The Faith To See

“”I believe! Help my lack of faith.”  Mark 9:24

This was the desperate cry of a father who brought his son to Jesus and his disciples for healing. The boy was “possessed by a spirit that won’t let him talk. Whenever the spirit brings on a seizure, it throws him to the ground. Then he foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and becomes exhausted.”  (Mark 9:14-29) The disciples were not able to heal the boy. When Jesus asked how long the boy has been sick, the father responded in frustration:

“He has been this way since he was a child. The demon has often thrown him into fire or into water to destroy him. If it’s possible for you, put yourself in our place, and help us!”

Jesus then said to him, “As far as possibilities go, everything is possible for the person who believes.”

In our modern medically advanced society, it is difficult for us to appreciate this miracle of healing. From the story, the boy might have a brain tumour that affects his speech and causing epilepsy. It would be negligence for a doctor to send such a patient to a priest for exorcism instead of sending him to the neurosurgeon. In our modern society we have more faith in medicine and doctors than in God.

Recently, I saw a man with liver cancer who developed a stroke and was paralysed in his right upper and lower limbs. He was found to have a big blood clot in the left side of his brain. He received no surgery and was only given rehabilitation but he recovered completely. I was reminded that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and that it is God who heals.

Jesus came, died and rose from the dead to give us the gift of faith to live our lives as the children of God. We not called to live a life of blind faith but we need to be healed of our blindness to the love of God. Faith is not a matter of the mind but of the heart. We believe with our minds but we need faith to commit our wills and desires to God.

It is our lack of faith in God’s providential care that keeps us from living the truly abundant life of agape love, unspeakable joy and the peace that is beyond human understanding in the Kingdom of God.  We are, to quote John Barry, walking in circles looking for home. We do not realise that we are already home for our home is in Christ.

We have a lack of faith when we do not have a personal relationship with God as our Heavenly Father. God will give us the desires of our heart when we delight in Him. John Barry noted that if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t really want to know what God wants. In our hearts, we’re certain that knowing will mean uncomfortable change.  For our human nature drives us to seek pleasure and to avoid pain.  We fail to see that the problems in life and suffering can be our ladders to God’s throne of grace so that we can find strength for our weaknesses and forgiveness for our sinfulness. It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that we can “overcome whoever we are, wherever we have been and whatever we will do.”

Faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit - we cannot strive to earn or to gain faith. It is a gift that we can only receive by emptying our hearts of our egos. Our egos seek to Edge God Out of the throne of our hearts. We need the spirit of repentance to confess our need for God’s power of love in our lives. As Sarah Young reminds us, faltering steps of dependence are the links to Christ’s presence.  Confessing our needs, our failings and our weaknesses is not a reflection of our lack of faith.  It is an affirmation of our need for God’s grace in our lives so that we can Exalt God Only with our lives.

Faith is also the fruit of the Spirit. We cannot try to get more faith through our bible study or church worship or good works. We can only grow in faith as we meditate on and live out the truths that God has revealed to us through His Word and in our worship. We need the faith to see what God can do or will do as well as our desperate need for God to fill our hearts with the resurrection power of Christ. Only then will we be able to see our life, problems and blessings from His perspective. Only then can we grow in faith in God’s faithfulness so that when the storms of life strike us, we will find peace in the eye of the storm.

Be Sinless to sin less in a sinful world

 "I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said.”  1 Corinthians 15:3

A man was walking up a hill when he saw a boy on a bicycle. He was pedalling up the hill against the wind, strenuously and painfully when he saw a trolley car going up the hill. The boy rode to the back of the trolley car and laid hold of the bar at the back. And he went up the hill like a bird!

