The Secret War

“Praise God’s name forever and ever! Power and wisdom belong to him.  He changes the times and seasons. He gives power to kings, and he takes their power away. He gives wisdom to people, so they become wise. He lets people learn things and become wise.  He knows hidden secrets that are hard to understand. Light lives with him, so he knows what is in the dark and secret places." Daniel 2:20-22

The whole world is at war with the Covid 19 virus. We are bombarded with grim images of  pain, sorrow and grief every day. We are reminded of how precious health is and how fragile wealth is. Health and wealth have been the idols of our modern society. There is a secret battle for our hearts since the beginning of time. We have the mind of Adam which seeks to be god instead of the mind of Christ which seeks to bear the image of God's love and to glorify God. 

Our mission is to bring heaven to earth and we are in the midst of a secret war "against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12, NLT) But the battle belongs to the Lord and the challenge is to practice the obedience of faith - to seek the Lord and to wait on Him. 

We are all infected by the sin virus which is more infectious and deadly than the Covid 19 virus. As the world desperately tries to flatten the curve of the Covid 19 infection, God is flattening the curve of inequality and injustice in the world.  Covid 19 became a pandemic as many were not vigilant in practising hygienic measures and social distancing seriously. Likewise, the sin virus is threatening the spiritual, moral and ethical health of all of us. 

The social distancing forced upon us is a wake up call - to teach us again the ancient wisdom of solitude, silence and contemplation. It is a time to learn to be still so that God can search our hearts:

"Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life." Psalms 139:23-24 NLT

Indeed, God is changing the times and seasons of the world and has promised wisdom and comfort to help us understand the blessing of sorrow. With our worldly spirit, we see sorrow as a punishment from an angry God for our sins.  But Jesus Christ came to open our eyes to see sorrow as a blessing when we are reborn again as the children of God. Jesus came to teach us the secret of suffering when He died on the cross and rose from the grave. And through His resurrection He has given us the Holy Spirit to fulfill the truth of the second beatitude:

"Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted." Matthew 5:4 NKJV

God knows our sorrows and griefs as well as the dark and secret places of our hearts.  When we put our trust in God as our Abba Father, we experience His unfailing Love embracing us and comforting us:

"All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us. For the more we suffer for Christ, the more God will shower us with his comfort through Christ." 2 Corinthians 1:3-5 NLT

The good news is that God has given as the Holy Spirit as the love vaccine to immunise us against the sin virus. With the Holy Spirit, we have love, joy and peace to overcome our lust, guilt and fears. We can cultivate the fruits of patience, kindness and goodness to counter the sins of anger, greed and envy. And we can put on faithfulness, humility and self control to cure the sins of sloth, pride and gluttony.

The Covid 19 pandemic is a hidden blessing to remind us that Lent is a time for prayer and reflection on God's Word. It is a time to be in the wilderness of our lives and to face the truth that we are in the midst of a spiritual war and a deadly spiritual infection. There are difficult times and storms ahead of us but we can praise God that His Love always trumps evil and that everything will work for good for all who truly love God.

Embracing God Only

"And the second command is like the first: ‘Love your neighbor the same as you love yourself.’  All of the law and the writings of the prophets take their meaning from these two commands.” Matthew 22:39-40 ERV

With the Covid 19 pandemic, millions of people all the over the world have to practice social distancing and to reduce physical contact with one another. This can be very stressful and a heavy burden but we have a choice to turn this time into an invitation and opportunity to practice solitude and silence to "reset" our minds so that our hearts may be more in tune with the heartbeat of God. We can choose to use this time in the season of Lent to Embrace God Only and to confess that we have been Edging God Out.

In times of illness, disasters and tragedies, we are driven to find answers for our predicament. Like the disciples of Jesus, we read in chapter 9 of the gospel of John, that they asked Jesus why a man was born blind: 

"While Jesus was walking, he saw a man who had been blind since the time he was born. Jesus’ followers asked him, “Teacher, why was this man born blind? Whose sin made it happen? Was it his own sin or that of his parents?” John 9:1-2 ERV

But Jesus answered:

“It was not any sin of this man or his parents that caused him to be blind. He was born blind so that he could be used to show what great things God can do. John 9:3 ERV

When we see things from a humanistic and religious perspective that is focused on obedience to the law we are blind to the unseen presence of God and the hidden action of His amazing grace. The faith of the Pharisees was a second hand faith:

