https://odb.org/MY/2022/07/10/watching-out-for-one-another

We can never avoid doing good or helping another or looking out for someone’s needs if we are in the Kingdom of God. This is because the Kingdom of God is a community of believers who live as a community with a common goal although in present times we live separately. We are supposed to administer justice by showing mercy and compassion to one another, and not to oppress the widow, the fatherless or the poor or the foreigner. In other words, we must show mercy and compassion to the weak and downtrodden, the oppressed amongst us.

It is the nature of God to help the weak and the oppressed, the fatherless, the poor and the foreigner. Thus as children of God we must follow after our Heavenly Father and do the same. It’s not optional or a matter of choice or preference. It is a must. It is part of the process of us not conforming to the pattern of this world and being transformed as we renew our minds. As we tune ourselves to God’s wavelength, we will understand and want to follow God’s heart.

Yet it is not a question of those with giving to those without. Not only the strong and able versus the weak and downtrodden. True compassion and mercy are applicable to everyone including those who are fatherless, widows, poor and the foreigner. We will receive as we give of ourselves to others. I think we need not go to the extent to live out of our car to save the rent so we may give away our rent money to other more needy people. But the point is at whatever level we are whether in abundance or lack, we can still give and bless others. Whether we have much, little or more – we can all give and look out for others. Most are living on a shoestring budget but if we are able to stretch our dollar to bless another, do you think our Heavenly Father will not make sure that our needs are met too? It’s a paradox but actually the key to receive is to bless and let go. Not arithmetically like give 100 and receive 1,000 or 10,000 but if we give, we will receive. That’s just how the economy of the Kingdom works. As the natural economy is stimulated with spending, the Kingdom economy is stimulated by the giving of ourselves. This is because the more we give and the more many amongst us give, the windows of heavens will open up and more and more of God’s blessings will flow down and we will see a Kingdom that is overflowing with the love, mercy, compassion, goodness and power of the Almighty!

Let’s all learn this spiritual lesson well. Give and you shall receive. It applies to everyone, whether poor or rich, whether those with fathers or the fatherless, whether those with spouse or widows, whether you are a native or a foreigner. Practice this in our lives and see for ourselves the floodgates of heaven’s blessings opening up and flowing down into our lives!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/07/08/food-that-says-i-love-you

I recall that when I was attending my previous church, we had a meal together as a church at first every Sunday and later I think it was once a month or once a fortnight. We had the basic meal catered but with add ons cooked by members potluck style. So every Sunday worship service was eagerly anticipated as we get to enjoy a nice meal together and later when the inhouse meal became once a month or once a fortnight, a group of us would still adjourn somewhere nearby for a simple chicken rice meal together. A family that prays together stays together and I would add that a family that eats together stays together. That applies to a congregation of church people as well. There is something special about sharing a meal together.

We can also see that in the bible God speaks about feasts, wedding banquets, festivals, meals together and even the well known Psalm 23 on the Lord is my Shepherd makes references to feasts. Jesus also used the illustration of wedding banquets in His teachings on the Kingdom of God. In fact, He performed His miracle of turning water to wine in a wedding feast.

Most significantly, the last meal Jesus had before He was crucified was the Passover meal with His 12 disciples. It was significant because He will not partake of that Passover meal again until He comes again. That is also why He taught us to break bread and drink of the wine as a remembrance of Him until He comes again.

It is unfortunate that the modern church has turned that last meal into the ceremonial and symbolic holy communion when it was originally a full meal shared together by Jesus and His disciples. Sharing a meal together as a congregation is really a good practice that we should all emulate and if we read the book of the Acts of the Apostles, we will also see that the early church ate together. I also think it is a good practice as the poor and needy will at least have one meal assured at church. As the church mandated singing for worship, I wished it had also practiced having meals as part of the service.