Like the boy, we so often struggle against problems and temptations, trying to sin less to please God. We lost the important message that Christ had already died for our sins. We can only succeed in sinning less when we put on the robe of righteousness of Christ and remember that we are sinless in God’s eyes. We can only live as new creations in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Sin is our separation from God. As long as we are not in communion with God, we will sin as we are living in a fallen world. We will sin as long as we feed ourselves with a spiritually unhealthy diet of bad news in the world and do not take time to feed on the Word of God and keep our thoughts on whatever is right or deserves praise: things that are true, honourable, fair, pure, acceptable, or commendable.” (Philippians 4:8)

Martin Luther struggled to overcome his guilt and terror of death by his spiritual performance of the medieval rites and practices of his Catholic faith. He shared his struggles:

“Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I could also not believe that I had pleased him with my works……. I was a good monk, and kept my order so strictly that if ever a monk could get to heaven by monastic discipline, I was that monk.  All my companions in the monastery would confirm this….

And yet my conscience did not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, “You didn’t do that right. You weren’t contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.”

As he studied Paul’s letter to the Romans, he found a profound and liberating revelation in the truth of Romans 1:17: “The just man lives by faith.” He was set free from the obsession with his spiritual practices. He came to the realisation that the performance of good deeds and religious rituals cannot restore our relationship with God. It is only though our faith that Christ will clothe us with his own righteousness. This was also John Wesley’s “heart strangely warmed” experience on Aldersgate day that filled him with the fire of love to share the gospel of God's love with much power in the United Kingdom and beyond.

Jesus died to set us free from our performance anxiety by showing us the Love of God. Understanding the meaning of the resurrection of Christ gives us the power to transform our lives and our struggles. This was the testimony of a man who was stricken with cancer and had to endure months of treatments and major surgeries as well as the death of his father. His wife thought that that must have been the worst year of his life. However, he realised that he had been comforted with a profound sense of Christ’s presence throughout those difficult days. So he told his wife, “You know, it may have been the best.”

To be a Christian is not trying to sin less but to live the sinless life of Christ who is in us. We do so by faith as we commit our lives to Christ and enthrone Him as King in our lives. Only then can we be free from guilt when we fail to be more loving in the eyes of others and from self-righteousness when we think we have been more loving than others. Only then will our good deeds be the fruit of the Holy Spirit rather than our selfish and self-centred attempts to win God’s  favour.

Let us live our lives rooted in the good news that God loves and accepts us as we are. We are called to live as ambassadors for Christ and children of God for we are sinless when we put on the robe of righteousness of Christ. So let us proclaim the good news:

“I am precious in God’s eyes and so are you!”

FROM DEATH TO LIFE

The Good News of Easter is that Jesus Christ died on the cross so that we may not only live the abundant life in the here and now but to move on to an eternal life when we die. We are spiritually dead when we live our lives only in the dimension of the space and time of our earthly lives. We live in fear of death when we have not come to terms with the reality of evil and God’s judgment against sin and evil. We live in denial of old age, pain and suffering when we put our hope in modern medicine and worship the idols of wealth, health and longevity.

The Greeks worshipped an “unknown God” as they sought to find the true meaning of life and death. Philosophy was seen as a way of training for dying to reduce their fear of death. St Paul reminded them that God has set a day for judging the world with justice by Jesus Christ who was raised from the dead. (Acts 17:31)

We need to understand, appreciate and gratefully respond to God’s amazing gift of grace through Jesus Christ so that we can be delivered from the deadly existence of a worldly life to the deathless existence of a life in and with Christ. To do so, we need to face the reality of God’s judgment against sin and evil. It is strange that human beings demand justice for crimes committed against them but are unable to accept God’s judgment against the evil powers and principalities of the spiritual realm. But when we are able to do so we have the blessed assurance that God will be our hiding place at such a time:

“For You are my hiding place; You protect me from trouble. You surround me with songs of victory.” (Psalm 32:7)

The writer of an Upper Room devotional on 14^th April 2013 made the very important observation that “the resurrection is not another ancient story with a good moral to be remembered on Easter Sunday. The resurrection is the reality that sustains our faith and anchors our reasoning.”

