Wednesday, November 28, 2007

NT Wright Interview- Introducing Jesus

More about what the Gospel is from an interview with NT Wright

You can read the full interview here. I haven't read the whole interview yet, coz I'm really tired today, just skimmed through it.

However, there's just one small bit I wanted to share here. (Last time I participated in the "outdoor evangelism" with my church, someone from China said they have never heard of Jesus.) How could you introduce Jesus in 1 minute??

Trevin Wax: So how would you share all of this with an individual in the evangelistic task, if an individual were to come up and to say, “What must I do to be saved?” “How can I become a part of this…”

N.T. Wright: I would want to know a lot about where they were coming from. I mean, if I had two minutes, I would tell very, very simply the story of Jesus.

I once on a train was approached by a Japanese student who saw me reading a book about Jesus. He didn’t know much English. He said, “Can you tell me about Jesus?” I was about to get off the train. I simply told him (he didn’t know the story) that there was this man who was a Jew. He believed that God’s purposes to rescue the whole world were coming to fulfillment. He died to take the weight of evil upon himself. He rose to launch God’s project and to invite the whole world to join in with it and find it for themselves. How long did that take me? 35 seconds? That’s more or less it.

However, when I think of the real people that I meet, I think both of bright university students in Durham University and of unemployed mineworkers in the pit village five miles down the road. Total, total disjunct. And I really believe…

Look at what Paul does in Acts. No two speeches are alike. OK, he will have repeated himself here and there, but he says it the way these people need to hear it.

And though the story is very simple… If someone were to say, “What must I do to be saved?” I’m being kind to say, “Are we talking about rescuing your mortgage or your marriage or your eternal salvation or what?” because people have layer upon layer upon layer of things to be saved from. We can deal with all of them, but we have to find where the shoe pinches for them and then that’s the point of entry into an authentic grounding of the gospel in their reality.

The God who raises the dead

Just wanted to share this with you all. God spoke to me directly through this last night. NT Wright is not just a scholar, no one can write this without experiencing God in his own life. That's why he's my fav writer, even when his scholarly works are sometimes too difficult for me...

From NT Wright's Following Jesus- Biblical Reflections on Discipleship

Do you know what the most frequent command in the Bible turns out to be? ..."Don't be afraid"

The irony of this surprising command is that, though it's what we all really want to hear, we have as much difficulty, if not more, in obeying thus command as any other. We all cherish fear so closely that we find we can't shed it even when we're told to do so.

... And the resurrection of Jesus issues the surprising command: don't be afraid; because the God who made the world is the God who raised Jesus from the dead, and calls you now to follow him...

(example of Paul from 2 Corinthians 8-9) "I was so utterly unbearably crushed, that I despaired of life itself; indeed I felt as though I had received the sentence of death."... "this was to make me rely on the God who raises the dead."...

Living by faith rather than by fear is so odd for us, so scary for us, that it takes a lot of learning...

All the other command that enable us to make sense of our human life follow this one. When we grasp at that which is not ours, it is because we are afraid that if we don't we won't have enough. When we use sex as a means of self-gratification rather than as the glorious affirmation of a lifelong commitment, we do so not just because of lust; lust itself is nurtured in fear, fear of rejection, fear of loneliness. When we lie, we do so because we are afraid that the truth will be embarrassing. And so on...

If then, we recognize the truth about the surpassing God, the God who raises the dead, we can trust him with every lesser task that may come our way. He can be trusted with exams, ... jobs, even when they don't necessarily work out the way we thought they should... marriage... money, even when it seems as though there is even less of it available than we had thought... old age... death itself.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Death awaits Korea's escape mastermind

I've shared this story on my google reader, Facebook and through email yesterday... If you haven't read this story through these sources from me yet, I'm sharing this on my blog today...

If you prefer to read the story in Chinese version, you can try here or here. Otherwise the news report below has a lot more details...
From the Sunday Times

ONE of the bravest men I have ever met is locked in a Chinese prison this weekend, facing the risk of being sent back to certain execution in his native North Korea.

His story stands for the human suffering that endures while diplomats craft a controversial agreement to disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons and to grant its dictator, Kim Jong-il, the peace treaty and the recognition that his regime has sought for decades.

The man is Yoo Sang-joon, a refugee from North Korea who lost his wife and younger son in a famine under Kim’s Stalinist system in the 1990s, and who then escaped across the border into China.

