Colourful Geylang

Geylang by night

In the night or by day, Geylang baffles logic and beauty. Its the only place in Singapore where URA(Urban Renewal Authority) have not stolen the soul with a heavy touch.

Everyone in Singapore has heard of Geylang. It is the red-light district. It is concentrated in the even-numbered streets from Lorong 8 to Lorong 18. When darkness falls the red lanterns light up and the ladies of the night stalk their prey. The horny and desperate males are the victims. The neon lights of scores of bars and hourly-rated hotels assault bystanders for attention. The sordid streets do not sleep. Brightly lit, they beckon the young and the retirees, of all races and nationalities.

Beyond this nucleus, are a hundred eating places, famous food hangouts where even the timid will venture, despite Geylang by daythe risk of a suspect reputation. Makansutra calls it paradise. From herbal tonics, and foods fabled as aphrosidiacs, to common street hawker fare, these restaurants open till the hours of morn. There are also the shopping emporiums, 24 hours convenience stores, and the fruit shops laden with durians that defy season.

Geylang in the daytime is just as colourful. Light industries litter the outskirts of the Viagra-laced streets. The taller and larger buildings are along the MRT tracks between Kallang and Aljunied. Scattered along the terraced shophouses are all kinds of small businesses from internet cafes, wholesale suppliers of timber and metal, electrical and electronic and furniture retailers. Banks (so similar to the red light area in their pecuniary intentions, as we have seen in the last year and a half) and even clinics position themselves there for a piece of the action.

Guilin building, GeylangThe irony is that side by side with the immoral are literally hundreds of civic and community groups, associations, churches, temples, and mosques. I take that back: maybe its not such an irony! Anyway, Geylang is a very religious place. The scents of incense, the colour green and red appear like a recurring theme. The church I grew up in and am now serving as the senior pastor is ten minutes away from where the red-light diestrict is. Its nearer to the HDB flats and the national library branch. Our next-door neighbours are private residential apartments, a condominium, a church and the Youth for Christ shared facility, and two famous temples.

The Urban Renewal Authority(URA) plan in 1992 had relocated many Chinese clan associations and community groups into the area. Many other religious organizations have followed suit because its difficult to find places elsewhere that is zoned for such purposes. According to the URA, places of worship serve the public whilst associations are allowed only private worship by members of the association as an incidental activity. On hearsay, there are about 30 to 40 Christian organizations/churches in Geylang.

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Singapore churches are preaching the half gospel

Lord anoint your servants to preach the good news of JesusI find Michael Horton’s books invigorating. I have read his “Putting the Amazing Back into Grace” and “Power Religion” of which I would warmly commend the former. But I have not read his more recent books titled Christless Christianity and the Gospel-Driven Life but they should be thought provoking stuff.Michael is currently the  professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary in Escondido, California, and the author of many books. Recently he was interviewed by Mark Galli from Christianity Today.

I am posting excerpts from this interview on some issues raised in these recent books to strengthen my claims that preaching in Singapore is too man-centered and imperative-driven and needs to return to being God-centered and indicative-driven or gospel-driven. What people have been receiving is a half gospel. The interview will clarify what I mean.

Here are some excerpts from there:

ARE OUR SERMONS IN CHURCHES TODAY CHRISTLESS:

What is at the core of the temptation to practice a Christless Christianity?

When the emphasis becomes human-centered rather than God-centered. In more conservative contexts, you hear it as exhortation: “These are God’s commandments. The culture is slipping away from us. We have to recover it, and you play a role. Is your life matching up to what God calls us to?” Of course there is a place for that, but it seems to be the dominant emphasis.

Then there is the therapeutic approach: “You can be happier if you follow God’s principles.” All of this is said with a smile, but it’s still imperative. It’s still about techniques and principles for you to follow in order to have your best life now.

In both cases, it’s law rather than gospel. I don’t even know when I walk into a church that says it’s Bible-believing that I’m actually going to hear an exposition of Scripture with Christ at the center, or whether I’m going to hear about how I should “dare to be a Daniel.” The question is not whether we have imperatives in Scripture. The question is whether the imperatives are all we are getting, because people assume we already know the gospel—and we don’t.

But aren’t many churches doing good preaching about how to improve your marriage, transform your life, and serve the poor?

The question is whether this is the Good News. There is nothing wrong with law, but law isn’t gospel. The gospel isn’t “Follow Jesus’ example” or “Transform your life” or “How to raise good children.” The gospel is: Jesus Christ came to save sinners—even bad parents, even lousy followers of Jesus, which we all are on our best days. All of the emphasis falls on “What would Jesus do?” rather than “What has Jesus done?”

Why is this such a temptation for the church?

