Suddenly, my bicycle light picked up on an oncoming bicycle. I braked in time, but fell. I was in a daze; my tongue instinctively grazed over my lip and teeth. I felt a deep cut in my upper lip and a front tooth had broken. I was bleeding. “Oh God! Have mercy on me, I thought to myself.”

The 24-hour clinics were closed early due the pandemic, I had to go to bed with my cut lip and broken tooth, but kept the faith to host our SG Zoom meeting the next morning. My SG prayed for me, and a member advised me to immerse the broken piece of tooth in milk and bring it to the dentist.  Immediately after our SG Meeting, I went to a clinic and got a tetanus jab. With my tooth in a plastic bag of milk, I found a dental clinic open on Sunday. The dentist confirmed that I did the right thing for my tooth. By God’s grace, she glued back my broken tooth! My lip has since healed completely.

This was one of the many incidents where I experienced God’s grace. Just the week before the accident, our Children Ministry touched on the topic, “God will deliver you from all your troubles”. The key memory verse was Psalm 34:17: “When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles”.

We taught our children that God’s deliverance from our troubles may come in different forms (using the analogy of hail stones and umbrellas):

• God could deliver us miraculously like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who were delivered from the furnace (Daniel 3:28). He took away the harm of the fire (hailstones) from them.
• He could deliver by helping us and giving us the grace to go through something difficult. He gives us the “umbrella” to handle the “hailstones”.
• Sometimes He delivers us by taking us home to Himself, i.e. taking us away from the “hailstones”.

I see this promise of God at work during this Covid-19 pandemic.  I feel that God has not taken away the virus, in order to remind us of His faithfulness in the midst of trials; that His grace is sufficient for us. By God’s grace, the Singapore government has done reasonably well to manage the pandemic, despite the recent spike in infections. With one of the highest vaccinations rates in the world, it  enables as many of its vulnerable people as possible to be protected  against severe illness and death. Delicate decisions to balance health consideration with restoring its economy are being made, as Singapore calibrates safety measures to ease its people towards living with the virus. Success to overcome the virus depends on its people working together to stay safe. We must uphold our government in our daily prayers.  We must support the government’s efforts by observing the safety measures. Unless medically advised otherwise, we should get vaccinated to protect ourselves and those around us. Given the commandment to love one another, we must be prepared to help those in need.  Pray for the safety of those who have not taken the vaccination either because of medical reasons or vaccine hesitancy. The Lord is in control and we can trust the Lord to bring us through this pandemic.

During this pandemic, the Lord took my wife’s cousin home. She suffered from myeloma yet inspired many with her faith in God. She was at peace when she went home to the Lord. The Lord had delivered her soul and healed her spiritually. We are reminded that our final blessedness is not found in this temporal world but in His eternal kingdom to come.

By brother Lum Weng Kiong

It has been a long break since the church went out to the neighbourhood for BCS neighbourhood visitation. Covid-19 has changed the world, and it will never be the same as before Chinese New Year 2020, which was the last time we visited our neighbours. As we go out this month, let’s look at how Jesus Christ would want us to do it.

1 Corinthians 13, the great passage about love, ends with “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love”. The virtue of obedience is essential behind these three great pillars of faith, hope and love in the Kingdom of God. Faith is putting belief into action in obedience to God’s will. Hope has to be directed towards God’s will. Of what use is love if it does not obey God?

Love, faith and obedience

At the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:40-46; Matthew 26:36-46), Jesus Christ had agonised on His upcoming death, sweating blood, knowing full well the supernatural suffering that He had to go through. Yet in perfect obedience, faith and love for His Father, He confirmed His Father’s will that mankind, whom God loved, would be saved by the innocent and substitutionary suffering of Him (Jesus Christ) on the cross.

Jon Bloom a staff-writer for desiringGod.com wrote: “Supreme love was made visible in Jesus’s death on the cross, where “the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2) pursued his, and our full, eternal joy (John 15:11) through his obedience in the midst of the greatest suffering (Hebrews 5:8). God wore his love on his bloody sleeve. Jesus did not merely “love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18). “By this we know love.”

