blogpastor – Page 196

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Discipleship as paying attention to God’s righteousness

25 June 2012 blogpastor 1 Comment

I saw this quotation in the LIBERATE website and reproduced it here. It shows the role that trust in Christ’s finished works plays in discipleship. Its not so much putting in more efforts to be a better Christian, but its giving more and more attention to what Christ has already done. Its worth pondering over.

The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment that God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness. We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God is righteous. Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasm. (Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, 128-129)

2012 Church camp in Penang

18 June 2012 blogpastor 6 Comments

Penang church camp

Its church camp season again. Malaysian hotels lay out the red carpets to Singapore churches and rake in the Singapore dollar. This time round our church camp was held in Bayview Hotel at Batu Ferringhi in Penang. When they proposed Penang it seemed an organizational jungle and obstacle course. That was a year ago, now it’s past tense and the organizing team did a great job of delivering one of our best camps ever.

Program lite

Pastor Vincent Lun was the camp speaker and together with his wife Jenny they brought to us an appreciation of what it takes to be church that welcomes sinners the way Jesus did. They have left what could have been a comfortable pastorate at Riverlife Church and have pioneered a unique missional outpost that reaches the outcasts and rejects and despised of society. They share what it meant to do ministry among such precious but forgotten people. We were blessed by their open sharing of their lives and ministry.

We keep our church camp sessions light. Those were the days decades back when 6-8 sessions is the norm. Now together with revised goals we have a revised program with four preaching sessions, two light sessions of icebreakers and games, and one session of holy communion and group sharing. We introduced an interesting idea: we got 4 young preachers to preach sermonettes of 10 minutes each. One thing we small churches can choose to excel in is to handcraft and develop emerging leadership.

Of chendol and durians

There was time for us to go tour Penang and shop twice. The memorable one for me was when we were dropped off at Komtar Shopping Mall and from there four of us went in search of the Penang durian and chendol. We found the famous chendol stall and there was a constant crowd. The sun was beating us down and the humidity was worse than in Singapore. I was not that impressed with the taste. I prefer my chendol with thicker coconut milk- a stronger punchy gula malacca in it. Beware the other store just opposite which has more signs to claim they are “the real thing”. Where there is genuine, there is the counterfeit seeking space. This happens in the spiritual as well as in the natural.

Searching for the durian was quite a task as we had to ask locals for direction and it was after 45 minutes of walking that we determined Singaporeans finally found the stall opposite some UMNO building. The first durian he sold us was more sweet than bitter, something we could have found in Singapore. Then he tempted us with a red marked durian. It looked a pale yellow. But when we put it into our mouth it was smooth, creamy and not mushy nor dry but of perfect constitution. The taste was a perfect balance of sweetness, bitterness and a hint of wine. I have stumbled upon an unforgettable durian experience. I couldn’t figure out his Hokkien accent and though we asked him to repeat a few times the name of the durian variety we had just tasted, the closest it sounded to my ears was “Capri”. Durian has gone upmarket and Italian.

From job description to the dictates of love

5 June 2012 blogpastor 5 Comments

There was a man who employed a maid and gave her a job description. She was to wake up at 7 every morning and prepare breakfast for him and his elderly sick mother and make sure she took her medicine. Later she was to clean and tidy the whole house and do the laundry. After that she was to cook lunch for his mother and to make sure his mum took a nap. Later she was to cook dinner and take his wheelchair-bound mother for a walk in the nearby park. After dinner she was to iron the clothing and prepare his mum for bed. On Sundays she had her day off, and he would take care of his mum then. The maid did her best to follow the job description but she often failed and faltered, and she did her best to cover her failures.

The man fell in love with the maid and confessed his love for her. She responded in kind and soon they got married. After the wedding, the man took out the old job description and tore it away and said to her, “You are now my wife. We have a love and trust relationship with one another. We do not need a job descriptions. Do as your love dictates.”

The wife did everything she used to do for the man, now her husband, and his mother, now her mother in law. However she did even much more, giving them both much love, affection and she bore three children. She did more than her old job description and with more love, energy, purpose, devotion and faithfulness.

But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of written code. (Rom 7:6)

But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.(Gal 5:18)