It’s our default setting. No one has to be taught to trust in themselves. No one has to be taught that what you experience inside yourself is more authoritative than what comes to you externally, even if it comes from God. Since the Fall, it has been part of our character to look within ourselves. And it is part of our inherent Pelagianism to think we can save ourselves by following the right instructions.

In such a therapeutic, pragmatic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps society as ours, the message of God having to do all the work in saving us comes as an offensive shot at our egos. In this culture, religion is all about being good, about the horizontal, about loving God and neighbor. All of that is the fruit of the gospel. The gospel has nothing to do with what I do. The gospel is entirely a message about what someone else has done not only for me but also for the renewal of the whole creation.

ON WHATS A GOSPEL-DRIVEN LIFE (IS HE TAKING A DIG AT THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE?):

What specifically do you mean by “a gospel-driven life”?

Because I live in San Diego, I think of a sailboat decked out with all of the latest equipment that tells you where you are and where you need to be. It plots your course, but it’s a sailboat, so you need wind in your sails. You start out, and it’s a beautiful day with wind in your sails. You’re out in the middle of the ocean when the wind dies down. You’re just sitting there dead calm. And your radio tells you that a hurricane is approaching. But all of your sophisticated equipment will not be able to get you to safety. What you need is wind in your sails.

A lot of Christians, especially people who have had dramatic conversion experiences, go sailing out of the harbor with wind in their sails. They are so confident in Christ and what he has done for their salvation, and that gospel wind is in their sails. Yet after two years, they have heard just one imperative after another. They have lots of course plotting, lots of books on how to do this and that. They’ve read every manual on spiritual disciplines. They have heard their pastor tell them they need to pray more, to read the Bible more, to evangelize more. Now they are dead in the water. There’s no wind in the sails.

Paul calls the gospel “the power of God unto salvation,” and I don’t think he meant the power of God just unto conversion. The gospel remains the power of God unto salvation until we are glorified. Calvin once said we need the gospel preached to us every week, and the Lord’s Supper to ratify that promise, because we are partly unbelievers until we die.

‘Paul calls the gospel “the power of God unto salvation,” and I don’t think he meant the power of God just unto conversion.

In The Gospel-Driven Life you use news as a metaphor. Why?

I stole it from the apostles! Their dominant metaphor for the gospel message is “good news.” The content is that God has done all the saving, no thanks to us. Someone asked Martin Luther what we contribute to salvation, and he said, “Sin and resistance!”

The gospel is not even my conversion experience. If somebody asks me what the gospel is, I’m not going to talk about me; I’m going to talk about Christ. All of the testimonies we find from the apostles’ lips are not testimonies about what happened in their hearts. They are testimonies about what happened in history when God saved his people from their sins. That’s the gospel. Although the gospel makes all sorts of things happen inside of me and gives me the fruit of the Spirit, the gospel itself is always an external word that comes to me announcing that someone else in history has accomplished my salvation for me.

Someone comes with instructions and says, “Here’s what your life could be like if you do x, y, or z.” Good news is, “Let me tell you what has happened!” The gospel is not good instructions, not a good idea, and not good advice. The gospel is an announcement of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

So what is the first step in living a gospel-driven life?

Become a recipient again. Mary and Martha, the two sisters and disciples of Jesus, had different relationships with Jesus. Martha busied herself with many tasks, and she was getting mad at Mary for making her do all the work. Mary was sitting at Jesus’ feet, learning from him. Jesus rebuked Martha for criticizing her sister and said Mary had chosen the better part.

First and foremost, disciples are recipients of Jesus Christ’s teaching. His teachings are really teachings concerning his person and his work. He has accomplished our salvation. He has accomplished our redemption. So first, allow the gospel to soak in again.

Then allow the imperatives that arise out of that to be our reasonable service. Instead of trying to live the victorious Christian life, instead of trying to get into God’s favor by following tips and formulas, let’s receive the gospel and then follow the commands of God’s law when it comes to directives. Then our sailboat is perfectly equipped. Now we have the wind in our sails—the gospel—and we also have God’s own wisdom to guide us in that gospel-driven life.

If we understand what Michael Horton is saying in this interview, we will understand why our churches of full of tired Marthas running around on an empty tank in the kitchen, and who will end up in churches that cater for Marys.

For the full interview go to Christ the Center article in online Christianity Today.com.

And read a related article which I posted recently on the indicatives and imperatives of the gospel.

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“Destined to Reign” book review by Dr Gordon Wong

d2rI came across this review written by Dr Gordon Wong, Old Testament professor with Trinity Theological College. There is wisdom to be gained from reading and reflecting on what he has to say about Joseph Prince’s teaching in his book “Destined to Reign”.

