Devotional 250210

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. Praise God for giving us another beautiful day to be in His service. I reached home at about 1 am this morning and woke up at 7 am. I was working on a video project for our vision sharing event. The editorial work was so tedious (I marvel the details of God’s creation by His Word. I wished I had that power to finish our project by just saying, “Let there be a video project!”). Our team spent 4 hours to finish only 2 minutes of our presentation. And the video is more than 10 minutes long. Therefore, we still need to work on it this evening. Hopefully, it will not take us till midnight because I have to fly to Houston tomorrow morning with it. Please pray for God’s creative power for our team to finish it on time.

Let’s read the spiritual journal from Dr. Eugene Peterson in his book Living The Message. No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this. Never so much as imagined anything like it – What God has arranged for those who Love Him. But you’ve seen and heard it because God by his Spirit has brought it all out into the open before you (1 Cor 2:9-10 Message). Every Monday I leave the routines of my daily work and hike along the streams and through the forests of Maryland. The first hours of that walk are uneventful: I am tired, sluggish, and inattentive. Then bird-song begins to penetrate my senses, and the play of light on oak eaves and asters catches my interest. In the forest of trees, one sycamore forces its solid rootedness on me, and then sends my eyes arcing across trajectories upwards and outwards. I have been walking these forest trails for years, but I am ever and again finding an insect that I have never seen before startling me with its combined aspects of ferocity and fragility. How many more are there to be found? A rock formation, absolutely new, thrusts millions of years of prehistory into my present. This creation is so complex, so intricate, so profuse with life and form and color and scent! And I walk through it deaf and dumb and blind, groping my way, stupidly absorbed in putting one foot in front of the other, seeing a mere fraction of what is there. The Monday walks wake me up, a little anyway, to what I miss in my sleepy routines. The wakefulness lasts, sometimes, through Thursday, occasionally all the way to Sunday. A friend calls these weekly rambles “Emmaus walks”: “And their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Luke 24:31).

What walking through Maryland forests does to my bodily senses, reading the Revelation does to my faith perceptions. For I am quite as dull to the marvelous word of Christ’s covenant as I am to his creation, “O Lord, and shall I ever live at this poor dying rate?” Not if St. John’s Revelation has its way. A few paragraphs into the Revelation, the adrenaline starts rushing through the arteries of my faith, and I am on my feet alive, tingling. It is impossible to read the Revelation and not have my imagination aroused. The Revelation I forces and enables me to look at what is spread out right before me, and to see it with fresh eyes. It forces me because, being the last book in the Bible, I cannot finish the story apart from it. It enables me because, by using the unfamiliar language of apocalyptic vision. My imagination is called into vigorous play.
In spite of these obvious benefits and necessary renewals, there are many people who stubbornly refuse to read it, or (which is just as bad) refuse to read it on its own terms. These are the same people who suppress fairy tales because they are brutal and fill children’s minds with material for nightmares, and who bowdlerize Chaucer because his book is too difficult as it stands. They avoid the demands of either imagination or intellect. If they cannot read a page with a rapid skim of an eye trained under the metronome of speed reading, they abandon the effort and slump back into passivity before cartoons and commercials.

But for people who are fed up with such bland fare, the Revelation is a gift—a work of intense imagination that pulls its reader into a world of sky battles between angels and beasts, lurid punishments and glorious salvations, kaleidoscopic vision and cosmic song. It is a world in which children are instinctively at home and in which adults, by becoming as little children, recapture an elemental involvement in the basic conflicts and struggles that permeate moral existence, and then go on to discover again the soaring adoration and primal affirmation for which God made us.

Hope you find time to enjoy meditating on the book of Revelation with similar imagination like Eugene Peterson.

Have a blessed day of service,
Lawrence

Devotional 240210

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. Hope you had a good start this morning. A friend of mine visited me from NY. After having breakfast with him and sending him to airport, it was almost 10 am already. But it is always good to rekindle relationship with some good old friend. Life is too short on earth to care only about work. Relationship has eternal value than our accomplishment on earth. It is God’s grace that we are able to work and accomplish things on earth. But if it is in the expense of our relationship with God and family, I don’t think it is worthy.

I’m thanking you, GOD, from a full heart, I’m writing the book on your wonders! (Psalm 9:1). ‘Charis always demands the answer eucharistia (that is, grace always demands the answer of gratitude). Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice m echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning” [Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics]. God is personal reality to be enjoyed. We ire so created and so redeemed that we are capable of enjoying him. All the movements of discipleship arrive at a place where joy is experienced. Every step of assent toward God develops the capacity to enjoy Not only is there, increasingly, more to be enjoyed, there is steadily the acquired ability to enjoy it.

