Honestly, I don't think my sermon last Sunday was the most organized and it could have been better. But I wanna share my short testimony from this wonderful experience (and privilege!) of sharing God's Word with our beloved youthgroup.
Giving sermon is such a challenging experience. I put in a lot of time into the sermon outline (10 hours on Saturday!!), but the more time I spent I felt my spiritual energy draining... Isn't that weird? I thought I'd receive strength as I got deeper into the passage, but it was the other way around. I started having headaches - not too serious, but bad enough to really annoy & distract me - all this happening brought me down to my knees every couple minutes, and all I could say in my prayer was "Father I'm so weak... I need you!" Headaches continued into the morning of that Sunday and I asked JDSN for Advil - and he gave me children's medicine from the youthgroup's bookshelf. -.-;; I took 5 pills of that stuff but didn't feel any better. I tried to spend some time getting my heart ready while Meeloo's thing was going on, but a CM class stormed into the room I was praying in, so I went to join the farewell party. During the worship time I decided to pray about my headache, but just then something suddenly stirred me inside. It was as if a dam burst open and I just could not stop crying. I faced the back wall to hide my face, and as I was just standing there wailing, God revealed to me the love that He has for this youthgroup. His heart was so tender, so gentle and.. awe-some. I felt the brokenness within the singing voices behind me, and the hunger, the pain... I really cried out to God that He'll use me as His agent that day, one last time before I went up to stand at the pulpit.. er, the music stand. =)
Two kids from my class came to me after the sermon and told me the message was really touching and they cried. As I was listening to them I was really thankful to be a part of the big, loving kingdom family. Seeing their bright faces as they were sharing brought sunshine to my heart. =)
I've been struggling with some serious coughing lately and I don't know where it came from. On Saturday as I was preparing the message, I prayed that this coughing will not hinder the delivery of His message - secretly hoping that I can use preaching as an excuse to ask God to heal my throat. Coughing continued through that night, the Sunday morning, the worship time... But it was suddenly suppressed when I started speaking, and remained that way throughout the service. Isn't that amazing?
But man, the way God works is just weird sometimes. God really did answer my prayer and He did not let coughs to hinder the sermon - but my coughing came back after the service was over. So here I am, back with a fresh bag of Ricola and I'll be out to buy some cough syrup later. =/ (Why.. oh why?!!)
And... in a way, I was sorta challenged by my own sermon... haha. I always had trouble giving to others freely, whether it be gifts or donating to the poor, and I was never really at peace whenever I don't give. (The sermon was about having peace in God.) It always bothered me to see myself not trying harder to reach out to the friends around me, and that's very unsettling. And I want peace! I realized that, choosing to walk the narrow path is actually the only way we can be at peace with God.
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Anyhow, the story of Jonah and the whole city of Nineveh coming to repentance is a pretty powerful story. An entire city repenting before God at that time was an event that was just unheard of, and we can all see that God used Jonah powerfully. (But did you know that Nineveh would soon be destroyed? They became proud shortly after this great repentance... Nahum prophesies this) But Jesus, who is far greater than Jonah, was received with cold and hardened hearts in today's passage. How can that be?
Yesterday I went to Cal and had a chance to attend a lecture and discussion by Dr. Francis Collins, who claims to be the "Christian evolutionist". It was very intellectually challenging, hearing his idea of theistic evolution - and he's a genius geneticist/medical doctor/quantum physicist (a pretty prestigious guy), who loves to chill with 2nd order differential equations on his free time. While his arguments are very convincing, with diagrams of human and chimp's chromosomes and all, I started to wonder if Dr. Collins was somewhat forced to reach this conclusion of creation/evolution hybrid - being a scientist who must believe in logic and reason, and at the same time maintaining a very visible presence as a firm believer of Jesus Christ to the general public. I think he must have had to reach a compromise at some point in his search of answers.
But not to say that he's right or wrong, his lecture got me started thinking... Just how big should that "leap of faith" be? Dr. Collins mentioned that he had to make that leap of faith after seeing the limits to the answers that today's science can provide. But what if the missing fossils were all found, DNA's of all species mapped out and evolution could be explained using all known laws of the universe - would the human mind still have that hunger and desire to know God and follow Christ, to the point of death?
Regardless of how much our little minds can explain this universe, I think the prerequisite to accepting Jesus in our hearts is... to simply have open hearts. Well, most of us are not doctors or physicists (or both), but thankfully, the door is wide open for anybody to come freely and understand the gospel message. People with hardened hearts were not able to accept Jesus even when Jesus was standing right in front of them! I need to have a childlike faith in Jesus and renew that faith every morning. I want to hunger for God.
Application: to keep a lookout for opportunities to give. Especially for non-believing friends. To be unselfish with things that I think I rightfully own.
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