Today there is no service for my congregation. There are no ushers, beaming at the doors. No worship leaders singing and praising God. There’s no pastor to welcome and pray for the congregation. There is no message prepared from the Bible. Well, actually, I wouldn’t know because I did not go to church today. English service was canceled because a large chunk of the English congregation is gone to Camp Iawah for the winter retreat. So, I vouched to stay at home this morning and do some soul searching and sermon listening.
When I woke up, my parents and sister had already left for the children’s and Chinese Sunday school and the Chinese service, so my humble abode was (and is) empty. I remember praying quite fervently last night about something that had been bothering me for a long time. It was a prayer of repentance, mostly, and one to reaffirm the allegiance that I swore to Christ the day I was called to believe in Him for salvation. Over the past while, I’ve steadily allowed for God to take less and less importance and priority in my life. Verily, it had become more and more my life and not Christ’s life in me.
I had asked God very specifically to give me the faith I need, day after day, to remain faithful to His call and not become deaf, mute, and blind to His presence, or worse, fall away from Christ’s purpose. This required quite a bit of honesty from my part for I had to finally come to terms with many minor acts of indiscretion and the resulting potential for a major disaster. As a child, I could never understand how people I heard about tried to hide things from God even in their prayers, much like Adam and Eve who hid from an omniscient God after taking the Fruit. Now I understand. It’s not a conscious thought of “I must keep this away from God’s eye.” For me at least, it was a persisting denial of God’s relevance to a particular issue, mostly for fear of what God might and likely would say. This lead me to pray about any and every thing around the issue, but never actually admitting to God how I feel about it or why I had taken such an uncanny interest in this.
I woke up and washed my face. I then switched on the television and somehow found myself tuning in to a sermon by Adrian Rogers. It was about Joseph as a good model for Christians and here are my mental notes:
- The God-given difference that Christ makes within us sets us infinitely apart from the world.
- We should pursue our God-given dreams.
- We should persist through God-given obstacles.
- “I want people to see [me] and conclude that the one thing that ultimately defines this person is that God is with [me].”
- We should present ourselves to God, signing the contract and let Him fill the terms (yes in that order).
- Resulting from this will be a transformation, allowing Christ who is already in us to come outward as opposed to being crushed inward by conforming to the world.
- And finally, realization comes and we will know who we are and what God’s will is in our lives.
He preached from Genesis and cross-referenced with passages from Romans (12:1-2, 8:28) and it was all in all uplifting, even though I had missed the first third of the sermon. It made sense to me and it gave me a Biblical way of looking at how to handle these things planted in my heart and on my mind.
I have this tendency to assume that my heart and all its desires are evil. Though this may not be such a bad rule to apply most of the time, it would be wrong to assume that the hearts of Christians are always bent on evil, especially since some dreams and desires could be set in place by God. I find it exceedingly difficult to figure out what exactly my motives are. This is why I run into trouble when I try to pray, because I can almost never tell if I am praying for a good thing for all the wrong reasons. I always wonder whether a prayer for something good for someone else with side-effects that also benefit me greatly would be a good way to pray. I ask for God’s will to be done for someone else but in my heart I know that that in itself could also mean a very great blessing to me too. In economics, this is called conflicting motive. I will seek something that appears to be altruistic but in fact also benefits me. It then becomes impossible to tell what the true motive behind the action was. And since I’ve always understood prayer to be effective when it is prayer in God’s will and coming forth from an obedient (as opposed to selfish) spirit, I am always quite pessimistic about the effectiveness of my prayers.
I then listened to a sermon by pastor John Piper hosted online (here if you’d like to read/listen for yourself). It was based on Malachi 2:10-16 and it dealt with the issue of faithlessness in three areas: promises in general that are broken, marriages to nonbelievers, and divorcing a spouse. I was extremely interested in the second topic since that one hits closest to where I’m caught right now. It’s easy to tell yourself as a Christian that you would never disobey God’s law when it comes to such obvious and serious points such as marrying someone who does not affirm that Jesus is of infinite value, but this all too often easier said than done (especially after the fact of having connected with said unbeliever).
Of course, I’m not considering marriage or anything but it is something I definitely need to be mindful about since Satan’s greatest feat lies in having convinced the world of his nonexistence. Though I am not marrying, it would be wise to avoid anything particularly serious with anyone (Christians and non-Christians alike), and that’s my pact with God. It’s hard for me not to be hopeful of the possibility of a conversion, a shift in fundamental values to coincide with a life “entwined with Christ’s” (as Allen so eloquently put it), but until (or unless) such a thing comes to be, I cannot entertain thoughts of deepening intimacy.**
In all honesty, I am not at all confident in my ability to actually carry out this resolution given my weaknesses, but I hope for faith in God’s ability to work all things (good and bad, pleasure and pain) for my good (Rom. 8:28).
Thank You God, for speaking to me this morning.
** I’m considering whether I should write more on this subject later, about why exactly Christians should only marry other Christians, and whether I am fit to do so, because up until last night, this was a command that I just took for granted without wondering “Why? Why is this important?” That, and I’m not getting married anytime soon… sadly.