While most of us are not in any position to advise or instruct churches to organise meals amongst its members as part of the Sunday worship service celebrations, we ourselves can practice this among ourselves. Let’s eat together with others after worship – either go out as a group or join a group to eat together. Eating is surviving as it is one of the major things we need to continually do to live. Wild carnivore animals spend most of their time hunting for their next meal while herbivores continuously eat the vegetation in their surroundings. It is part and parcel of living, like breathing. That is why God Himself who created us also celebrates meals together among His people with happy and joyous references to banquets, feasts and festivals! God loves us and knows that we all love to eat!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/07/07/hurry-up-and-wait

Not to compare with the era of Keynes (the economics theorist that everyone who had studied economics cannot not know) in the 1930s but even say, 30 years back, the pace of life was slower. I remembered when I first came out to work, we were still using typewriters and even word processors like Wordstar and WordPerfect followed the way of the typewriter when formatting and aligning text. I can’t remember whether we even get to select the font type and size! We typed out our letters and send them by mail and fax. You only get to see the photo after it was processed and printed out as it was still purely 35mm film then. No mobile phones yet when I first started work. Of course later when mobile phones came, we started sending sms texts. Still information was not as readily available as now at our finger tips via Google and the world wide web.

So strangely even as Keynes predicted that with the advent of technology and machines and heightened economic activities, humans will only need to work 3 hours a day or 15 hours a week – we have turned out to work longer and longer hours! 12-hour days with traffic and commuting is pretty much the norm nowadays! In larger cities and metros, it is always a rush to get to work. We go through a sea of people as we take the tube, the underground or in KL, our LRTs and MRTs but more likely we see thousands and thousands of cars and motorcycles on the road. I recall that the favourite mode of transportation back in my day was the No.11 and 12 minibuses prowling the PJ-KL city centre routes.

Will we pause to wait for the Lord? Will we, like David, seek to learn what the Lord will do for me? What is the plan? What is God’s plans and purposes for us?

Life will not slow down. It will get more hectic until the day we retire. There will always be things to do, deadlines to meet. I have just been at my new workplace for a month and there are already multiple matters running in parallel that we need to chase and close. In IT, the world is evolving into the cloud, into digitalisation, big data and analytics. People are talking about curated content, targeted advertising and recommendation engines.

As humans, we always need to adapt as the world changes but as believers we must always maintain an eternal perspective on things while seeking the Lord every day as to what the Lord will do for me, or rather what does He want us to do? Remember as children of God, we have a specific mission on earth. We may be pilgrims passing through, but we are all pilgrims with a calling. Wait for the Lord, seek Him and He will be the lamp unto our path!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/07/06/you-can-do-it-2

We are all acquinted with the power of encouragement as the teaching is always it is better to encourage than to criticise. So someone didn’t do as well – we say, it’s ok, try again or work harder and do better next time. It is a good principle to follow whether in the world or the church, just that in the former people tend to be more exacting in their pronouncements, less forgiving and more demanding of results. So bosses have less patience to tolerate incompetence and tardiness and will surely scold and rebuke us if we produce less than stellar results or are slow. The reason I guess is that at the work place we are paid to do a job and thus there is a clear expectation of our job scope and responsibilities.

We can adapt the same approach in the church. If someone doesn’t conform, we can scold and reprimand and criticise. However, in matters of faith, there is also the concept of voluntariness as well as pace. Different ones of us are changed differently and most of the work is done by the Holy Spirit on the inside, in the heart which is not outwardly visible immediately. We should let the person change and grow at his or her pace.

The encouragement I like to emphasise this morning is somewhat different. It has more to do with dealing with disappointment and hardship in the walk of faith. Sometimes the going is so tough that instead of the tough gets going, we are tempted to throw everything away and walk. The eternal promises are just so far out and unreachable that the toil of the present living just overwhelms us. It may be too difficult to live out the faith if we are constantly persecuted by friends and family. That is why the body of believers need to step in to encourage those going through such severe difficulties in the faith. Don’t give up. Don’t despair. God is with us. The sufferings will not last forever. Everything we go through now is still worth it and cannot compare to the glory that awaits us in eternity Paul wrote this before in Romans 8:18 and it is true. We must hold on and believe that it can only be true because we are trusting in the one amd only true and living God!