Faith is not just believing in God for even demons believe and tremble with fear (James 2:19). Faith is the commitment to live our lives centered on God with Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives. This is not something that we do with our human effort but a gift of grace that we receive from God when we empty our hearts of all that is not of God.

We will always be tempted to use God’s blessings for our personal gain. There is nothing wrong with enjoying what God has given us – the problem is when these blessings become idols in our hearts and draw us away from what God wants to do in our lives. We need to practice the spiritual disciplines of prayer to wait on God and biblical meditation for God’s revelation of His love and grace in Jesus Christ.

To be in the world but not to be of the world does not mean that we will not have problems and tribulations. When our focus is on Christ and on Christ alone, even when things seem so wrong, we can be sure that God is in control and that He will lead us to be in the right place and to do the right thing at the right time. We will not see our problems as God’s punishment but as God’s training and equipping us for the tasks He has planned for us. The bible is full of stories of extraordinary things happening to extraordinary people with extraordinary destinies.

When we are tempted to worry, or to doubt or to fear, we can turn to the cross and remember that God holds all our tomorrows. When we are sick, in pain or suffering, we can call upon the name of our Lord and remember that by His stripes we are healed. When we have been hurt by others, we can remember that Jesus has borne our hurts on the cross so that we can forgive in the power of His grace and remembering that God alone has the right to take revenge (Romans 12:19)

Let us encourage one another to live lives of victories by sharing the Presence of the Living Christ through the problems we face in our lives. This is the gospel of God's amazing grace that should move us to sing songs of victory such as:

We acclaim Your life, O Jesus,

Now we sing Your victory;

Sin or hell may seek to seize us

But Your conquest keeps us free.

Stand in triumph, stand in triumph,

Worship Christ, the Risen King!

The Life Giving Cross

G.K. Chesterton wrote that “it is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; rather Christianity has been found difficult and left untried.” This is a sad reflection of how the good news of Christ's death on the cross has been misunderstood and misrepresented. Indeed, Good Friday is “not a time for theorising about how we can be saved by God's love on the cross.” It is a time to remember, reflect and to experience the wonder of God's love for us through the suffering and death of Jesus Christ on the cross.

At the close of the Good Friday service in the morning at Queenstown Lutheran Church, a large wooden cross was carried in through the sanctuary, slowly up the center aisle, from the entrance to the altar. The congregation faced the cross during the procession and at the beginning, mid-point and end-point (at the Altar), the pastor led the congregation in the following response:

P:  Behold, the life-giving cross on which was hung the salvation for the whole world.

C:  Oh come, let us worship Him.

It was a moving reminder of the life-giving Cross of Christ. Earlier in the service, Rev Christian Schmidt made the point that the cross was used to cause a slow death with maximum pain. Indeed, in the hands of man, the cross was an instrument of torture. However, in the hands of God, it became a means of grace. Jesus was fully human when he suffered and died on the cross. On the cross, He experienced the pain of being separated from God as He cried, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”, which means, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Jesus rose from the dead for He was fully divine and demonstrated the power of God's love over evil. The power of the resurrection gives us the hope to transcend and transform any suffering in our lives. The cross is therefore a symbol of the life giving power of God's amazing grace.

Later in the night, at the CCMC's Good Friday night service, we were reminded of the important truth that the cross has opened the way for us to come before God's throne of grace without fear or guilt. Indeed, Good Friday is a time to celebrate the good news that we can draw near to God through Christ and that we are holy and blameless because Christ is in us, our hope of glory.

As we sang the last hymn, The Power of the Cross, I was reminded of our calling to live as a forgiven people:

This, the power of the Cross:

Son of God – slain for us

What a love! What a cost!

We stand forgiven at the Cross

How foolish we are to try to draw near to God with our human efforts instead of doing so through the power of the Cross. We turn prayer into a performance instead of a time to be in God's presence and a way by which God can change our hearts. We pray for God to take away our suffering instead of waiting on God so that His power may be made perfect in our suffering.

