Can't Preach Without Conviction.

Preparing several messages a week is not something I find easy. This week I am juggling between the Sunday's message which is top priority and the upcoming messages for the men's breakthrough weekend. On top of that, I just began the process for the preparation of the church camp messages.

But it is not the hours involved preparing, or even the mental effort that's difficult.  It's the spiritual challenge. Its kindling my enthusiasm on a given morning with a new pair of passages and a blank piece of paper.

How do you stay fresh?

Quoting the Psalmist, Paul answered: “I believed, therefore I have spoken” (2 Cor 4:13).

Here is the key: convictions keep us preachers preaching. A preacher can preach without eloquence, commentaries or training. But one thing he cannot preach without is convictions. He can perhaps ‘talk’ of spiritual generalities, or convey some humanistic message. But he cannot really preach unless his words are coming from his heart, from the deep burners of his soul.

‘I believed therefore, I spoke’, said the Psalmist (Ps 116:10).  What will not only propel a man into the ministry, but keep him there? It's conviction. It's a non-negotiable. And conviction cannot be rushed. It cannot be micro-waved. It comes from struggling through the text to understand the heart of the God behind the text and then coming to the place of surrender to it's call.

Without conviction, the preaching is simply rhetoric, a lot of dazzling words without the depth of His Word darting through the soul. A T Robertson once wrote, "The highest excellence in preaching is where reverent learning is united with great pulpit ability and deep conviction."

Peace Of The World And Peace Of The Lord

 I often like to sit and watch people as they hurry through the streets. They all seem to have  a zest for life and an energy and colour that I can only envy. But there have been too many times when I have also found that inside in of all that zest and energy, they lacked hope because they don't have a meta-narrative. They don't have a big story, a big vision, that can give them perspective beyond the ups and downs of their everyday lives. When their health, relationships, and lives are going well, they feel happy and full of hope; but the reverse is also true. When things aren't going well the bottom falls out of their world. They don't have anything to give them a vision beyond the present moment. As a result, they lay broken."

In essence, that is  "the peace that this world can give us." In his farewell discourse, Jesus contrasts two kinds of peace: a peace that he leaves us and a peace that the world can give us. What is the difference?

The peace that the world can give to us is not a negative or a bad peace. It is real and it is good, but it is fragile and inadequate.

It is fragile because it can easily be taken away from us. Peace, as we experience it ordinarily in our lives, is generally predicated on feeling healthy, loved, and secure. But all of these are fragile. They can change radically with one visit to the doctor, with an unexpected dizzy spell, with sudden chest pains, with the loss of a job, with the rupture of a relationship, with the passing of a loved one, or with multiple kinds of betrayal that can blindside us. We try mightily to take measures to guarantee health, security, and the trustworthiness of our relationships, but we live with a lot of anxiety, knowing these are always fragile. We live inside an anxious peace.

As well, the peace we experience in our ordinary lives never comes to us without a shadow. Strangely, there is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life so that even in our most happy moments there is something missing. In every satisfaction there is an awareness of limitation. In every success there is fear of jealousy. In every friendship there is distance. In every embrace there is loneliness. In this life there is not such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy. Every bit of life is touched by a bit of death. The world can give us peace, except it never does this perfectly.

What Jesus offers is a peace that is not fragile, that is already beyond fear and anxiety, that does not depend upon feeling healthy, secure, and loved in this world. What is this peace?

At the last supper and as he was dying, Jesus offered us his gift of peace. And what is this? It is the absolute assurance the we are connected to the source of life in such a way that nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever sever - not bad health, not betrayal by someone, indeed, not even our own sin. We are unconditionally loved and held by the source of life itself and nothing can change that. Nothing can change God's unconditional love for us.

That's the meta-narrative we need in order to keep perspective during the ups and downs of our lives. We are like actors in a play. The ending of the story has already been written and it is a happy glorious triumphant one. We know that we will triumph in the end, just as we know that we will have some rocky scenes before that ending. If we keep that in mind, we can more patiently bear the seeming death-dealing tragedies that befall us. We are being held unconditionally by the source of life itself, God.

If that is true, and it is, then we have an assurance of life, wholeness, and happiness beyond the loss of youth, the loss of health, the loss of reputation, the betrayal of friends, the loss of a loved one, and even beyond our own sin and betrayals. In the end, as Horatio Spafford says, it is well, it is well, with my soul.