"We are followers of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses. But we don’t even know where this man comes from!” John 9:29 ERV

They were blind to the miraculous signs of God at work in the blind man because of their bondage to the law - “That man does not obey the law about the Sabbath day. So he is not from God.” John 9:16

Jesus came to set us free from living a life that is in bondage to rules and regulations so that we can live the life of freedom that comes from loving God, others and ourselves. The meaning of all the laws and writings of the prophets is to draw us to Jesus Christ, our Shepherd of Love. We are to love others as the evidence of our love for God:

"Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us." 1 John 4:11-12 NLT

However, we cannot truly love others unless we love ourselves - not to satisfy our lustful desires - but out of gratitude for being the beloved of God.  Like the man who was born blind, we will then have a first hand testimony of how God loves us and has been at work in our lives:

"The man answered, “This is really strange! You don’t know where he comes from, but he healed my eyes. We all know that God does not listen to sinners, but he will listen to anyone who worships and obeys him. This is the first time we have ever heard of anyone healing the eyes of someone born blind. This man must be from God. If he were not from God, he could not do anything like this.” John 9:30-33 ERV

In these troubled times when the world is in turmoil and darkness and future is uncertain and unpredictable, we need the Light of Christ that can only be found in the darkness of faith that lies beyond our feeling, thinking, understanding and beliefs. We need to confess our pride of knowledge and to pray for wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

Anthony de Mello had written about the greatest need of the church:

"The Church is passing through a period of chaos and crisis. This is not necessarily a bad thing. A crisis is a challenge to grow. Chaos precedes creation - provided, and this is a big proviso, the Spirit of God is hovering over it.

The greatest need of the Church today is not new legislation, new theology, new structures, new liturgies - all these without the Holy Spirit are like a dead body without a soul. We desperately need someone to take away our hearts of stone and give us a heart of flesh; we need a fresh infusion of enthusiasm and inspiration and courage and spiritual strength. We need to persevere in our task without discouragement or cynicism, with new faith in the future and in the people we work for. In other words, we need a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit."

We can use this time of social distancing to wait on God and for the Holy Spirit to pour God's love into our hearts. In this time of chaos and anxiety, we will have many opportunities to experience the grace of God. Anthony de Mello warns us that without the leading of the Holy Spirit we will be lying witnesses or pushers who are insecure people with a compulsion to convince others so that they themselves will be less insecure.

Let us encourage one another to Embrace God Only by waiting on God and sharing how we have experienced God's love and grace in our struggles, doubts and fears in these turbulent times.

Putting On Christ

For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes.  There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. Galatians 3:26-28 NLT

The Covid 19 pandemic heightens our awareness to several truths about life that we have not been paying attention to. Firstly, the virus draws our attention to the reality of how much we need one another, how infectious our thoughts and actions can be and how important it is to care for one another. Secondly, the virus forces us to face the reality of how fragile life and wealth can be. Thirdly, the virus exposes the spiritual condition of our hearts.

Angela Merkel has described the Covid 19 pandemic as the biggest challenge to Germany since World War II. It is indeed a crisis that may spell the end of the capitalistic economy. But it is also the greatest opportunity for all of us who believe that we are the children of God through faith in Christ Jesus to live out the truth that we are all one in Christ Jesus.

To do so, we need to put on Christ who is our robe of righteousness. But how are we to put on Christ in our daily lives? The apostle Paul uses the metaphor of putting on new clothes. So we first have to take off our old clothes of guilt and self righteousness. Many of us are living in the mental prisons of our past or we are living with nightmares of the future. The first step to putting on Christ is well described by Eugene Peterson in his interpretation of Romans 12:1-2:

"So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. Romans 12:1-2 MSG

Like the prodigal son and the alcoholics in the Alcoholic Anonymous programme, we need to take the first steps of admitting our powerlessness in a future that is so unpredictable and uncertain as well as full of potential calamities such as economic collapse, viral pandemics, world wars and climate change. We need to believe in a God of love who holds the future in His hands and who can restore us to sanity and to turn our wills and our lives to Him.

Jesus came to set us free from the prisons of our past so that they can be our universities to help us live more fully in the present and to see God's dreams for our future. When we take the first step of turning back to God we will, like the prodigal son, find God waiting for us. Richard Rohr drew attention of the goal of true prayer - to give us access to God, to allow us to listen to God and to hear Him as well as to experience God's presence deep within our hearts.

