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Retirement Update

29 November 2021 blogpastor Leave a comment

It has been a year since I retired. There is only one word to describe it: SWEET.

I looked at my TO DO list and saw what is left undone and they are: Use Skills Future Fund, CPF Inquiry, Look at camera Fujifilm xs10 manual, Paint all ceilings (one ceiling left – the biggest one), Set up Pay Now. Twenty four of the listed items have been done and many, many more that were not listed. It’s been sweat, not sweet.

I treated the year as a sabbatical I never had in forty years of pastoral work. My sabbaticals were from three to six months. I longed for a “biblical” one year sabbatical. My first was a short sabbatical in 2000 when I attended conferences with Pastor Lawrence Koo and Andrew Khoo at the Toronto Airport Church, Willow Creek Church, and Brooklyn Tabernacle Church. On the second three months sabbatical I mainly learned to fish – literally. The third one was six months and the most fruitful: I was 35 days in a prayer retreat in Chiangmai. The most recent one was three months and I did the Camino Ignaciano, another meaningful retreat.

When I retired as the senior pastor, I felt I had to stay away from church so that the new pastor in charge of English congregation can settle in with ease as the new leader. Thankfully this period coincided with Covid-19 and made staying away less painful. Church services were just a few clicks away every Sunday. Initially, I thought six months was sufficient. Near the end of that period, I decided to extend it to a year.

Rest for the body and soul

It was a good year of sweet rest. I listened much more to my body and paid attention to its needs. I am healthier now than before I retired. I could sleep-in most days and sleep came easily for me, so I felt very rested. Thankfully, I did not have to force myself into some regime of strict exercise or diet. After all, I enjoyed outdoor sports activities and, without gritting my teeth, health was a natural outcome. In addition, being extricated from pastoral cares and burdens also freed the soul to rest and this is so good for health, and so sweet.

The art of relish

During retirement, I could do the things I enjoyed most. I went back to blogging and writing and am currently working on two ebooks for distribution (pray for me). I blogged more regularly than before and have seen a return of readership. I have read more widely: novels, thrillers, non-fiction and others. I have returned to leisure cycling and hiking, but could not return to tennis because I had tennis elbow the first time I did. I am also learning photography and joining my wife in a new sport called pickle ball.

Family time had expanded and contracted. For over a year my daughter was working remotely and stayed with us and that was such a joy, and my sons and their families came back from overseas. My grandchildren were fun to have around whenever they came by my home. But now they have gone to the US for work though it’s a comfort that we still have a son and his wife around. The nest is empty but my wife and I have much more time together and this is also a privilege to treasure and enjoy as we are in our mid-60s and only God knows how much time left we have together. Retirement is sweet with no working hours hindering our full enjoyment of God’s gifts of family and pleasurable activities.

Intimacy and friendships

The most delightful and fruitful of all activities was simply time spent on fellowship with God. I loved prayer, reading, journaling, and having the luxury of time to slow down and be quiet before God. I was worried that my life of prayer would taper off when I retired, but it was not so. I still made prayer a priority even though there were no sermons to preach, nor decisions to make, nor people problems to grapple with, nor emotional turbulence to process. Part of this delight was reading Christian books that nourished my soul, and theological stuff that stretched me intellectually. I could also go on a prayer retreat albeit locally.

Another delight is my continued fellowship with pastor friends, some retired, some not. I continued fellowship with individual pastors as well as small group of pastors, including a recent addition: some pastors from Ministers Fellowship International, Singapore. I am also blessed to be a part of a small Catholic community that organizes caminos (journeys) and prayer retreats.

Did I still preach during the past year? Yes, I did. I took a four-month hiatus, and then began to preach after that, but only occasionally in the English and deaf congregations, and mostly in pre-recorded services, which I have gotten used to! I enjoyed the lighter preaching schedule as you have more time to to conceive and gestate and carry a sermon before delivery.

With the recent news of a new strain found in Africa, called Omicron, and which WHO viewed as a “variant of concern”, I pray that the current move back to on-site vaccinated services will not falter but continue to bring God’s people together.

“Lord, have mercy. Waves upon waves of infection have touched so many nations and our tiny island. Stretch out you hand to save us. Help us point people to Jesus as the only Hope of the World. Free us from fear, frustration and depression and fill us with new joy and peace that can only be found in YOU! Amen.”

This was how the sabbatical year panned out but I will leave to another blogpost some updates about the near future.