I recently read the book Destined to Reign (2007) by Joseph Prince, the senior pastor of New Creation Church. When I conveyed some of my thoughts on the book, one of my pastoral colleagues thought it would be helpful if I shared them with more Methodists. Let me begin by saying that Pastor Prince’s emphasis on grace has been a great blessing from God to many. My nephew and cousin belong to New Creation church and have grown immensely in their relationship with God. My prayer is that God will use Prince’s gifts of preaching to even more blessed effect as he allows the Holy Spirit to convict him (graciously, as always) of areas that could be improved. I hope my comments below will be helpful towards that end.

1. Prince’s teaching on God’s Grace and Anger

His emphasis on grace has led some to accuse him of giving Christians a licence to sin. He vehemently rejects this criticism (e.g. p. 30) and explains that a person who has properly experienced grace is one who is inspired and empowered to turn away from sin.

What I like: the book’s stress on the power of God’s grace is correct. The grace of God in the Bible is meant to inspire holiness, and not allow sinfulness. The book’s strong emphasis on grace is true to the Bible. Self-condemnation and guilt are real problems that afflict many people today, and the message of God’s grace is truly good news.

What I had reservations about:
In stressing grace, the book appears to suggest that God no longer gets angry with Christians. If this is what it really means to teach, then this is not biblical. On p. 41, read: “We do see God being angry in the Old Testament, and in the book of Revelation, where his anger is toward those who have rejected Jesus. But for you and me, believers in the new covenant, we are not part of the Old Testament and we will never be punished because we have already received Jesus. As believers, God is no longer angry with us because all His anger for our sins fell upon Jesus at the cross.”

I suspect (and hope) that what the book really means is that God’s anger is not the type that takes delight in condemning us and pointing out how horrible we are. Also, I think (and hope) that what the book means to say is that God’s anger and punishment on believers does not result in the loss of eternal salvation. But to say the above is very different from saying that God gets angry only with unbelievers and never with true believers (p. 41), or to insist that “the Holy Spirit never convicts you of sin” (p.134). Does the Bible really say that God never gets angry with believers anymore? In the Bible (both Old and New Testaments), God is presented as getting angry with believers. For example, the letters to the 7 churches (i.e. people who profess to be believers) in Revelation 2-3 include a lot of stinging rebuke and condemnation from Jesus himself, including the use of threats of punishment and judgement. (I find attempts to say that the “churches” in Revelation do not really refer to believers as far-fetched.) God Himself seems to punish two professing believers Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-11. Isn’t this an example of the Holy Spirit, through Peter, convicting Ananias and Sapphira of their sins? Or must we assume the (not so gracious) judgement that Ananias and Sapphira cannot have been true believers?? For argument’s sake, even if they were not true believers, they were certainly in the church assembly. So there is place still for Spirit-inspired preaching for the conviction of sin within church walls. There may be many “believers” like Ananias and Sapphira who need the Holy Spirit to convict us of sin and our need for grace. Perhaps the book could have made a clearer distinction between divine anger at Christians that results in the loss of eternal salvation (which is what he is most concerned to speak against) and divine anger at Christians that aims to correct and discipline (which he seems to reject). To be fair, Prince does accept the positive idea of child discipline or training (pp. 65-67), but he rejects any association of this discipline with the words “anger” or “punishment”.

God’s anger was, and can still be an expression of His love and grace, just like a loving mother who sometimes scolds her child. (Prince is, hopefully, only joking when he implies, p.37, that children will become schizophrenic if parents sometimes express happiness and at other times anger!) To say that God will never get angry or punish believers anymore may promote (unwittingly or mistakenly) a distortion of the Bible’s teaching about God’s grace. God’s anger is an expression of His love and grace towards his children. Prince would perhaps do better to speak of righteous anger (Ephesians 4:26) versus unrighteous anger. God never gets (unrighteously) angry with us, but loving grace demands a place for righteous anger as long as His beloved children still need discipline.

2. Prince’s teaching on Law

The book is very strong on rejecting the value of the Law in the OT as being of any positive help for Christians. For example, on p.120 there is a section entitled “The Ten Commandments Kill” and it says that these commandments are “the ministry of death”.

What I like: I think (and hope) that the book is trying to say two biblical things about the Law. Firstly, it may be warning us that the Ten Commandments can be used or preached in a condemning way that destroys the soul of people and makes them cringe in fear or turn away from God as a harsh Master. This is a good biblical warning. Secondly, the book’s description of the Law as a ministry of death rather than life correctly describes and reinforces the biblical view that obedience to the Law cannot lead us to receive salvation. It is correct and very good of Prince to speak against those who are “trying to use the Ten Commandments to remove their sins” (p.124). We are saved by grace, not by obedience to the Ten Commandments or the Law. If these two points represent what Prince teaches on the Law in the Bible, then this is good and biblical.

