https://odb.org/MY/2022/12/03/christmas-light

We will notice a few interesting facts as we read Exodus 3:4-10. One of them is that although God is within the burning bush, He could see that Moses had gone to the burning bush, suggesting that God is seeing Moses from a place other than the bushing bush itself. Of course that is possible as He is God. He is omnipresent. So He is at the burning bush and yet has a helicopter view. This is one of those passages in Scripture that demonstrates the omnipresence nature of the LORD. The most striking fact is obviously that the bush is burning, and yet it is not consumed by the fire. Somewhat like the Christmas tree that is lighted by real candles.

The third thing we will notice is that God asked Moses to remove his sandals as the ground where God is is holy. Sandals are dirty as they offer our feet, and thus, our body protection from the ground. Especially so in the desert, which is very dusty, full of sand and dirt. It is thus a good practice that Asians do not wear shoes in homes. We try to keep dirt outside as much as we can.

As we read on the passage, we see God’s heart for His people. He came down to earth because He heard the cry of His people and wanted to rescue them from Egypt and bring them to the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey and inhabited by hostile peoples. His heart remains so today as He still wants to rescue us from the world (Egypt) and bring us into His Kingdom (the Promised Land) so that we can be our best for Him and serve out His plans and purposes for our lives. It is the place where we can find true peace and contentment, living out His will for us.

What’s the message this morning? I believe it is that He still wants to rescue us today from our Egypts and bring us into His Promised Land for us. But remember, as much God is also our friend and brother in our Lord Jesus Christ, He is holy. We need to remove our sandals when we are with Him and sandals in our context, representing our attachment and sometimes obsession with the world and the things of the world.

https://odb.org/MY/2022/12/01/the-power-of-mutual-encouragement

One of the great things of the Kingdom of God is that each and every one of us has a part to play based on the gifts and talents uniquely given to us by God, to fulfil God’s plans and purposes for our lives, preplanned by God for us even before the creation of the world itself when we were all still in the spirit form.

Some of us could have spent years after we have known Christ living in the fullness of His glory and will, just doing what God had prepared for us. Yet there are many still searching for our “sweet spot” in His kingdom, the place where we know we will excel because that is what we were created for. We may serve in a variety of ways before discovering our true calling, based on the needs of our church and community.

One of the ways everyone of us can serve, however, is actually to be a Barnabas, an encourager. Paul encouraged the Jewish believers of Christ in Hebrews, who were under pressure to revert to Judaism. In Hebrews 3:13, Paul exhorted them to encourage one another daily, so that none of them will be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. And that is something everyone can do. Just encourage one another in the faith. Pat someone on the shoulder if you feel he or she is down. Pray and send a Word from Scripture to someone in need. Pray for someone in need. Don’t just forward multiple messages in WhatsApp, but write one yourself and give it to someone as the Lord prompts us. Say and speak positively about the goodness of God and what lies ahead in the future for us, our inheritance in Christ in the heavenly places, our place in the new heaven and earth, the new Holy City of Jerusalem, the mansion Christ has gone ahead to prepare for us and the treasures that we have stored there during our lifetime on earth. There are just so many great things to look forward to, and if we are suffering now here on earth, it can never compare to what we have ahead of us in glory. Paul said this before in Romans 8:18.

Be a Barnabas, my brothers and sisters in Christ and friends. No one hates an encourager. Instead, everyone will appreciate an encourager. Have a great day ahead!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/11/30/warning-sounds

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger – Proverbs 15:1.

I think everyone is aware that we intentionally say all the wrong things in anger, harsh words that are calculated to hurt. Yet, we don’t actually mean what we say, especially to our loved ones. Unfortunately, the damage would have been done, and usually, it takes a long time for the emotional wounds to heal. That is why people advise that we shouldn’t make important decisions when angry. In fact, we shouldn’t also make major decisions when we are very happy and elated as both extremes in emotions do not bring the best out of us. Let things settle down first, then decide so that we do things rationally after praying about it, seeking God and considering all angles and views.

To avoid saying harsh things in anger, perhaps it’s best to walk sway from a heated confrontation or deescalate the situation by talking about something else or just apply Proverbs 15:1 by speaking gently. The idea is to not add oil to fire, and the justification is that words wrongly said would have far-reaching ramifications. So be a peacemaker, not a “batu api” (fire stone in Malay), meaning don’t be an inciter. If we could remain calm, we would be a gem indeed!

As we get older, we will also realise that anger increases our blood pressure unnecessarily and may lead to health complications like a stroke or cardiac arrest. So, being slow to anger is not only a virtue but is also healthy! We could avoid catastrophic consequences.