His personal tragedy did not end there, for his surviving son, Chul-min, aged 10, perished in the Mongolian desert in a forlorn attempt to evade Chinese security forces and North Korean agents hunting down the refugees. After that numbing bereavement, Yoo, who is about 36, found solace in the Christian religion, fell in with a group of South Korean missionaries and devoted himself to helping others escape to freedom.

He could have stayed in comfort and safety in South Korea but he chose to return to hostile territory as a rescuer.

Yoo hid people in chilly apartments, smuggled food to families living like troglodytes in pits concealed in snow-covered fields, bought clothes for the escapees and taught them how to get past checkpoints.

One year ago he took the risk of meeting me to explain how the underground network smuggled people from the frozen wastes of northeast China to the border where the slow-flowing Mekong River divides Laos from Thailand.

“Helping other people makes it easier to deal with my grief for my son,” he explained, as we huddled in a dank hotel room. “I try to get the orphans out first. You will understand why.”

Cool, dispassionate and dignified, he trusted to elaborate security precautions – The Sunday Times agreed to call him Nam Hong-chul, informing readers that this was a pseudonym – and to luck.

However, his luck ran out a few weeks ago when he was caught in a dragnet to sweep up the escape network.

......

Those caught are detained in special jails, then escorted under armed guard across one of the bridges linking China to North Korea.

Horrifying scenes have been witnessed even here. Chinese soldiers have told their relatives of watching, nauseated, as the North Koreans force thick wire through the hands of the prisoners or under their collarbones, yoking them like animals to the slaughter.

In one well documented crime, North Korean security agents beat a man to death in front of the Chinese as soon as he was handed over, recognising him as a dissident.

The only thing standing between Yoo and a fate like that is his slender green-and-gold South Korean passport.

The South Korean embassy in China is aware of his case and the government in Seoul has said that it does all it can to help its citizens.

However, refugee campaigners fear that the left-leaning administration of President Roh Moo-hyun is prone to appease both the Chinese and the North Koreans in its quest for a diplomatic agreement before general elections next month.

“We have good reason to believe that the Chinese have on occasion in the past ignored the naturalisation of some former refugees, thrown away their South Korean passports and just returned them to the North Korean authorities,” said Tim Peters, a Christian pastor who runs a charity to aid refugees.

“That would mean instant execution for someone like Yoo Sang-joon, known to be helping escapees.”

Demonstrators on his behalf picketed South Korean government offices last week, just as the prime ministers of North and South Korea held talks to promote the south’s “sunshine policy” of conciliation towards Kim.

Peters hopes that behind the scenes foreign governments will be making the case to the Chinese that their interests are best served by respecting Yoo’s South Korean citizenship.

Chinese lawyers have said that the mere act of helping refugees does not break any article of the penal code and the Chinese have apparently begun to heed calls for decent behaviour towards the refugees.

Reliable sources say that a few months ago the Chinese government issued a directive that pregnant women were not to be sent back to North Korea.

It came after a weight of testimony that women were subject to forced abortions on return, that babies born to them in prison were left to die and, in some cases, the infants were murdered or their mothers forced to kill them by prison guards.

The Chinese decision appears to follow diplomatic representations and private lobbying to persuade the authorities in Beijing that the situation was intolerable for a nation proposing to welcome the world to the Olympic Games next summer.

However, its most telling aspect is that the Chinese must have accepted that the stories of child killings were true. That has profound legal implications. Human rights groups are trying to collect evidence that may one day be used against Kim’s underlings in prosecutions for crimes against humanity. “Despite the directive to cut back on repatriating pregnant refugee women, the policy is not being enforced uniformly,” Peters warned.

......

The fate of Yoo, who has done all that he humanly could to help his own people, now poses an immediate test of the proposition that diplomacy gets results from authoritarian regimes.

If you want to help him, please scroll down this page and see how you can help by sending a letter to the Chinese minister of Justice and Wen Jiabao.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Another doomsday cult??

From Reuters

At least 30 members of a Russian doomsday cult have barricaded themselves in a remote cave to await the end of the world and are threatening to commit suicide if police intervene, officials and media said Thursday.

..."They are simple Christians," a local priest, Father Georgy, told NTV television station. "They say: 'The church is doing a bad job, the end of the world is coming soon and we are all saving ourselves'."

Let's not argue about when the end of the world will be. "They are simple Christians... The end of the world is coming soon and we are all saving ourselves." Are we this selfish like them, when it comes to saving ourselves??