Covid 19 is to open our eyes to the truths of the first two beatitudes which Eugene Peterson has translated as follows:

“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.

You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you." Matthew 5:3-4 MSG

Eugene Peterson also gives us the following wise advice in Romans 12:3:

"I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him." Romans 12:3 MSG

Let us therefore give thanks that we can live by grace. As we wash our hands, use the sanitisers and wear masks during this Covid 19 pandemic, let us remember to put on Christ and seek the Holy Spirit to cleanse our hearts, rewire our thoughts and renew our minds.

The Law & The Spirit

"How foolish can you be? After starting your new lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort?" Galatians 3:3 NLT

It is our human nature to try to be in control of our lives. We want to be gods instead of being godlike in our relationships. We need the light of God's Word to reveal the darkness that is deep within our hearts. The spiritual condition of our human hearts is diagnosed by the prophet Jeremiah as follows:

“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?" Jeremiah 17:9 NLT

One of the important objectives of reading and reflecting on the bible is to open our hearts and minds to the Holy Spirit. We need to pray for the Holy Spirit to search our hearts and to reveal our unconscious sinful desires to our conscious minds. We need to be aware of our imperfections and weaknesses so that we can draw close to God to seek His grace to overcome them.

Unlike Adam and Eve, we need not be ashamed of our naked imperfect selves and hide from God for "Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing. For it is written in the Scriptures, “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” Galatians 3:13 NLT

Jesus came to set us free from guilt, the fear of death and the wrath of God so that we can live new transformed lives in the Spirit. This will change our attitude towards the bible. Instead of looking for facts to bolster our faith, we read and listen to God's Word for the Holy Spirit to reveal truths that we need to put into practice in our lives so that our faith in God's love will grow:

"No one can know a person’s thoughts except that person’s own spirit, and no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit. And we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given us." 1 Corinthians 2:11-12 NLT

The apostle Paul drew the attention of the Galatian Christians to the following truths from the Old Testament:

1. The way of the law:

If you obey my decrees and my regulations, you will find life through them. I am the Lord. Leviticus 18:5 NLT

2. The curse of depending on the law to be made right with God:

‘Cursed is anyone who does not affirm and obey the terms of these instructions.’ And all the people will reply, ‘Amen.’ Deuteronomy 27:26 NLT
3. Abraham's faith:

And Abram believed the Lord , and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith. Genesis 15:6 NLT

4. God's promise to Abraham:

I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you.” Genesis 12:3 NLT

“For Abraham will certainly become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. Genesis 18:18 NLT

And through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed—all because you have obeyed me.” Genesis 22:18 NLT

5. The need to live by faith:

“Look at the proud! They trust in themselves, and their lives are crooked. But the righteous will live by their faithfulness to God. Habakkuk 2:4 NLT

6. Christ's rescue from the curse of the law:

“If someone has committed a crime worthy of death and is executed and hung on a tree,  the body must not remain hanging from the tree overnight. You must bury the body that same day, for anyone who is hung is cursed in the sight of God." Deuteronomy 21:22-23 NLT

It is our faith in what Jesus Christ has done for us on the cross that will set us free from trying to please God by trying to obey rules instead of having a relationship with Him. When we receive the promise of God's gift of the Holy Spirit we become God's new creations. The life of Abraham gives us a glimpse of how God is at work in our lives when we live by faith. We will not live for worldly blessings but we will live to be spiritually fruitful by being a blessing to others.

We may not live perfect lives but we can trust that God will use even our imperfections for His glory. May we live by faith and grow in faith. May we live with heaven in our hearts so that we can face whatever hells we may face here on earth.

Hide & Seek - When God Seems Absent

“You hide Your face, and they are terrified. You take away their breath, and they die and return to dust.” - Psalm 104:27-29

All of us, sooner or later, will experience a time when we feel that God has abandoned us  - times when our prayers are not unanswered; times when  we can find no comfort in our grief and suffering. In such times we need to lament of recall the heart-breaking lament of Jesus on the cross - “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me” - the cry of despair in Psalm 22:1.

How we feel and react when God seems absent depends on how we see ourselves and our relationship with God  -am I a slave of sin or a child of God?  Do we see ourselves in the hands of an angry God or a loving Heavenly Father?  The good news is that Jesus came to set us free from our slavery to sin and to redeem us to be the children of God. Jesus did not promise us a life free from struggles but to show us that we can overcome our struggles because God’s power is greatest when we are weak.