The message today is thus – be gentle in speech and slow to anger. That will go a long way in preserving relationships and lengthening our life span!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/11/29/a-hot-meal

Matthew 25:40 is a concept that Jesus espoused encouraging us to help our lesser brethren in their times of need. Jesus begins at verse 34 by inviting the righteous to come and take their inheritance in the Kingdom that was prepared since the creation of the world. This is because they had fed Him when He was hungry. They had given Him a drink when He was thristy. They had clothed Him when He needed clothes. They had visited Him when He was in prison. They had looked after Him when He was sick. Meaning to say when the righteous had helped those of His brothers and sisters who needed help, they had helped Him. It is similar in concept to building treasures in heaven; that is, what we do for God counts towards our riches in heaven. Such riches are intangible here, but they will mean something solid and real when we are in heaven. Those riches could also be the inheritance that Christ spoke about in Matthew 25 verse 34.

This concept of being kind to others in the Kingdom and broadly being kind to everyone (storing treasures in heaven) is radical because it goes against the grain of the world, then and now. The world either takes kindness for granted or just refuses to be kind to others. Everyone minds their own business and goes about life not being involved in the lives of others. You do your thing, I do mine. I’m not obliged to help you as you need to help yourself. In fact, I’m in need of help myself! Why should I be kind to you? Are others kind to me? Do they give me a green pass? Do I get a special treatment, a VIP lane? I get treated like everyone else. So get in line. That’s life! Life doesn’t afford anyone any special treatment. You get life as it is. What is it in for me if I’m kind to you? Nothing!

Except that Jesus taught that if we are kind to another brethren and I would say another human being, we are actually being kind to Him. Jesus thus gives us a reason to be kind to others. Everyone we meet and face in life is Jesus personified, and if we think that way, we will always be kind to everyone lest we ended up being unkind to our Saviour and Lord, who died for our sins and saved us from the sting of sin which is death.

It is strong and difficult teaching but helps us break through our conventional thinking to only think of our own interests most if not all the time. It is teaching that will alleviate us from only storing riches on earth for our old age to storing riches in heaven for our life in eternity. It helps us focus more on the spiritual than only be mindful of the natural. Our work in the world still needs to be done – at least we are not only putting aside some for the rainy day, but we are also putting some in heaven for the time when we are there!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/11/27/so-beautiful

Before I had Ivan and Daniel, I never quite understood the fuss people had over babies and toddlers. Everyone were like saying how cute they were, and yet, for me, they seemed overrated. They were just babies and toddlers. Nothing too special. They were messy and looked so fragile. So I never carried a baby or child before until I had my own. I was afraid that if I had made a wrong move, I could have broken an arm or a leg.

That all changed when I had my own baby and child. Of course, my wife had to carry them in her womb for nine months and deliver them, but they were mine as they were a product of our marriage union. Suddenly I realised what the fuss was. They looked really cute and handsome! I remember being fascinated by their tiny fingers and toes. Their tiny hands and legs. They even had hair on their heads! (But customary for Chinese families, we had their heads shaved for their full moon celebration).

Why the change in me? Obviously, when the baby is ours, the whole perspective changes. They looked cute. Although they are still fragile, I quickly learnt how to handle them, to carry them, help them to sleep, to feed them, change their diapers, but despite all that I never did bathe them until much later. Bathing babies carry high risks, and so that I left to the experts who were my wife, our helper, and mum in law.

That is why if my outlook on babies could change drastically when they were mine, how do you think the Lord looks at us when each of us are uniquely His? Paul declared in Ephesians 2:10 that we are His handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. We are specially and uniquely created by God. We are His. Like our own babies and children are ours, we are God’s very own.

This morning, as we go to church to worship Him and listen to His Word being preached, remember that God loves us. We are His. Each and every one of us is His. We are all uniquely created by Him. Despite our weaknesses, despite our stubbornness, our pig headed-ness; He loves us and will continue to love us. Why? Because we are all His, redeemed back by the blood of Jesus on the Cross of Calvary. God loves us.

Let’s give Him all the glory and honour that He deserves. May His name be exalted all over the earth! Amen!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/11/25/enduring-hope

In the natural, we know that every living, breathing, and moving creature needs to be born or given birth to before it comes out into the earth and live. It is mostly a situation of an egg and a sperm becoming one and being fertilised, just a question of whether the embryo is developed inside or outside the body. That’s our first birth.

We also know that every living creature has a life span – with mosquitos probably living for a few weeks, but humans living around 80 years on average, and some animals like tortoises living even past 120 years. Whatever is the average life span of our species, we will eventually die. That’s our first death.