Christ’s Finished Work: Eternal Life

22 November 2021 blogpastor 2 Comments

Did you know that eternal life has two dimensions? We often find it referred to in terms of duration or quantity of life. This is certainly one dimension. Eternal life is conscious, perpetual, unending, forever existence with God in eternity. It is life in Christ beyond death. We Christians believe after we die we enter an intermediate state where we are conscious of Christ’s presence (2 Cor 5:8), to await the second coming of Christ, when the dead will be bodily raised to life (John 11:25-26). For those who are still alive when Jesus comes again, their bodies will be changed in the twinkling of an eye (1 Cor 15:51,52; 1 Thess 4:17). Christians would be spared the judgment for Christ took our judgment on himself on the cross, but we will enter into our eternal reward, and dwell with God in the new heaven and new earth. This is our Christian hope, the eternal hope.

The Second Dimension

However, there is a second dimension to eternal life – the here and now dimension! The apostle John speaks of eternal life as a present possession of all who believe in Christ: “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life” (John 5:24). This eternal life has to do with quality of life not quantity of life, with abundance of life not duration of life. According to John’s gospel, it is a life of acquaintance and friendship with God: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John17:3). This knowledge is an experiential knowledge of personal relationship, friendship and living interaction with the true and living God, not mere theories about who God is.

It is the kingdom life of the age to come brought forward when Jesus came preaching and inaugurated the kingdom. He brought the life of the age to come, for people to taste it in the here and now, as administered by the Holy Spirit. Another way to describe it is “God’s kind of life”. As the seed, so the fruit. God’s life is a seed that brings forth his kind of god-like life and character.

By Faith in Christ’s Finished Work

This precious possession can only be gained by faith alone. It is a gift of God that we cannot deserve or earn (Rom 6:23). We receive it by placing our faith completely in Christ to save us and give us eternal life (John 10:27,28).

The first Adam was placed in the garden and put to the test. He was to obey God and access would then be given to the tree of life. He did not. Instead, he disobeyed God so he was blocked from access to the “eternal life”. Christ is the second Adam and was sent to do what the first failed to do: perfect obedience. By obeying the Father, even unto death on the Cross, Christ won back access to the “eternal life” and now gives it to all who believes him (Phil 2:8; Rom 5:18,19). Thus it is the finished work of Christ that restored to man the access to the life that Adam forfeited, and the cross of Calvary is indeed a “Tree of Life”, for all who believe in Christ’s finished work receives eternal life in the here and now, and which continues beyond physical death (John 11:25,26).

The implication for us is that we need to learn to draw deep from the wells of eternal life. The more we deepen our friendship and experiential knowledge of God, we more we will taste and see that eternal life is precious in the here and now, a foretaste of the life to come.

Lord, thank you for your obedience to the cross that brought us eternal life. We want to draw near to you and know you more. We want to know what you feel, what you think about different situations, and what you want of your church and of our lives. Help us to live day by day, with an awareness that you want love our company and want to be a part of our everyday mundane life. Amen.

Advent Sermons: Have a Mary Christmas

18 November 2021 blogpastor 5 Comments

“Pastor, do you have any sermon ideas for Advent 2021?” Advent begins on Sunday, 28th November and ends on 24^th December, requiring a sermon series over four Sundays. I had posted a blogpost a few years back that was well-received about sermons that addresses the needs of seniors in church and this may suit you this Christmas season. You can access this HERE.

For this blogpost, I would like to suggest a fresh sermon series for Advent 2021 about Mary the mother of Jesus. Mary, as a model of Christian discipleship and feminine godliness is too often left neglected and forgotten in the dark church storeroom layered with centuries of dust. Haven’t we gotten over the Protestant reformation suspicion of all things Catholic? Is there such a deep unconscious fear of criticism from the pew if Mary is talked about too much from the pulpit? The Protestant pulpit need to talk more about Mary for she is the greatest model of godliness that can inspire, comfort and strengthen the silent majority of our churches (most churches have more females than males). Most pulpits are manned by males, and the dominant examples held up are male Bible heroes, and probably we pastors have forgotten that more than half of our listeners are faithful women starved of a female model of godly femininity, discipleship and leadership that they can easily relate to and identify with.

Enough of polemics, my suggestion is to keep each sermon compact, practical and focused on one main truth, since most services are hybrid (on-site as well as online), and it is challenging to keep the attention of people online with lengthy sermons.

This series is for all the ladies (adult and teenagers) in church, though it certainly is suitable for all God’s people, including the men. Perhaps it’s time for men to do the extra work of trying to relate, draw out and apply biblical truth for themselves from a sermon series that uphold a woman as an example to aspire to.