 In times when we are experiencing the absence of God’s love and grace, we need to first ask ourselves if we are the ones hiding from God just as Adam did when he and Eve disobeyed God. We read in Genesis 3:8-9:

“And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord  God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?”

Are we fearful of God and hiding from Him? If so, we need the spirit of repentance so that we can pray with the psalmist:

“Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!”  - Psalm 139:23-24

We can  confess that we have wandered away from God and acknowledge that we are the lost sheep waiting for our Shepherd of Love to find us. For Jesus came to seek and save those who are lost (Luke 19:10)

God may seem to be absent because we need to grow in our understanding of God’s amazing grace and love. These are the times when God needs to move us out of our comfort zones so that we can become His partners rather than His servants.  In John 15:14-15, Jesus told his disciples:

“You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” (ESV)

Perhaps we can learn to see such times as a time of God playing hide and seek with us - a time when God wants us to seek Him because He is drawing us into a closer and deeper  intimacy with Him as our Heavenly Father. In life, we will face the mountains of pain, sorrow and suffering. We have the choice of facing such mountains with helplessness and despair or to look beyond the mountains to seek God who can remove the mountains. We can stand on the promise of God recorded in Jeremiah 29:11-14:

“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. I will be found by you,” says the Lord.

When God seems absent, it is time to change our thoughts and beliefs - a time to renew our minds so that our hearts will be in tune with God’s heartbeat. In times when we face the storms of life, we will find peace when we seek the Presence of God and remember His Promises of Providence, Power and Protection as we pray the Lord’s Prayer:

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our trespasses so that we can forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us out of temptation and deliver us from evil.

BTO Souls

Vesak Day is the commemoration of the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha by the Buddhists. Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths - the first truth is that all life is suffering, pain and misery. The second truth is that suffering is caused by selfish craving and personal desire. The third truth is that this suffering can be overcomed. The fourth truth is that the way to overcome this misery through the Eightfold Path.

In his first epistle, 1 Peter 4:12-13, the apostle Peter gives us another perspective of suffering:

“Dear friends, don’t be surprised at the fiery trials you are going through, as if something strange were happening to you. Instead, be very glad - for these trials make you partners with Christ in his suffering, so that will have the wonderful joy of seeing his glory when it is revealed to all the world.”(NLT)

Bishop Fulton Sheen that there are fractions of truth to be found in all religions. Instead of pointing out the errors of non believers, we can affirm the truths that can be found in them. For example, instead of judging the Confucians about their failure to accept Christ, we can affirm that they are right to emphasize the brotherhood of men. However, to achieve the brotherhood of men, we need the Fatherhood of God. And we can share how Christ died so that we can become the children of God and brothers and sisters in Christ.

Likewise, we can affirm the first three truths that Buddha taught - that life is suffering, suffering is caused by our selfish desires and that we can overcome suffering by getting rid of our selfish desires. To get rid of our selfish desires, Buddha prescribed the Eightfold Path comprising of the eight practices of right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right samadhi.

However, Christ died on the Cross to provide us with a simpler and better way by identifying ourselves with his death so that we can have BTO (Broken To Obey) souls. So often God needs to break our hardened hearts so that our minds will be open to see His perfect will for our lives. Only then will we be able to obey God’s commandment to love Him and to love others as ourselves.

Matthew 5:3 reminded me of the first step of Surrender in the Twelve Steps programme:

“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and His rule.” MSG

Another author, Lysa Terkeust, shares the following insights in her book, “Unglued’. These are the fruit of a surrendered life to God:

“We can’t always fix our circumstances, but we can fix our minds on God.”

“I can face things that are out of my control and not act out of control.”

“Renewing our minds with new thoughts is crucial. New thoughts come from new perspectives.”

We need to understand that there is a spiritual warfare that is raging in and around us. Richard Parrott draws attention to the truth that we are living in the world of the unholy trinity - sin, death and the devil and hence our families are dysfunctional. The devil and his world system tempts us to be a chameleon who needs everyone to agree with us, or a bully, forcing everyone to agree with us, or a rebel, proving that nobody agrees with us.

The good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that He has already won the battle. As a child of God who is secure in God’s love for us, we will not need everyone to agree with us or to force them to do so and it will not matter when nobody agrees with us.