We study the bible trying to find formulas to please God instead of enjoying the wonderful promises of God's love for us. We struggle to understand the bible instead of letting God use His Word to search our hearts so that we can understand ourselves better and to be empowered to live as children of God.

Let us give thanks for the life giving Cross of Christ. Let us draw near to God each day so that we can experience God's joy and peace in the messy and confusing world around us. For life is not about us but it is all about Christ who is in us. It is only as we seek to live in Christ that we can experience the life that is both fully human and fully divine.

WHAT IS LIFE ALL ABOUT?

OUR SPIRITUAL POVERTY

After the General Election in 1997, I had written an article on “Materialism, The Hidden Rot of Society” which was published in the 1998 volume of Solidarity, The NSP newsletter and subsequently printed in the book, Publish and Perish, produced by the NSP in 2001. Below is an extract from the article.

“One of the strange paradoxes of modern society is that the consumer society has to encourage the people to spend more of their money and more of their time on the non-necessities, on the “useless things”, the junk of life in order to stimulate economic growth and generate the income to give them the necessities of modern life.

But what is really a good and fulfilling life? Is it living in private houses, owning cars and travelling abroad? We have been deluded by the materialistic approach to life and neglecting the spiritual dimension of life.

It has been said that we are strangling the life out of ourselves because of how we think and it is only when we start to see the world more as it is that we will stop strangling ourselves. We need to shift from seeing a world made up of things to seeing a world that’s open to and primarily made up of relationships. We need to recognize that there is a deeper reality that exists beyond anything we can express in words. For what appears most real to us – whatever see, touch, feel, taste and hear, are actually non-substantial.

Mr. Lee Kuan Yew had posed the question, “What is life about?” to the students at the National University of Singapore in December 1996. According to Mr. Lee, life is about living and this according to him, is bringing up a family, living in a society that makes everybody feel at ease with one another, living in a society where there are other things – painting, music, plays, dramas, dances, operas, paintings, restaurants, parks – giving ease to the bare existence of life.

But the reality of life in Singapore is that living as described by Mr. Lee Kuan Yew seems to be only for the elite – what about the rest of us ordinary Singaporeans? Unfortunately, many Singaporeans are so busy earning their living that they don’t have time to even think about what life is about and to see that materialism can never answer the deeper questions of life. Many equate wealth with goodness and see the rich man as being blessed.

We need to change the values in our society. Our society has become so materialistic that we have lost sight of what life is really all about. As I care for those who are dying, I realized that one of the most important questions we will face when we are our death beds is:

“Has the world become a better place from what I have given or has the world become a poorer place because of what I have consumed?”

The real meaning of our lives lies in what we have given rather than what we have taken from this world. The truth is that wealth is no guarantee of happiness. In the past twenty years, the British economy grew by 40%, the German by 50% and the Japanese by 60%. But this does not mean the Germans and Japanese are any happier. In fact, surveys have shown that it is the Japanese who are envious of the lifestyles of almost everyone.

Likewise, we may be richer than our Malaysian and Indonesian neighbours. But are we  happier? Mr. Canagaratnam Gunasingham drew attention to the fact that a peasant society under the harshest of conditions is a storehouse of human values. It is in such a storehouse that the inner resources of traditional life reside.

According to him, the steeply rising expectations of a social class which already enjoys high levels of gratification is a serious weakness as it may matter little to this group that a segment of the population is deprived in terms of what the economy yields. “A gracious society is but sounding brass and tinkling symbol if it does not go with a tragic vision which society often loses sight of as their material prosperity advances” wrote Mr. Gunasingham.

Indeed it is human greed rather than an economic system that is the root cause of economic injustice. It has been said that a poor person may envy the rich and strive to gain great wealth, but if he succeeds he discovers that he still wants more – “whoever loves money never has enough, whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.”

It is only when our citizens are imbued with spiritual values that they will have contented hearts that frees them to share what they have with those who are less fortunate.

