Tag Archives: growing

Christian Wholeness – this Saturday (May 12)

Posted by on May 10, 2012 1 comment

You and I are not intended to plunge down the mountain of radical obedience alone

Posted by on May 10, 2012 No comments

A quote that was read a couple of times on the weekend:

High atop the Andes Mountains, the rays of the sun strike ice, and a single drop of water forms. It begins to trace a hesitant course downward, gradually joining with other drops of water to become a steady stream. The stream gains speed and strength. Thousands of feet below and hundreds of miles later, what were once single drops have converged to become the mightiest river on earth: the Amazon. Flowing into the Atlantic Ocean at a rate of more than seven million cubic feet per second, the Amazon is more powerful than the next ten largest rivers in the world combined.

In my book Radical, I explored how the biblical gospel affects individual Christian lives. Simply put, in a world of urgent spiritual and physical need, gospel-believing, God-exalting men and women do not have time to waste their lives pursuing a Christian spin on the American [Australian, Singaporean, Canadian etc] dream. Using the imagery above, I tried to picture what happens when the truth of Christ penetrates our hearts, melts our assumptions, and propels us on a journey of abandonment to God.

But you and I are not intended to plunge down the mountain of radical obedience alone. That’s one of the reasons I love this imagery of the Amazon. The force of a single drop of water descending the Andes is minus cule. Similarly, as long as individual Christians journey alone—no matter how “radical” they are—their effect will be minimal. But as men and women who are surrendered to the person of Christ join together in churches that are committed to the purpose of Christ, then nothing can stop the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth

David Platt, Radical Together (pp.1-2).

Then on page 5:

If you and I want our lives to count for God’s purpose in the world, we need to begin with a commitment to God’s people in the church. God has called us to lock arms with one another in single-minded, death-defying obedience to one objective: the declaration of his gospel for the demonstration of his glory to all nations. This is God’s design for his people, and it is worth giving our lives to see it accomplished. It is worth it for billions of people who do not yet know that Jesus is the grave-conquering, life-giving, all-satisfying King. And it is worth it for you and me, because we were made to enjoy the great pleasures of God in the context of total abandonment to his global purpose.

David Platt, Radical Together (pp.1-2).

As I mentioned in yesterdays blog post, let’s keep discussing this book, it’s ideas, and how we can “enjoy the great pleasures of God in the context of radical abandonment to His global purpose”.

Church Camp – brilliant!

Posted by on May 9, 2012 No comments

I’m still tired, but so thoroughly encouraged by our church weekend away. A big thanks to Matt for finding a beautiful place to stay, and for everyone else who made the weekend possible. We love being and doing church with you! And we look forward to what God will do in and through us in the coming weeks, months, years as we:

  1. Work against the tyranny of the good
  2. Trust in the gospel that saves us from work but saves us to work
  3. Dig into the Word that does the work
  4. Depend on the wrong people to be the right church
  5. Live and long for the end of the world
  6. Be selfless followers of a self-centred God.

(Radical Together, David Platt)

Ask any of our church campers about any of the above which don’t make sense to you! Let’s keep the conversation going – so we can all be radical followers of Jesus, and so that God will continue to unleash the people of God for the purpose of God.

The R.E.A.P. Bible reading method

Posted by on February 23, 2012 Comments Off

At the Ignite Training Conference last month, one of the speakers introduced us to the R.E.A.P. method of Bible reading. It struck a cord with a number of us, so I thought I’d share it here.

R.E.A.P. stands for Read, Examine, Apply, Pray. The R.E.A.P. method is from a sermon by Pastor Matt Carter from the Austin Stone Community Church in Austin, Texas. You can find the original document here (the below is a slightly edited copy).

READ
Read the passages with an open heart, asking the Holy Spirit to give you words of encouragement, direction, and correction (2 Timothy 3:16). Underline the verses that seem important and that God is
using to speak to you.

EXAMINE
Spend some time reflecting and writing about what you’ve read. Write down one or two of the key
verses that stuck out to you.

APPLY
After examining the passage, apply the text to your own life. Ask yourself these questions:

  1. What is God’s word for me from the key verses I’ve written down?
  2. How will I live differently and be different today because of what I just read?
  3. What are the things in my life that need to change in light of this truth?

PRAY
Pray through the passage and your application, asking God to change your heart and to change your life,
based on the time you’ve spent in God’s Word.

Here’s an example of using the REAP method to read and study your Bible:

READ
1 Kings 8–9

EXAMINE

Key verse: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27 ESV)

Solomon builds the template and brings the ark of the covenant into the holy of holies, but he realizes that God cannot be contained by a house made with human hands.

