I was just chatting with a Christian friend who purportedly likes rules because they make things clear to follow and, hence, help determine the right course of action or decision. Yet this friend feels tortured when she is somehow made to break rules, or when rules are suspended in her favour after she has broken them.
I asked if she love those rules in a manner that is not about practicality or functionality but actually appreciate the heart of the rules and meaning of them. Not always, she recognises.
Yet the Psalmist could say in Psalm 112 as well as 119 (they may or may not be written by the same author) that he delights in God’s laws and statues or that one who delights in it is blessed. How do you love rules? How do you delight in these things anyways? Surely it is because you’ve grasp and understood the spirit beyond them and what they were set out to do. And in order to do that you, must embrace the character and spirit of the one who have put these rules in place.
It is in fearing God, loving God where we find ourselves delighting in the statues of God because He had put them in place as a manner of relating to us and guiding us, revealing His intentions and His designs. And that’s why the Bible often portrays obedience as a consequence of love. That is what it means to fear God – to be in awe of Him, His works, His intents. We can love God, and learn to love His laws but still struggle with them, and struggle with obedience. Until we are about to allow our will to be subject to Him, and to have our will be aligned to loving and serving Him, there will always be a tension.
Which is why I determined that each day, we are choosing to be Christians all over again. Conscious that our every deed and, in fact, every decision will bring us back to consider our faith in the Lord.
It’s Good Friday and while in the car with my wife, the song by Elvis Presley, ‘It’s now or never’ came up and I asked her, isn’t this the tune of a hymn?
She said no, it’s an old song.
I said, it’s definitely a hymn. And I searched, realised it was ‘Down from His glory’ that shared the same melody as the Elvis Presley song, which was based on a very old Neapolitan (some kind of dialect of Italy though recognise almost as a distinct language) song, ‘O Sole Mio’ (written in 1898). The title translates to ‘My Sunshine’ and the original song was a bit of a love song that used ‘sun’ or ‘sunshine’ point to his subject of adoration.
Meanwhile, Down from His glory was written by William Booth-Clibborn in 1921. He is not to be confused with his own maternal grandfather, William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. What I thought was interesting was how William Booth-Clibborn basically paid tribute to the source of the melody for which he composed his hymn with the lines in the chorus:
O how I love Him! How I adore Him! My breath, my sunshine, my all in all.
What a wonderful way a love song had been directed towards the praise and adoration of the Lord! In contrast, ‘It’s now or never’, despite Elvis’ musical talents and brilliance in delivering this somewhat seductive song, becomes so superficial and pale in comparison to the depth of William Booth-Clibborn’s hymn.
A year ago, I reflected on Maundy Thursday and also shared about what this word ‘maundy’ was referring to. Maundy refers to the command – and this command was to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). The focus of this term was not so much on the last supper, nor the betrayal of Jesus, but on the washing of the disciples’ feet.
There is always a lot to unpack within the gospel for the record, leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in these two days. But we continue to focus on this feet-washing matter. What does it mean, why does it matter and what of this experience did the disciples take away?
On one hand, Jesus washing of the disciples’ feet is a matter of service. He was demonstrating to the disciples the level of humility that they are all called to. John the Baptist said that he was not worthy to loose/untie the sandal strap of Jesus (John 1:27) and yet here was Jesus, washing the feet of His disciples. And in John 13:14-17, Jesus clearly expects that the example he set will make a strong impression in the disciples to follow his example of love and service. The mandate to love one another then follows from there.
On the other hand, we got to peer even more deeply into the spiritual meaning of feet-washing from the perspective of those whose feet are being washed. This is perhaps thanks to Peter, who tried to ask Jesus to wash his head and hands after Jesus said that Peter had no part with Him if He didn’t wash Peter’s feet. Peter probably tries to say that all of him is with Jesus and therefore asks to be washed fully. But Jesus explains further that ‘He who is bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean’ (John 13:10). So the feet washing is not just symbolic of the loving and serving of the one who washes. There was a separate point being brought up.
And this is the point that daily cleansing of the filth from the world (sanctification) is needed, even when we have been cleansed through salvation. There will always be influences from the world that draws us to sin and we would have our personal struggles that we are dealing with – the daily cleansing, with the Lord’s word, with prayer, mutual encouragement and service (which can come through a gentle rebuke, or holding one another accountable) will allow us to sanctify one another to the Lord.
