfulness but the good news is that Christ died to set us free so that we can walk in newness of life as children of God in both the sweet times of life as well as the bitter times.

Shaun Niequist gave the following wise advice:

“When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.”

The hymn, O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go, was written by George Mathieson when he lost his eyesight as well as his fiancée. May the following verse inspire us to live the bittersweet life:

"O joy that seekest me through pain,

I dare not shut my heart to Thee

I'll trace the rainbow through the rain,

And feel the promise is not in vain

That morn shall tearless be.

From Fear To Love

"They trust in their wealth and boast of great riches. Yet they cannot redeem themselves from death by paying a ransom to God. Redemption does not come so easily, for no one can ever pay enough to live forever and never see the grave"

(Psalm 49:6-9)

The psalmist paints a stark reminder of the fate of all human beings - rich or poor, wise or fools. In his letter to the Romans, Paul draw our attention to the relationship between sin and death:

“When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned. Yes, people sinned even before the law was given. But it was not counted as sin because there was not yet any law to break. Still, everyone died – from the time of Adam to the time of Moses – even those who did not disobey an explicit commandment of God, as Adam did.” (Romans 5:12-14)

The story of Adam and Eve is to help us understand life and death by recognizing the reality of the spiritual dimension of life. Adam is our human nature - seeking to live a life without God - a life that is focused on trying to add years to one's life on earth. It is a life that is under bondage to the forces of evil that enslave us through our fear of death.

Jesus came to set us free from the fear of death and suffering by opening the way to God's throne of grace. Through Christ our relationship with God as our Heavenly Father is restored so that we can add life to our moments, days, weeks, months or years. In Christ we can do so whether we are young or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick.

Jesus came to transform our superstitious fear of God to a healthy reverential awe of God as our Creator as well as our loving Heavenly Father. We are then empowered to walk in God's ways and seek His will because we want to love Him with all our minds, our hearts and our souls.

But we will encounter the "desert" experiences of life and the dark night of the soul in the surrender of all that we are and all that we have to the will of God. Lent is a time to remind us that the road to eternal life is not a shortcut from suffering but a path through suffering. David Rensberger noted that the lesson of the desert is that we need to remain attentive to God and to stay utterly dependent on Him. As we do so, our neurotic fear of God will be transformed to a vibrant love for God.

Lent is therefore a time to refocus our attention on God instead of ourselves. Jesus taught us to pray, "Our Heavenly Father, hallowed be Your Name," so that we will not be afraid of God but we will be fearful of dishonoring His Name. We will become lovers of God who want to honour Him instead of trying to be performers of the world seeking the approval of men.

Guilty, Grumbling or Grateful?

The Christian gospel is all about God’s love but many of us as Christians are not living in the truth that we are God’s beloved. We are paralysed by guilt or we are F.O.C. (full of complaints) instead of being empowered by love.

A mother shared in an Upper Room devotional of how her six year old son showed no interest in talking with her when she wanted to know every detail of his life. How sad and true that we too have little time for God!

Guilt is one of biggest obstacle to our experiencing the love of God. When our focus is on what we are doing or how we are behaving or on what we should or should not be doing, we live in fear of God rather than on having a loving relationship with Him as our Heavenly Father.

Another obstacle that keeps us from the love of God is a grumbling spirit. This is a symptom of our pride which blinds us to the many blessings God has given us. It is an expression of our covetousness and selfishness as our focus is on our needs and wants. Like the Jews who complained after their deliverance from slavery in Egypt, we forget what God had done for us.

Jesus came to show us what it truly means to love God with all our hearts, our souls and our minds. He died on the cross to set us free from guilt so that we can experience the love and forgiveness of God. He taught us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread” so that we will live grateful lives in total dependence on God.

The primary objective of prayer is not to get God to solve all our problems but to put our trust in God – that His ways are better than our ways and that His thoughts are not our thoughts. Unless we trust God, we cannot prove that He is trustworthy and we are unable to experience His love. When we do not experience His love, our lives cannot be filled with gratitude.

Trevor Hudson and Stephen D. Bryant give us the following excellent advice:

“IF YOU ARE UNSURE about your belovedness, I invite you to listen deeply to the Spirit of God. Listen to the Spirit whisper in your own depths that you are God’s beloved. And as you claim your own belovedness, begin to see others also as God’s beloved, so that we can participate in our belovedness together.

We in the church are not God’s elite. God has no favorites. Remember that scripture says, “For God so loved the world.” Let us begin to see beyond race, beyond culture, beyond gender, beyond sexual orientation, beyond religion, beyond all these externals and see each other as God’s beloved. When we relate to others as God relates to us, our sense of being God’s beloved deepens even more.”

Lent is a time to spring clean our hearts of guilt and a complaining spirit. It is a time to empty our hearts so that God can fill them with His overflowing and unfailing Love. It is a time to grow in true faith in what God has done through Jesus Christ. We need to move from filling our minds with an intellectual faith about God to filling our hearts with an experiential and passionate faith in God’s Love for us.

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.”