https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/22/something-deep-and-binding

The fundamental difference between us humans and other living beings on earth is that we have reasoning power and a will. That’s the intellect part. And yet emotionally we are also different as animals although they too experience emotions, are driven by instinct while we may act based on our emotions rather than intellect. Thus we follow our heart instead of our head when it comes to God, to love and things of beauty and marvel. Some of our actions and decisions are irrational as they are driven by our emotions. That is why we must never discount the power of words and tone when dealing with people. The more polite and respectful we are and the softer our tone especially when faced with hostility, the better will things likely turn out. The fact that we are emotional beings also means that we may be swayed by a compelling sob story although it may actually be just a tall tale.

As Christians and thus people who are acquinted with God’s Word, we know that the difference between us and other living things here on earth lies in the fact that we were created in the image of God. That explains why we have the intellect as well as the emotional dimension in decision making as the other fundamental difference we have with other living creatures who are driven by instinct is the will. We may decide not to live for emotional reasons but an animal will be instinctively driven to survive no matter what. Or we may be driven to sacrifice our lives or our own self interest for others which wild animals will not but domesticated ones may still do perhaps having trained to do so by humans.

Of course as Christians we also know that the other fundamental difference between us and other living creatures is that we are spiritual beings like God since we are made in His image. As much as we are physical beings of flesh and blood, we have a soul that lives forever.

The message today I believe is that as much as God tells us that we have been created in His image and thus we have intellect, emotions and a will and as much as we are flesh and blood, we are spiritual beings with a soul – therefore, use the most important distinction we have wisely. Ultimately, man have the will to decide whether to follow God or to go his own way. Use our will wisely in all aspects of our lives. Always decide in the best interests of God and His kingdom. Always put the interests of others first above our own. When we exercise our intellect and emotions in that manner, we will never be far from the will of God and thus will be assured of a good ending. If we do our best for God and for others, we will never go wrong.

https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/20/refreshed-at-simons-house

A ministry showcased in today’s ODB which highlights Paul’s commendation in 1 Corinthians 16 is that of hospitality. Paul and others were refreshed in their spirit even as these people devoted themselves to the service of the Lord’s people.

Ministry and service in the Kingdom can take many forms and we need not always be looking at preaching and worship leading. Ushering and cleaning are examples of how we could serve God. Some actually cook meals for church lunches or create and design beautiful bouquets of flowers. There are just many ways we could serve God in our lives while working for our living and just living life. And like Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus, we could likewise devote ourselves to the service of the Lord’s people whether meeting the needs of passing missionaries or just providing a place of rest for visiting pastors and preachers. I know of someone who started by hosting ministers and missionaries in her home and ended up becoming a missionary herself.

What are we devoting ourselves to in the service of the Kingdom of God? Is there an area that the Lord has impressed upon our hearts? Could it be hospital visitations or just plain visitation to church members homes as we tag along with the pastor to do home visits? Whatever it is, it is time to start doing and to do it now. Don’t wait until our job is less hectic. Don’t wait until we are retired. Serve God now. Devote ourselves to a ministry now. Time waits for no man. We hesitate, dither and pause and deliberate – we will get no where. Step out and start devoting ourselves to the thing God has impressed upon us. Start today and start now!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/19/food-from-heaven

The manna from heaven that the LORD provided for the Israelites in their 40 years in the wilderness was an active demonstration of the supernatural penetrating into the natural as it would have been impossible for a nation of nearly 2 million people (600,000 men plus women and children) to live in the dessert for such a prolonged period of time that spanned at least one generation. In fact a whole generation of adult Israelites who were divinely brought out of Egypt by God through Moses and entered the desert died there, except Caleb and Joshua. Only the children of the former Egyptian slaves and those born there in the wilderness together with Caleb and Joshua finally entered the Promised Land 40 years later.

Besides the manna being supernatural, God’s presence was with them all the time as He resided in the Tent of Meeting (Tabernacle) and led them by a cloud in the day and by a ball of fire in the night. Wherever they stopped amd camped, they were able to find a water source with the staff of Moses leading the way. Thus their lives and sustenance were fully dependent on the supernatural.

