Pray for Egypt: "Persecution is Bringing Believers Together"

This Egyptian church met in the desert after their church building was attacked and destroyed.

“What we are seeing happening in the Middle East is bringing us all together. We churches do not have the luxury of staying separate any more. We have realised that what we have in common far exceeds what separates us.”
(Egyptian church leader)

War doesn’t discriminate against denominations, a church leader in Egypt has discovered. People have died for their faith, regardless of what church they go to. The persecution is bringing believers together as they share in their suffering.

In Aleppo, 12 bishops from different denominations came together to pray. It was the first time something like that has happened in centuries. The church in the Middle East is becoming more united and looking outwards.

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

Source: http://www.opendoorsyouth.org/

Jesus Shows How Practical Our Faith Is: Living in the Light (1 John 1:6-7)

“So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth. But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin”
(1 John 1:6-7, NLT).

God’s light (1 John 1:5) has a special purpose. It is not a light that going to kill us. Instead, it is life-giving, nourishing, helpful light. The Apostle Paul reminds us: “For God, who said, ‘Let there be light in the darkness,’ has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Notice that throughout John’s first letter, he speaks out against three false claims of the false teachers (verse 1:6, 8, 10). Each begins with, “If we claim/say…” Then there is a contradiction, followed by a true statement.

In verse 6, John says, “We are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth.” In other words, John is speaking against the heresy that the way we live doesn’t really matter. The way we live does matter! From the beginning of history, we are reminded that faith (what we firmly believe) and life (how we live as Christians) should reflect each other. To live in fellowship with God commits us to a life of reflecting God’s goodness. Not only are we to learn and understand the truth [in which I always promote Christian students to have good Biblical-theological thinking], but we must also do the truth. To talk about God and His goodness without really living that way is to become a hypocrite (see James 2:14-17).

Notice here how practical our faith is: God’s light not only helps us see but shows us how and where to walk. Christianity is an action-type faith. It is more than mere talk or an abstract philosophy; it helps us move toward what is right and true. And our faith also helps us grow together as the Body of Christ. Notice Bible verses about, John telling us that our fellowship (sharing, being close, enjoying being together, and so on), will grow as we walk in God’s light. Truth should lead to closeness and harmony, not misunderstanding or rivalry, or separation. To walk in the light, then, is to be open, honest, and sincere, to hide nothing, and to be real and not phony. This means being open and caring with other people as well as with God; caring about and listening to them as well as being concerned about ourselves.

To me, a good example of phoniness is the person who pretends to care. Such a person may show an initial interest in you and say, “Hi, how are you? We should hang out together next time,” but never does; or promises, “I’ll pray for you,” and doesn’t follow through. Christians are learning to be “real” people – to say what they mean and mean what they say; to become more loving and caring. Another result of walking or “living in the light” is that our sins are taken away. “The blood of Jesus… cleanses us from all sin.” The word “cleanses” means “steadily purified”; it is not something that happened only once but continues to happen every moment of every day. Therefore, living in the Light of God. Amen.

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

Our Wired Lives on Facebook Series: #1 The Whole World is Getting Connected.

Currently I’m reading Randi Zuckerberg’s book Dot Complicated: Untangled Our Wired Lives (Harper-Collins Publishers, 2013), she wrote:

“’Zuck’s Law,’ so-named for my dear brother, says that the amount of information we share in the world doubles every two years. In the time it takes you to read a single page of this book, another hundred hours of cat videos, hilarious skateboarding dogs, and many other, er, valuable pieces of content will have been uploaded to the web. Over a million tweets will have been shared. Some of them will actually be read. And over sixteen million pieces of content will have been posted on Facebook. That’s a lot of photos of people’s lunches.

        

    Of course, there are limits to this trend. At some point, people simply can’t handle any more information – there are only so many hilarious cat videos and cute baby pictures we can look at. But you get the idea. The scale of what’s being shared is almost beyond our comprehension. Here’s an incredible thought: according to a Digital Universe report published in December 2012 by the analyst firm IDC, there are more pieces of digital content in the world today than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth. Wow….

            Today, we expect to be online all the time, and we expect to be reachable everywhere. We usually are.  A Morgan Stanley Internet Trends report shows that over 90 percent of people keep their mobile phones within three feet of them, twenty-four hours a day. A May 2012 Harris poll in the United States found that 53 percent of people regularly check their phones in the middle of the night after they’ve already gone to bed, and a surprising and slightly disturbing number of people check their phones while on toilet…

            This online-all-the-time mentality pervades every area of one lives. Two 2012 surveys, one from Yahoo! And the other from Gazelle, revealed the following eye-opening data:

§  25 percent of women would give up sex for a year to keep their tablets.