Be the encourager, be the builder of faith. That’s our role as a fellow believer. Don’t give up. God will come through eventually. Even if he doesn’t, we are already assured a place in eternity. In the end, that’s what matters. He is our God and we are His people. Let us all be like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who went into the fiery furnace and believed that God will save them but declared that even if God did not save them, they will still not bow down and worship the golden statue made by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon – see Daniel Chapter 3.

https://odb.org/MY/2022/07/05/wisdom-and-understanding

I think while it is outstanding and astounding that Julian of Norwich spent 20 years praying in isolation to seek the Lord after seeing visions of Jesus’ crucifixion as she was healed from a sa crerious and potentially fatal illness, it is probably not something practical in the modern world. That was in the 14th century. To spend 20 years in solitude praying to seek the meaning of those visions now would look very much an opporunity lost to share and testify of that experience – but the point remains that God speaks and reveals things to us, during ancient times speaking to Abraham and Moses and all the prophets, to Paul and the other Apostles, to Julian of Norwich as well as to us here in 2022. The Lord reveals of Himself and the mysteries of the Kingdom as we seek Him in prayer, as we dwell and meditate upon His Word.

I’m sure many of us have experienced receiving revelations from God as we read His Word. Something like a different perspective to a passage of Scripture. As we read on and pray, God may reveal an aspect of Him that we didn’t see before in a familiar bible passage. To those of us who prepare sermons, we know that even as God speaks, we must never take passages out of context. Any Scripture needs to be read in the context of the chapter and the book and in line with the literary style of the period it was written, in consistency with the cultural practices of that time and most importantly in conformity with the established tenets of our faith. We are not here to propagate a new movement of the Christian faith! Although God may use a passage or word to speak to us literally, it is not wise to rely on its literal meaning to form the basis of a message or sermon. A personal Word to us is not the same as a Word for sharing with others or a congregation or for teaching.

Having said that, I encourage that we all seek to pursue the Lord speaking to us through His Word as revelations confirm and assure us that God is alive and real to us in our personal context. As we read and pray and meditate, ask that He opens up our mind to see and our hearts to receive of His Word to edify and encourage and strengthen us. For Him to let us know and assure us that He is with us as we go through the rigours and the ups and downs of life, its many challenges and storms. The reality of God in our lives is an essential facet of our faith that we must cherish and cling on to dearly. We have the means and the ability as a child of God redeemed by the blood of Christ to reach out to the most powerful force in the universe, a direct line to the Great I Am, the Almighty God, the creator of heavens and earth. Read His Word, study it, meditate upon it and He will give and teach us the Wisdom of His ways!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/07/04/no-greater-love-7

There is no greater love than a man who lays down his life for his friend. Jesus said this in John 15:13. Although He did that for us when He died on the cross for our sins, He meant it both literally and figuratively. This is important because although the literal meaning is the ultimate, the figurative meaning is what most of us will likely encounter in our lifetime. That means love involves sacrifice. When we love, we are willing to part with something. It may not be our life but there must be something that gives. There is a cost to love. If there is no cost, then perhaps the love is just verbal, just words without action. It is just saying but without doing anything.

Jesus taught us to love God with all our heart, mind and soul and to love our neighbour. Is there something that we can do to show that we love God and our neighbour? Is there an action that can follow our love for God and our neighbour? Are we helping the poor and needy? Are we giving our time and talents for the church, for the Kingdom of God? Are we serving God? Are we putting in time to attend our cell group so that we may grow and help others in the group with the sharing of our life? Do we share our thoughts and our life experience during our cell group meetings? Do we share about our walk with God? An action is involved, a sacrifice is made when we do something for someone and that may just involve us sharing our life in a cell group. Or we could clean the church or the toilets as our sacrifice and love for the congregation. That is love because love must be love in action. Loving God and our neighbour is not merely refraining from sin and doing evil. It is not passive. It is active. It usually requires something from us.