In a letter to the Forum Page in September 1992, attention was drawn to the fact that the rise and fall of nations and empires are not due only to political, social and economic forces but that moral and spiritual forces also play a very important role. We must not lose sight of the spiritual and moral aspects of living or we will fall into the trap of letting things become more important than people. And when our citizens are motivated primarily by monetary rewards, our talented citizens will be easily “creamed off” by “greener pastures.”

It would be very sad if the PAP succeeds in winning the elections but fails to build a nation and worse still, to alienate the people from the government. Mr. Janadas Devan  had rightly pointed out that “Singapore in fact does not exist unless every member of that totality can say, This is my Singapore, I’ll take care of it – for you as well as for myself. And no Singaporean is going to say that unless he or she has a vote, a voice. A self satisfied elite that forgets this are like Generals who believe that they can win wars without soldiers.” An elite in a nation that uses materialism to entrench themselves in power will therefore soon find themselves left without a nation.

One American dream is to reach a point in one’s life where one doesn’t have to do anything one does not want to do and can do everything that one wants to do. We are in danger of seeking to follow such a futile and empty dream. The author of the book, Ecclesiastes, reached such a point in his life only to find a sense of futility. He wrote:

“I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my work and this was the reward for all my labour. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”

Human beings are created for relationships and we need to remember that “what makes us human is not our mind but out heart, not our ability to thinks but our ability to love.”

Singaporeans need to learn to live simpler lifestyles so that they will have more time for themselves and families. We need to recognize that there are limits to our productivity. After all, what will it profit Singaporeans to gain the whole world but to lose their souls?

We have to learn to measure our standard of living not by what we have but by what we are – a joyful and healthy people instead of a people driven by anxiety, insecurity, greed, envy, lust and pride. 

It is only when we are community of selfless individuals committed to the welfare of others that we will have a truly democratic society. A society comprising of individuals who are materialistic and self centered will always be governed by an elite that knows how to use fear, greed and promises of security to their advantage.”

The Bad News and The Good News

The bad news is that time and again we fail to do the good that we want to do and do the bad things that we do not want to do. This is the natural state of our human condition. We are sinners and it is only natural that sinners sin! We have no true health and no true justice because the noble professions of medicine and law are no longer a calling but good vocations to earn good money.

The bad news is that money has become the god of our modern society. The love of money is the root of all evil. It is therefore no surprise that the world is in a mess and full of misery.  We humans have messed up and contaminated God’s wonderful and beautiful world with our greed, lust, pride and selfishness. In 1973, E. F. Schumacher in his book, "Small Is Beautiful" reminded us that the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realization, and fulfillment is not a matter of goods but people. Hence economic thinking must "get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labor mobility and capital accumulation” in order to "make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness and spiritual death.” Otherwise, he recommended, "let us scrap economics and start afresh."

The Good News is that where sin abounds, God’s grace abounds even more. The season of Lent is a time to reflect on the meaning of the suffering of Jesus Christ on the Cross. The cross, as Timothy Keller rightly pointed out, reveals the systems of the world to be corrupt – serving power and oppression instead of justice and truth. Jesus’ death on the cross was to show us not only “bankruptcy of the world” but to reveal the wonder and power of God’s love to break the power of the fear of death over us so that we can live a life of love and not a life of fear.

The Good News is that Jesus died on the cross so that we too can die to our false identities based on our performance and achievements. Timothy Keller makes the very important observation that Jesus is not a King on a throne to whom we have to submit out of fear or guilt. Jesus is a King on the Cross to whom we want to submit out of our love and trust. Jesus’ command for us to take up our cross is not a commandment to endure our pain and suffering in life but to “die to self-determination, die to control of our own life, die to using him for our agenda,”

Jesus died and rose from the dead so that the Holy Spirit will empower us to live our true identity as a child of God in an intimate relationship with our Loving Heavenly Father. As we pray, Our Father who is in Heaven, let us direct our wills to hallow His Name. Let us remember that we are the ambassadors of God’s Kingdom here on earth. God has given us His Holy Spirit but we need to let the Holy Spirit have control of us so that God’s perfect Will will be done on earth as it is in heaven through our lives.