What I had reservations about: That the Law can be preached and understood in such a way as to promote soul-destroying guilt and deeper condemnation is certainly true. Prince is to be commended for eloquently highlighting this biblical warning about the danger of the Law, and stressing the wonderful grace of God that forgives us all through Christ. But while there are many who need this message of God’s grace-filled forgiveness to save them from their guilt and despair over sin, there are many others who need the message of God’s grace-filled discipline and rebuke to save them from presumption and indifference to sin. Prince’s emphasis on free and full forgiveness is very good at helping the former, but not so good for the latter. Does Prince believe that guilt is the only problem people have because of sin? If so, that would present an incomplete picture. Sin does not only imprison us in guilt; it also lulls us into indifference and presumption. The Bible addresses both these effects of sin. The book appears to suggest that there is no way of preaching the Law in a graceful manner in order to set us free from our sinful indifference and presumption.

Similarly, Prince is correct to stress that the Law cannot save or justify, but his writings give the impression that the Law has no other positive function except to prove that we cannot be saved by it. But the Law in the Bible is also presented as a positive expression of God’s grace in telling us what God desires. But because Prince contrasts Law and Grace in this manner, he gives the impression of implying that the Law has only the negative value of telling people that they cannot be saved by their attempts at obedience to the Law. The Law certainly does perform that valuable function, but it does much more as well. It helps us know what is good in God’s eyes. The book is weak on emphasising the ongoing value of the Law for both Christians and unbelievers.

To be fair to this book, there are certain parts of the Bible that also speak in similarly strong negative tones against the Law (e.g. most of Galatians and parts of the books of Romans and Hebrews). But this negative view is balanced out in other parts of the Bible that are very positive about the Law (e.g. Jesus in Matt 5:19-20; James 1:25; Psalm 119 etc.). In other words, the Law as a means of salvation is spoken of very negatively in the Bible, but the Law as a means of showing us God’s pleasure or desire for our lives is spoken of very positively. The book seems to emphasise only the negative picture of the Law. Doing so would fail to do justice to the biblical balance which speaks also of the ongoing positive value of the Law for Christians. Paul, himself, could sum up the Law very positively as teaching us to love one another (Gal 5:14; Rom 13:8,10).

3. Prince’s teaching on Healing

Healing is a big topic in the Bible, and it is not the main theme of Prince’s book. But from the little he says in his final full chapter “Good Things Happen” (pp. 287ff), Prince relates testimonies of people who were healed when they received the grace and forgiveness of God. He also states that “once you know that you have been forgiven of all your sins, past, present and future, the healing of all our diseases follows” (p.290).

What I like: I think Prince is correct to say that the Bible speaks of a God who heals our diseases, and this is a true expression of the forgiveness and grace of God. Physical healing is taught and prayed for and experienced in the Bible.

What I had reservations about: Whilst the book speaks of Bible passages where physical healing is expected and takes place, it says nothing about the passages that accept (without surprise or anguish) that miraculous physical healing did not take place e.g. 2 Tim 4:20; Philippians 2:25-27; 1 Tim 5:23; Gal 4:13-14. Incidentally, Galatians 4:13-14 tells us explicitly that Paul did have a bodily sickness which resulted in the greater good of the Gospel being preached contra Prince’s statement that “Paul did not suffer any sickness or disease” (p. 71). The problem is not so much with what Prince affirms viz. that healing is a blessing from a God who is full of grace; the problem is with what he omits to affirm viz. that physical illness without healing on earth can also fall within the gracious providence of God. The Bible teaches us both to pray for physical healing and to be prepared to endure illness with patient endurance. The victorious Christian life is one that remains faithful to God in both times of abundance and poverty, in sickness or in health, for richer or for poorer (cf. Philippians 4:12-13). I do not know the ministry of Prince well enough to be sure of what he really thinks about healing on earth. Perhaps if you listen long enough to his sermons, you may be able to make a fairer assessment. Does he preach to help Christians cope with the onslaught of poverty and illness, or does he speak only of removing sickness and suffering by effortless faith? We need both messages, because that is the balance we find in Scripture.

In general, most preachers are prone to partial teaching. We all tend to favour one side of the balance more than the other as a result of our personal experience of God’s dealings with us. The danger comes when we imply that the side we prefer is the only true side of biblical truth!

May God grant us wisdom and discernment as we seek to live in ways that befit those who have been saved by such a wonderful grace as that which our Lord Jesus has lavished on us.

Postscript: There are several places where I do not agree with Prince’s interpretation of the Bible verses (e.g. pp. 124f on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; p.263-65 on the cold, hot and lukewarm Laodiceans in Rev 3:15-16), but these are disagreements over the interpretation of specific phrases that can commonly be found amongst devout Bible teachers. My comments above focus on some major issues that discerning Christians should reflect on more carefully.

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