And we need this assurance. We live with constant anxiety because we sense that our health, security, and relationships are fragile, that our peace can easily disappear. We live too with regrets about our own sins and betrayals. And we live with more than a little uneasiness about broken relationships and loved ones broken by bitterness or death. Our peace is fragile and anxious.

We need to more deeply receive Jesus' farewell gift to us: I leave you a peace that no one can take from you: Know that you are loved and held unconditionally.

When You Suffer

“And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace,

who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, 

will himself restore, confirm, strengthen and establish you.  

To him be the dominion forever and ever.  Amen.”  

1 Peter 5:10-11

And after you have suffered a little while.
Our suffering is real, be it emotional or physical.   “A little while” does not trivialize it.  But suffering is not the rest of our story.  It will end, and soon – according to this verse.

the God of all grace.
He has remedies, comforts and powers for every need, every occasion, every moment.
He is the God of all grace. And His grace is always sufficient.

who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ.
Someday we will all be in glory; just that today some of us are called home before others.

will himself.
Not mediated but directly and personally.  Not bare luck but his own loving personal involvement.

restore, confirm, strengthen and establish you.
Terms upon terms, because God has thought of everything.
Whatever you have lost he will restore.
You lost a loved one, a dear one; God still restores -
the lost strength, the lost joy, the lost hope - God will Himself restore.
However you are weak he will confirm, strengthen and establish you,
so that you emerge whole, formidable, happy.

To him be the dominion forever and ever.
God is still God alone and He is still on the Throne. He is Sovereign in all that suffering and pain. He alone knows what He is about.

Amen.  Very few things in life deserve this absolute affirmation.  But here is one. Every thing promised will be!

Permission To Dream.

I am so grateful that God surrounds me with people who give me permission to dream.

I’ve been in  meetings before where the leader will share a big vision for a new initiative.

And I’ve seen people in the meetings roll their eyes or give that sceptically look like "Are you sure?" And then immediately share their abridged version of seven  reasons this might not work.

Or subtly point out to everyone how much work this is going to add to their already full plate.

But it must be the sheer favour of the Lord that in recent times, I am so surrounded with people who propel me to dream and dream big. I love to get in a room with staff members and ministry leaders who burst into flames with just a drop of vision kerosene.

I believe we have truly entered into that season of faith where we are believing God for the impossible and getting excited about the God who is more than able!

Last week, when my family was celebrating my son's 21st birthday, he told us his great dream about his future. It was so big and grand, I wondered if I will  still be alive when it comes to pass. But none of us doubted it's possibility. We all gave him full permission to dream, by our responses, both verbally and non verbally.

A lot of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers have grounded their family members from dreaming big. This is sad.

I also love spending time with other leaders who, through their leadership approach and way of seeing the world, give me permission to dream in my own context.

I am attending a meeting Thursday night which to me is a permission slip for dreaming: to set audacious goals, speak them, pray our guts out, work hard, face the obstacles, do the uncomfortable, trust God through it all and give God the glory when it comes to pass, or try again if it doesn’t. It makes life so exciting. It gives me the reason to wake up every morning with fresh hope and joy.

We all need permission to dream.

To my Wife, my Children, my Staff, the Agape Guy's Ministry Core, the Heads of Ministry (Worship, Rays, Agapeland, Chinese), the Cell Leaders and the Council - thank you for giving one another the permission to dream and dream big for God!

Check this verse in Eph 3:20: Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us. 

God is more than able to do more than we are able to imagine!

Permission granted. Go dream.

Exposition Must Be For Application!

“Sound Bible exposition is an imperative ‘must’ in the church of the living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God himself, through application of the Word and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God.”

A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (London, 1967), pages 9-10.

Read To Remember To Get Revelation.

The reason we need to read Scripture is because we need something to remember. Let me explain. In John 2, Jesus turns the Temple upside down or rightside up. He drives out the animals and turns over the tables. And it says the disciples "remembered" what was written: "Zeal for your house will consume me." If you don't read the Word you can't remember it. It's like not studying for a test. It's real hard to remember what you haven't read in the first place. The reason many of us don't have any revelation is because we haven't read the Word, therefore we cannot remember it. The disciples have a revelation in this moment because they remember what they have read.