The love and obedience of Christ is the fuel for our love

Jonathan Aitken, a politician who found Christ, wrote: “For at its essence true worship is a passionate love for God, not moralistic rule keeping or feats of self-discipline. For sinners like us, the fuel of that love is a profound realization, in the words of former slave trader-turned-pastor, John Newton, ‘that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour.’”

With growing faith, love as He has loved

Jesus Christ has demonstrated his love in many ways for his disciples, and instructed them how they should love in John 13:34-35: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

What appears to be new is the way we are to love, namely, “as Jesus has loved us.” The Son of God showed what love is when he came into the world and laid down his life for his people. Loving one another the way Jesus loved us is only possible with the divine power of God to help us grow in faith (2 Peter 1:3-8).

Loving God means keeping His Commandments

John in 1 John 5:3 pointed out: “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.”  God gives us the Holy Spirit to help us with them (John 14:16). We know God’s great love and compassion for the Lost. The opportunity to share the Good News comes when the Lost see and feel God’s love and compassion for them in us.

Let us therefore go forth into the neighbourhood this month, in love, faith and obedience to the Lord our God, so that the Lost may be found and have hope. Whoever serves, let him serve by the strength that God supplies in order that in everything God may be glorified (1 Peter 4:11).

By Lum Weng Kiong (YCKC Bulletin 18 Oct 2020)

Romans 8:30a (ESV) wrote, “And those whom He predestined He also called, and those whom He called He also justified, ….“ Looking back, here is my story of God’s blessing of this verse on me.

Chosen

Nobody knows how God has predestined things but I hold that He has chosen me by His grace before the foundation of the earth. My earliest memory of when Jesus Christ first came into my life, was from my mother. She said that I was very sick at one year old. We went to stay with my grandfather, who was a Chinese physician, but he was not able to heal me. My mother then decided to bring me to a hospital near my grandfather’s home, fearing the worst.  Along the way, there was a church. My staunch Taoist mother, in her desperation, brought me into this church to pray. Since then, my mother told the family that Jesus Christ had saved me when I was a baby, and that she would not object if Jesus Christ were to claim me for Himself.

God kept calling

God has been calling me since my schooldays. Occasionally, some Christian friends would bring me to Christian meetings. I attended Billy Graham’s crusade in 1978. When I started working, I even responded to an altar call, but I did not make any effort to connect with a church. I told my Christian friends I would find out more about God when I had time.

In 1992, I went for a medical checkup for a niggling pain in my wrist. I was shocked when the X-ray results showed that I had a growing bone tumor in my left hand. The orthopedic surgeon was non-committal when asked about my prognosis. Instead he suggested, “If you are religious, pray hard to whoever you believe. You will need it”.  It was Jesus Christ I prayed to before the major operation, although I did not know how to pray properly then. God is good. He placed a Christian nurse to look after me and encouraged me when I was in hospital for more than a month. I told God I had to live as my wife was pregnant with my first child then. By God’s grace, I recovered fully, but busyness at work claimed me.

Justification by faith in Christ alone

The next part of my life was pivotal to my conversion. My second son had many unexplained episodes of long crying spells as a baby. We subsequently sold our apartment thinking that the crying spells were due to bad geomancy. As our new home was not ready, we rented a place, which happened to be opposite a church.

One night my second son was crying incessantly again. At my wit’s end,  I carried him out and found myself at the premises of the church. I prayed to the Lord to stop my son’s crying and promised Him that I would come back to the church to know more about Him. Just like what happened when I was a baby, it seemed more than a coincidence that it was my turn to bring my baby son to church in desperation. My son stopped crying.

On settling down at our new home, my wife and I sent our two sons to the church’s Sunday School. Six months later, we walked into the church to attend a service. We went into studying the Bible, and got to know Jesus Christ better. We were baptized in 2001 and it is now 21 years since we walked into Yio Chu Kang Chapel.

Towards Glorification

Now in this sanctification journey to learn to love as Jesus Christ has loved, I want to claim His promise – “… and those whom He justified He also glorified” (Romans 8:30b). John Newton’s Amazing Grace sings in my heart:

“Through many dangers, toils and snares, We have already come.
T’was grace that brought us safe thus far. And grace will lead us home.”

By Lum Weng Kiong (YCKC Bulletin 12 May 2019)