But if we accept Jesus Christ into our lives as our Lord and Saviour and repent of our sins, we will experience what Jesus called a born-again experience (John 3: 3-7). Of course, we are not going back into our mother’s womb and being reborn as someone had asked Jesus before in the past. It’s the spiritual birthing of the spirit that is the fundamental core of our body. Once we are born again, we are able to relate to God in the spiritual realm and will become more aware of the happenings in that realm that despite us living in the physical world, there is another dimension that is hidden from us and yet is a hive of activities. Paul mentioned before in Ephesians 6:12 that our fight is not against flesh and blood but principalities and powers of darkness in the high places. That is thus the second birth only experienced by believers.

As much as Revelations 21 speaks about the new heaven and the new earth and new holy city of Jerusalem with God dwelling among His people for which those who are victorious will inherit and God will be their God and they His people. Revelation 21 also foretells in verse 8 the ultimate end for those who are cowardly, unbelieving, vile, murderers, sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars – they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulphur. That is the second death, and it is an eternity spent without God.

The question worth pondering today is whether we will truly be experiencing the second birth only, or will we also be sucked into the second death. The logic and theory is that it is one or the other, and yet we know that after experiencing the joy, peace, and grace of the second birth, some people do descend back into darkness and will thus be risking the second death. As believers, let’s make sure we remain at two births and one death only!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/11/24/hopes-and-longings

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life (Proverbs 13:12). We all have our hopes and aspirations, and the older we get, the less confident we are of seeing them come to pass. Sometimes, it is just a hope and desire for someone we love to be on a normal path, but he or she chose the road least travelled. Sometimes, these hopes are our dreams that we have left buried like the Shunammite woman in the time of Elisha (2 Kings 4:8) who had lost her hope for a child as her husband was already old.

Our hearts could be sick when our hopes are not fulfilled, and yet, with the passage of time, we have learnt to accept the reality of our situation. Time heals, they say. But if the hope or longing is fulfilled, it is a tree of life. Something that could last us for eternity as the expression, “the tree of life,” is the key to eternal life at the Garden of Eden before the fall. Indeed, hope and longing fulfilled will make our heart settled and happy, particularly experienced by people who had found their soul mates and life partners consummated in marriage. Or if we have found that the thing we do is really what we have been made for, that sweet spot of who we are and what we do in life merging as one. Or we are right now fulfilling God’s plans and purposes for our lives.

Like the Shunammite woman, God can restore a lost hope. In that story, Elisha prophesied to her that she will have a child somewhat in return for her generosity in providing him a permanent place to stay whenever he was in Jerusalem. God rewards our generosity to others, and sometimes, this could mean resurrecting our dead dreams and hopes, our buried longings and aspirations. We are seeing that unfolding right before our eyes, even as Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim is at the cusp of fulfilling his hope and aspiration of finally becoming the Prime Minister of Malaysia after being the PM in waiting since the time of Dr M.

Like Anwar, God can do the same for us if not now, one day. Just continue to do what we do best for Him. One day, the LORD will reward our labour of love. Amen

https://odb.org/MY/2022/11/23/trusting-our-future-to-god

Just by way of illustration but based on true events – let’s say we had bought a piece of stock in the open market for RM1.50, and it has lately been hovering between RM0.90 and RM1.20. To buy and sell at the current price range means we are losing money compared to our original price, but if we could buy at RM0.90 and sell at RM1.20, we would theoretically be breaking even (excluding stamp duties and broker commission) and if we manage to do that twice or more, we would be making some money. But what happened to me was that after I bought it at RM0.90, the price dropped further to RM0.80, and now I have lost RM0.70 for the first stock and RM0.10 for the second stock bringing my total loss to RM0.80 when I would have only lost RM0.30 if I had sold the first stock at RM1.20.

The point is we will never know what will happen next, and stocks are probably one of the best illustration because the price could change the next minute and this is particularly so when it comes to crypto currencies.

But take it further into our lives, and although the reality is likely to be less dramatic, we could be breathing one minute and no longer breathing the next. This is because people have died from a heart attack or cardiac arrest just like that. We could be communicating with them on WhatsApp one moment and the next total silence because they are dead. Or just a simple thing like what happened to me at breakfast yesterday morning. One moment, I had just started drinking coffee from the glass, and the next moment, I actually dropped the glass and spilled nearly 80% of the coffee onto the table, my shirt and pants! Fortunately, I only spilled it to my side of the table, and thus not a drop went to my wife’s side. It was dramatic as everyone in the shop looked at me, and the workers were kind in cleaning up the mess I made. If I knew that this would happen, I would have gripped the glass tighter or drank using the spoon. But we will not know and can’t know. That’s how we are made. We have no power or ability to see the future, not just in months or years but even in the next second or minute.

