Last week, I was reading through the journal I kept from my trip to South East Asia, and one of the pages all I had written was this:

Out past the mangrove trees, where eternity is real.

At the place I was staying, there was a beach covered in mangrove trees. One afternoon, while it was low tide, I waded out just past the furthest tree. Out there, all I could see was the ocean and the sky. No islands in the distance, no clouds in the sky, no boats on the horizon. Back on shore, I could hear the laughs of friends enjoying a care-free afternoon. I could hear the cry of mosques for the local people to come and pray. I could hear a boat, chuging along, ladden with fish.
Out there, eternity was real. The unending eternal blue. And I was part of that. A speck in what was an eternity.

And yet, my percieved eternity, in all it’s vastness, was but a speck. A speck in the grander scheme of the...

Much like school, life is a series of stages that are supposed to prepare you for the stage afterwards. You start with infancy, then preschool, then primary school, then high school, then university for most of you, then work, then more work, maybe some travel, then more work, and then finally retirement in preparation for the final years of this life. But in all this preparation, there is one thing lacking: none of these parts of life can prepare you for eternity.

I remember back when I was in year 7, there was an ad campaign, run by the Bible Society, called “Jesus. All About Life.” This campaign had a series of tv ads, as well as billboards, free barbeques, and people coming to schools to talk about who Jesus is. And as a kid who had grown up in a Christian family and was a Christian myself, I didn’t understand what the big fuss was all about. Of course, Jesus was all about life...

My reflections on 2017.

As this year draws to a close, I wanted to put what I feel about everything into some coherent form so that I might be able to share it with those I care about. Over this past week, I have started and restarted this piece multiple times in order to find the right words to say.
Words are strange like that. Almost always present but never the right ones until after the situation has past.
But, much to my satisfaction, I have found the words that summarise my year in a poem written by another.

Written in 1863, during the American Civil War by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, this is the last stanza of his poem titled ‘Christmas Bells’:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”

I don’t exactly know what Longfellow was trying to say but, for me, his...

Over the past three weeks, I have put myself through a lot. Too much to explain here and now. But trust me. It’s been a chaotic three weeks. An emotional roller-coaster that has turned friendships on their heads and my heart into a bout of turmoil.

I say it has been chaotic but I don’t really believe that. I can’t believe that. It goes against what I know to be true. My God is sovereign in all things. YHWH is sovereign in all things. Which means that these past three weeks have been under His control. He has willed for all of this to be.
That has been hard to grapple with. Hard to make sense of. Why would the God who loves me and cares for me put me through such turmoil?
I have only one answer:
For the sake of His holy name.

After a whole lot of things had gone on, I ended up reading Psalm 23 yesterday. Verse 1 reads:
YHWH is my shepherd, I shall not want.
What does it mean that I...

The work was done with nothing but
Wood and nails in Your scar-borne hands
O show me how to work and praise
Trusting that I am Your instrument
Wood and Nails by The Porter’s Gate Worship Project

Over the past few days, this song has been playing on repeat in my head. Those four lines, playing over and over like a broken record. I cannot seem to get them out. But, to be entirely honest, I don’t want them to leave.

The work was done.
It is finished was His cry. The debt was paid. The ransom handed over. The innocent Lamb of God, sacrificed so that the guilty can go free. It will never be undone. It can never be undone. My Saviour died and rose for me so that I could be free from all my sin and shame. Free from the slavery of the flesh. Free to be His. Called to be His. I am His.

With nothing but wood and nails in Your scar-borne hands.
It was not by my hands that I am made His. Nothing...

I am tired. Not necessarily physically tired, although I did probably sleep poorly last night. Not necessarily mentally tired, although I am being stretched while at Bible college. Not necessarily spiritually tired, although I have found it hard to open my Bible daily in recent weeks. Not necessarily emotionally tired either, although a lot is going on in my life that I am part of.
Yet, I am tired. And I think I know why: being a 21st century Christian.

To be a Christian is to hear the call of the Saviour, to deny your self, die to your self, take up your Cross and follow Him to wherever He wishes for you to go. This is one of the most radical commands in all of human history:
Don’t be who you want to be. Don’t pursue your own hopes and dreams. Don’t be who society and culture wants you to be. Be someone else. Belong to someone else. Be Christ’s slave so that the gospel may be known!
...

“If Christ is not all to you, He is nothing to you. He will never go into partnership as a part Saviour of men. If He be something He must be everything, and if He be not everything He is nothing to you.”
- C.H. Spurgeon

Yesterday, while sitting at a cafe with an old friend, we started talking about where our identity is found. Both of us being Christians, we know that we are found in Christ above all other things. Paul writes in Galatians 3:28-29:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.”
See, Paul gets it. The Galatians get it. Now that they are in Christ, they have forsaken all other identities. And now that we are found in Christ, we are heirs to the inheritance promised to Abraham. We are found in Christ...

Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. - 1 Corinthians 6:18-20

If you were looking for a simple yes or no answer, you’ve come to the wrong place. After much thought and discussion with Christian friends, I two halves to my answer to this seemingly straight forward question.

Firstly, the issue comes down to the definition of sex, and the role that kissing has in that. Google defines sex as performing the act of sexual intercourse. I agree. That is what sex is. But the biblical understanding of sex is so much more. It’s the same action but it has a much deeper purpose than to satisfy a physical desire...

My reflections from my time in South East Asia

I was once told that to be an effective evangelist, results needed to be produced, people need to be saved, lives need to be changed. I’m not saying that that it is a bad thing to want growth, to strive for converts, to fight for the souls of the unsaved. I’m saying that if you measure how effective you are evangelising based on the amount of people converted, then there is a flaw in your thinking. Jesus makes it clear in chapter 13 of Matthew’s gospel that the Word is always good, therefore effective evangelism is about if you are proclaiming the gospel or not. From what I have observed in churches across Sydney, and from reading about churches across the globe, the idea that effective evangelism is about numbers of people saved is more commonly held than I hoped for. And I strongly believe that this is the reason why so many churches and...