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| JesusOthersYou that's right, in my spare time i like to make creative acronyms. actually, this acronym for the word "joy" was a miraculous feat of my memory. perhaps more precisely, something that God reminded me of in the midst of teaching me about selflessness and my own selfishness these past few days. back in elementary school, my elementary school principal ms. gleason talked about the word "joy" in chapel. i can't believe i still remember it. she had it on a big piece of white paper and was pointing at the word to all us little kids in chapel and she said, see the word joy? pointing at the "j", she said, jesus comes first. pointing at the "o" she said, others come second. pointing at the "y" she said, you come last. but the acronymn has never meant so much to me as it does now. i certainly didn't think much of it when i was under 10 years old, but if i could ever find ms. gleason again, i'd tell her how much of an impact this acronym has had on my life since last week. i've been finding that selfishness comes in all sorts of subtle forms. like, sometimes we spend most of our prayer time praying for ourselves and our own spiritual shortcomings instead of for others (read utmost entries june 20 and 21 if you get the chance), or sometimes we like to grab the middle seat and not the end seat at the restaurant table when we're eating dinner with our friends, or sometimes when we're in the middle of something and someone calls us just to chat, we aren't quite willing to drop everything and talk to that person. we aren't quite willing to be like jesus, who never ignored an intrusion. anyway, i guess there are just a lot of situations in life when we don't notice until later, that at that moment, we make out the word joy to be yjo or yoj or something. i've noticed more and more of those sort of situations in my life lately. and it's sort of strange how we've been deceived into thinking that more of ourselves would make us happier. and it's just, awfully unsatisfying, because truthfully we can never get enough of ourselves and we never win. i was moved into writing this blog tonight because today i felt that something stole my joy away. and in reflection, it was because i was sort of caught in one of those subtle selfishness situations that turned joy into yoj. i know it's really silly, this jesus others you acronym thing. but i cannot help but thank God for the acronym, because it's too easy to forget and even too hard to believe that joy actually comes from putting jesus first, others second, and you last. wow, thanks. ms. gleason, better known as mrs. briggs now eh? :p | | |
| the forgiveness of God while scrambling through a bunch of old books and folders the other day, i came across a different edition of my utmost for his highest that i'd forgotten i had, one that i had left hidden in hong kong for two years. i flipped through and noticed that a bunch of pages were folded on the corner and figured that they must have been the ones that i thought were real good. one of them was on november 20th, titled "the forgiveness of God": Beware of the pleasant view of the fatherhood of God: God is so kind and loving that of course He will forgive us. That thought, based solely on emotion, cannot be found anywhere in the New Testament. The only basis on which God can forgive us is the tremendous tragedy of the Cross of Christ. To base our forgiveness on any other ground is unconscious blasphemy. The only ground on which God can forgive our sin and reinstate us to His favor is through the Cross of Christ. There is no other way! Forgiveness, which is so easy for us to accept, cost the agony at Calvary. We should never take the forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and our sanctification in simple faith, and then forget the enormous cost to God that made all of this ours. Forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace. The cost to God was the Cross of Christ. To forgive sin, while remaining a holy God, this price had to be paid. Never accept a view of the fatherhood of God if it blots out the atonement. The revealed truth of God is that without the atonement He cannot forgive— He would contradict His nature if He did. The only way we can be forgiven is by being brought back to God through the atonement of the Cross. God’s forgiveness is possible only in the supernatural realm. Compared with the miracle of the forgiveness of sin, the experience of sanctification is small. Sanctification is simply the wonderful expression or evidence of the forgiveness of sins in a human life. But the thing that awakens the deepest fountain of gratitude in a human being is that God has forgiven his sin. Paul never got away from this. Once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, you will be held as in a vise, constrained by the love of God. | | |