I always believed that God leaves behind a historical narrative or story in His Word as a way to proclaim His goodness and love and also to guide future generations on how to relate to Him by Him showing examples of how He related with His people in the past.

Thus we know that, if necessary, God can and will bring the supernatural into the natural even for long periods of time as evident from this example of 40 years in the desert. In the case of Elijah and the widow at Zarephath, God also provided food for the 3 of them during intense famine in the land from just a little leftover of flour and oil that the widow was about to prepare for her son and herself to die. Elijah was also fed by ravens before God led him to the widow. All these real life stories of the ancients demonstrated God’s usage of the supernatural into the natural to preserve life.

The lesson this morning I believe is not the repeated theme of bread of life (like yesterday’s) but more of God telling us today at this time and hour and this present age that He is able and will do the necessary for us in order that we may live. He had ensured the survival of a nation in the harsh and unhabitable wilderness for 40 years. He had ensured the survival of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath despite the raging famine. He will thus ensure the survival of each and every one of us notwithstanding the expected recession, rising prices, reduced purchasing power, scarcity of work, slowdown in businesses and the economy in the days to come post Covid, post the Russian-Ukraine war, post US-China trade war. Perhaps it is true that Christ will return this generation and perhaps we believers may be raptured. But until then, the LORD our God, Jesus Christ our Lord and the Holy Spirit will ensure that we get to live to fight another day! Yes, life is fleeting and we can be like the flower that bloom today and is blown away and forgotten the next day. But the picture that came to me is that we as people of the faith will be like the sunflower which grew and stood tall in a lonely forsaken desert highway. We could live and thrive despite the adverse and unfair conditions life brings us. Why? Because if God is with us, who can be against us?

https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/18/crave-him

Bread represents food. At the minimum, we must eat at least bread or rice or noodles (in our context, maggie mee!) even if it’s plain and empty of egg, meat or vegetables. At times of war or famine, just a scoop of raw rice or flour to cook into a pot of rice or bake into a loaf of bread will do. Some people live to eat but the truth is we need to eat to live, like all animals and living creatures. We are made such that continuous sustenance is a prerequisite to survival. Food and drink is essential and necessary for the living.

Before Jesus started His ministry, He spent 40 days in the wilderness and one of the temptation He faced was the challenge by the devil for Him to turn stone into bread, the devil knowing that He was hungry and His body was craving for food. But we know that Jesus rebutted the devil by quoting Scripture that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. The question then was not whether Jesus could do what the devil challenged Him to do, but whether He should abandon His goal of a 40-day fast to prove to the devil He could do that. Sometimes we let pride take control and forget our goal in life. For example, we ended up doing something we regret because of pride forgetting at that moment that we are to be a mirror image of Christ. We are challenged and we let go our burst of rage or conniving heart to manipulate a situation as though we are playing devil’s advocate when we are really being the devil!

The main message this morning is however that as much as bread or rice (meaning to say, in context, the means in which we put food on our table) is essential to our survival as human beings, God is still more important. Jesus is the bread of life that as we eat and drink, we will never ever grow hungry or thirsty. There is the eternal dimension in the sense of the upcoming tree of life that we will enjoy one day as revealed in Revelation 21 but more importantly, even here on this earth, we will never go hungry and thirsty if we put our trust in God. The devil will always say that we need to do what’s necessary to survive (turn stone to bread to break the hunger and fast) but the truth is man need not live on bread alone as God will ensure that we as His children will live even as we put our trust and surrender our lives fully to Him. God brought manna from heaven during the 40 years the Israelites were in the wilderness, will He not make a way for us to continue to serve Him? We need not bow down to any other gods and idols and we need not test the LORD our God. Place our trust in Jesus the Bread of Life and He will give us rest and we will never ever go hungry or thirsty!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/16/the-fierce-struggle