APPLY
I will not treat God as if He’s only present in a church building on Sundays. Rather, I will acknowledge that He is everywhere and seek to acknowledge and live in light of His presence wherever I go, whatever I am doing.

PRAY
God, forgive me for believing that you are smaller than you really are.
Give me faith today, and help me to believe that you are truly everywhere I go.

The above R.E.A.P. method can take anywhere between 5 minutes and 20 minutes. The benefit of it is the quality of Bible reading you will do – understanding the passage, applying it each day, and asking God for strength to live it out. So, grab your Bible, grab a notebook, grab a good Bible reading plan (here’s the one I highlighted last Sunday at church), and get REAPING the benefits.

Equip them, train them, support them, and set them free…

Posted by on January 10, 2012 Comments Off

To prepare for our church leadership meeting tomorrow night (our Engine Room), we’re reading a book by David Platt called ‘Radical Together’. It’s an excellent book about “unleashing the people of God in the church to carry out the purposes of God in the world”.  As a pastor, one paragraph stood out to me this morning:

If you are a leader in the church, think about the individuals in your care. See their faces, hear their names, and picture their lives. Consider how God has written a different story in each of their lives, filled with varied circumstances and challenges, trials and temptations, experiences and encounters. He has sovereignly led them to the life stage and situation where they now find themselves, surrounded by people you will never meet and opportunities you will never have. And you have been called by God to serve them in the accomplishment of God’s purpose for their lives. If you’re like me, the last thing you want is to sideline them to sit during a performance while you do the work or to participate in a program you have created. Instead, you want to equip them, train them, support them, and set them free to use everything God has given them to make His glory known in ways you could never design or imagine. (page 67)

This is a good reminder of my role as your pastor. Please pray for me – to equip you, train you, support you, and set you free to love and serve the Lord Jesus at church and throughout your world. And in doing so, may we fulfill the purpose God gave us in Ephesians 4:11-16

11 It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, 12 to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

The end result being: 14 Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. 15 Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. 16 From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

 

 

Helpful steps in reading the Bible for yourself

Posted by on July 17, 2011 Comments Off

Last Saturday, Keiyeng and I headed down to the Brisbane Chinese Alliance Church at Rochedale to lead a few BC3 training sessions on ‘how to give a kids talk’ and ‘daily time with God’. Some 5:17ers were there, which was great.

In the session I lead, included were some helpful steps to go through when doing your personal Bible reading. They’re taken from the Ministry Papers, written by Steve Cree:

Step 1: Relax. Sit down and focus on what you’re doing.

Step 2: Pray. Ask God to help you to understand His Word and ask the Spirit to help you to respond in obedience and faith to what you learn.

Step 3: Read the Bible passage.

Step 4: Re-read it – make sure you don’t read too much at a time.

Step 5: Think about what it means: what’s the flow of thought? What’s the main idea, encouragement, challenge etc? What does it tell you about Jesus and living with Him as Lord?

Step 6: (if you are so inclined) Record. Write notes about what you learned and how it applies to you.

Step 7: Take one thought, verse or idea from the passage – and think about it for the rest of the day (or until the next Bible reading session occurs). Try to live out the implications of that thought / verse.

Step 8: Praise and prayer. Give thanks to God for what you learnt, confess your struggle in the issue learnt (if you struggle in this issue), and ask for help to trust in Jesus and follow Him as Lord in this area.

The above steps aren’t to put a straight-jacket on your Bible reading. They shouldn’t be seen as laws – because God hasn’t told us exactly how much we should read each day, when we should read it or rules for how one must do their daily time with God. But the above steps are there to help us get the most out of our reading.

(for why we read the Bible, click on our resources page, and read the top two articles.)

Happy reading!

Nutrition nourishes incrementally

Posted by on October 28, 2010 Comments Off

This is a thought that came into my head a couple of Sundays ago just as Steve started preaching, and I prayed that God’s word would nourish and grow His people. It occurred to me that just like physical food, God’s word nourishes us incrementally.

What I mean by this is that just like our 3 meals a day, it’s barely possible to tell what good they’re doing for us. After all, skip one and most of us can survive pretty well. But of course skip many, and our bodies will certainly begin to suffer. We’ll start losing weight, getting sick, and eventually, dying of malnutrition (as sadly, so many people in the world do…).