§  15 percent of all survey respondents would give up their cars to keep their tablets.

§  Nearly 15 percent of all survey respondents said they’d rather give up sex entirely than go for even a weekend without their iPhones.

A 2012 TeleNav survey asked people which of life’s “little pleasures” they would rather do without for a week, instead of parting with their phones:

§  70 percent would give up alcohol.

§  21 percent would give up their shoes.

§  28 percent of Apple product users would go without seeing their significant others; 23 percent of Android users agreed.

A recent study from McCann Truth Central claimed that 49 percent of married moms would give up their engagement rings before they would part with their mobile phones. And a 2012 study from Harris Interactive revealed that 40 percent of people would rather go to jail for the evening than give up their social media accounts.

So, this is the world we live in now. Technology is almost everywhere and has come to dominate our lives. So much so, in fact, that we’ve starting to see people yearning to be less connected and trying to implement rules, structure, and discipline in both their own and their families’ lives, to ensure that all this connectivity does not come at the expense of relationships, skill development, and manners.

      It’s going to become increasingly important to find that balance, because in the next decade we’re going to see something even more extraordinary. Everyone and everything will be connected. There will be no division anymore between online and offline.”

[Long excerpt from Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives by Randi Zuckerberg (Harper-Collins Publishers, 2013), page 60-63. Buy this book!]

Let technology supposed to help us, not lord it over us.

Let technology fill our lives with meaning, rather than fear.

Let technology empowered us, rather than overwhelmed us.

Let technology become tools of opportunity to glorify God in everything,

rather than promote insecurity.

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

Jesus is Continually Healing the Helpless

“Then a demon-possessed man, who was blind and couldn’t speak, was brought to Jesus. He healed the man so that he could both speak and see. The crowd was amazed and asked, ‘Could it be that Jesus is the Son of David, the Messiah?’” (Matthew 12:22-23, NLT).

Healing is one of Jesus’ most prominent acts of ministry. He healed those with physical needs: lameness, blindness, and so on. He healed some who were troubled by a demonic presence, as in today’s passage. And Jesus helped those who needed spiritual healing: forgiveness of sin, cleansing of the soul, restoration of wholeness. Mark 2:1-12 shows Jesus healing people physically to demonstrate that he could also heal people spiritually.

No one talks much about demons today. (Maybe in the East Malaysia we’re quite familiar with these kind of talks. I think the West in the cities probably a bit difficult to imagine). Talks of demons is interpreted as primitive ignorance combined with a barely hidden fear that such an obvious display of evil would be terrifying. Some people chalk up all reported demonic activity to a simplistic view of reality that explains all natural phenomena in spiritual terms. But insisting that everything can be explained naturalistically eventually strips life of any meaning beyond chemical reactions. The Bible takes a more realistic approach by describing life experiences in real terms. The human writers (of the Bible) understood demons to be as much of the natural (fallen) order as any one of many items that can’t be seen (gases, love, light) but are still real.

In today’s passage, we glimpse an encounter between Jesus and demonic powers that had incapacitated a man’s sight and speech. This man with normal eyes and vocal cords couldn’t use them because a demon prevented him. Jesus’ impulsion of the demon freed this man to engage the world. Imagine for a moment the helplessness of blindness and muteness. This man “was brought to Jesus”; he didn’t find his own way. His whole experience is a teaching case for us of the incapacitating effects of sin and the wonderful ways God heals us.

Think about this: Jesus’ desire to heal others clearly demonstrated his compassion. His healing helped bring isolated people back into community. He urges us to show compassion toward others by praying for healing or bringing a healing word to those who are hurting. Do these and let people consider Jesus who is living in you by asking, “Could it be that Jesus is the Son of David, the Messiah?” For only Jesus can save, but we can make people ready to welcome Jesus in their life by preparing “the way… make ready the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Mark 1:2-3) through healing – physically and spiritually – the helpless. Pray.

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

Jesus brings Unity in Diversity (The Gospel of Peace)

“Soon afterward Jesus began a tour of the nearby towns and villages, preaching and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom of God. He took his twelves disciples with him, along with some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases. Among them were Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons; Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s business manager; Susanna; and many others who were contributing their own resources to support Jesus and his disciples” (Luke 8:1-3, NLT).