Even as we were created in the spirit before our physical bodies came into being, there is actually in parallel an immense world out there in the spiritual realm that are unseen to us. Our physical human senses are not able to see, hear, smell, taste or touch that world because our 5 senses are made for this physical world. Yet we know they exist. There are occasions when the spiritual realm are able to penetrate into the physical realm like when we pray and God moves in signs and wonders, through healing and deliverance. Or there are people bestowed with a 3rd eye or a 6th sense to see the spiritual world that exists side by side with us. However, as much as the spiritual realm exists in parallel with us, it is not a world inhabited by departed spirits. When we pass on in this physical world and give our body back to the soil that it was created from, our spirit goes back to God and all will be resurrected on the day of Jesus Christ. The question then is whether we will go on to enjoy the new heaven and new earth and live with God as revealed to John in Revelation 21 or will we banished to a place of gnashing of teeth?

The final destination of the human soul is determined by what it does here on earth while its human body still have breadth. That is why many have described the believer as only being a pilgrim passing through the earth on the way to eternity. It’s a pilgrimage fraught with trials and challenges, and yet we are also empowered with the grace, goodness and power of God to overcome and cone out victorious.

That is why Paul reminds us that our fight is not against flesh and blood but against the principalities of the air, the dark forces, the evil rulers and authorities that are in the heavenly realms. They are always fighting with our heavenly hosts and angels to take control of the spiritual realm so that the souls of humans are either drawn to the world or to God. Prayer is our God-given weapon to call upon the heavenly hosts to fight for us against the vile and evil schemes of the evil one.

The fight is always for the souls of mankind. That is the real fight. All others are just peripherals. What we go through in life is just like a play although it is real to us. Because in the end, we will live for eternity. The physical is only temporal, but the spiritual is eternal. Thus whatever we do in the physical to survive amd continue to live in the physical, we must always bear in mind and give emphasis to and prioritise the eternal. Are we storing up riches in heaven? Are we doing what God had planned for us before the foundations of the world? Can we be like Job who look to the day when he knows that his Redeemer lives and though his skin be destroyed, he will see God. Job was an excellent picture of what happened in the spiritual realm having affected the physical and yet the soul of man (Job) was intact as his faith for God was unwavering.

The message today I believe is to look beyond the physical when we face issues in life. There is more to life than that, much more. The battle is being fought in the spiritual realm and we can help out by praying for our heavenly hosts to always protect and preserve the souls of man. We serve God in church to meet the physical and spiritual needs of our fellow brethren but always remember to pray and intercede in the spiritual realm as there is where the real fight lies.

https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/15/monkeying-with-the-cosmos

When we do our daily devotional with God based on ODB, we can not avoid seeing repeated subject matters as there are 365 days to a year. In other words, certain themes may be spoken about again and again, although the writing or the content may be fresh. We face the same issue with satellite pay TV when compared against user generated content in YouTube. We in pay TV used to be the Goliath with more than 100 channels compared to terrestrial TV, but now we are the David when compared against the sheer immensity, depth, and how current YouTube content is. Totally no match!

Thus today’s ODB speaks about the fact that the universe has a creator and the creator is God. However the twist is that Jesus was also there at the beginning. That God created the universe and entire cosmos together with Jesus Christ the Son. So even though Jesus appeared on earth through the virgin birth of Mary about 2,000 years ago, He existed well before the foundations of the world.

Which brings us to the question this morning? When were we created? Did we only come into existence when our father’s sperm and our mother’s egg became one? Did we come into existence only at conception? Our physical human body only came into being at conception, which is undeniable. However, our spirit was created only then, too? Is it at the point of the conception of our human physical body?

In Ephesians 1:4 Paul declared that God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. Meaning to say that even before the physical world, the universe and the cosmos, were created by God, He had already created us in the spirit. Our existence as spiritual beings even predates the creation of the first physical man, Adam that even as God gave him breadth after making him from the soil of the earth, his spirit had already existed in the spiritual realm. We will one day be sure of this when we meet God.