Similarly, you may not be able to tell in yourself what effect one Sunday sermon has on your ‘spiritual growth’. You might walk out of church not thinking (or recognising) you’ve learned anything useful or been grown by what you’ve heard. Indeed, miss one sermon and in God’s providence you probably won’t fall away. But stop ‘eating’ God’s word altogether, and you’ll lose ‘spiritual’ weight, get ‘spiritually’ sick, and eventually ‘die spiritually’ of malnutrition.

The point is, just as physical food nourishes and grows us incrementally (I often can’t tell whether Jakey’s had enough milk in one sitting, but the fact is, day by day he’s growing chubbier and longer so it becomes obvious in hindsight that he is getting enough!), so does spiritual food. On both fronts you have to trust this is the case and keep eating, not skipping meals.

Just like a mum can’t see the growth of her kids like great-aunt Mavis clearly can on her half-yearly visit, so you can’t necessarily see your own growth day to day and week to week. But keep eating from God’s word, because His word says that by it you are growing, and He is doing His work of maturing and completing you (and me!) till the day of Christ Jesus. yum.

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”  Matthew 4:4

“…being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”  Philippians 1:6

what Jono taught us about conflict

Posted by on September 25, 2010 Comments Off

Most people think conflict is yuck; I don’t know m/any who thrive on it. But what Jono (Steve’s / our Christian psychologist) taught us about conflict is that the worst thing about it is not necessarily the conflict itself, but the power we can let it have over us, unnecessarily. We learned that some people (not us) deal with conflict much better than others (like us); without denying its ‘yuckness’ they’re able to respond to it like water off a duck’s back. We however, were stew-ers; conflict got to us with both depth (of intensity of effect on our thoughts and emotions) and length (of time it bothered us). Hard work, and not very livable.

So did Jono teach us to live in denial, or become emotionless and detached? Nope, but we did learn (from God, through him) how to respond to conflict in such a way that it no longer needs to eat away at us – and yes, this makes for a much healthier, easier existence, as well as makes us much more effective in navigating our way through the conflict with godly wisdom.

What Jono taught us was that conflict (or any emotionally / relationally traumatic experience) often gains or holds power over us because of other factors in our lives / in our past. So for me, I have over the years developed an overly strong need to see justice or equity enacted and if it’s not, I can get very worked up. In an inter-personal conflict situation then, if I or a loved one is not receiving justice, or is on the end of injustice, I get very worked up. Now it’s not wrong to desire justice per se. It’s a godly quality and God seeks it for His people. But the thing is my desire (or need) for justice is possibly fuelled by some negative rather than positive elements, such as a need to control my environment and relationships or have them completely under control, or a lack of trust in God’s ‘delayed’ timing or purposes, or a self-centred self-righteousness rather than a genuinely impartial humility. So when these negative desires fuel my desire to see justice enacted, you can see that if the conflict is unresolved and injustice perpetuates, I stay worked up. The conflict situation asssumes  a power over me that my unrenewed, ungodly thought patterns can’t or won’t release.

The Bomb and the Trigger:

Jono showed us that many of our thought patterns can be similarly unrenewed (by God’s word, a la Romans 12:1-2) and ungodly. Then, when a trigger (precipitating event) occurs in the present, ungodly thought patterns that have built up over the past go into play, and we react badly – and often this harks back to an original past event where our unrenewed thought patterns first developed. If we can identify this original event (the original ‘bomb’ event that events in the present can ‘trigger’), bring it before God and invite Him to heal and renew us and our thought patterns, and if He does, then the connection between this original bomb event and the ongoing triggers we experience, will be severed.

So in my example above, if I can identify the factors or bomb event/s in my past (not in a mysterious Freudian sense, but a real, practical way), that have led me to so strongly or wrongly need ‘justice’ and equity and to be or feel in control in my relationships, and bring this to God for transformation by His word and Spirit, I can truly be set free from these unhelpful needs and patterns. And this is happening. It’s a work in progress as God continues to show me the issues behind these patterns. I won’t share them here but suffice to say He has healed and renewed both me and Steve in deep and real ways with respect to our bombs and triggers, and the way we’re now able to healthily and appropriately respond to conflict or other’s ‘disapproval’ etc is remarkably different from 2 years ago! We’re able to see conflict with much clearer, more realistic, less ‘taken personally’ perspective, treat it for what it is and disregard it for what it isn’t, deal with it biblically and prayerfully, and ‘let it go’ to the extent that we can’t and shouldn’t seek to control the outcomes. We’re able to put our trust in God and His approval of us rather than needing the approval of others (especially where it’s not going to be forthcoming anyway). And thankfully, we’ve also been able to share our lessons and experiences with others. (Mind you it’s not easy to bare one’s soul in a public blog like this, so please deal gently with this post ;) )