People have often wondered why Jesus never called any women in the way he called the twelve disciples. Knowing the character of the disciples as we do, Jesus invitation to “follow me” wasn’t given based on some kind of impressive resume. In the culture of the day, established business people and leaders would be prohibited from the travelling lifestyle the disciples had. Peter, James, John, and the rest needed a specific challenge; the women, however, simply responded to Jesus’ character and words – they followed. Women were at the cross, while the disciples hid. They were also at the tomb early while the eleven grieved, and so they were the first to discover the joyful of Jesus’ resurrection.

The three women – Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna –were written in the Christian history. Mary Magdalene had been afflicted with multiple demons, which Jesus expelled. This explanation captures the basis for this Mary’s connection with Jesus. She filled the void evil left behind with devotion to the One who set her free. Joanna, on the other hand, was a woman with social influence and an important husband, which shows that Jesus drew followers from every strata of society. Susanna, who is not mentioned anywhere else in Scripture, may have been a person widely known during Jesus’ time.

These three and other women would probably not have been allowed to carry out public duties like preaching and baptizing, but the Scripture notes that they used their personal means to support the efforts of Jesus’ travelling band. They partnered in ministry with their money (Btw, this shows that Jesus and his disciples were not wealthy and materially rich. Thus, I sometime wonder, what is the basis of today’s prosperity gospel teaching in the light of Jesus’ earthly life and ministry?). Yet these women also bore witness to Jesus’ power in their lives. Their presence made practical the “preaching and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom of God.” Citizenship in Jesus’ Kingdom was open to women too. No discrimination. Jesus wasn’t simply speaking about an ideal Kingdom that might be achieved at some future date. He was modelling the diversity, unity and love of people whose connection to one another through Jesus Christ overcame any other barrier. Here the writer was describing an early form of community that would later be called the church (ekklesia), the ones called out by God for his purposes.

Think about this: As Jesus invested in the lives of others, he ignored many of the social barriers that kept people separate such as gender, race, nationality, social class, language, personality, etc. This breaking down of walls is still a hallmarks of the Kingdom of God. Remember – Peter, John, James and Andrew were fisherman; John and James were called “Son of Thunder” due to their vengeful and fiery attitudes; Philip and Bartholomew were ‘good-boys’ very well versed in the Hebrew Scriptures; Matthew an ex-tax collector; Thomas the doubter; James of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus and Judas Iscariot were probably members of the revolutionary group called the Zealots; Saul of Tarsus or Paul was a Pharisees; maybe Nicodemus remained a Pharisees; and on and on. Jesus brought all of them together. You and me together. Us and them together. Jesus brings the Gospel of peace.

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

Jesus Might Spent More Time Outside the Church

I have great optimism about the reputation of Christianity in the future. [Right now, the perceptions raised in the book Unchristian by David Kinnaman of what our emerging culture thinks of Christians and the church such as too hypocritical, judgmental, antihomosexual, only care about people being ‘saved,’ etc. are pretty embarrassing and sadly true*]. But the good news is that while people have negative perceptions of the church and Christians, they are open to and respect what they know of Jesus. This led me to write a book about this, where I conclude that people like Jesus but not the church.

So if over the next thirty years, Christians, and especially church leaders, escape the subculture that we have created, this could really change the climate of how we are viewed by those outside the church. In theory, it really shouldn’t be hard to do. Jesus followers need to simply be friends with those outside the church. It’s not too complicated – going to movies with them, caring for them as any friend would, having them over for dinner, being there for them, not just seeing them as evangelistic targets. So even if they stumble at the gospel, as many, of course, will, at least they won’t stumble at all the negative stereotypes and perceptions that have developed.

But it does mean that we do need to take the words of Jesus seriously when he said not to be separate from the world but to be in the world, protected from evil. I absolutely know we need Christian community, but we have swung the pendulum so far into Christian “community” that we now live in more of an isolated world. Our time is filled with Christian activities and busyness in the church, taking us away from building normal and healthy friendships with those in the world.

So the future could be quite positive if people experience that not all Christians are antihomosexual, judgmental, and sheltered. I envisioned Christians naturally befriending those outside the church, understanding their faith, being deeper thinkers theologically, and truly having answers for those who ask. My prayer and hope for the future is that church leaders will become missional leaders, which in turn will produce missional churches, and then the perceptions will be changed to positive as the Spirit of God uses our lives to be salt and light. So when a similar study is undertaken in thirty years, people will describe Christians as “loving, kind, family centred, caring for the poor, good examples, peaceful,” and the other fruits of the Spirit.

