Holding Back

I usually don’t get depressed reading my Bible, but these days have been different.

As I mentioned some time back, I’ve started on another Bible-on-a-year trip. At the moment I have just finished 2 Chronicles. This time through this part of the Bible I paid special attention to the prayers of David. I found myself crying when I read this:

“O LORD, God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Israel, keep this desire in the hearts of your people forever, and keep their hearts loyal to you. And give my son Solomon the wholehearted devotion to keep your commands, requirements and decrees and to do everything to build the palatial structure for which I have provided." (1 Chr 29:18-19, NIV)

Did David ask for the wrong thing? No, as a parent I’d pray the same for my sons. I’d beg God to keep their hearts devoted to him. But we know that in the end Solomon fell into idolatry.

As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his father had been. He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molech the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the LORD; he did not follow the LORD completely, as David his father had done. (1 Kings 11:4-6, NIV)

And because I knew that, it made all the accounts of Solomon’s early reign and his great start all the more bittersweet. It’s kinda like watching the early days of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. You know that, in spite of all the good things he did earlier, he was going to fall away, and he was going to become Darth Vedar.

This time through the Bible, however, I think I found the beginning of Solomon’s fall, the mistake he made that led him down the slippery slope and caused everything to end so badly.

Solomon brought Pharaoh's daughter up from the City of David to the palace he had built for her, for he said, "My wife must not live in the palace of David king of Israel, because the places the ark of the LORD has entered are holy." (2 Chr 8:11, NIV)

Solomon’s first foreign wife was the daughter of Pharaoh (from Egypt). Very early in his reign, he made the decision to keep her away from the presence of the LORD. Think about it, he wouldn’t even let her enter David’s palace just because the ark of the God USED to be there?

I personally believe this decision that his wife would be kept out-of-bounds to God, so to speak, that caused this aspect of his life to spiral out of control.

King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh's daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the LORD had told the Israelites, "You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods." Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. (1 Kings 11:1-3, NIV)

We usually read the account of Jesus feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fish, and we learn from it that whatever we offer to God gets multiplied to make an impact for his kingdom. But the converse is also true. If we leave one aspect of our lives apart from God’s rule and blessing, that part of our lives starts to grow, to multiply and fester, and eventually it has the potential to derail our lives and mess things up for us big-time.

It was not the problem of a foreign wife that was the root of the problem. If we look at the matter in detail, we’ll see that David had a foreign wife too, the daughter of the king of Geshur (1 Chr 3:2). And so did Joseph, in fact, he married the daughter of the priest of On. That’s like a Christian prophet marrying the daughter of the Dalai Lama (if he ever had one, of course). But that did not cause those two men to backslide. They saw God as heavily involved with ALL they did. In fact, David even brought God into his domestic squabbles, as we see from the following incident involving one of his wives.

When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, "How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, disrobing in the sight of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!" David said to Michal, "It was before the LORD, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the LORD's people Israel—I will celebrate before the LORD. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in honor." (2 Sam 6:20-22, NIV)

By the way, I personally think the last line about the slave girls was David’s way of hitting Michal below the belt. I can understand his anger, but it was still mean, in my opinion. Let’s not idealize everything a man of God does, OK? Having said that, however, the fact remains that despite his mistakes, David saw God as vitally involved with all he did.

Unlike Solomon.

And hence the lesson I took from this and want to share with you.

It is too easy to divide up our lives into compartments, our family, work, leisure, ministry and other spiritual stuff and see them all as separate. And when we see them as separate, the temptation of thinking that God belongs to and should only be involved with the more spiritual stuff (such as our prayer times, Sunday services and church ministries) is strong.

If we ever give in to that temptation, we are courting trouble the way Solomon did. God desires to leave his mark, to show his hand in EVERY area of our lives.

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 The 5:23, NIV)

And this is the key to seeing if you have been holding back areas of your life from God - Prayer. If there is any area of your life you have not been submitting to God in prayer, this is an area you have declared out-of-bounds to God. Whether you do that because you think it is too trivial to bring to God or because you are harboring rebellion in that area does not matter. What matters now is the fact that what you hold back from God poses a grave danger to your walk with God.