Unless we are in the battlefield fighting a war for our country or the police confronting criminals to maintain peace and order, we are unlikely to be sacrificing our lives for another. But sacrificial love need not only be about sacrificing our lives. Can we give of something that is ours to give? Our time, talent, money, effort for someone else, for the Kingdom of God, for the glory of the Lord? We cannot remain passive and uninvolved forever. It is time to step out, step up and get into the fray. That is what love really means. Love = sacrifice. Have a good week ahead everyone and let’s action our love!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/07/03/he-knows-my-heart

When we make a genuine mistake, apologise and try to make amends but people nevertheless accuse us of having done so intentionally, only God knows our heart intention and thus this is not an argument we can win. The Lord doesn’t judge by what He sees with His eyes or what He hears with His ears but He will judge with righteousness and justice. He is able to see deep within us into our hearts. Whether we were sincere and genuine.

There lies the crux of the matter. The situation we will likely face however is the converse of what was illustrated in the ODB example today. Rather than us having made a genuine mistake and not having the intention to cut the queue and accused of having intended that, it is more of us behaving in a manner that is outwardly acceptable but inwardly insincere, fake and false.

In conformity to socially acceptable behaviour, in fact socially acceptable “Christian” behaviour, we may do certain things or take certain action to flow with the crowd. Unfortunately our hearts are not really in those things. For example, we may give to a beggar to show people our generosity but not with the intention to help the beggar. Or we participate in a program to help the poor because everyone is participating but our heart is not with the poor.

The thing is while we can fool human beings, we can’t fool God and a lot of these things only become really meaningful to us and to God if our actions and hearts are aligned. To God as He can see our hearts, what really matters is the intention of our hearts. Are we real, genuine and sincere? Do we really believe in the cause? Or are we just flowing with what everyone is doing? I think this is important to God because if we are genuine and sincere, there will be more to come in the sense that God will open more opportunities for us to do such noble things for more people. For example, when we give and we give genuinely, the Lord will open more avenues for us to give. Granted our resources are finite, but there will be different groups we can give to because in the end, the actual amount is not as pertinent as the heart to help. We can give smaller amounts to help more people and enjoy the blessings that come with blessing more people which may include the ability to give even more!

Therefore let us examine ourselves this morning as we worship the Lord in church. Let us do things with sincerity and genuine love. Remember God sees our heart. Make sure our hearts are always real before God and man. Have a blessed Sunday in church everyone and may He dwell in the praises of His people and may we be enveloped by His tangible presence as we praise and worship Him today!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/07/02/surviving-together

Some people believe they can be a believer but need not join a church or a fellowship. Their argument is that their relationship with God is between them and God and thus they don’t need to involve anyone else, or rather it is perfectly OK to relate to God without involving other believers.

That belief is of course incorrect and misconceived as we need each other to grow spiritually and in maturity. The community of believers encourages and supports our faith, besides being a form of check and balance for us, for example, with someone telling us if we are off the narrow path. There is strength in numbers whether in war or peace, whether in prayer or spiritual warfare, whether in evangelism or discipling. Two is better than one and three is better than two. It is true with knots and threads and it is true with people. Even at work, working as a team is more encouraging and inspiring as we are able to achieve much more compared to working solo.

That is why Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:11 that Christ gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and the teachers to equip His people for works of service so that the body may be built up. The various ministries are to equip and build up the people of God for the work of God. They are not the work itself as they are to prepare the body for God’s work.

Of course when we meet as a body, we meet all sorts of people in various forms. Different believers are at different levels of work in progress in terms of our conforming to the image of Christ. That’s part and parcel of spiritual maturity. No doubt what matters most is our relationship with God and yet we need to relate to others in the body as part of our spiritual growth. The fruit of the Spirit can only be birthed and formed as we interact and relate with people, as we go through the difficulty of dealing with all sorts of people – even those who are in the family of God. In the modern Christian world, we cannot be a hermit and grow in Christ because part of that growth comes from us growing as we relate and connect with others. Never an easy task and sometimes we wish we can be all alone in our room or house. But that’s not life. God has made us with company. We are not alone. There are many out there. They need us as much as we need them. That is why we always need to meet as a congregation.