Here's a revelation equation: Reading + Remembering = Revelation.

We need to read the Word so that the Holy Spirit can selectively and strategically bring to mind those words that He inspired thousands of years ago. We need to read so that we have something to remember. And it'll lead to revelation.

Your Greatness.

When you are seventy or eighty, and you wake up from bed one morning and look back on your life, how will you feel about it? Now that you are so old, you won't have to answer to anybody or fulfill their expectations - not your parents, not your boss or business associates or colleagues; not even your spouse. What would you have done with the gift of life? What story would you have left to tell that will keep you still relevant to the younger generation; still inspiring to the future you won't live to see?

The answers to those compelling questions above will be important to you then, so the question should be important to you now.

The course of your life is deternmined by three things:

1. The Relationships you form
2. The Decisions you make
3. The Actions you take

Each has the potential to change the course of your life.

If you are not doing something with your life, it really doesn't matter how long you live. If you are doing something with your life, it really doesn't matter how short it is. Life does not consist of years lived, but the usefulness of it. Life does not consist of how much you have accomplished or acquired but how well you have lived it to honour your Maker.

Your focus must be beyond yourself. Your life is just too small to give your glory to. You look better and you live a greater life when that life is lived for God's glory.

If you are giving, loving, helping, serving, encouraging, and adding value to others and in the course of it all returning glory to Him who has blessed you with much, you will be living a life that is well lived.

That will be your greatness! Live life to His glory!

There Will Be Divisions.

The church in Corinth was so divided that you might say it was diced. There were divisions over which apostle was superior, sexual morality, lawsuits, marriage, eating meat, head-coverings for women, the Lord’s Supper, spiritual gifts, the resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection of believers, and I’m probably missing some.

Paul, who really wanted these saints to “be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Cor 1:10), said something in chapter 11, verse 19 that is important for us to remember:

There must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized.

Factions though painful serve the church. They provide opportunity to show up the hearts of people. How?

Well through 1 Corinthians Paul tells us how. Like, exposing an unwillingness to submit to the apostles’ teaching is certainly one thing (e.g.1 Cor11:16). But a lack of love is the biggie (1 Cor 13). Paul said love is greater than faith (1 Cor 13:13). And if we have truth and not love, we’re nothing (1 Cor 13:2). Nothing.

There are people in churches who are disagreed over issues and that in itself is not altogether wrong. There will be differences. There will be disagreements. But when we disengage just because we disagree, we have violated a higher rule – the law of love. It shows up the heart. There may be truth but there is no love. And where there is no love, we are nothing. It is the bottom-line measure of discipleship.

Paul said there must be factions. Factions reveal hearts. So in our disagreements and divisions, Paul wants us to measure our motives, words, and actions by the gauge of chapter 13. The less

they look or sound like biblically defined love, the more concerned he wants us to be about the genuineness of our discipleship.

Trust

I have been wired to be a very trusting person. I love to believe in people. As a result, anyone who knows me - even a little bit - knows that loyalty and trust are my highest values in relationship.

But as someone very smart once said:
An unguarded strength is a double weakness.

So my intense desire to trust others and be trustworthy has - at times - come back to bite me. And usually, the damage had little to do with the actions of the other person. It had everything to do with my approach.

This past weekend, I was led to look at some of my failed relationships in the past where I had so trusted someone only to discover that they had betrayed me. I am not bitter about those relationships. Every failed relationship blessed me with some level of growth (through pain, of course).

And this is what I discovered: I’m learning that it’s as important to define what trust is not as to define what it is. Here are my current thoughts on the subject:

* Trusting someone doesn’t mean they’ll never fail you or hurt you. It just means they wouldn’t intentionally do it, or do it the same way over and over again.

* Trusting someone doesn’t demand that they’re a part of your life forever.

* It’s okay to trust someone in one area of your life, but not in another. Just be clear - with them, and yourself.

* Trust is not a pass/fail class. There are degrees and shades of trust. Discerning the different dimensions is the first step toward developing more trust.

* My level of trust in someone is often about my own moods, experiences, and perceptions. I must monitor these conditions and factor them in.

* People can’t earn your trust where expectations aren’t defined. Everyone you truly care about deserves to understand your standards.

The only one who is completely and eternally trustworthy is Jesus – The man who trusts in Him will never be put to shame.

