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Monday sabbath

25 January 2018 blogpastor Leave a comment

I do not keep the sabbath as a law, but I live by the wisdom of sabbath. Christ is my sabbath. In Christ I have entered a spiritual rest from all works and labouring to earn salvation. However there is wisdom to be drawn from God’s idea of rest, remembering, and relishing one day a week.

One day in the week, usually Monday my day off, I choose to slow down to rest and avoid the kind of work which I usually do. I take time to meditate and pray. I try to delight in everything throughout the day. I rest.

The noise without and the noise within is stilled with quiet waiting before God

This Monday morning, I cycled to the Japanese Garden and found a bench facing the disused golf course of the now defunct Jurong Country Club. The government seized it for its vaunted development of the rapid rail station and peripheral mixed development.

Slowing down takes time. I was sitting there still and silent for 40 minutes. My thoughts were everywhere. So I sought to focus on my physical senses especially the sense of sound and touch. It helped. I shut my eyes, felt the cool breeze, and listened. Immediately, I heard the distant and faded pounding of a piledriver– thud, thud, thud. I heard something that sounded like a motor boat in the distance. There was the sound of excavators at work. There was the chirping of small birds and sometimes the squak of the heron. A golf cart rolls by behind me and I can hear that too. Must be the park management staff. Even the crickets whistle incessantly. A lot of construction work is going on at the fringe of the Jurong Lake and some even in the Chinese Garden.

Slowly my wandering thoughts which were like distracting monkeys jumping all over the branches of my mind, calmed down and quietened, as though asleep. Finally I did come to a place of restfulness and I meditated on the stages of prayer and the life of prayer that Jesus lived. Some lovely thoughts and took some notes of the insights.

Parents coaxing their child to smile in a child photography session in open air

I rounded off my time with the Lord cycling around the Chinese Garden and saw this couple having a photo shoot of their infant child. It was the first time I have seen a child photography session in the Chinese Garden.

Preaching to Mandarin congregation

22 January 2018 blogpastor Leave a comment

Kenny preaches to Mandarin congregation with Annie the interpreter

I have not preached in the Mandarin service for some years. With the young preachers of the English congregation taking the pulpit regularly as part of their development, I thought it good to deposit something of myself in the Mandarin and deaf congregations. Pastor Edmund the Mandarin congregation pastor welcomed me to preach yesterday.

I began my preparation last week praying for the congregation and thinking about the composition of the group of 60 plus believers. The age groupings, the needs I could imagine such age groups would have, the actual needs that I know of, and the challenges the congregation was facing.

I looked at a few of the messages I preached last year in the English Service and prayerfully thought of using one of them. Truth is both timely and timeless. So I looked for a sermon with timeless truths that apply to their life situation making them timely!! I finally settled on one message and copied it and renamed the file and started editing it prayerfully. I call this a “microwave sermon”. The microwave is the prayer preparation and the modifications.

I had to change the number of verses to exposit from five verses to simply one verse. From three main points in the sermon, I focused on two. The message was interpreted so the time taken would be double. I did not want it to be a lengthy sermon so I shortened the passage, and the number of main points.

The applications and the conclusion had to change too. I had to share more illustrations and stories. This modification went on right to the time when the service began. As we stood and worship the Lord in the Mandarin congregation, thoughts flashed by and I had to change the introduction.

The heart of the message remained the same. It was like a house renovation.

In the end, I preached the sermon and enjoyed doing so. The Spirit was upon me to preach good news to the believers. I hope they enjoyed it and found it inspiring and that the message brought them closer to God.

After the service they had lunch. So I sat down and chatted with a couple there. It was a meaningful Sunday.

Hiking Mt Kinabalu at age 11

11 January 2018 blogpastor Leave a comment

I was solemnising the marriage of two faithful members of the church when during the course of the dinner, I heard a unique name called out that triggered my memory. It was, “Mao Siang” (spelling uncertain).

Years ago, in 2005, I led some young people from the church on a hike to Mt Kinabalu. it included adults for sure. However, the youngest of them was eleven year old Mao Siang, one of our member’s nephew.

Mao Siang, Rachel the cousin (who got married).Peter Lim and Eunice, the aunt.

It was remarkable that at that young age he had the motivation, discipline and endurance to go through the rigours of weeks of afternoon training at Bukit Timah Hill and finally to summit the mountain. I was amazed. And with such a unique name, I simply could not forget.

Mao Siang (second from left, lowest row) at the Loh’s Peak, summit of Mt Kinabalu.

So I asked the mother to introduce him to me and I learned he was studying in the second year in the National Technology University of Singapore. I could not resist taking a wefie and blogging about this.

With Mao Siang at the wedding of his cousin Rachel

If you are interested in hiking Mt Kinabalu in Sabah, East Malaysia have a look at the blogposts below:

Kinabalu 1 – where Mao Siang hiked with us.

Kinabalu 2 – church youths to Kinabalu and God’s intervention

Kinabalu 3 – the last church hike to Kinabalu