Love Makes It All New
I think I’ll be talking too much before the year is
over. Maybe I should listen more to others now. This essay is presented as a
tribute to many others who have spoken. About love, worship and missions. And
of these three, which do you think is the greatest?
They say
that the year 2003 was the year of the blog[1].
The number of blogs has surpassed the one million mark.
The blog is
an online diary. It’s where you can link-up with other people on a daily,
casual yet meaningful basis. More interactive and ‘intimate’ than the average
website, less rush-rush than online chatting, more communal than email and
discussion groups, blogs allow people to track and share each other’s lives,
stories, ideas, feelings and discoveries in a surprisingly unique way (even
considering how high-tech we’ve become).
Blogs have
been heralded as the new platform for multiple genres such as personal
journals, notebooks, note cards, to wider-audience varieties like bulletin
boards, newspapers and newsletter to creative writing like fiction and poetry[2].
Needless to
say, Christians have also been using the blog to bring forth the
Sadly,
blogs have also been abused and employed as means of corrupting character,
spreading hate, cheating people and so on[4].
All the more why I’m glad that Christians are planting the victory flag of
Christ with beautiful submissions like the following excerpts from writer Lisa
Samson who presents her version of 1 Corinthians 13:
If I speak with polish of Glenn
Close, or write like Annie Dillard, or do either of these with the perspective
of one who serves God and has stood in praise before the Divine Presence -- and
have no love to give -- well, all those words might as well be thrown in the
garbage because they sound like the hideous noise of a dial-up modem connecting
to the internet.
And though I have faith that could
stop the violence in the
And though I sacrifice my own life
by giving mouth-to-mouth to a stranger or donating blood, or traveling to a
dangerous country only to have my car set on fire by a mob -- if I don't have
love to give -- my spiritual account still says $0.0.
Love answers the "why"
question of the toddler a thousand times; love listens on the phone for an hour
to a hurting friend; it will go downstairs itself if there's a strange noise in
the house or sip the hot drink before handing it to its five-year-old;
Love never wonders unduly that its
mate is staying at work late to fool around with a co-worker; it always
believes in people--that they may not be where they could be, but by God,
they're not going to be where they are a year from now! It doesn't throw down
the towel at every little thing or big problem and brandish the
"divorce" word and love never says, "But I'm not IN love with
you anymore." It also doesn't leave a church at the drop of hat or a song
it didn't like. Love likes all the songs if it brings someone closer to God.
And still we see as though in that
fog, stumbling along in pure faith that God is who He says He is, but someday,
oh someday the mists will lift and we will see His face. And on that day, He
will see ours, for the first time, in our new perfection, not the future
promise of such, this blood-stained perfection bought on the cross stabbed into
the hill of Calvary. Completion! Redemption full blown!
Faith, and hope and love abide here
now as we paupers live our lives covered in a costly grace. But love? It outshines it all.[5]
Lai
Chin Kit lamented that Christianity today can be a mile wide and an inch deep[6]. I
think this may be true of Christian communication
as well. If this is the case, I’m glad people like Ms. Samson are acting to
remedy this situation. But it’s not only her but thousands of others, even from
The primary to worship is my own heart. Colossians
3:15-17 so clearly spells that out. In corporate worship, the
primary to worship is the heart of the people of God. Thus, when we can
worship in silence, and we should in every single waking second, than that is
to understand that God desires the worship from our hearts.
So coming back to what worship is. Is it just during
church that we worship? Is it just during the singing that we worship? If Col 3:15-17
were to be understood in its entirety, it makes no provisions of whether it is
just in church. It is of daily living. To not see that our lives outside and
inside the church is connected is to compartmentalize ourselves and
short-change God of the worship He truly deserves.
How is it that we can observe the
forms of worship so resolutely and enforce it so rigidly yet our hearts are
closed off? More
and more I can see how we cannot worship when anger, the “me” complex and our
strong sense of smugness dominate our hearts. How is love possible in such
soil?[8]
As in life, love is the
beginning and end of worship. Love also motivates us to sow the seed of the
Word. However, as many are beginning to see, one doesn’t have to mention the ‘four spiritual laws’. What do you think of the
below statement?[9]:
“People
who think and write about church growth perhaps should pay a little more
attention to the Book of Acts. The earliest Christians simply acted like
Christians, like friends and followers of Jesus. They devoted themselves to
love and compassion. It doesn’t say they devoted themselves to church growth of
evangelism. It says they devoted themselves
to caring for one another and for others, and the world as compelled by their
authenticity, the integrity of the life they lived in the world. Their life
together was the very best evangelism.” (emphasis mine)[10]
An ‘old’ (or ‘everlasting’) way of evangelism i.e. of sharing new eternal life with people? There’s
also a new word in town: missional.
How do the below paragraphs expressed by the church movement called Emergent
make you feel?
The word expresses the belief that God intends
Christianity to be more than a system of belief or even a way of life. Our
beliefs are intended to foster a way of life that in turn sends us into the
world to serve God and our neighbors, so that God’s will may be done on earth
as it is in heaven, and so that God’s kingdom may come.
This missional focus on God’s kingdom tells us that the
church is never to be the withdrawn or isolated end user of the gospel; rather,
we receive the gospel so that we may be equipped and sent into the world to
love our neighbors and serve “the least of these.” For Emergent, the church
doesn’t have a mission; the church is
mission[11].
Innovative ways of
communicating and interacting. Novel ways of saying what love and worship are
about. An integrated approach to missions. And a lot of fresh links. What can I
say? I’m in love with a God who makes all things new (smile).
[1] Visit http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/barrios/blogs
for a brief introduction on the growing influence of blogs.
[2] Click on http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/cinichol/BlogStuff/Blogging.htm;
see also http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm
on the ‘art’ of blogging.
[3]Visit http://www.joannejacobs.com for more
teacher and teaching resources.
[4] As fate would have it, only a few hours before writing
this sentence I was informed that my own blog has been cancelled. Over five
months of writing evaporated like cyber-smoke and I’ve been asked to pay US$35
to retrieve my archived data. Anybody seen Matchstick
Men? There’s a great quote, “I’ve never robbed anyone. They gave me their
money. There’s a difference.”
[5] The Love Chapter,
Lisa Samson, http://lisasamson.typepad.com/author_intrusion
. “Love Outshines It All” was, in fact, the original title of this article.
[6] In a sermon delivered to Luther House Chapel on
October 10th, 2004. The remark was made in the context of the
genocide in
[7] If you’re completely new to blogging, you may begin
with the following two (from Malaysia) which have become international ‘hubs’
for Christian blogging: http://sivinkit.net run by Pastor Sivin Kit
of Bangsar Lutheran Church and http://messychristian.blogs.com
run by another member of BLC.
[8] My Worship vs.
God’s Worship, Donald Lim, http://mytightrope.blogspot.com
[9] One of many ‘Web Interactives’ given by Leonard Sweet
in his book Post-Modern Pilgrims: First
Century Passion For The 21st
Century World, Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000.
[10] Give Me That Old
Time Religion, John Buchanan, a sermon delivered to the Fourth Presbyterian
Church of Chicago, available at http://www.fourthchurch.org
[11] About Emergent,