The Humiliation of Crucifixion

When Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked his Father to let the cup of suffering pass him by he wasn't, for the most part, cringing before the prospect of brute physical suffering. He was cringing before the prospect of a very particular kind of suffering that is generally more feared than physical pain. When he asked God if it was really necessary to die in this way he was referring to more than death through capital punishment.

Crucifixion was devised and designed by the Romans with more than one thing in mind. It was designed as capital punishment, to put a criminal to death, but it aimed to do a couple of other things as well.

It was designed to inflict optimal physical pain. Thus the procedure was dragged out over a good number of hours and the amount of pain inflicted at any given moment was carefully calculated so as not to cause unconsciousness and thus ease the pain of the one being crucified. Indeed they sometimes even gave wine mixed with morphine to the person being crucified, not to ease his suffering, but to keep him from passing out from pain so as to have to endure it longer.

But crucifixion was designed with still another even more callous intent. It was designed to humiliate the person. Among other things, the person was stripped naked before being hung on a cross so that his genitals would be publicly exposed. As well, at the moment of death his bowels would loosen. Crucifixion clearly had humiliation in mind.

In the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated. That, among other reasons, is why the crucifixion was such a devastating blow to his disciples and why many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn't connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph.

Interestingly there is a striking parallel between what crucifixion did to the human body and what nature itself often does to the human body through old age, cancer, dementia, AIDS, and diseases such as Parkinson's, and other such sicknesses that humiliate the body before killing it. They expose publicly what is most vulnerable inside of our humanity. They shame the body.

Why? What is the connection between this type of pain and the glory of Easter Sunday? Why is it, as the gospels say, "necessary to first suffer in this manner so as to enter into glory?"

Because, paradoxically, a certain depth of soul can only be attained through a certain depth of humiliation. How and why is this so? It isn't easy to articulate rationally but we can understand this through experience:

Ask yourself this question with courage and honesty: What experiences in my life have made me deep? In virtually every case, I will venture to say, experiences that have deepened you will be incidences that you feel some shame in acknowledging, a powerlessness from which you were unable to protect yourself, an abuse from which you could not defend yourself, an inadequacy of body or mind that has left you vulnerable, an humiliating incident that once happened to you, or some mistake you made which publicly exposed your lack of strength in some area. All of us, like Jesus, have also been, in one way or another, hung up publicly and humiliated. And we have depth of soul to just that extent.

But depth of soul comes in very different modes. Humiliation makes us deep, but we can be deep in character, understanding, graciousness, and forgiveness or we can be deep in anger, bitterness, and revenge-seeking. Jesus' crucifixion stretched his heart and made it huge in empathy, graciousness, and forgiveness.

In the crucifixion, Jesus was humiliated, shamed, brutalized. That pain stretched his heart to a great depth. But that new space did not fill in with bitterness and anger. It filled in instead with a depth of empathy and forgiveness that we have yet to fully understand.

Behold Jesus, our Lord! There is no one like Him.

Utterly Inexhaustible!

Congratulations to the many who have finished reading the New Testament in 30 days! What a wonderful journey this has been. What a way to grow in our sopiritual disciplines. What a deposit made into our souls. What new habits we have acquired!

Now is the time to keep reading and reading. The Bible is inexhaustible.

Here is a quote from Spurgeon to encourage all of us:

“I have many an old book in my library in which there have been bookworms, and I have sometimes amused myself with tracing a worm. I do not know how he gets to the volume originally, but being there he eats his way into it. He bores a hole in a direct line, and sometimes I find that he dies before he gets halfway through the tome. Now and then a worm has eaten his way right through from one wooden cover to another; yes, and through the cover also. This was a most successful bookworm.

Few of us can eat our way quite so far. I am one of the bookworms that have not got halfway into my Bible yet; but I am eating my way as fast as I can. This one thing I have proved to myself beyond all question; I shall never, never exhaust this precious book. Much less shall I exhaust the wondrous person of my divinely-blessed Lord. He is that bread which came down from heaven. He is utterly inexhaustible.”

C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1950), II:365.

Here is athe celebration video of the NTin30 journey. Enjoy!

Titanic: Was It All True?

The other night they screened Titanic again. I was just about to switch channels but I got gripped to those final scenes where the rich and famous would push to save themselves at the expense of the children and women and the poor.