My encouragement to us today is that if we have been comfortable attending church online, it is time to dress up and step out of our rooms and houses and start to physically go to church. Real interactions in life occur face to face. Even businesses and companies have started to get people back to offices. The present ethos is work from home if you are not well otherwise come to office, in the same rein – unless you are not well come to church to worship God as a congregation!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/07/01/celestial-communion

I just had an interesting conversation with a Muslim colleague on the Holy Communion a few days back. Basically I explained that it was initiated by Jesus for us believers to remember His death until He comes again. It was originally a Jewish passover meal to commensurate God’s grace in sparing the lives of the first born of the Israelites when they were in Egypt when the Angel of Death came and took the life of every first born in every Egyptian family during that time including the first born of their livestock. The sign that caused the Angel of Death to bypass a home was the blood of an unblemished lamb splashed on its doors and Jesus later became the Lamb of God that redeemed us and avoided us as believers from eternal death and damnation.

The original Holy Communion was actually a proper meal that started with Jesus breaking the bread and giving thanks to God but for the congregation to partake it as part of a Sunday worship service it has been simplified over the years into a piece of bread and some juice. There is nothing physically magical in the bread and juice in the sense that they didn’t originate from any specific place or anywhere special like the zam zam water. Yet even though the significance is spiritual, there is something supernatural that could occur as we partake the elements. Believers have been known to have experienced healings and breakthroughs by just partaking of the Holy Communion. Nothing magical but there is both spiritual and supernatural significance. The only rule churches have is that we have to be believers to partake of the sacraments. If we have not accepted Christ, we must refrain from it as it is only meant for those who have accepted the death and resurrection of Christ in their lives.

In my previous church, we don’t just partake of the elements corporately but we use the time to also pray for one another or with families praying with one another. I think that’s a good practice to use that solemn time to pray for another and cultivate the unity of the spirit and the body. That as we remember what the Lord did for us and be thankful for the gift of salvation and eternal life, we give thanks together and use the opportunity to pray for the needs of one another.

Let’s partake the Holy Communion seriously, and the coming Sundays as we partake of the sacraments, use that time to examine ourselves, seek forgiveness and repent from our sins and thank the Lord for His love and mercy in calling us to be children of God, to be a part of the Kingdom of Heaven.

https://odb.org/MY/2022/06/30/giving-god-my-work

I was with a group of companies for nearly 27 years before I recently found a good opening elsewhere and exited. My pastor said that 3 more years and I would have clocked 30 years and would equal government servants on the pension scheme! In my 27 years, I was not at a single job. I had moved around a few times but I was nevertheless at a job for a long time with the last stint at nearly 13 years. So obviously there were times when I wanted to join another organisation, do something else in a new environment and yet we don’t leave just because there’s another opportunity elsewhere. Actually, in the present work culture, employers value loyalty less than youth and even though they complain when the young nowadays leave after a short stint, they still prefer youth to experience. The young brings vibrancy and a buzz to organisations but crucially they are cheaper, more productive, abounding with energy and ideas. Yet we should not leave for just a few hundred more or just for a change.

This is because as believers, we also believe in God’s calling for our lives and for some of us, there could be a calling to be where we are for a season and sometimes that season is a long one. There is something to be achieved in our lives and for those around us where God has placed us.

That is why there comes a point where we need to look at our work as something we do for God as part of our worship and living sacrifice for Him, not just a job to put food on the table. Some of us have no choice but to stay where we are and it could be for a variety of reasons like a good salary, excellent benefits, proximity to our homes or we are already a master of what we do. Some have not much choice because they are civil servants. Yet we sometimes still wish we could move on somewhere because the work has become less of an adventure more of a chore that pays the bills.

Some of us dream of going full time for the Lord but ultimately our job is our calling whether we are full time or working in the world. That’s our land, the place where God wants us to be and has placed us to be. Cultivate the land that God has given us. Until a really good opportunity comes along and we have the prompting of God to make a move, stay on and do our best for the Lord.

Whatever you do, do it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward (Colossians 3:22-23).