devotion25 - 寶貴十架

Happy Easter Sunday Revs! xD
Today's devotion is simple. Take some time to listen to this song and ponder on the lyrics. Let's go back to the foot of the cross and thank God for all the goodness He has bless us with. Take some moment to thank God for sending His son to die on the cross for us and give us life.

主耶穌 我感謝祢 祢的身體為我而捨

帶我出黑暗 進入光明國度 使我再次能看見

主耶穌 我感謝祢 祢的寶血為我而流

寶貴十架上 醫治恩典湧流 使我完全得自由

寶貴十架的大能賜我生命 主耶穌我俯伏敬拜祢

寶貴十架的救恩是祢所立的約 祢的愛永遠不改變

goodnight,kev! xD

Happy Easter Sunday

Dear brothers and sisters, I hope during this holiday you are refresh by our Lord and staying strong in your walk, dwelling in His goodness and blessings. Today, I was in church for the Easter drama that was put up by the youths. It was thought evoking - gospel made real.

Anyway the main thing was that my sister came to church with me. It was the second time she came to my church and it was a great encouragement to me. For the recent months I have seen God working in my family and the ministry that I'm in. I believe God have destined us to be loved by Him and if you have been praying and waiting for the Lord to give an answer for the salvation of your family, DOUBT no further! God will move. God will clear hinderances. God have saved and will continue to save! Our loved ones are in God's list =)

Let's encourage and spur one another to go forth into the world, into the campus, into families and into our love ones in bringing the love of our father into the world =)

devotion24: You Never Thoroughly Intended It

I read quite a lot, both for pleasure and for my theological studies. Every so often, I read something that stops me dead in my tracks and affects me so deeply that I have to put the book down and consider what I've just read. No author has done that as powerfully and frequently as C.S. Lewis. Today, I want to share one of those moments with you and explore how we can apply it to our relationship with Jesus. (In fairness, these are not his own words - Lewis was quoting William Law). He wrote:

If you will stop here and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.

If we consider Christianity to be a life-long journey, then surely the destination is a perfect and complete union with Christ. We begin the journey by not knowing Christ at all and it is complete when we have surrendered to Christ so fully and completely that nothing of ourselves remains.

If we stop to take a look at the things which prevent us from reaching that goal, it will appear that there are hundreds of little things on the journey which block our way. Work, friends, community and family responsibilities all present obstacles. We're so busy!

The truth that Lewis brings to our attention is that there are not many reasons, but rather one simple reason which underlies it all. If you don't have the kind of passion and intimacy in your relationship with Christ that you should then you don't fully intend to. You see, the quality of your relationship with Christ is all in your hands and no one else's. This is not like a marriage where both husband and wife must work to achieve closeness. Christ is and has always been completely accessible and available. He waits patiently for us to take each next step toward Him. You either take the steps or you don't.

Every reason you can imagine for why you have not taken the next step on the journey can be distilled down to one simple fact - you don't want to. There is no secret or magic formula here. It's simple. We come closer to Christ by spending time with Him, reading His word, serving Him and praying. None of us are being physically prevented or restrained from doing these things and so the choice to do them or not to do them is ours alone.

Yet, we do other things instead. We watch TV, put in a little overtime at work, visit with friends or any other myriad of things that are more important to us at that given moment. It's a given that there are things we must do to survive such as eating and working in order to make money to pay for our food and shelter. Jesus understands this. Yet, there is so much that we do not need to do. All that time we could be working on our relationship with Jesus. But we don't.

I'm busy! I have work to do! I'm tired! Wrap the excuse any way you wish and surround it by any reason you like but when you unwrap it, what you will find inside every time is the same basic truth. You don't intend to have a better relationship with Jesus.

The relationship you have with Jesus is exactly the one you want to have. When you want to have a closer, deeper relationship with Him, you will. Nothing in this world can prevent it.

Goodnight Revs,
kev!(:

Hey Revs! Should catch these 2 videos! Absolutely entertaining! :)

DevotionTWENTY-THREE: 2-Way Traffic

Ever had a 1-way friendship? You know the drill - people who always need a favour but never give anything in return? Everytime they come close, you know they've brought a new set of demands and needs. Clearly there is something missing if you're looking for the joy of friendship.