Poverty

As I have been talking over and over about caring for the poor... I started thinking what I can actually do, not just "talking"...

(Please click on the pic below to see the words, I'm sorry, my blog is just too narrow. It'll be worth your time, I promise.)



I saw this on my way to church today.

P1050369

I took this photo at 9:15am, and when I went home today at 1:30pm, this old man was still squatting in the same position as before. As I was talking about caring for the poor, I was thinking if I gave this man $100, and told him "Jesus loves him", would he be more feel more loved? (He may be a really rich beggar, and laughed at me for being silly if I did that. However, when was being a Christian not silly and crazy?) What does God want me to do??

He's been squatting there for hours, and hundreds of people going to my church must have walked past him in the day, I wonder if there is even 1 person who showed their love and care towards him.

Faith and Fear

Today is the first practice lesson with observation by someone from the Sunday School Department.

As for the comments I've got, some I already knew for quite some time (like I talk too fast, I actually look intimidating coz I seemed to know too much... sigh...), others I haven't noticed before, (like some of the conjunctions/phrases I like to use, are pretty distracting... like "I don't know".) Overall it's a valuable experience. And the reviewer is really nice and good person. I'm a proud person and have problem in accepting others opinion, thank God for placing her as my reviewer instead of another real haughty reviewer. =P I won't listen a word of what the other woman would have said if she was the reviewer.

However, there are something I really don't agree, like I need to sound sure when I'm talking about the Bible because I'm talking about FACTS! (Yeah, if only the Bible scholars can agree on what everything is about.) And as I was teaching the story of Jairus' daughter and the bleeding woman, I talked about their struggle of faith and fear. She said it's mostly about faith, they had already overcome their fear.

Why is it that we always need to make these people in the Bible the paragon of faith? Why can't they have doubts like us? Fear like us?? It is exactly this "I'm sure about this attitude" that drives people away from church. Even the greatest of church fathers and Mother Teresa had doubts at times, why can't this be discussed??

(Please click on the pics below to see the words, I'm sorry, my blog is just too narrow. It'll be worth your time, I promise.)







I don't think I'm boring people to tears... I think I'm talking about stuff too difficult and too deep and too fast for people to understand though... hmm...

As I was asking God to change me quickly, I shut myself up even before I said it, "yeah, like you're really soft and malleable." I'm really hard and stubborn, chisels may not even be able to change me... =P Bulldozer is more like it... sigh... Lord, change me... though I doubt this process will be quick...

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

CGST Winter course



More details here.

THERE IS A COURSE ON MARK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Mark 4:35-41


[35]On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the other side."
[36] And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him.
[37] And a great storm of wind arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already filling.
[38] But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care if we perish?"
[39] And he awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
[40] He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?"
[41] And they were filled with awe, and said to one another, "Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?"

I remember I have heard a sermon on this passage before. When you look at the reconstructed boat above, you believe Jesus could really be sleeping in a boat like that during the storm? (It's not as if it's a Titanic!)

The preacher suggested that Jesus may be pretending to sleep?? while the disciples were in a panic. =P

It's during the time of crisis when we can see ourselves truly.

The disciples had saw so many different miracles before, yet when their lives were endangered, Jesus still need to ask them, "Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?"

What about us??

More about this passage from NT Wright's Mark for Everyone,

This tale isn't just about danger and rescue. Older echoes like Jonah, Israelities crossing the Red Sea, stories of creation of God'w new world emerged from the dark primal sea, the Psalms several times speak of the creator God who rules the raging sea, telling the rough and threatening waves to quieten down.

The Jews were not a seafaring people; the sea came to symbolise for them the dark power of evil, threatening to destroy God's good creation, God's people, God's purposes. In books like Daniel, the sea is where the monster came from. So when Jesus rescues the disciples from a storm, we are witnessing something which says in concrete terms, what the parables earlier in the chapter were saying in word-pictures. God's sovereign power is being unleashed; that is, God's kingdom is at hand. It's the same power that made the world in the first place. And the power is now living in Jesus, and acting through him.

Just as in Daniel 7 the monsters who've come up from the sea are finally put to flight by "one like a son of man", so here Jesus assumes the role of God's agent in defeating the forces of chaos. He isn't a Jonah. He is doing exactly what the living God wants.