Well did that really happen? I was browsing a book just today, and I saw this illustration. D.A. Carson’s latest work, Scandalous: The Cross and Ressurection of Jesus, is simply excellent. The writing is crisp, the exegesis superb, the theology invigorating.

This is what he says about those scenes of the Titanic:

"Did you see the film Titanic that was screened about a dozen years ago? The great ship is full of the richest people in the world, and , according to the film, as the ship sinks, the rich men start to scramble for the few an inadequate lifeboats, shoving aside the women and children in their desperate desire to live. British sailors draw handguns and fire into the air, crying “Stand back! Stand back! Women and children first!” In reality, of course, nothing like that happened. The universal testimony of the witnesses who survived the disaster is that the men hung back and urged the women and children into the lifeboats. John Jacob Astor was there, at the time the richest man on earth, the Bill Gates of 1912. He dragged his wife to a boat, shoved her on, and stepped back. Someone urged him to get in, too. He refused: the boats are too few, and must be for the women and children first. He stepped back, and drowned. The philanthropist Benjamin Guggenheim was present. He was traveling with his mistress, but when he perceived that it was unlikely he would survive, he told one of his servants, “Tell my wife that Benjamin Guggenheim knows his duty” –and he hung back, and drowned. There is not a single report of some rich man displacing women and children in the mad rush for survival.

When the film was reviewed in the New York Times, the reviewer asked why the producer and director of the film had distorted history so flagrantly in this regard. The scene as they depicted it was implausible from the beginning. British sailors drawing handguns? Most British police officers do not carry handguns; British sailors certainly do not. So why this willful distortion of history? And then the reviewer answered his own question: if the producer and director had told the truth, he said, no one would have believed them.

I have seldom read a more damning indictment of the development of Western culture, especially Anglo-Saxon culture, in the last century. One hundred years ago, there remained in our culture enough residue of the Christian virtue of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, of the moral imperative that seeks the other’s good at personal expense, that Christians and non-Christians alike thought it noble, if unremarkable, to choose death for the sake of others. A mere century later, such a course is judged so unbelievable that the history has to be distorted" (30-31).

Wow! What food for thought!

You Want To Hear God?

“What is the single most important skill that church leaders needs to have in order to be successful?”

Somebody asked me this the other day, and I thought it was a pretty good question.
I didn’t have to think about it very long… because I just knew the answer was leadership. The ability to motivate and inspire people, and the wisdom to construct systems that reinforce the vision.

But then I thought about preaching… maybe that’s the most important piece of the church growth puzzle. I don’t know of a church that has ever succeeded apart from the anointed communication of God’s Word connecting to people in the context of corporate worship.

At this point, all of the major categories hit me like a flashflood:
leadership, preaching, administration, vision...

How could I ever narrow it down to one “most important skill”?
There are so many skills that are integral to growing a church. Then I thought: there is actually one critical skill that is the foundation of all the others: The single most important skill in growing a church or a minstry is the fine art of hearing from God.

But are you sure you can handle what He has to say?

I hear a lot of people express a desire to hear from God… but sometimes when God speaks, He delivers a very tough message. I’ll give you an example: 1 Samuel 3 is one of the most popular passages preachers use to illustrate “How to hear from God”. But when God finally does open His mouth, the content isn’t very uplifting, warm and fuzzy, or even hopeful. In fact, God’s first message to Samuel was that his mentor, Eli, was about to be judged severely for the sins of his house. And to make matters worse, Samuel had to turn around and personally relay the message to Eli.

Do you still want to hear from God?

� When you ask God to speak to you about His will for your life, make sure you’re ready to embrace the repercussions. Be prepared to obey.
� If you ask the Lord to reveal any sin in your life that is separating you from Him, be very aware that He’ll probably do it.

� When you ask God to speak to you about a financial decision, He might not tell you what you want to hear. Instead, He might fill your ear with what you need to hear. And His instruction might require a deep sacrifice, or a step of big faith.

When God speaks, He doesn’t always just whisper sweet nothings into your ear.
In fact, sometimes the announcement He makes will leave your ears ringing, and your head spinning. Other times, the words He speaks fill your soul with inexplicable encouragement and peace.

So here’s the summary:
God often speaks words of deep comfort.
But He also speaks words of deep challenge.
And you never know which one you’re going to get.