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“I want to know You more…”

by Alfred Lam on October 5, 2009 · 1 comment

“I want to know you/I want to hear your voice/I want to know you more….”

I am not sure why, but during the singing time in church today, this phase from a familiar song  jolted me.

It was a song that I must have sung a 100 times before.   But for some reason this morning, something about those words stopped me in my tracks.

“I want to know you more…”

Really?   I mean, do we really?

By definition, to know someone more is to find out something about the person that we didn’t know before.  Perhaps even to have a long held impression about the person shattered.

That’s what happens when you get to know someone more.

But it seems that so often, when I hear people talk about their experience of “knowing God more”, it is little more than confirming what they already “knew” about God. 

It’s almost like we start out with this mental image of whom God is “supposed to be”, and when we come across an experience that happen to confirm that image, we talk about it, and others join in, “praising God”.

I have been part of those “sharing of testimonies” countless times.  Often I wonder…are we really “praising God”, or are we simply “congratulating” ourselves for “being right” about God?

What happens to all those experiences that do not “jive” with who we think God is supposed to be and how He is supposed to act?  Why don’t we talk about those more?

In fact, I have observed that when we come across an experience of that sort, we often do the worst possible thing:  We take that experience , we push it down, we twist it around, we “shoehorn” it into this box we have in our minds labelled:  ”This is who God is”.

Do we really what to know God more?

Can we handle being wrong, terribly wrong, fundamentally wrong about God, about who He is, what He wants, how He works, what He does?

It is quite clear that in the biblical story, that’s part and parcel of being “God’s people”…God’s people in the Bible are often those who are most “wrong” about God.   And God, for thousands of years have had to say “That is NOT who I am…”

For some reason, the church today seems to be quite convinced that God doesn’t have to do that anymore…”We’ve got you figured out…thank you very much.”

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why God has always had a “thing” against people creating and worshiping man made images.  Because once you create an “image”, you are saying: “Here, we’ve figured it out: THIS is what God looks like…”

The Bible says we were created in God’s image…I wonder if in the way we approach Christianity, the opposite is true, that we, in our own minds, have “created God in our image”

It seems to me, biblically, that a central part of the journey of faith is to be proven “wrong” about God.   Yet today we seem to be bent on proving to others how “right” we are about Him.

Meanwhile, we sing “I want to know you/I want to hear your voice/I want to know you more…”

Do we really?

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On Easter

by Alfred Lam on April 10, 2009 · 5 comments

This has been a special weekend for us. As part of the week-long surprise birthday celebration I planned for Anna, after I picked her up from work on Thursday evening, we drove 9 straight hours to spend the weekend in Chicago. Anna didn’t suspect a thing! I even managed to pack her bags for the weekend, with all the right cloths, clean underwear for everyone, AND all her lotions and potions! (To all those of little faith and doubted if I can pull it off, let me hear you now…who’s your daddy?? :)

It’s been a while since the last time I drove 9 hours straight. But surprisingly I did ok. On the way down, Anna and I had a lot of time to talk. We talked about Taylor, we talked about our marriage, we talked about our plans for the future, we talked about our dreams, and we talked about our faith. We both noted that being away meant we won’t be attending any church services or religious activities over the Easter weekend.

A few short years ago this would’ve been unthinkable. But life for us has changed over the last couple of years. To this day, we feel sad and hurt about the abandonment and betrayal we suffered from some in the church community that we had devoted our entire lives to. To this day, special days like Easter brings us saddness at the notion of being abandoned and left behind. But at the same time, we both felt that leaving that environment has done more to crystalize and grow our faith than anything else we have experienced in more than 20 years of being Christians. It has forced us to stop defining our faith by membership to an institution or attendence at meetings.

Rather, we now see our Christian faith as a daily decision to live the kind of lives that Jesus modelled for us. Jesus said, “I am the way…” We now see that Jesus did not come to start a “religion”. Rather, He came to announce good news and to give us a model. The good news is that the Kingdom of God is here. God is here, and God is at work in doing something greater than we can ever imagine. Jesus then modeled a way of living, and offered us a Way to live that will allow our lives to become part of what God wants to do in the world.

This changes everything for us. For us, Easter no longer means attending a once a year special church service. Rather, we “celebrate” Easter daily by living with the conviction that today, and everyday, I can wake up to the reality that God wants to do something new in me and through me. As we talked on the long drive down to Chicago, we realized that throughout this journey, God has “overhauled” our lives and put in a whole bunch of new parts: our understanding of Him and His work, our appreciation for family and friendship, our marriage, our way of parenthood, among other things.

We had a great weekend with lots of good eats (Chicago deep dish pizza…yummm :) but we had to leave Chicago at 6am on Sunday morning because we wanted to catch Taylor’s skating class in Toronto Sunday afternoon. As I drove off, I reflected on the whole weekend with all the laughter and good food, fun with Taylor, long talks with Anna, and it occured to me that this was probably the most meaningful Easter weekend that I have ever “attended”. I looked out the car and saw the Sun just beginning to rise over the beautiful Chicago skyline. What a breath taking, beautiful sight! It was as if God was whispering: “Look! A new day has begun…”

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68 weeks

February 16, 2009

68.
That’s how many weeks it has been since the last time I was “in church”.
68 Sundays ago, I went for what I thought may be the last time. I said what I had to say. I drove away, alone.
The snow. It came early that year. It was snowing when I drove home. The road seemed [...]

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The Ted Haggard Story

January 13, 2009

This week I read about the Ted Haggard story, how the one time megachurch planter/pastor and President of the National Association of Evangelicals was treated when it was revealed 2 years ago that he had engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct. Apparently he signed an agreement with his church to not speak about the situation for [...]

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A Quiet Longing after a busy weekend

December 1, 2008

I felt slightly weary driving to work today after a busy weekend. As I mentioned in my previous post, we were busy cleaning up and purging stuff on Saturday. On Sunday we did a little more cleaning up, had lunch with my parents, did some grocery shopping, and as usual, I went to play hockey [...]

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Thoughts from a day of purging…

November 30, 2008

“Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body” (Ecc 12:12)
Today, in preparation for doing some renovations in the house, we spent the day doing some much needed “purging”. As part of that process, Anna and I went through our collection of books, some of them from our university days, [...]

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The Danger of Good Intentions…

October 11, 2008

Wow…who would have thought an “innocent” post like the last one would generate so many comments and strong words. I feel as though I should start a new post to say a few things “in response to the responses”…
First of all, in case I have not been clear enough, I appreciate everyone who posted a [...]

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a longing for belonging

July 7, 2008

A couple of nights ago I ran into a pastor whom I have done a couple of projects with before. Since I left the ministry, I have experienced a few such encounters with “ex-colleagues”. Without exception, those encounters had happened as follows:
First, The person tried extremely hard to pretend not to see me. I once [...]

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Reflections (5) A Better Faith?

February 4, 2008

One of the most loaded statements in the entire Bible is found in the Old Testament book of Habakkuk. I have always loved Habakkuk the man. He is one of those guys who won’t take any BS from anybody. Not even from God Himself. He looked around, didn’t like what God was [...]

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Reflection (4): Brokenness…

January 25, 2008

Mother Teresa once said “You will never know Jesus is all you need, until Jesus is all you have.”
I have been thinking about that quote a lot lately.
How often have we been guilty of telling the world that “Jesus is all you need!” When we have never, not once, allowed ourselves to remotely come [...]

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