Receiving God’s Word as the Final Word

Of course, the main point that St Luke was eager to point out to his audience in the passage Luke 1:26-38 was the deity and sinlessness of Jesus. However, there are many facets of Mary’s response to God that we can dwell on and gather fruit. In this case, it was her amazing child-like response to the angelic announcement. Her response was one of child-like faith in God’s word, in defiance of human logic and experience, the natural order of human conception, of God’s past ways of blessing infertile couples, and of the expectations of her culture. She accepted God’s word as final, and though she could never understand how the Holy Spirit would accomplish it, she did not doubt the angel’s explanation as to how a virgin can conceive! She took God’s word as the final word. “Blessed is she who believed, for there would be a fulfillment of those things which were told her from the Lord” (Luke 1:45). The blessed life is one of believing and not doubting the love and power and word of God. It believes God’s word about any topic on beliefs, values and morality is final despite what others say, what science says, what the media says, what circumstances says. Herein we must stand as the people of the world gets blown here and there and everywhere by the winds of relativism. Everything must bow before God’s final word.

Living Courageously

According to a Cambridge review study, women are almost twice as likely to experience anxiety as men due to differences in brain chemistry and hormone fluctuations, coping strategies, and other factors about which you can read HERE. Therefore, the issue of living with courage the way Mary lived out her faith has a high relevancy for women.

Marriage were arranged for teenagers in those days so Mary was a teenager when she had that supernatural encounter with the angel and believed those words spoken to her. It was this faith that sustained her and gave her the courage to live in the face of shame, suspicion, misunderstanding and disapproval – things that greatly affect teenage girls today. Teenagers and women experience such anxieties too and perhaps more so with social media amplification. They may also face such challenges with their families, workplaces and schools. Members will be encouraged, when their pastors uphold Mary, a simple village teenager, as an inspiring example of a godly woman, who used the shield of her faith in God, to defend her from the onslaught of fiery missiles aimed at her by the evil one.

As a sermon illustration, an inspiring example of a young Singaporean young woman in missions who faced fearful situations in the missions field with an attitude of faith can be found HERE.

Openness to God

Mary’s openness to God is one of the secrets of God’s blessing on her life. She had her eyes and ears open to discern what God is saying and doing through life’s many interactions, both supernatural and natural. Whether it was an angelic encounter, Elizabeth’s testimony, the reports of the sophisticated magi or lowly shepherds, or the exclamations of Anna the elderly widower, and Simeon an elderly visitor to the Temple, or her husband Josephs’ dream, or her child’s words, she received these as messages from God, and pondered over them throughout her life, letting those words orientate and regulate her expectations and direction in life. We need this kind of willingness to listen to God no matter how he chooses to communicate with us, as long as it is in line with God’s character and revelation of himself in the Bible. Such openness and meditation upon God’s communications with us enable us to walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, understanding what the will of the Lord is, and keeping ourselves filled with the Spirit (Eph 5:15-18).

A Blessedness That Includes Suffering

The Christian life is a balanced life. Mary was told that she was highly favoured and she was blessed among women. In addition, Simeon told her, “a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2: 34,35). Joy and pain would both be part of her life. It is also part of any believer’s discipleship. There is no doubt about this. It is clear that we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places because we are in Christ. These are primarily spiritual blessings, but God is generous and cares about our physical and material well-being too. However, we have to see that suffering is also a part of the whole package. “Those who desire to live godly lives in Christ will suffer persecution”(2 Tim 3:12) and we should not be surprised when a “fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12-19).

Mary was greatly blessed, and indeed spiritual blessings like her special calling, and material blessing of providence, provision (like the magi’s gifts) and protection (escape from Herod) marked her path of discipleship. However, she was also familiar with suffering. The difficulties she encountered with Joseph at the beginning, giving birth in unhygienic conditions away from home and family support, the refugee status she lived with in Egypt after they fled from Herod, her widowhood, saying goodbye to Jesus, hearing rumours and slander about Jesus during his ministry, rejection from her community in Nazareth, and the “sword” that pierced her soul when Jesus was rejected by the religious leaders and when she saw her son crucified by the Romans. Grief, sorrow, opposition, rejection, criticism, judgement, misunderstandings, ostracism, disgrace and shame – she went through all these as part of being “greatly blessed among women” – an example of balanced discipleship. So too must the women in our church learn to accept this balance in their discipleship journey.