All of these mattered to Jesus at the point before His betrayal and crucifixion (noting the way John wrote verses 2-3). This was almost the last time the disciples gathered together, and Jesus was certainly teaching them the final lessons He could share and leave with them directly before His death. There’s one common misunderstanding that I’d like to tidy up before finishing this post. The question is whether Judas’ feet were washed. Given that Jesus alluded to the fact that Judas was ‘unclean’ in John 13:10-11. The difficulty of John 13’s record is that verses 1-17 about feet washing comes first but then verses 18-30 where Jesus identifies his betrayer comes later. So there’s this impression that Jesus washed the feet of all his disciples and then subsequently Judas left.
But if you read verse 2 carefully, you realise that the elements of the flowing prose from verses 1-30 isn’t chronologically ordered. The foot washing took place immediately after supper. Whereas verses 18-38 was almost like a flashback to the times the supper when Jesus and his disciples were still eating, and then Judas went out from them and Jesus continued teaching, giving the command to love, and then predicting Peter’s denial.
I have not looked into why John wrote the way he did but I had thought that John must have been so deeply impacted by having his feet washed by Jesus and he wanted to write about that and show how Jesus lived out this ‘mandate’ while he was alive, and also how this related to the cleansing the disciples needed vis-a-vis the one they already had (salvation received in their hearts). By sharing this experience first and then unpacking the rest in the next couple of chapters, John was prefacing Jesus’ teachings with first the revelation of who His person was like from His action.
To be a Christian, the person of Jesus needs to hit us, the manner He taught with His life and not just His words. It is the consciousness of His life that enables us to cling on to His words.
This year had been an interesting experiment for me, to develop more focused content around energy transition, establish thought-leadership on bioenergy, but also to consider my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ more in the way I show up in work and life.
The markets were rough, but God opened up several opportunities for me to drive my message on the role of renewable fuels in the energy transition. This year, I took part in several conferences in Singapore, Vietnam and webinars for Australian audiences. Bioenergy has achieved a level of traction that I have not seen before at a regional and global level – I am now more convinced that it would have a more promising role to play than what the electrification champions might think.
In any case, we are all trying to deal with the issue of climate change. And it appears that the economic system that has been set up is way more sticky, and stubborn when it comes to holding on to carbon-intensive economics. Part of the issue is that risk perception, as well as the way traditional finance works, has really made things harder. I reckon if the world was less financially connected, certain regions might have had worked harder on energy transition and made a bigger difference.
2025 was complex for geopolitics and certain markets have demonstrated incredible resilience even as we all battled with insane valuations around AI, which I observe as a capital misallocation (for the sake of the world) when compared to energy transition investments. Trying to drive growth in consulting in Asia Pacific remains a huge challenge and rightly so; the markets here are very different and business strategy takes a very different approach from the sort championed by Anglo-Saxon consulting houses.
The follower approach to things in Asia (sans China) however, is something that I have to continue leveraging on as I am bringing capabilities and experience from European and Australian markets into Southeast Asia. My main challenge is still to develop and tailor better offerings that would be attractive to Asian, particularly Southeast Asian clients.
On the ministry front, the work of learning from scriptures, teaching, sharing it and applying it in life is ceaseless. One epiphany I had this year concerns the fullness of Christ. We often want to take scripture, be selective about Christ’s teachings and discard what we don’t like. Paul doesn’t do that; he even recognises how he is sharing in the suffering of Christ. Even what we consider the ‘bad’ and challenging parts of life lived by Christ are worthy of emulating – not the pursuit of pain but the appreciation of the deeper meaning of what suffering is about. Our goal is towards this fullness, not just as individuals but as a church, as members of the body of Christ.
God, reality, life is so much bigger than a single mind or person can fully comprehend and contain. And so what we can receive into ourselves is really just a piece, just a glimpse. When Christ is in us, we bring that bit of who Christ is to those in the world. Including the hope we have in Him. But as a church, we can be more than one person and reflect the different dimensions and aspects of God. The diverse gifts that God grants us to bring to others is perhaps a good way to see how rich God’s blessings can be. Not just the gifts but the blessings received through the gifts of others.
And putting these together, I want to end this post with the verse from 1 Corinthians 2:9
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”
This verse combines concepts and ideas from Isaiah 64 and Psalm 31:19. Paul also added the point about ‘entered into the heart of man’ – the idea that no one can conceive or imagine what God has prepared. It is sufficient for us to follow faithfully, to sense God’s leading and to keep growing in knowledge, in steadfastness, in faith. And the hope comes, the joy comes, and the blessings comes with it.