But we will live as BTO (Broken To Obey) souls who find our greatest joy in obeying what God commands us to do. We will fear God because we love Him rather than trying to love God because we fear Him. So let us learn to see our times of trouble as opportunities to hand over our lives to God so that He can turn us into His masterpieces of love:

“For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”

Hell, Purgatory and Heaven on earth

“What joy for those whose strength comes from the Lord, who have set their minds on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When they walk through the Valley of Weeping, it will become a place of refreshing springs. The autumn rains will clothe it with blessings."  Psalm 84:5-6

Fulton Sheen, a well known Catholic bishop n the 20^th century was of the view that modern man deny hell because they deny sin. Furthermore he noted that the denial of punishment is a denial of the sovereignty of law. Likewise the denial of hell is a denial of the sovereignty of God. He observed that saints fear hell but never deny it and that great sinners deny hell but never fear it. He described three possible destinations that await us at death:

1. Hell - Pain without Love

2. Purgatory - Pain with Love

3. Heaven - Love without Pain

Bishop Sheen felt that the modern man is accommodating a creed to the way he lives, rather than the way he lives to a creed. He also reminded us that the Devil is never so strong as when he gets man to deny there is a devil.

Our beliefs determine how we live, what we do with our lives and how we face death. It is therefore of critical importance to have a right perspective of hell, purgatory and heaven. Bishop Sheen shared the following truth:

“Remember that in God there is no future. God knows all, not in the succession of time, but in the “now standing still” of eternity, that is, all at once.”

Quantum physics can help us to understand the above observation of Bishop Sheen. God is beyond time. Perhaps we need to understand hell, purgatory and heaven not as something we will experience only after we die but as experiences that we have in the here and now. In this regard, the parable of the prodigal son gives us some valuable insights.

Hell is separation from God and a godless life is hell on earth. When the prodigal son chose to leave his father, he was actually going to hell even though he thought he was enjoying life with wine, women and song. Without God, our hearts are empty and we will seek to fill it with our addictions - to alcohol, gambling, sex and so on. We become slaves of our desires and pleasures and we suffer pain without love.

By God’s grace, He draws us back to Himself through times of suffering - pain with love. Such times are to purify our hearts and to help us to come to our senses like the prodigal son. We see our need for God’s mercy and grace. Through repentance, we turn back to God and we are born again as children of God through our faith in Jesus Christ. And so we can enjoy the heavenly banquet with our Heavenly Father through the ritual of the Holy Communion in the here and now. We will experience love without pain and perfect love casts out all fear.

How we see God determines how we respond to what happens to us in life. If we see God as an angry Judge, we will live graceless lives. We will turn away from God like the prodigal son or we will serve God with a fearful and grudging heart like the elder brother. Jesus came to show us that God is our Heavenly Father who wants us to be the best that we can be. And to do so, He will have to prune away the unproductive areas of our lives so that we can bear the fruit of love more abundantly.

We can live as human beings seeking spiritual experiences - crawling through life like a caterpillar. This is hell on earth. When we receive the gospel of Jesus Christ, we go into the stage of the pupa - to be regenerated and transformed. This may be a time of suffering - physical, emotional, social or spiritual - a time of loss and pain. It is purgatory here on earth.

As our minds are renewed and our hearts regenerated, we will live transformed lives. When we see life from the perspective of a butterfly rather than a caterpillar, we will be in heaven on earth. It is a futile exercise to try to understand what heaven is like. It is more fruitful to be God’s answer as we pray, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Hell, purgatory and heaven are not the places we go to when we die. They are the states of being that are determined by our relationship with God. When we live our lives without God we are already in hell even when we have health, wealth and power. When God is first and foremost in our lives, we are in heaven even when we are suffering, in poverty and powerless. When we have faith that God is calling us back to him, our valleys of weeping are our purgatory where God is purifying us for life in heaven.

When we live with the fear of death, we are slaves of Satan. When we are possessed by the love of money, we are slaves of the world. When our egos are on the throne of our hearts, we will be controlled by the fear of men. But when Jesus is enthroned in our hearts, the perfect love of God casts out our fear of death. We will be filled with God’s love so that we will love people instead of things. And the fear of God will keep us from the fear of men so that we can become the persons that God has created us to be.

So let us learn to live with the fear of God, to be filled with the love of God and to love others in the power of the Holy Spirit during this season of Pentecost.