A Shining Red Dot or A Cancerous Dark Spot

The Population White Paper marks a critical turning point in the history of our nation. We stand on the threshold of becoming a shiny tiny red dot on the blue spot of our planet earth or a cancerous spot in a dark world. We are just a tiny red dot and we cannot afford to make the mistakes of the Americans consuming the bulk of our world resources. The future of Singapore does not lie in managing the size of our population. We need to address the danger of greed and our spiritual poverty.

It is so important to address the right questions if we are to have the right answers. We can be a shining beacon of a small compassionate co-operative community to the world or we can be a selfish and greedy society, a cancerous dark spot consuming the world resources. We need to choose between greed or love as the motivating power for our lives.

E. F Schumacher, in his book, Small Is Beautiful, had drawn attention to the danger of Keynesian economics that is rooted in greed. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes had espoused the view that “for at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

Keynes described capitalism as “the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. At the same time, Keynes also warned that “the decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.”

We reap what we sow. Hence the recent financial scandals in our world during the past two years come as no surprise. We are all living in an imperfect world and none of us are free from the temptations of the world. The news that Singapore “is at the heart of a global match-fixing empire” for football fixing matches all over the world casts a dark spot over our reputation for low corruption.  This, together with the sex scandals in 2012 and the indictment of a couple of civil servants by the CPIB  are but warning symptoms of a decline in morality in our society.  Our population problems pales in the light of our moral bankruptcy and spiritual poverty.

However, this is not a time for finger pointing which will only cultivate a culture of blame – this is a time for serious reflection by all Singaporeans. When we blame society for being materialistic we need to remember that we are the society as Mr. Tan Chuan Jin, the Acting Minister for Manpower and Senior Minister of State at the Ministry of National Development, rightly pointed out in a forum in November 2012. He made the point that “if everyone of us chooses to exercise our rights and fight for something we believe in, then society will change.”

Indeed all of us can be agents of change in our homes, our workplace and the communities that we are living in. However, in order to encourage our citizens to do so, we need a culture of safety – where people are not penalised for drawing attention to deficiencies in our social system. It is encouraging that the climate of fear has been reduced and this is seen in the results of the Punggol East by-election.

E.F. Schumacher has also drawn attention to the need for each one of us to find the strength to overcome the violence of greed, envy, hate and lust within ourselves. He believed that Gandhi had given us the answer:

“There must recognition of the existence of the soul apart from the body, and of its permanent nature, and this recognition must amount to a living faith; and, in the last resort, non-violence does not avail those who do not possess a living faith in the God of love.”

It is only with such a living faith that we will be better stewards of the resources of our world and to use them not just for our own good but for the good of others. We will also seek to humanise work so that work will not be “an inhuman chore” but the “true foundations of society” through the relationships established by work.

We need a spiritual revolution so that we will not see the “ avoidance of taxes as the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward” but as a responsibility to share our blessings and to be a blessing through paying our taxes. As Gandhi reminds us, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed.” We need to live simple lives so that others may simply live.

Just we need a healthy immune system to resist and overcome disease, we need a healthy moral immune system to resist and overcome greed. Leonard Sweet warned the Americans that they are living under conditions of zero morality and there is a moral vacuum in their postmodern society.

It is sad that we did not follow the wisdom of the late Goh Keng Swee who introduced moral education in the schools. We need spiritual wisdom in order to make good use of information to nourish our souls, to build relationships and to harness technology for the common good rather than for selfish ends. 

The time has come for a "return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue - that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable." The time has come for us to come to our senses so that we will see that the love of money is the root of all evil, that “people do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,” and that there is no profit to gain the whole world but to lose our souls. We are in desperate need for wisdom and love so that we will be a shining red dot and not a cancerous dark spot.