In the meantime, I just like to encourage everyone again that we are all special and unique in the eyes of God. He loves each and every one of us like a father and mother love every single one of their children. We may have a few offspring but God has billions and yet He loves each and every one of them.

Blessed Sunday, everyone! As we dwell in God’s presence today, know that you are loved dearly by God and there is nothing that He will not want for us if it is in His will. He always wants the best for us. Trust Him with all our heart, our mind and our strength for He is our God and we are His children!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/14/the-gift-of-repentance

When we accept Christ, what’s usually emphasised is the eternal life that salvation brings. That salvation is God’s gift to mankind as God loved the world so much (Joh. 3:16) that with the death and resurrection of Christ, we are redeemed from sin and the sting of sin which is death. So although we die, we live for Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life (John 11:2).

But salvation although it’s free (it is not by our own effort or good works), it is not without a cost. It cost Jesus His life. It will also cost us our lives as much as we are saved by grace. Fundamentally, salvation comes with the repentance of the heart. We need to repent from our sins. There must be a transformation of our minds to not conform to the pattern of the world. Our old self must be crucified daily as it tries to assert dominance over our new self in Christ. Our lives must then be a living sacrifice for God since Christ has redeemed us with His blood. There is a cost to following Jesus as we need to carry our own cross daily even as we may ask Jesus to carry our yoke for us and put on His yoke which is light and easy (Matthew 11:28). Using legal terminology, although there are no conditions precedent to accepting Jesus – Jesus accepts us as we are – there is a condition subsequent and that is the repentance of our hearts and it will permeate us thecrest of our lives.

In the ancient days, God will punish His people if they sin and rebel against Him and yet when they repent, He will relent and forgive them as He is gracious and compassionate and slow to anger. He is still the same and what more since the blood of the Lamb has erased our sins.

We cannot be saved if our hearts have not repented. That is why Paul advised in Philippians 2:12 that we each need to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. James even went further and asked – what does it profit if someone says he has faith but does not have works. Can faith save him?

As much as some say that Christian life is not a bed of roses, it is also not paved with gold. But we are assured of a better life in God on earth as in heaven – because if we were to ask our Father in heaven for bread, will He give us a stone or if we were to ask for a fish, will He give us a snake? (See Luke 11:11).

In God we will live our optimum life. We will fulfil our potential in Him and become the person He had planned us to be since the foundations of the earth. We will become the best we could be if we are with God by being able to realise our fullest potential in Him. He will restore what the locusts had eaten and complete His work in us till the day of the Lord.

https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/13/finish-strong

When it comes to our spiritual walk, the natural tendency is to get weary and slack off. Not backsliding but just our fervency or intensity reduced. It could be due to a variety of reasons, among of which, is just plain fatigue. Sometimes we face the same issues over and over again, so we get tired and kind of worn out.

The exhortation by Paul in Acts 20 is thus a good motivation for us to keep things hot. Paul considers his life worth nothing and his only aim is to finish the race and complete the task God has given him. Meaning to say nothing else is on his mind except to finish the race and complete his God given task. He is fully focused and totally committed.

For us, Paul’s 100% focus might not be practical as we have our work, our career, family and other obligations to think about. In fact, for me, my work occupies most of my thoughts most of the time. It is not practical because our job pays our bills and put food on the table. Also as we approach retirement, we who are not on a pension scheme, need to build up substantial savings for our old age.

However, having said that we also know that our life here is temporal and an eternal destiny and inheritance await us in heaven. There is thus also a need to store our treasures in heaven and sow into the kingdom. Further we also need to be focused on fulfilling God’s calling for us on earth, to fulfil His plans and purposes for us so that we are conformed to the image of Christ that we may test and approve His good and pleasing and perfect will for us.

