Hi, hope u like my new blogskin. I love it for the sunny and surreal kinda feeling. =P I'm on MC today cos of food poisoning. Vomitted on the bus yesterday on the way home, and thank God I brought a plastic bag along cos I kinda thought I might vomit. Anyway no one noticed I vomitted, either I'm very discrete or singaporeans are a lot who can't be bothered with whats going on around them!
I am inspired by someone's website containing his spiritual journey and some of his thoughts from teenager to now. And I am keen to start a blog too for that. Cos I am not so sure whether most of my readers here like to read spiritual stuffs.
I am currently reading John Piper's Desiring God. Yups, have not finished it, and it is such a good book. Some of the parts I read yesterday really stuck me and touched me a lot. And its been a long time since I really felt such joy in my heart. I hope that this will help u as well. I shall type some paragraphs that I really like, lest I misquote him:
Love is the overflow of joy in God. It is not a duty for duty's sake or right for right's sake. It is not a resolute abandoning of one's own good with a view soley to the good of the other person. It is first a deeply satisfying experience of the fullness of God's grace and then a doubly satisfying experience of sharing the grace with another person.
When poverty-stricken Macedonians beg Paul for the privilege of giving money to other poor saints, we may assume that this is not just what they ought to do or have to do, but what they really long to do. It is their joy-an extension of their joy in God. To be sure, they are "denying themselves" whatever pleasures or comforts they could have from the money they give away, but the joy of extending God's grace to others is a far better reward than anything money could buy. The Macedonians have discovered the labour of Christian Hedonism: love! It is the overdlow of joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others.
...if you try to abandon the pursuit of your full and lasting joy, you cannot love people or please God. If love is the overflow of joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others, then to abandon the pursuit of this joy is to abandon the pursuit of love. And if God is pleased by cheerful givers, then to abandon the pursuit of this cheerfulness sets you on a course in which God takes no delight. If we are indifferent to whether we do a good deed cheerfully, we are indifferent to what pleases God. For God loves a cheerful giver.
Love enjoys ministry
Don't do your work under constraint. This means the impulse should come gladly from within, not oppresively from without...The "eagerness" of ministry should not come from the extrinsic reward of money, but from the instrinsic reward of seeing God's grace flow through you to others.
On money
But a wealth-and-prosperity doctrine is afoot today, shaped by the half-truth that says, "We glorify God with our money by enjoying thankfully all the things He enables us to buy. Why should a son of the King live like a pauper?" And so on. The true half of this is that we should give thanks for every good thing God enables us to have. That does glorify Him. The false half is the subtle implication that God can be glorified in this way by all kinds of luxurious purchases.
If this were true, Jesus would not have said, "Sell your possesssions, and give to the needy"(Lk 12:33) He would not have said, "Do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink"(Luke12:29)...God is NOT glorified when we keep for ourselves (no matter how thankfully) what we ought to be using to alleviate the misery of unevangelized , uneducated, unmedicated and unfed millions. The evidence that many professional Christians have been decieved by this doctrine is how little they give and how much they own...And by an almost irresistable law of consumer culture, they have bought bigger (and more) houses, newer (and more) cars, fancier (and more) clothes, better (and more) meat, and all manners of trinkers and gadgets and containers and devices and equipment ot make life more fun.
I hope that the above that I have typed are useful for you. Worthy of contemplation, isn't it?
For me, the part on seeking joy when we serve really helped me and enlightened me. With regards to the money portion, it confirmed whatever that's in my heart.
In all conclusion...God is a good God.
U noe what? We can seek after joy and be filled with hope about our future cos we know that He is very good. Just like Jesus, looking to the real reward and not fixing our eyes on now.
Also read this portion on prayer and the word of God in the book, which were really good. And I went to pray after that...feeling Happy, not by compulsion so that I have to clock in my prayer time. =)
There was this song that suddenly came to me.
I have found exceeding joy,
Jesus answered when I called
this Name that has saved me,
pure love that embraced me.
Mercy, grace, eternal life.
Bought from darkness to His light.
While lost in my sin, He
raised me and made me live.
Chorus:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
my heart joys in God my Saviour,
for He lifts the lowly,
He's done great things for me.
I will sing, praising evermore,
He is mighty and Holy is His Name.
I will lift my head up high,
praising Jesus through each trial.
Though I have not seen Him,
I love Him completely.
May I encourage my dear readers to seek after JOY. But the real and permanent kind. Warning! Don't get short-changed by seeking other kinds of joy! They don't satisfy..!
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