Dan Kimball

Pastor and Author

Quote from Unchristian by David Kinnaman and Fermi Project (Baker Books, 2007) pg. 232-233

*Passage in the bracket on the first paragraph is mine

Original title as ‘Jesus’

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

Let's Bring Out the God-Colors in the World

“You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven”
(Matthew 5:16, The Message)

I understand why most nonChristians believe that Christians are only concerned with converting people and getting them into heaven. If you are part of my generation, you remember the crusades, revivals and worship services that ended with invitations to come forward and be saved. Those who did were immediately paraded across the front of the church and declared Christians. For a couple of generations, the emphasis was placed solely on that conversion moment.

In some ways, this is understandable. Christians know that salvation is important. But the truth is, we have put the cart before the horse. We have communicated that we want people to believe something that is critical to their lives before they know us, have experienced us or have received anything from us… and before we know them.

If we were able to rewrite the script for the reputation of Christianity, I think we would put the emphasis on developing relationships with nonbelievers, serving them, loving them, and making them feel accepted. Only then would we earn the right to share the gospel. Their acceptance by us would not be predicated on their willingness to accept Christ. After all, God loved us before we were lovable; God loved the whole world before the world knew anything about him. This should be our model.

Here’s my advice to Christians who want to change culture’s perception of Christianity: “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” In other words, do something that causes people to look favourably in God’s direction. I still believe that everyone spends eternity somewhere. If that’s the case, getting this right isn’t a marginal issue. It is the issue.

Andy Stanley

Senior Pastor, North Point Ministries, Atlanta, GA.

Quote from Unchristian by David Kinnaman and Fermi Project (Baker Books, 2007) pg. 88-89

Original title as ‘Don’t Put the Cart Before the Horse’

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

Invest God-given Time, Energy and Talents in Your Community

“For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink.

I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home” (Jesus, Matthew 25:35, NLT)

“The best portion of a good man’s life – his little nameless acts of kindness,

unremembered acts of kindness” (William Wordsworth, poet)

One of the comments people most commonly make after a major disaster has hit a community is how it brought people together to help and comfort each other. More often than not, when I read and talk to people who are going through some difficulties and ask them if there is anyone nearby to whom they can turn for support, they cannot think of anyone they know well enough to ask. Admittedly, I only do and join few social community projects in Sarawak, but I understand that this phenomenon is not exclusive to large, city areas only. The need for social community projects is vast and very demanding, especially, today.

Few years ago, I joined FES Malaysia, a student ministry organization, 2-weeks program called S.W.E.E.P. (Social Work Exposure & Embracement Program) and my life changed! Since then, my view on Christian faith broadened and my perspective of the Gospel enlarged. Getting involve in social community projects (definitely not the only means out there!) give joy to me because I get a chance to practise my faith, witnessing Christ both through my work and words, and it is an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives together – even with the students and my non-Christian friends. Offering to volunteer to help with or initiate a community project has been, for me, the most satisfying ways to love God and people.

In my experience, it pays to think and plan before rushing in to help with the first project you encounter or are requested to help with. In order to obtain the best return in terms of helping the community, while at the same time it helps you in your relationship with God and others, you will need to bear several things in mind prayerfully:

Do Personal Research and Respect Local Needs

You can do this by asking neighbours and meeting leaders of local organizations or churches. It also helps to spend time reading the local newspaper, campus or community bulletins, and listening to any local radio station. Do some research before you get involve. Don’t assume needs but offer helps only in the area of needs (not whatever you wants).  

Try to Match a Local Need or Interest to One of Your Talents

If you are good organizer, you could offer to put on trips for residents’ association, or be on the committee of a charity group. If your talent is writing, you could perhaps, offer to start a newsletter or write something like this article in your blog or any social medias. Give encouragements, update needs and be the voice for the voiceless. If you have driving license, offer your help in transportation. If you’re good in English or math, be a volunteer teacher. “If… be…” There are lots of opportunities and ways you can be involve. What are your God-given gifts or talents? Remember this: Playing to your strengths will be much more satisfying for you and make your involvement much more effective.

Under- Rather than Over-Commit

This is much easier said than done (over-commitment is one of my weaknesses. vise versa). Every community and charitable project is never ending and is constantly thirsty for help. It is particularly hard to say “No!” in crises, but remember – these are inevitable and frequent in this world. Don’t overcommitted that you lost your personal, quiet and alone time with Jesus along the way. Jesus is our priority, not men. That’s why the first commandment is the first, not second. Jesus said, “You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me” (John 12:8). So you have to be clear about the commitment you can give, and stick within your capability boundaries with super-assertiveness. Remind yourself that over-commitment leads to resentfulness, bitterness and burnout – none of which will benefit anyone if you do.

“[Whether] you eat or drink, or whatever you do (that include social community work),

do it all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31, bracket mine)

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.