muses

It’s been a maddening month of May. Maddening not because I’ve lost my temper or my sanity (almost, just almost), but because of the many responsibilities to meet. There’s a major project at work that will end after June and two adults events in June to publicise, both of which have taken up much of my time.

And once again, I’ve slipped into the mode of doing than being - doing to fulfil my duties rather than being a disciple of Christ through growing in intimacy with God, character and love for people. I thank God for the many thoughts today from sermon, fellowship with a sister, and the CGL training to bring me to see that I need to grieve over the state of my heart. It’s really exasperating that I can know the right things to do but not obey. I’ve a wicked heart, prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love. I need to return to fellowship with God. I look forward to a new month to work out this fellowship with God.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love
Here’s my heart, Lord
Take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above

(The blog title is coincidentally a song by Queen, but that’s beside the point =P)

I read this ‘Ask Pastor John’ entry on John Piper’s Desiring God website today and it felt like it was for me! I’ve spent too much time listening to songs, watching TV, surfing the web, all related to the latest season of American Idol. Now that the season is over, there’s a certain feeling of emptiness. And I realised that I want to be entertained more than the desire to read Christian literature, pray, or even to have more Bible Study. I have my Quiet Time, I do my Foundation homework, but I lack the fervour for God’s things. I need prayer. Could you please pray for me?

***

How can I break free from an addiction to entertainment?

I believe I do love Jesus, but most of the time I’d rather spend time being entertained than spend time in God’s word. How do I break this hold that entertainment has on my heart?

That’s a very good question. And I think it’s especially relevant because we live, I think, more now than ever, in a day when entertaining kinds of things are immediately accessible.

I was thinking the other day of the difference between our temptations and, say, 250 years ago, the day of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards would write about the folly of young people getting together to do “frivolous conversation” or other worse things. (”Bundling” it was called: getting in bed together and keeping your clothes on, that sort of thing. Just spice up life a little bit. Life gets boring in New England 250 years ago.)

Today we carry in our pockets radio, television, internet, and games, and anything that would be titillating, fun! And “fun” is a word in the church today that’s just rampant! It’s an adjective, it’s a noun, it’s a verb, because we do ministry in order to fit this mentality.

I’m deeply concerned about that. I want to stand for seriousness about God, instead of making him palatable by making him “fun”! Turning him into another piece of entertainment.

So this question is, “How do you break free from that kind of addiction?”

1. Recognizing it is a huge step in the right direction.
2. Seek the Lord earnestly about it. Pray like crazy that God would open your eyes to see wondrous things out of his law.
3. Immerse yourself in the Bible, even when you don’t feel like it, pleading with God to open your eyes to see what’s really there.
4. Get in a group where you talk about serious things.
5. Begin to share your faith. One of the reasons we are not as moved by our own faith as we are is because we almost never talk about it to any unbeliever. It starts to feel like a kind of hothouse thing, and then it starts to have a feeling of unreality about it. And then the powers of entertainment have more sway in our life.

And so those would be some of the things, but ultimately it’s a gift of grace to feel the glory of God.

One last suggestion: think about your death. Think about your death a lot. Ask what you’d like to be doing in the season of life, or hours or days, leading up to meeting Christ. I do that a lot these days. I think about the impact of death, and what I would like to be found doing, and how I would prepare to meet him and give an account to him.

Hmmm… a Christian comic. Looks cool to me.

It’s 4am in the morning and I’ve been awake for the last hour. I woke up with this swelling in my little finger, and it caused me enough discomfort that I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was exasperated because I haven’t been sleeping well. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s work (it’s the dreaded Annual Report period again), maybe it’s the new bedsheets (should have washed before using). In my vain attempt to fall asleep again, I argued with God. How can I work if I can’t get enough rest? I’ve been so tired at work since last week. But I realised that I’ve placed too much confidence in sleep itself, so I prayed that God will sustain me at work. And He reminded me of something, so I did a search:

In vain you rise early
and stay up late,
toiling for food to eat—
for he grants sleep to those he loves.

Psalm 127:2

Ah… in vain have I stayed up so long. Did I toil for food to eat? Well, I’m just trying to make a living. But it’s the last part that I am going to cling on to.

Abba, I know that You love me, so grant me good, deep sleep.  Enough to give me rest from my labour and strength for another day. Thank you Father. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

P.S: Please pray for me that I will get adequate rest. Thank you.

I met a cult member last Monday. I did a questionnaire that she handed me and thought it was just another Christian survey. Then I realised that there was something wrong: there was reference to some mother or feminine god in the questionnaire. Then she tried to share with me about this mother god, quoting verses from the same Bible that I read no less, and I tried to counter her arguments with verses from other parts of the Bible. I think she found herself going nowhere in her conversation with me, so she just left some pamphlets with me before bidding me farewell.

As much as I know what I believe in, I was still disturbed by the encounter. I felt that I should have pointed her to some passages more explicitly, or that I should have argued over the erroneous interpretations more sternly, but that’s bygones now. And as it turns out, the ‘church’ is a sect that broke away from the Latter Day Saints church (otherwise known as the Mormon church) and was established 60 years ago, according to the pamphlets. It wasn’t some mainstream Christian church whose doctrine went awry.

But all these reminded me of the Word session from March’s Adult Fellowship, where we were warned with the following verse:

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.

Colossians 2:8

We can be deceived by human tradition and basic principles of this world. So how do we guard ourselves from these lies?

Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

Hebrews 5:13-14

So how can I discern between good and evil? How do I train myself to do that? Constant use of God’s word. Not just a mental, theoretical knowledge, but an active working knowledge through the practice of God’s word. That is obedience. In these days where there are increasingly more false teachings, obedience to the word of God guards us from these lies.

I always remember this analogy regarding discernment of truth: How do you tell you have a counterfeit note? You can possibly acquaint yourself with all the features of the latest batch of counterfeit notes, and look out for them on the note you’re handling. But you would have to know all the fake notes out in the market. Or you can be so familiar with the real thing that you know something is fake when you encounter it. So I will have to know the real thing, by using the Word of God.