The forces of evil are aroused, angry and threatening, but Jesus is so confident of God's presence and power that he can fall asleep on a pillow. The disciples are cross; doesn't he care? Jesus reverses the question, don't you yet have faith?

Here is Jesus with the disciples, here are forces of evil, here is Jesus not now asleep on a pillow but slumped on the cross, we hear his voice: Why are you afraid? Don't you believe?? Who then is this?

Here's Mark invitation to all of us: ok, go on and wake Jesus up, pray to him in your fear and anger, and don't be surprised when he turns to you as the storm subsides in the background and asks when you're going to get some real faith.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Are you crazy enough??

Jesus was considered crazy EVEN by his family. When I was explaining this part of Mark, I thought about what NT Wright said and what Littleho said in his blog, so I gave an example of what Jesus might say if He was here today. He might have told young people in our church to forget about studying, go to disco and karaoke to be with these other people in need of the Gospel?? Can you imagine just how their parents would react to that??? =P

I remembered when I was still in school, people often prayed for me, "God, please give her the wisdom to get good grades in exams so as to glorify Your name."

I wonder if God ever thinks in that way??? Christians getting good grades in exams= His name being glorified??? What is God thinking when He hears prayers like this... =P??

2 Corinthians 12
[7] And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated.
[8] Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me;
[9] but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
[10] For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Mustard Seed

Last night while I was praying, this passage comforted me...

Mark 4:30-32
[30]And he said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it?
[31] It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth;
[32] yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

I guess what we do is just like a mustard seed... and one day it may grow and become the greatest of all shrubs.

I've been really stressed recently, and I guess I really didn't let go.

The Gospel of Mark (3:20-35)

NRSV Mark 3:20-35

Then he went home;
[20] and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat.
[21] And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, "He is beside himself."
[22] And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Be-el'zebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons."
[23] And he called them to him, and said to them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? [24] If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
[25] And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
[26] And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end.
[27] But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man; then indeed he may plunder his house.
[28]"Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter;
[29] but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin" --
[30] for they had said, "He has an unclean spirit."
[31]And his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside they sent to him and called him.
[32] And a crowd was sitting about him; and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you."
[33] And he replied, "Who are my mother and my brothers?"
[34] And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers!
[35] Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother."

Quoted from NT Wright's Mark for Everyone. He can say it much better than I can ever do...

Family Solidarity is like observance of fasting, Sabbath and other signs of Jewish identity. It’s being loyal to their ancestral heritage to Abraham. He did the unthinkable, he severed his ties to his family. He wanted to establish a new family, a new Kingdom.

Word about Jesus spread to Jerusalem. If Jesus' family begin to think he's mad, what is the wider public to make of him- particularly when part of that wider public that concerns itself with the ancestral tradition of Israel. This passage is in fact a powerful witness to the remarkable things Jesus was doing. The early church certainly didn't make up the story about people saying that he was mad or in league with the devil. Equally, people only say that kind of thing when the stakes are raised, when something is happening for which there is no other explanation.

Jesus just makes matters worse. He slices through the whole traditional structure in one clean cut. He has a different vocation, a different mission, and it involves breaking hallowed family ties. God is doing the unthinkable: he is starting a new family, a new holy people, and is doing so without regard for ordinary human family bonds. Unless you read v34-35 ad deeply shocking, you haven't got the message.

How easy it is to slide back into a sense of belonging, of group identity, that comes from something other than loyalty to Jesus. We substitute longlasting friendship, membership in the same group, tribe, family, club, party, social class or whatever it may be. But the call to be around Jesus, to listen to him, even if those outside think us crazy, is what matters. The church in each generation and in every place, needs to remember this and act on it.

Mark has set up a picture of those inside and those outside which is going to be very important in the next chapter. The gospel and allegiance to Jesus produce a division, often and unexpected and unwelcome one, in every group or society where they make their way. Mark's call to his readers then and now is to stick with Jesus whatever the cost.

Jesus did add a warning. Once you label what is in fact the work of the Holy Spirit as the work of the devil, there's no way back. It's like holding a conspiracy theory: all the evidence you see will simply confirm your belief. You will be blind to the truth. It isn't that God gets specially angry with one sin in particular. It's rather that if you decide firmly that the doctor who is offering to perform a life-saving operation on you is in fact a sadistic murderer, you will never give your consent to the operation.

There is no middle way, for the world today as for Israel then. Jesus is either the one who brought God's kingdom or a dangerous madman.