In sum, I’ll borrow from an incisive piece of advice that came to Steve from our Bible College Principal – you could say God has been teaching us how to have tough minds, and soft hearts. You don’t want the opposite – tough hearts (that are thoroughly insensitive to people or conflict or relationship dynamics), or soft minds (that cave in under the least of pressures, not able to withstand with wisdom and grace) – but tough-mindedness and soft-heartedness is Christlike, to be emulated. I hope this post helps you copy Jesus in this way too, as you submit your thought patterns to God’s Word and Spirit for His powerful healing, transformation, and renewal.

How physics equations can help our discipleship

Posted by on August 8, 2010 1 comment

Physics was my least-liked senior subject; I only did it because being the compliant young lady I was (hmm, questionable), I thought I may as well follow in my big sister’s footsteps and pick the same subjects she did in grade 11-12. In hindsight I wish I’d chosen Modern History or something like that, but I didn’t really know what the Humanities were all about till later in life. :s

Anyway, enough junior and senior physics stuck with me that I’m now able to make some useful sense of it in an ‘all of life’ context, and that’s pretty cool. Take for example, Newton’s second law of motion, F=ma, and how I reckon it can help us understand our discipleship.

F=ma in words is Force = mass * acceleration. Simply (or simplistically) put for our purposes, if an object has a force applied to it in a certain direction at a certain rate of acceleration, it will move. But having said that, the force needs to be great enough to overcome the inertia possessed by the mass / object otherwise it will stay put (think of a little kid trying to push his big father off a chair). Also, the direction of application of F and a can be negative or positive (or come from any direction) – that is, you can make the object move backwards or forwards depending where you push or pull it from.

How does all this help us understand discipleship?! Well Steve and I were just praying through the orange bookmark with all 5:17ers’ names on it, and I was having a ponder about where we’re all at in terms of our following Jesus. In a sense, we’re all ‘masses’ that need a Force applied to us in a certain direction, and we’re all moving at different rates of acceleration. Some of us have greater inertia than others and thus need more Force applied, and some of us are moving backwards and need a good dose of Force applied in the opposite direction. Some of us are stuck, because equal and opposite Forces have been applied such that we’re not moving at all.

To change the physics equation a bit, discipleship (like an apple that falls out of a tree) needs intentional momentum and positive trajectory. God wants us to grow! He wants us to move forward in following Christ, and preferably not at a snail’s pace.

I guess the implications are: if we’re serious about growing, we need to recognise what Forces are being applied to our lives, and in what directions. Are we exposing ourselves to positive-direction ones, and are we growing proportionally? If not, is the Force too small (eg. not enough Bible input or prayer or submission to God’s Spirit or fellowship and accountability) or is the inertia of the mass too big (eg. am I too stubborn, proud, blind, hardened, or foolish to submit myself to the Force God wants to apply?)

Paul the Apostle had a great formula for Christian growth – Romans 12:1-2 -

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.

The world applies a negative conforming Force to us and we need to resist it, and instead submit ourselves to the transforming, renewing Forces of God’s word and Spirit. How are you going at this?

Here’s another equation you might like to turn into prayer for yourself and our church family. You might have come across it elsewhere.

Growth in Christ = F * A * T = Faithful * Available * Teachable

May God make 5:17ers self-consciously, prayerfully, and humbly F*A*T – so that the Forces He applies to us will result in His glory, our good, and a huge, positive impact on our world.

Reading through the Letter of James

Posted by on May 18, 2010 Comments Off
I know I said in last Sunday’s sermon that we should all have a read of the Letter of James at home this week – and please don’t let this stop you! But we are going to read through the Letter at our Community Groups (tonight and Thursday night respectively). Here’s the first session of the CG studies:


Gospel OUT: Community Group studies #1 (James chapters 1-5)


In our first look at the Book of James, we will try to get an overall grasp of what he was trying to say, rather than try to work out the finer details. In the space below, record what your group thinks is / are the main point/s of each chapter as you read the book all the way through. It would be worthwhile to note any themes or concepts which crop up more than once, as well as any words which are used recurrently.


Read all of the Book of James


Chapter 1


Chapter 2


Chapter 3


Chapter 4


Chapter 5


Was there anything you weren’t sure about as you read through James’ letter? Make a note of something you would like to understand better about the book by the end of our studies on James.



Please comment with your findings, questions etc!