My exhortation for us today is that whatever we need to do to survive in this world, make sure we don’t compromise our destiny in heaven, make sure we stay true to His narrow path and make sure we sow into our heavenly treasures. Treat others well. Treat others with dignity. Give people their due respect. Serve God with all our heart. Work at our character to be consistent with the image of Christ. Fulfil God’s plans and purposes for our lives. Run the race consistently and finish strongly to complete our God-given task! As we dwell in His presence, I know that He will take away all our weariness and rejuvenate us to fight another day for His cause! Amen!

https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/12/walking-by-a-blessing

I think some of us tend to think that if we give our lives to God, not only accepting Christ but fully surrendering our lives to Christ which is actually the same thing, we will lose out in terms of what we could achieve in the world. So we either refuse to enter into a relationship with God or we have one foot in the Kingdom of God and another in the world. Perhaps some of us feel that spiritual standards are just too high for us to be successful in the world since in the Kingdom of God, we pursue God and His purposes for our lives and not riches or fame.

But have we thought that our lives might actually be better off with God on our side while living in accordance with His percepts? For example, the Israelites need to be in Israel for the Messiah to come. And so God arranged for someone to overrun the Babylonians and free the Israelites in order that the prophesy in Micah 5:2 may be fulfilled. In history, that person was Cyrus the Great of Persia who invaded and defeated Babylon and gave permission for the Jews to return to their promised land. In Isaiah 48, God thus commented that wouldn’t it have been better if they had listened to Him earlier and thus would not need to be exiled to Babylon in the first place?

The point to ponder today is that perhaps our lives would have been better if we had listened to God and had given our lives to Him earlier. Maybe we need not go through all the challenges in making a living and charting a career on our own steam? Maybe we like the Israelites had walked by a blessing that has been staring in our face all this while like that little rock of gold in today’s ODB’s life story?

What is gone is gone. The past is the past. Crying over spilled milk will not bring back the milk. What’s important is the future and the road ahead. Repent and give our lives to God and step fully on to this side of the line. Don’t be half hearted but live our lives fully for God and His plans and purposes for our lives! We need to be like Peter and jump into the water to Jesus, can’t remain one foot on the boat and one foot on the water. Just not possible.

https://odb.org/MY/2022/05/11/always-worth-sharing

It is interesting to note that Paul uses the picture of a Roman processional victory with spices and fragrances in 2 Corinthians 2 to illustrate the point that in a way we are like captives and spoils of war that Christ has captured for His glory and purposes. Unlike the real POWs who in ancient times ended up as slaves in return for their lives, we are free people liberated from sin but tasked to share the Good News and serve in the Kingdom based on our calling and gifting. In a way we are bond servants (slaves) to Christ and in a way, we are His property as He had redeemed us with His blood. But He also made us co-heirs with Him with a rich inheritance in glory that is accessible now even here on earth with a greater inheritance awaiting us as our Father prepares a place for us in His mansion of many rooms in heaven. We are slaves with the rights, privileges and authority of sons and daughters that nothing whether on earth or in heaven nor any principality or power of darkness may separate us from the infinite love of God. Christ is proud of us as He puts us through the victory procession – we are the fruits of His victory on the cross.

We therefore have an obligation to preach and share the Gospel to the people we meet so that more will have the privilege to become sons and daughters with Christ, to be co-heirs to the inheritance in glory and in most times, sharing the Good News may require the same tenacity of faith that we expend daily to live out the Christian life. If we have been sharing Christ to our friends and colleagues and family through word and our conduct and character – continue on and don’t give up! Salvation is in the hands of God and that person’s will and yet we must try to facilitate the work of the Holy Spirit as much as we can. Our constant sharing of our lives and word will inevitably leave an impression, the question is whether that impression is pleasant and lasting or ugly and fleeting? That is why it is essential that our life testimony matches the Gospel we preach. As much as we are not the one determining the conversion of faith, we ought to be the instrument that God uses to enhance and augment, rather then degrade and lessen it. The message of the Gospel is strong and powerful by itself as it is the Word of God and yet we may by our negative testimony blunt its impact. Share and live our life as Christ intends and we will see the fruits of our labour and we may have our own victory procession for Christ!