| Toronto "if we can reach toronto, we can reach the whole world" such a city. i'm not from toronto, never stayed here for a prolonged period of time, never particularly liked it either, but man, having stayed here for 9 days now, i'm kinda sorta beginning to develop some feelings for this city. :) i've travelled on the TTC way too much this past week, and i don't know, i just feel like i've seen so many sorts of people. i feel like i've seen people of almost every ethnicity here now. but it's not just ethnicity that i'm talking about, see, there is the homeless, blind, hungry, penniless man i walked past everyday of this week, the well dressed man that walks up to you on the streets and asks you to be his wife, the crack addict walking through the back alley of my sister's church, the girls and boys so washed away by the materialism of today, the mentally ill persons at the hospital that my sister works at, the chinese congregations in the many chinese churches in toronto that are fading in passion, the angry lady on the train yelling and threatening to throw her shoe at her friend, the man selling tokens behind the glass at a subway station who is clearly not happy to be there. so forth, so forth, you name it, every "kind" of brokenness, every "kind" of deception, it's so prevalent in this most multicultural city. we go on missions to other countries, and that is good and important, but the need here is just as much. i wish i was a better writer, if only i could better describe what an impression the people of toronto have left on me this week. poor and rich alike, they are thirsty. and what's to be done? where is hope now? there is an unfailing love that will do more than simply change their circumstances - i believe it. again, "if we could reach toronto, we could reach the whole world." i'm quoting that from a clever friend. i guess we can't literally, but you know what i'm getting at. i've heard that summer KCCF in toronto's going to do a lot of outreach in these next few months. i wish i was still around, i'm so excited for you guys, and i cannot wait to hear what God's going to do through it. and all of this reminds me of one thing that a speaker in urbana said... "we can save people from the hell they are in now, but we also need to save them from the hell that is to come" i hope we won't just try to change a little bit of the unfortunate circumstances that so many of the people in toronto are surrounded by, but that we will give them the gospel. | | |
| Me and my sister use to…. A few weeks ago, a friend and I were talking about what sort of stupid things we use to do when we were kids. And then I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in forever, I use to eat ice with my sister like it was some special candy that mommy wouldn’t let us have too much of. I thought about it again tonight on my way back home… So we were living in the second house that my parents bought back at Kowloon City in Hong Kong. It was like a 10 minute walk away from school and my dad still drove us to school every morning, haha. I don’t know what grade I was in, but both me and my sister were in elementary school I think. We each had a room to ourselves, but sometimes we’d sleep in the same room anyway. And in those nights, we’ll wait until both daddy and mommy got into bed, we’d make sure the lights were all off and they were sound asleep. Then we would chuckle at one another and say okay go now go now! We would tipy toe (it’s tipy toe yea?) into the kitchen, get a cup, and put ice into it, then bring it back to the room and suck and bite every piece of ice like it was candy. Sometimes we would even dare one another to go get more after the first cup was finished. Then we would make sure we left no traces of what we had just done. Seriously, I think we thought we were doing something really bad, and that mommy would be really mad if she found out. We did it so much that we started to think whether ice was bad for us, I think we were getting a bit concerned for ourselves. I can’t remember if we ended up asking mom whether or not it was bad, but I remember my sister said that maybe it’s bad because it lowers your normal body temperature. HAHAHA, actually, does anyone know if eating too much ice is bad for you? Maybe it DOES lower your optimal body temperature, dum dum dum…. We’ve grown up, but we still eat a lot when we’re together, just not ice. | | |
| Integrity i've been thinking about integrity. a friend last year told me she knew a guy full of integrity. i didn't know what it really meant. ah, words, they are so subjective. you never know what a person really means when they use words as such. like the word love, and the word like, its ranges on big scales and its different for everyone. but integrity, what does that mean. i'm thinking about integrity with a very narrow road ahead of me because i'm thinking about integrity in terms of my own life, and i know where it's lacking. serving. i would like to try to serve God solely, not man, not myself. i would like to try to be in this leadership position and that position, and be making this announcement, and leading that worship song not because i like to be up there with my guitar or a mic, and not because i like to hear the good job eunice lines after i'm done. people. i'd really like to meet up with you because i love you, not because i have to, and not because i have to clear my heavy conscience. maybe to ask how you're doing because i'm genuinely interested in how you're doing. prayer. i want to pray in front of people without having to think about the eloquence and spirituality of my words, i refuse to pray less its real. we could go on forever. we all have different places, or different moments of actions, or times when we're in the company of certain individuals, where we tend to compromise our integrity. this integrity word is loaded. but as of tonight, maybe it could be summed up with this - at the end of the day, to be able to say that everything you displayed to the world in word or action reflected your inside. i feel that in too many ways, i need to be sure of him to live with integrity. ah, it might take a summer to figure this one out. | | |
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