God's Tough Love

I went to church this morning and heard the message on God's "tough love." The speaker branched off from how Jesus was highly praised and adored on what we commemorate as "Palm Sunday" to when He was crucified during the "Holy Week" celebration.

She springs from this question, "What made the crowd change their tune in as fast as a week?" That is a rather difficult thing to digest there, having people shout "praise the Lord, Jesus is king" to "crucify him." That is a 180 degree turn.

As she explained it though, in the short span of time between those 2 dates Jesus started to speak of things that people didn't really want to hear:

• He reprimanded those selling and doing business in the temple
• He welcomed sinners (adulterers & tax collectors) as those who may enter heaven
• He told the people to pay their taxes so to speak

These were unexpected for people, they all wanted to hear good things - happy things about heaven and about salvation.

I guess it is rather difficult to hear reprimand and to hear correction. I certainly understand how that feels but I guess if we want to pick up our cross and follow Jesus, these are necessary for us to follow.

I do hope God can give me the strength to abide by His love - though how tough it can be sometimes. What I think though, similar to what Job said - we should accept both good and bad from the Lord

God's Love Shepherds us from Mara to Elim

In the church sermon today, the reference was Deuteronomy 8, where he started with verse 3

And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.

God led His people, the Israelites out of Egypt and into the desert. There He taught them humility. In the same way this is how He deal with us Christians.

I have endured this lesson as well. I came from a great work-place that offered great pay where I was revered as someone who was sort of an "expert" at what I did. I moved though thinking that I would have better opportunity in another company. This indeed was quite a humbling experience as I realized I was an expert at nothing.

God allows His people to taste the bitter waters of Mara. As we are allowed to learn lessons the hard way because some times this is the only way we can learn them. It's kind of difficult to teach humility by word only but it's a lot easier to absorb it by practice.

After Mara though, God also let's us taste how sweet the waters are after we have learned our lessons. He is also gracious enough to let us enjoy Elim - a land with 12 springs and 70 palm trees. Imagine that within the desert.

We enjoy God's presence in this abundance these days. We are very fortunate. The speaker called on the congregation to appreciate that day by day and to always acknowledge God's hand

The Link Between Love and Sacrifice

The message in church today was very timely and very heart-warming so to speak. The speaker at our church spoke about love, sounds very passe I know, but this is about love for the Lord.

Everybody loves. That is a fact of life right? And the reason why everyone goes to their church (or place of worship, whatever that may be or maybe almost everyone anyway) is because we love and/ or fear God.

This is a really nice concept, loving a higher-being who has been looking after us. I do the same. The thing about this Sunday morning's sermon was that the speaker emphasized that it's not just about saying "I love you," or "I love God," but it's the actions that go with it

The focus of the message was on sacrifice, the things we should learn to sacrifice if we truly love the Lord. Now last week the message was that there can be no love unless there is no sacrifice, so this sermon was sort of connected to the previous one.

Anyway, he highlighted 3 things about sacrifice

• Sacrifice your freedom - now since we have been saved in Christ, we are all free. But just because we're free doesn't mean we should just go about doing what we want when we want like spoiled brats. We should be aware that because we love the Lord, we should be able to sacrifice some things for Him as he has sacrificed for us. This is very common even in romantic relationships right? We don't go ahead and eat something we know our partner is allergic to because it might hurt him/ her in the process. I guess it's the same for the Lord. We should do something that might hurt Him or brother and sisters - that they might sin because of what you did

• Sacrifice your time - church seems like a big sacrifice to some people. Being stuck in church for about 2 hours to hear sermon can be dragging and boring some times. I used to think so that's for sure. I've fallen asleep some times too. Now I try to think of it as a time when God might want to speak to me. I think there's a bigger chance because there are all these people as well to whom God might be speaking too, I guess I'm just after some collective blessing or message that God might want to impart. It's also really nice to with good Christians sometimes. But not only that, we should be able to say our prayers and devotions daily. These aren't necessarily long periods of time but instead times when we can come to the Lord daily for guidance. I think it's worth it

• Sacrifice your pleasures/ comforts - this was pretty funny when the speaker shared. His example was the "spa." There are a lot of those in the city these days. They make you feel good but then if they cause you to sin then you should probably avoid them. I'm not particularly a spa fan so I wasn't affected but he was right. Sometimes we have to forego certain pleasures in life to be with God, like a night-out for instance or probably a lunch-date that would make going to church difficult.

It was a very nice message today. I hope many were blessed. I'm sure I was

Wrong Creed Breeds Wrong Character

The message from church today was pretty enlightening. The speaker was a Singaporean missionary who was assigned in UK and London. Didn't catch his name though but his message was very insightful.

He said that sometimes we think since we go to church often or pray a lot, we know God but actually our perception of God may be wrong. And he's actually right.

One of his examples was that many times people think that just because God is "love" doesn't mean he'll just give us our heart's desire and pamper us all the time. More often than not we prefer to see God like that instead of being the kind of God He really is which is also a God who disciplines us. We'd like to perceive God just as a messiah and savior and discount the fact that He is supposed to be Lord of our lives as well. This then leads us to turn away from the Lord when things get difficult because we are unable to accept that a God who's supposed to be the definition of "love" can do such a thing to us.

The key phrase I got from this is that the wrong perception leads to the wrong reaction which becomes part and parcel of a messed up relationship. This applies to a lot of other relationships as well - our relationships with other people, not just God. However this is most significant when we think about our relationship with God because it is the very foundation of how we deal with other people in our lives.

I'm grateful to the Lord, He sent that guy to speak in our church

(image from Angeltalk.com)