Best of all, we don’t have to wait until we get to the end of the road before we enjoy what is at the end of the road. So, “Come, bless the LORD . . . The LORD bless you!”

I named my daughter Cara which should be spelled chara = a joy came from charis (grace). It is God’s grace that we live today. Our joy and peace ultimately came from His charis for us. Therefore, we should give thanks to Him at all time. Without His grace, we ceased to exist; this is our Christian theology. Rain and sunshine are His common charis/grace for mankind. Even though mankind does not give thanks to Him nor recognizes His existence, God’s common grace does not therefore cease to come upon them. But the more thankful we are to God’s grace, the more joyful we become as His creature/children. And we find new strength in living abundantly because the joy of the Lord is our strength. Amen?

Love you in His charis,
Lawrence

Devotional 230210

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. Thank God for the nourishment of rains. Our soul thirst for God just like desert thirsts for water. How desperate we need the presence of God in our lives each day! My daughter told me about a recent experience she had encountered with her husband. On their way home after church service, her husband tuned into a Christian radio program that he seldom listened. Therefore, she asked him whether he knew he was listening to a preaching program. He said he did. With curiosity she asked, “Didn’t we just hear a sermon from church already?” He said, “I didn’t hear enough of the Word of God. I want more from Him!” I was thrilled to hear this testimony from my daughter. They both attend a marriage seminar offered by their church on every Thursday night for 13 weeks. My daughter is also attending a prayer seminar on Thursday night for 4 weeks. They both desire to want more of God in their lives. Pray that God will satisfy their thirst like deer panted for water.

My life is on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning (Psalm 130:6). Such are the two great realities of Psalm 130: suffering is real, God is real. Suffering is a mark of our existential authenticity; God is proof of our essential and eternal humanity. We accept suffering; we believe in God. The acceptance and the belief both come from “the depths.”

But there is more than a description of reality here; there is a procedure for participating in it. The program is given in two words: wait and hope. The words are at the center of the psalm. “I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits or the LORD more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. O Israel, hope in the lord!’’

The words wait and hope are connected with the image of the watchmen waiting through the night for the dawn. The connection provides important insights for the person in trouble who asks, “But surely, there is something for me to do!” The answer is yes, there is something for you to do, or more exactly there is someone you can be; be a watchman.

A watchman is an important person, but he doesn’t do very much. The massive turning of the earth, the immense energies released by the sun—all that goes on apart from him. He does nothing to influence or control such things: he is a watchman. He knows the dawn is coming; there are no doubts concerning that. Meanwhile he is alert to dangers, he comforts restless children or animals until it is time to work or play again in the light of day. ….

Nor would the psalmist have been content to be a watchman if he were not sure of God. The psalmist s and the Christian’s waiting and hoping is based on the conviction that God is actively involved in his creation and vigorously at work in redemption.

Waiting does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.

And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion of fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let him do it his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God but bullying God. “I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word 1 hope; my soul waits for the LORD more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.”

It is by His mercy that we find strength to deal with different challenges in life. Wait and hope are two important lessons of Christian living. But for sure they are essential for our spiritual growth.

Love you as fellow watchmen,
Lawrence

Devotional 220210

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. What a gorgeous day we have in Christ! Praise God for this Spring like weather. Pray that you will find His mercy and grace sufficient for you today. We truly live in His wonderful provision. And the more He gives, the more He wants us to give away in order to experience an abundant life we have in Him. He wants to give you a life of blessings.

This most generous God who gives seed to the farmer that becomes bread for your meals is more than extravagant with you. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way, so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God (Cor 9:11-12). Christian blessing is a realizing that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” As we learn to give and to share, our vitality increases and the people around us become “fruitful vines” and “olive shoots” around our tables.

The blessings that are promised to, pronounced upon and experienced by Christians, do not of course exclude difficulties. Bible never indicates that. But the difficulties are not inherent in the they come from the outside in the form of temptations, seductions, pressures. Not a day goes by but what we have to deal with that ancient triple threat that Christians in the Middle Ages summarized under the headings of the world, the flesh, and the devil: the world—the society of proud and arrogant mankind that defies and tries to eliminate God’s rule and presence in history; the flesh—the corruption that sin has introduced into our very appetites and instincts; and the devil—the malignant will that tempts and seduces us away from the will of God. We have to contend with all of that. Wt are in a battle. There is a fight of faith to be waged. But tithe way of faith itself is in tune with what God has done and is doing. The road we travel is the well-traveled road of discipleship. It is not a way of boredom or despair or confusion. It is not a miserable groping, but a way of blessing.