Have you wondered if God feels that way about us? With all our constant barrage of questions, problems and prayer requests. Surely, He wants us to cast all our cares on Him (1 Peter 5:7), and thankfully He stand ready and willing to help (Hebrews 4:16). But if we aspire to be God's friend, we need to recognize that true friendship with God is a reciprocal deal!

When Jesus talked about friendship He told His disciples, "You are my friends if you do what I command" (John 15:14). Jesus made it clear that His true friends would be those who would show allegiance to Him by doing what He told them to do: "Love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12)

Jesus proved His friendship when He laid down His life for us. Now the question is, what will we do for Him? Although we can never out-give Him or come close to repaying Him, we can display our friendship with Him even in our everyday lives too! How? Its when we extend kindness to someone in need, forgive an offender, show compassion to the poor and oppressed... ...

Remember, friendship with God has to be 2-way traffic :)

FAVOURITE!: Wang Lee Hom

HAHA! (: Hope you enjoyed listening to my FAVOURITE singer.(not idol, no worries! i don't idolise him) But he's a man with truckloads of talent, amazing and beautiful man. This is just a random post,HAHA! Just want to share my treasures with you guys.Touched?HAHA! Ah well, do continue to walk close with God and I'm sure you'll be a happy boy/girl! HAHA. Pse do come for this coming Wednesday's EXCO handover. Come and render your support to the incoming EXCO and to appreciate the outing EXCO shall we? See you there!

With love, kev (:

devotion22 - What Are You Afraid Of?

When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son (Genesis 22:9-10)

Late last year, my father and I sat in a hotel room following a men's conference in Toronto. Though he had given his life to Christ months earlier, he was still struggling with what it means to put Jesus first in his life and to surrender himself completely to Christ. "Let me ask you this," I said. "Would you trust Jesus enough to let him take Mom from you, if that was required of you in order to follow him?" He pondered their thirty-eight years of marriage and all that she means to him, then finally replied, "I don't know."

I empathize with my father as surely as I empathize with Abraham, whose test of faith has become the example for us all. The question for most of us, including my father, is academic since few people ever have to make such a dramatic choice. However, it's a useful test of the depth of our trust in Christ to ask, "What would I give up to follow Him?"

If we will be honest, there is something which each of us fears losing so much that it strains the limits of our faith to contemplate trusting it to God. Our life is perhaps the least of these, for surely there are worse fates than dying. Perhaps it is losing our wife, husband or child. Perhaps it is losing our freedom, our health or our mind.

As I began to take this inventory for myself in my twenties, I came across one thing which I could never permit God to take from me and which I could not offer in sacrifice. It was my mind. I justified this by saying that if I lost my sanity or my ability to perceive the world around me, how could I serve Christ? How would I even know who He was? If that were the case, would I be lost forever? Does my salvation rest upon my ability to understand it? I concluded that I could stand any manner of pain and torture so long as I had clarity of mind, but I told God in no uncertain terms that my conscious mind was off limits.

Years later, I came to the conclusion which must have preceded Abraham's reluctant decision to sacrifice His son, and which every Christian must reach before they can sacrifice the last remaining sacred treasure they have been withholding. I thought, "God, if you take this from me, it's part of your amazing plan and I can trust you." It was part of the realization that if God is going to take something from me, He will remain faithful to me and see me through it. He will give me whatever strength, faith and endurance I require to make it through the loss. This is the promise Jesus gives to all who place their faith in Him.

I don't know how God would sustain me if I had brain injury and lost my ability to reason. I don't know how my father would make it through the pain if he lost his wife. The point is that we don't have to worry about any of that once we surrender to God. We simply trust in the Lord with everything we have and He will see us through. God never said it would be easy, but He did say He would sustain us through the hard times and welcome us with open arms into His kingdom when our time comes.

Search deep within yourself now and contemplate the one thing that you have not been able to surrender to God. Find that one thing about which you have silently, subconsciously said, "God, take anything you require but please don't take this." I know that it feels like you would be destroyed if God took that from you, but you have to trust him. If God takes this from you, He will sustain you. Whatever He takes from you will be given back to you tenfold in Heaven. Most importantly, if God takes it from you, it is part of His amazing plan. Trust God with it now and let your surrender to Jesus Christ be complete.

The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, "I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me." (Genesis 22:15-18)