This Christmas, I rejoice with a few of my friends who have come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. They have been working through the implications of declaring their faith and are determined to follow Jesus.
I often wonder how to share my faith with others. I question myself for being too direct or not direct enough. Or talking about tangential stuff that people would not be relating to God. I fear coming across as being irrelevant, or just preachy.
But really, God does the work. He convicts the heart and transform people through their faith in Him. Our role as believers is to simply present the gospel, share our story and let God do the work. We will invite others sometimes to our communities. And there we share our faith not just through our words but also the love, the food and the unity of our church. The same applies outside when people see how we lead our lives, how we love them and how we seek to follow Christ.
So in the new year, I want to think less about myself and think less of myself so I won’t try to be doing God’s work. I would like to just do my part.
Despite being a Christian, I’d probably confess to living most of my life like an atheist, and for most of us in the modern world, that is perhaps the case. As we send our reports and deliverables to clients, we don’t start praying to God for Him to grant favour in the eyes of our clients. At the same time, before we start our meetings to make crucial decisions, it’s not like we ask the Lord to grant us wisdom to decide the right course of action in a corporate prayer. Beyond prayer, more often than not, we are petty with the way we approach our suppliers, and potentially quite transactional on many interactions.
If we had been in a more agriculture setting, surely after tilling the land and sowing the seeds, we would have prayed for good weather and for patience to arrive upon harvest time. Each day as we work the fields we’d ask the Lord to bless the work of our hands. And when if we were to be waiting in the market for someone who needs our produce to pass, we might ask for customers, and we might deal with them with greater kindness than we would when chasing a customer for bill payment.
I don’t know if it’s the environment, the (false) sense of self-sufficiency and control that leads us to act this way. But we often enjoy acting like we are in control; and we are glad for the assurance from others’ false sense of control over circumstances and happenstance. We have lost the security and comfort that we can have in the embrace of God’s grace and His provision. And each time we practice that modern day ritual of self-reliance and independence from nature and from God, we weaken our faith so much.
One of the first things that people tend to ask or wonder when they hear about the gospel of Christ is: if all people’s sins are always forgiven, then won’t they keep sinning? In the letter to Romans, Paul actually asked that same question himself to make explicit why such thinking has no place in Christianity:
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. – Romans 6:1-4 (NKJV)
I already dissected these verses in a previous post, and so I want to address a bit more how hiding these verses in our hearts allows us to apply the verses to some of the inner conversations we might be having with ourselves.
Many churches today emphasize the grace of God without highlighting that the grace exists because of the need for justice. And so one of the challenges for many Christians today is that when reminded of their sins or continued sinning, they are quick to say ‘am I under the law?’ – essentially implying if one is to be held accountable for his sins, then Christ died in vain for him. That is an extremely convoluted understanding of the gospel.
Paul makes it clear that the incredible grace of God suggests that one who has truly accepted his/her salvation and has been saved from sins would not choose to live in sin. When we continue to live in sin, we are not identifying with the Christ who died on the cross for us. Paul doesn’t just stop there. He reminds us that identifying fully with Christ means that our sins died with Christ on the cross; but not just that, we gain a new life that is meant to be lived in this world, just as Christ was raised to live from the dead by God.
This is a powerful thought – because baptism in our minds tend to relate to some kind of new birth, the sense of being born again. But to be born again only works when the old self has died. Thinking of salvation as a license to sin is precisely the workings of the old self, not the new. So if the old self is not yet dead, there isn’t the born-again to speak of. As we Christian continues to struggle with sin and temptation, let the words of Paul from Romans 6:1-4 encourage us to tread forth in the newness of life.
I wrote this back during the period of 2025 Elections but did not post it. I put it up at this point just as a record of my thoughts.
Having gone through the general elections in 2025, there was a bit of reflection on how our faith plays a role in the manner we approach democracy and vote, especially when it comes to a world where, in the US, faith is increasingly politicised and used often as a means to gain political support. Gratefully, in Singapore, and also in Australia, the system pushes towards the center rather than polarising towards the extremes.
Nevertheless, as a Christian, it is essential to recognise the place of authorities from a faith perspective. And considering also how, as Christian voters, we approach the whole idea of elections. We have been called to submit to authorities of our land in Paul’s letters to the Romans – this was in the backdrop of authorities that were not democratically elected. So they probably had little respect for the people they ruled over – many of whom were foreigners who were their spoils of conquest.