There are no tricks involved in getting in on this life of blessing, and no luck required. We simply become Christians and begin the life of faith. We acknowledge God as our maker and lover, and accept Christ as the means by which we can be in living relationship with God. We accept the announced and proclaimed truth that God at the center of our existence, find out how he has constructed this world (his creation), how he has provided for our redemption, and to walk in that way. In the plain words of the psalm: “Blessed is every one who fears the LORD, who walks in his ways!”

The abundant life we have in Christ is a life filled with the love of God. And the essence of love is giving, “God so loved the world that He gave…” It is self deceiving to say we love yet we don’t give our self or our possession to those we love. Giving is a natural expression of a lover. The more you love the more you give. A lover will never ask whether he or she gave too much or not. Giving is never enough for a person who is filled with love.

When we give or sow the seed of love, we harvest plenty of love in return. Our lives become abundant when we see others are blessed by your giving. Your garden will not be filled with the color and fragrant of flowers if you keep the seed in your closet. You have to give them out so that your lives will be abundant. The more we worry or concern that we may not have enough, the more we will gather for ourselves. This is what we called “scarcity mentality.” Chinese in general live with this kind of scarcity mentality no matter how much they may have in the bank. They are still enslaved in either their past experience of poverty or fear that they will be poor again. Many people were trapped in this kind of scarcity mentality that they can never enjoy abundant life that our Lord has offered. God wants to use them to become channel of His blessings to others. But their fear and worry hold them back in the prison of scarcity mentality. Hope you will not enslave yourself in the same prison. Bless others with your generous giving…

Love you because of this abundant life,
Lawrence

Devotional 190210

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. There is so much to catch up and deal with after the merging of two organizations. Numerous emails, phone calls and meetings have been dedicated to iron out our differences. It is like martial adjustment between two persons, who are so different in background and personality, trying to become one in marriage. There are many questions and suspicions on why other party or team does not do according to the way we do? It indeed requires divine intervention for two teams to truly become one. Please pray for our unity in Christ.

All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved (Acts 2:44-47). John Calvin, preaching to his congregation in Geneva, Switzerland, pointed out to his parishioners that we must develop better and deeper concepts of happiness from those held by the world which makes a happy life to consist in “ease, honors, and great wealth.”

Psalm 128 helps us do that. Too much of the world’s happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another. To increase my standard of living, someone in another part of the world must lower his. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness. Industrialized nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made poor and hungry. It doesn’t have to be that way. The experts on the world hunger problem say that there is enough to go around right now. We don’t have a production problem. We have the agricultural capability to produce enough food. We have the transportation technology to distribute the food. But we have a greed problem: if I don’t grab mine while I can, I might not be happy. The hunger problem is not going to be solved by government or by industry, but in church, among Christians who learn a different way to pursue happiness.

I agree that our happiness is defined by the world. One of the main things that we should not conform to the world is the standard of happiness. Without we know it we have picked up what the world tells us about the secret of happiness: to possess more wealth and more fame. Mass media bombards us with the glamorous and happy pictures of movie star and celebrities, as though they held the secret of happiness. Our children want to become rich and famous because the Media tells them that this is the goal of life. Is it really the case? Most parents do not have any complain on this kind of influence. They use this standard as motivation for education, “if you have better education, you will become rich and famous like those celebrities on TV. Therefore study harder.”

Christians are not immune from this kind of worldly temptation. Many will avoid any Biblical teaching on simple lifestyle or self-denial as extreme or unrealistic ideal. They attend church but not necessarily endorse wholeheartedly to the Word of God. Giving one self and money for example, are direct opposite to the goal of worldly happiness: rich and famous. But at the end of the day, their lives are not happy nor fulfilled even though they try. Moreover, they cease to become light and salt of the world. The world cannot be a better place when even the church conforms to the endless pursuit of materialistic wealth and economic manipulation of the poor. Before we condemn the world for their sins, we Christians need to confess our sins and repent from our worldly lifestyle and greed problem. Have mercy on us O Lord!

