Category Archives: Quote & Unquote
There’s an abundance of wisdom out there; this is my attempt to be learned by borrowing some of it for personal perusal.
day four – i am what i think.
HY and I had to miss the final evening service of the Retreat for an important task (more on that in a separate post) but the morning service was such an amazing spiritual buffet that it was more than enough food. These thoughts fed my mind on day four of Grace Retreat 2010 (and I feel so full).
- God may not empower you to choose but He will empower your choices; you need to quit waiting on God to prod you into action.
- It’s not what we consume that defiles us but what leaves our mouth that does; the mind is not godless, it’s what we do with the mind that makes us godless.
- The pleasures of sin don’t last forever, and the Devil knows that we’ve given our hearts to Jesus, so that’s why he is after our mind; hence the manner in which we deploy our mind is of paramount importance.
- Proverbs 23:7, paraphrased – “I am becoming what I’m thinking”. Life follows thoughts – that is why we need a resurrected mind, for attitude influences behaviour and thoughts determine future. Therefore, we ought to keep our brain strong for it controls the heart.
- Psalm 26:2 – “Test my mind” – to test is to examine so as to purge or clean out; you go to a doctor to find out what’s wrong (to fix it) and not what’s right: I’ve always believed that “judgment” is a neutral and necessary word, for evaluation.
- The mind is naturally set on the flesh which leads to death, so you should set your mind on the Spirit, which gives life and peace.
- Psalm 1:1-2 – Exercising the mind is like training the body – it takes effort! And so we should remember that memory work comes before revelation; if Jesus memorised the Word and practised spiritual disciplines, then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t or are exempted from it.
- My destiny is not heaven – that’s my destination – my destiny is to fulfill my purpose on this earth. I don’t wanna miss the whole point of life on earth!
- What am I feeding myself? All that we intake are seeds, and one day these seeds will bear fruit; my fruit will be and is determined by my seed.
- Philippians 4:8 – We should train our brain by conditioning it to think about the right things; rubbish in, rubbish out.
- 1 Peter 1:13 – We are instructed to “gird up” our minds for action, so we must nourish and feed it. As a result, the training of our thinking should lead to our acting. How? By thinking through things, memorising and meditating, as well as dwelling and pondering on Scripture.
- Digging deep into God’s Word is like a dog devouring a bone; it never relents until it goes deep enough to get all the remaining flesh, oil and the best bits of the bone; almost as if to “suck the marrow out of life”.
- Romans 8:6 – Revelation is most powerfully experienced when it speaks to your mind, moves to your heart and flows through your life.
To my surprise, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed ZA’s and JA’s preaching. They were, for a lack of a better way to phrase it, typical pentacostal preachers, but their teaching is biblically sound and to a certain extent, Word-based. Not the expository style of EC, BH or JP that I’ve always preferred, but still solid preaching. One thing I prayed and asked God for during this Retreat is to make me both a Word-based teacher and a Spirit-filled preacher.
day three – arise, faith, arise.
On the third day, Jesus rose from the dead; on the third day of this Retreat, my faith rose to another level. These are the thoughts of a man with little faith and was gently rebuked by God, for He has certainly proved His faithfulness to me, not that He needed to.
- To proclaim that the kingdom is at hand is to do the three things Jesus commonly did – to save, to heal and to do miracles.
- Biblically, there are three types of faith – desperate, believing and persistent; regardless of category, we ought to depend on God as a newborn babe would depend on his mother, for without faith we cannot please God (Hebrews 11:6).
- Faith is not about praying harder, longer or louder, and is not about begging or pleading with God, but focussing on God and how big He is, and not on our faith.
- Contrary to popular belief, faith isn’t based on feeling, emotion or circumstances, but on facts; didn’t Jesus rise from the dead? That’s a fact and that’s healthy faith; you can’t get saved without the Holy Spirit filling you.
- The mustard seed illustration is not about the size of our faith but the size of God, that we may see who He is and how circumstances yield to His power.
- Faith is to be exercised and activated, after it is taught and learnt; it is the currency in the kingdom of God and the absence of it renders you invalid.
- The Holy Spirit is the key to revelation and the grace of the Holy Spirit does the recalibration and reorientation. Conviction is not condemnation.
- Don’t try to get something you already have. Instead, we should keep the Spirit dripping like a tap intentionally left turned on slightly, so that whenever we require Him, He will be there, ready to flow.
- We’ll worry lesser about what others think of us when we realise how seldom they actually do. May this free my young people to relate with others.
- In my full-time calling, I should never worry about the money factor or even allow it to be a consideration because God will always make a way.
- Always pray in the Spirit, for when your body is out, your spirit is still praying. Praying in the Spirit means that you are always praying the will of God and hence you will always be on target. Lastly, praying in the Spirit is a decision – so make it, “I will decide to pray in my spirit”.
- The three primary purposes of speaking spiritual language is for praise, intercession and edification.
- After you learn to speak the language, you will learn to live the lifestyle; operating by the Spirit is to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh and hence it should naturally lead to a fruitful life of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
In my time with God in the morning, He spoke to me through Psalm 126:3 and it’s a reminder of His steadfast grace, unmerited favour and unfailing love in my life. HY and I have picked out our top 20 choices but we have a feeling that we’ll end up with that particular unit that we set our eyes on from the start.