Prayer is also the key to bringing any area of your life back to God’s rule. Whatever the area may be, begin by praying to God about it again. I pray to God about many aspects of my life, even how I do push-ups. And just a couple of nights ago I had a late night conversation with a dear brother-in-Christ who showed me yet another area I have been holding back from God. When he did so I realized that I have not been praying about that aspect of my life. So I had to commit that area of my life back to God again.

Anyway, that’s it for this sharing. Pray for me that I can organize my time well this season. I’ve been very busy, but there are still more matters I’d like to share with you. Be blessed!

Birthday Thoughts

I celebrated my birthday a couple of weeks back.

I usually don't, because I don't feel comfortable with people making a fuss over me. Most of the time my birthday is forgotten, because Jessiah's (my firstborn) birthday is less than a week before mine, so he gets all the attention. And I'm cool with it.

(He was supposed to be born on my birthday; I guess he was too impatient to wait another week!)

So how did I spend my birthday? I started off with worship, of course.

1. Thy Loving Kindness (D-E major)
2. My Life is in You, Lord (G major)
3. Through it all (G-A Major)
4. How Great is Our God (A major).

Then I continued with an ordinary day at work. It's a blessing to be happy and satisfied stuffing envelopes and pasting stamps on my birthday (that's NOT my usual routine, but it just had to be done by that day). Finally the day ended off with meeting the wife for a movie (17 Again). Yup, that was pretty much it.

In my university days I had a forbid fascination with cults. And my favorite cult in those days was the Jehovah's Witnesses. They were a textbook study of standard cult psychology and got me interested in studying Christian doctrine in detail. What fascinated me was how carefully they used their differences with standard Christian doctrine both for branding and for making their members feel superior to rank-and-file Christians, that they had some secret insider knowledge. Very Nicolaitan, right?

And one of their pet 'doctrines' was that birthdays were pagan celebrations, that the two times birthdays were described in the Bible bad things happened, and so genuine servants of Jehovah (what they CLAIM to be) should have nothing to do with birthday celebrations, whether their own or someone else's.

I was exposed to all these ideas in my undergrad days, so later on, when some Christians I knew suddenly started telling me that Christmas was a pagan festival and that Christians should ONLY observe Jewish feasts, I just smiled and left the matter at that. I already saw how similar ideas (in fact, for the JW exactly the same idea, Christmas) were used, and saw the fruits firsthand. I'll pass, thanks!

Birthdays can, in fact they ought, to be used for remembering God. In Psalm 139:13-14, we read "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well." But in the course of day to day life it's easy to forget to thank God for creating us in the first place. Birthdays provide an excellent platform for remembering and celebrating that.

The JW do have a point though (you never thought I'd ever say that, right?). They assert that birthdays take glory away from God and put it on the individual. And I have seen people who behave as if birthdays were their day of glory, that they should be allowed to do whatever they like on their respective birthdays. Such people who act in the spirit of Pharaoh (who executed a prisoner on that day, Gen 40:22) and Herod, who on his birthday had John the Baptist executed. Some people act as if their birthday celebrations gave them the right to treat other people badly or to demand that their whims and fancies be met, regardless of how much trouble they cause the people around them.

I personally believe that birthdays give us the opportunity to express who is the most important person in our lives. If we are self-centered, how we celebrate our birthdays will reveal that. If we live for Christ, how we celebrate our birthdays will reflect that too. I still remember the birthday party of one of my good friends. A few years ago he said "It's MY birthday, I want to spend it worshiping Jesus, so you all HAVE to join me!"

Please don't get me wrong. I am not saying that how I celebrated my birthday is the best way or the correct way. I am just sharing some thoughts and memories triggered by my own birthday, OK?

So in closing I'd say I am quite OK with how my birthday went this year. Of course there are still some items on my birthday wish list that I'd like to have, such as :

1) A working computer, my previous one zonked out (a laptop would be nice)

2) A video cam, I have still have lots more vids I'd like to record and put up

3) Training DVDs, both music and Budo

But in spite of not having all those things I am still content. I enjoyed myself on my birthday this year and for that I thank God. Many information marketing people on the Internet use their birthdays as an excuse for some special sale or promotion of their products. I don't think there is anything wrong with that, but I did not do that this year. Why? Because I have only ONE product at this point of time, I think it's weird to hold a birthday celebration sale just for that!

Yup, so that's it for this email. No special offer, no special promotion, just a simple sharing of my thoughts and musings. Be blessed!