Love you with the passion of Christ,
Lawrence

Devotional 180210

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. The tree in my backyard is totally covered with bright red flowers in announcing the coming of spring. Trees outside of my office window are also budding with little green leaves even though they still look kind of barren. Little birds are feeding on those fresh green leaves for breakfast. They are so noisy in singing praises to God for His wonderful provision of daily fresh meal. It reminds me to do the same when I am enjoying a fresh new day with all the provisions that my Creator God has graciously given to me.

If the LORD had not been on our side-- let Israel say--if the LORD had not been on our side when men attacked us, when their anger flared against us, they would have swallowed us alive; the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters would have swept us away.… (Psalm 124:1-5). The proper work for the Christian is witness, not apology, and Psalm 124 is an excellent model. It does not argue God’s help; it does not explain God’s help; it is a testimony of God’s help in the Form of a song. The song is so vigorous, so confident, so bursting with what can only be called reality, that it fundamentally changes our approach and our questions. No longer does it seem of the highest priority to ask, “Why did this happen to me. Why do I feel left alone?” Instead we ask, “How does it happen that there are people who sing with such confidence, ‘God is our help’?” The psalm is data that must be accounted for and the data are so solid, so vital, have so much more substance and are so much more interesting than the other things we hear through the day that it must be dealt with before we can go back to the whimpering complaints.

“If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, let Israel now say—if it had not be the LORD who was on our side, when men rose Lip against us, then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their anger was kindled against us; then over us would have gone the aging waters.” The witness is vivid and contagious. One person announces the theme, and everyone joins in. God’s help is not a private experience; it is a corporate reality—not an exception that occurs among isolated strangers, but the norm among the people of God.

Christians saw God at work from time to time while pre-Christian friends did not see it at all. It wasn’t God not doing anything for pre-Christian friends. It was the problem with the focus. When we focus on our relationship with God from time to time, we saw how He at work around us and among His children. It is a reality that God is actively working among His people; He either uses the environment to save us or shape us. Pre-Christian friends may describe God’s miraculous intervention as ‘coincidence.’ But when ‘coincidence’ happens on a daily basis, it cannot be coincidence any more. It is a ‘pattern’ or ‘norm’ of how God at work among His people. When one Christian shares his or her testimony of how God at work, all other Christians echo and affirm such experience to be true, because it also happened to them before. Therefore, don’t stop sharing your testimony. It helps to bring out more echoes of praises and thanksgiving from among the hearers.

Love you as fellow witnesses of Christ,
Lawrence

Devotional 170210

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. I felt energized and fully recovered from jetlag. I slept well and felt good as I woke up this morning. Thanks for your prayer. I have a lot of “home work” to catch up from my study. Please pray that I will be able to concentrate in my study, and balance my time in office work as well as with my sermon preparation. I need to prepare sermon and workshop at an Indonesian church in San Jose this Sunday, and a mission conference in Houston in the following weekend.

Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have (1 Cor. 13:4-5). Marriage is a classic act of freedom. Marriage partners, by leaving their natural family ties, break out of networks of necessity and predictability and at that moment become prime movers in the politics of freedom. This is true even in an arranged marriage: though the free will of the partners is not consulted, the arrangement is a result of someone’s choice and not the mere product of biological necessity. Every marriage, then, introduces into society fresh energies of love and freedom that have the power to unself not only the lovers themselves but America itself. The mere introduction of these energies is not enough, however, or we would have become Utopia long since. They need continuing and perfecting. Where can we get that but in Christ? A prayed and praying faithfulness carries us into the long life of love in which and by which the world will not perish.

That’s why Apostle Paul used marital relationship to describe the love we have in Christ, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church--for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Eph 5:22-32). It is out of free will that we offer ourselves to Christ in marriage. It is not out of biological necessity or political manipulation for us to enter into this intimate relationship with Christ. It is totally an act of freedom. It is out of freedom of love that a wife will submit to her husband. And it is also an act of freedom that a husband will love his wife sacrificially.

The more I meditate on this passage on marriage, the more I am convinced that Apostle was thinking about the relationship of Christ and the Church. Yes, it is an ideal marital relationship. But we are limited by our human ability and egocentric tendency. I wished I could make my wife holy and blameless. But I can’t. I try my best to feed and care for my wife. But in reality, it is a mutual feeding and caring relationship. That’s why I believe Apostle Paul was describing the loving relationship of Christ and the Church. As a church or a wife, all we need to do is to submit to our Husband or Christ, and enjoy the abundant love, security, nourishment and cleansing from Him. O how blessed we are to have a husband like Christ! Let’s enjoy our intimate relationship with Him today.

Love you because of Christ,
Lawrence