And so when people go through the political route seeking to express and take action on their ideals, we could give them the benefit of the doubt and determine who best represents our voice. It is perfectly acceptable for two strong and devote Christians to come to different conclusions about who represents or aligns more with their political inclinations. What is important, is that the partisanship in politics do not contaminate or affect the unity of the church.
As a model for the society then, we ought to recognise and respect the democratic process as a means for us to determine as a society who will help to govern and what would be the priorities for the next term of government. If we allow the campaigns, the political lines or partisanship to poison the entire term of government, or worse, the rest of our lives, then we are probably missing the point.
I’m currently doing some bible memory work of Romans 6:1-4. And sometimes, it just helps to do a close reading of the verses bit by bit and digest it so that the verses stick in my memory not just merely as words but as deep concepts and associations with the many other things I’ve learnt.
The context of Romans 6:1-4 is the preceding chapters of Romans that Paul has penned. He writes and expound on the incredible grace of God that is given to us through the gospel – that Christ died for our sins so we may gain salvation, and be reconciled with God.
Paul asks two questions:
What shall we say then? – this question is more to get us to respond somehow to the implications of the grace of God that had been presented before us in the preceding chapters.
Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? – this question effectively spells out what would be in the minds of most disciples: is the grace of the Lord fuelled by or shown only by the fact that we have sinned greatly?
He then answers the second question himself: ‘Certainly not!’
And then he poses another question to introduce another concept: “Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death?” He is presenting the argument that as we submit ourselves to be baptised in the name of Christ, we are entering His death (we allow our old selves to be dead)
Finally, having presented that concept, Paul then concludes his point here with a long statement of the implications of this baptism into Christ’ death:
We were buried with him through baptism into death
Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father
We also should walk in newness of life
In other words, just as Christ was raised up, we are likewise raised, living a different life from the one we lived before when we identify with Christ and accept Him as our saviour, receiving our salvation from Him.
I reproduce again the full text of the verses I’m trying to memorise:
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. – Romans 6:1-4 (NKJV)
I’m thinking of putting together some learnings from the bible (yes the Christian Holy Bible, word of God) as part of my posting every Sunday. These are not necessarily lessons learnt on the Sunday itself but it is a dedication of the day to the Lord. And an opportunity to share my learnings with readers (if at all).
In Matthew 22:36, a lawyer (religious legal scholar) asked Jesus what is the greatest command. While he did so to test Jesus, it was still a teaching moment for Jesus and he responded:
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” – Matt 22:37-40 (NKJV)
The reason these commandment hangs all the Law and the Prophets is because they in essence summarised the Ten Commandments, from which all the other Laws that the Jews had develop were derived from. In Romans 13, Paul further notes that:
Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not bear false witness,” “You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. – Romans 13:8-10 (NKJV)
All of the laws involving the various ‘don’t’s in our interaction with one another ultimately culminate in loving one’s neighbour. Paul explains further that this is because love does no harm to a neighbour.
But isn’t that hard, even impossible? In the modern secular world and also our laws of the land, we have likewise developed categorical prohibition against most of those deeds that Paul mentioned. But it is not just because that those deeds in and of themselves are wrong; nor the fact that they harm another person (utilitarianism); but that they come from a place other than love (in terms of spirit and intentionality). What does the Christian gospel give us then, that allows Paul to say that to the Roman church even though we as humans know we can’t live up to that?
The gospel gives us the basis that as we were still sinners, Christ died for us, what we can have eternal life and be reconciled to God. Personally, when I read those verses from Paul, I think about what kind of neighbour I would be if God was a neighbour to me – I won’t be a very good one but yet He would love me. In fact, He sent Christ to die for me – in effect fulfilling the law of loving me through the ultimate sacrifice for my sins. As a Christian, that is the basis from which God gives us the command. There is a certain degree of circularity about it: God gives us the commandments through Moses to help us recognise that we fall short of it, but at the same time it gives us an ability to appreciate God’s perfection – at the same time, it provides the foundation for us to understand, and appreciate Jesus Christ’s ministry and the reason for His coming to die on the cross, and hence the offer of salvation for us. The very laws that prescribe the sacrifice of the lamb is fulfilled by the sacrifice of Christ, as the ultimate sacrificial lamb for our sins.
The laws command, but also prophesy and are fulfilled by God alone. Thus, having been saved and adopted, we are freed to love, no longer being enslaved to the self or to sin.