“The Lord has done great things for us; we are glad.” God is good, He really is. Oh me of little faith. I should learn to step out of the boat!
“My son, you don’t need to prove anything to anyone because you are already fully-approved by Me and Me alone and that’s enough. Be secure in who I’ve created you to be and don’t get tangled in meeting the expectations of men.”
day one – come to Me and you will find rest.
I’m blogging from my mobile phone so posts will be short and sweet. I’ll do the tagging and categorising when I’m back in Singapore. These are what I took home from day one at the Grace Retreat 2010.
- There’s a need to be a man of the Word but it’s also important to be a man of the Spirit because the Spirit gives birth to the truth of the Word.
- I can pastor people but I can’t do their ministry. (I’ve actually written an entire entry on this but I guess I’ll wait until after Retreat to elaborate on it.)
- In Matthew 11:28, it’s almost as if Jesus was saying, “If you don’t come apart, you will come apart”. I thought that was a nice word play with nuances of truth.
- Going out of wine was the most disastrous scenario for Jewish customs; this was paralleled to being “weary”. Will read up more before I nod in agreement.
- When the enemy can’t take your heart, he’ll take your vision. That’s why it’s important that you always have vision – one of the most common and significant miracles Jesus did was to heal the blind, so they they could see the plans of God; a good analogy, but a little presumptuous, nonetheless, I’ll give benefit of doubt.
That aside, God has been speaking to my heart about certain issues I’ve been struggling with pertaining to ministry. I will continue to struggle with the Lord on these matters.
Lord, may You reveal things to me that would change my life. I love You and I need you to touch me fresh and anew. I cannot run on empty and I need Your grace in my life to help me operate and advance. Spirit, don’t pass me by…
the difference between a job and a career.
I spent some time deliberating this over the past couple of days. I found some interesting attempts at defining and differentiating the two. These definitions are amongst the first few to appear when I googled the above question:
“Your job is what you are doing today. Your career is what you’ve done over the past years and what you plan to do in the future… Your job feeds you and your family today. Your career will feed you and your family tomorrow and beyond.”
“The job pays your bills, and a career is a path you’ve taken (hopefully because you enjoy it) to attain or keep the ideal job for you.”
“A career is something that you build during your lifetime. Jobs are often times task-oriented positions to help meet the goals of an organisation or business. Jobs are often a means to an end… Sometimes jobs lead to careers.”
“A job is something you do simply to earn money; a career is a series of connected employment opportunities. A job has minimal impact on your future work life, while a career provides experience and learning to fuel your future. A job offers few networking opportunities, but a career is loaded with them. When you work at a job, you should do the minimum without annoying the boss. When you’re in a career, you should go the extra mile, doing tasks beyond your minimum job description.”
There’s an endless list of dichotomous definitions but they are largely synonymous.
I remember learning this from somewhere – maybe in one of KK’s workshop (?) – that in a career, people usually stay for a long time and “climb” up the organisational ladder; the good ones care about the welfare and well-being of the company and its employees. To a certain extent, they live for others. Whereas a job is just something people do from 9am to 5pm and remain indifferent to just about everything except for the accuracy and arrival of their paycheck. To another extent, they live for themselves.
Now, this gets me thinking about my own predicament – is it a job or a career? I know for sure that during my army days, it was a job – I did what I was expected to do; on good days, I go the extra mile and on bad days, I do the bare minimum. When I was in Shanghai, it felt a little different because I treated it like my own company. There wasn’t such a thing called “Official Working Hours” simply because at the management level, you work as hard and as long as you’re required to; my boss did not believe in overtime pay for the managers because it was expected of us to get the job done and the project(s) completed. AT’s an excellent boss, and although sometimes he’s quite a slave-driver, he has successfully imbued in us managers the all-important ownership of the company.
So this brings me back to me today as a youth minister with Grace Assembly of God. Is this my job? Not really, because I’d have been imparting my life into young people anyway even if I was an army officer or a marketing manager – I’m just doing it full-time on a more intensive level. Is this my career then? Not really too, because I do not even know if I will be doing this for the long run. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m committed to what I have signed on to do, but I’m keener to listen to God’s prompting. The last thing I want is to overstay – I think that would be absolutely meaningless. But if God tells me to go, I’d be gone in an instant – I’m not worried about transitions and to start out all over again in any industry because I have confidence in my ability to excel wherever I go.
Hence, my answer to the question above – the difference between a job and a career is to know your calling in life and to pursue that calling wholeheartedly in any given time or space instead of being in an occupation for a season of life. I’ve said this to quite a number of people – in my current “job”, while it’s slightly easier than the previous ones because my gifting and skills-set are tailor-made for it, I’ve also poured in double the work hours and emotional involvement. Yet I feel that since I’ve joined Grace in October 2009, I’ve not worked a single day at all simply because I am pursuing what I believe God has intended for me to pursue for this season of my life.
Have you found your calling? Are you stuck with a job? Or are you caught in a career?
joey asher | misunderstoodsunshinekid 