What then is our plan for the future? We take what life throws at us? We try to plan as much as we can but react and adapt as we go along? Yes, that’s what most of us will and can do. But the Bible teaches slightly differently. In Ecclesiastes 2, although we see that life is vanity or meaningless, by the end of the book, the author (believed to be Solomon and the wisest man alive then) advises that we trust our life and future to God. Life is meaningless at the core. We are born, we live, and we die. We don’t know exactly what lies ahead. We come to the earth naked, and we die naked. Yet if we have God in our lives, we will see that life is meaningful and purposeful because we could fulfil God’s plans and purposes for our lives. God have set eternity in our hearts, and with Jesus in our lives, we have eternal life. Though our body will die, our spirit will live on, and one day, our body will be resurrected with Christ.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, even as we go about our daily lives today, commit our life and our future to God. Trust Him with our future. Give Him our lives that His will may be done in our lives. Although we still do not know what will become of us the next moment, we know our life is in good hands if it is with God. Follow His voice and prompting in all that we do, and life will not be vanity anymore! Our life will then be purpose driven, driven by God’s plans and purposes for us!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/11/22/faith-in-action-2

One of the basic facets of our faith in Christ is this teaching in James 2, in particular, verse 26 that faith without works is dead. If we have faith but no works, it is quite useless. But if we have works but not faith, it is also useless because without faith, it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:16).

We all know that salvation is a gift from God. We are called by God to be His children. Although many are called, few are chosen (Matthew 22 :14). In the end, not everyone responds to the call. But fundamentally, we cannot work for our salvation. We are saved by the grace of God. We are saved because Jesus died for our sins as the final sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind, once and for all to break through the spiritual veil that separated man from the Father caused by the original sin of Adam and Eve at the Garden of Eden. Salvation is thus never a question of how hard we had worked in terms of our good deeds to compensate for our sins because we are stained by the original sin of Adam. Not a question of a scale as good deeds cannot outweigh the original sin without the atoning blood of Christ.

Having said that, once we have faith and believed in Christ Jesus as our Lord and Saviour and have reconciled with God, we then need to demonstrate our faith by our good works. If we are saved and continue to live in sin and do evil, are we then representative of God’s love and grace for our lives? We are saved by His grace and by the sacrificial blood of Christ but we continue to sin and do evil? We then become the ungrateful servant in the Parable of the Ungrateful Servant as taught by Jesus.

As James so clearly and rightfully pointed out, like the body without spirit is dead, faith without works is dead. If we are saved and thus we have Christ in us, we cannot avoid doing good. Did Abraham not demonstrate his faith by obeying God to sacrifice Isaac? Did Rahab not risk her life by helping the spies? Did Jesus not die for our sins on the cross? Our faith in Jesus has to be followed by our good works in Christ. That is the natural output, the most natural path after gaining salvation as the road to salvation will be and is paved with our good works here on earth which will translate spiritually to our treasures in heaven. We can say figuratively that our road to heaven is paved with gold, the gold of our good works for Christ in recognition and remembrance of His love and God’s grace in sending His Son to die for our sins that we will not perish but have life eternal!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/11/21/reading-backwards

For us who don’t know, the Gospels are accounts by four people (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) of the life and ministry of Jesus. While John and Matthew were part of the 12 disciples or Apostles of Christ, Mark and Luke were part of a wider circle of 70 Apostles. Another interesting fact is that the first 3 Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – are called Synoptic Gospels because they are written in a similar chronological order, broadly speaking, and narrates similar events albeit in a slightly differen my angle, while John covers a wider time frame and focuses on some core theological matters taught by Jesus.

John 2:2 contains a statement that breaks the chronology of the events when it referred to something at the end at the near beginning by writing on the resurrection of Christ and how after that the Apostles understood what Jesus meant by destroying the temple and rebuilding it in 3 days. It is also interesting to note that the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation which speaks of events of the future and written in a symbolic style was an account by the same John. Besides Peter who is considered the leader among the Apostles, John is regarded as closest to Jesus and John refers to himself as the disciple that Jesus loves.

It is thus a good approach to read the Bible forward and backward, for example, starting at both Genesis and Matthew or even Revelation. In other words, we start at both the beginning as well as the end. Some people read novels by reading the ending first or watch television dramas by starting with the last episode before going to the first. I’m not sure that for novels or TV dramas, we should start at the end but there is certainly nothing wrong to do so with the Bible. When it comes to reading the Bible, the most important point is to read it regularly on a daily basis. Doesn’t matter where we start so long as we do and continue to do so.

Just like to end today’s devotional commentary by saying that even as GE15 had resulted in a hung parliament for Malaysia and although it is not the change that most of us among the more progressive voters were hoping for (compared to the fundamentalists or the far right), I believe we must continue to trust God that He is in control of everything and that if the change we had hoped for doesn’t materialise this time, it will do so in the future. Continue to pray for His will be done here on earth as it is in heaven.