exams exams exams

I finished a mid session today, after spending the week studying for it. I think I passed, so thats good. I was intending the study for my next mid session tonight, but then I couldnt find my textbook! I've done so little work in that subject that I had no idea where the textbook was, and after 20 minutes of not being able to find it, I was wondering whether I had actually bought it or not. Finally I found it under a stack of other sheets under my bed.

Last Thursday I went to a really good SCCCA/Club 5 night at Moore College where Joshua spoke on Asian Myopic; how the asian dream is really short sighted. One thing that he said that sort of encouraged me was how he said it is very rare that parents disown their kids who go into ministry. And even when they do, once you have grandchildren.. they will forgive you. I hope he's right.

Something that he said that was really interesting was, when people say that they will keep their secular jobs, and give money to the church and do ministry where they can, he replies with, ok, you do that, but give away all the money that you make except for the x amount of dollars that a pastor would make. I know it'd be so hard if I were making a lot of money to be able to say, over 40 years or so of my working life to be giving away like 60 or 95% of your income, and not give your kids private school education or go to a holiday in Europe or something.

So apparently this guy was making a lot of money and Joshua used this reasoning with him, and the guy said, oh I might as well go into ministry then. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, it is really about money. But how strange it is to think that its ok as a Christian to be wealthy while its not ok for pastors to be wealthy. Well, as the story goes, that guy did decide to go into ministry, but before he committed to that, he thought, well, if I'm going to give up my career and everything, I better make sure its true, and so he turned to Luke's Gospel and read it, and concluded that it was true, so he went into ministry.


Last last Sunday I taught my first sunday school lesson, and I still cant believe no one volunteered to be in my play. And so I had to get this guy to pretend to be Martha. That certainly threw me off. Then later on this girl wouldnt do my craft because it was "stupid". Thanks.

On Saturday I meant to go to Cross Coaching but I thought registration started at 9:30, and the talk started at 10, so I turned up at 9:50, and the talk had already finished! So there was just a seminar on prayer, and then I went home cos my coach wasnt there that day. I think I like last years Cross Training better.

On Sunday Ying preached a very good sermon on being an apostolic church, although I was a bit confused at first what he meant when he said, we shouldnt criticise people who take passages out of context. At that point I was thinking.. what the, did I walk into Hillsong without realising?
But I asked him later and he said what he meant was that even though its bad to take passages out of context, not look at Old Testament with Jesus in mind, we shouldnt be too quick to criticise people who are preaching the overall bible message faithfully, but are just saying stuff which is generally true of the bible, even though you have no idea how they managed to get that from the passage. Because expositional preaching isnt the only form of preaching there is; and in China, you get some crap churches and some good ones, but in almost all of them people are taking passages out of context and arent preaching expositionally, but thats because they havent got the training, but if the pastor and the congregation are evangelical and everything they say is biblical (just not from the passage), why should we be so quick to say they're all crap. Jesus didnt preach expositionally (although he might be a special case, being the Word come to life). But neither did Paul.

That may have been something I did in HK when I went to ECC. I guess even though his ideas about the temptations of Jesus were pretty much wrong, at least his overall message is true of the bible. That beats churches that say Jesus is your boyfriend. What am I complaining about.

worried..

I realised that a lot of my mid sessions are coming out, so I'm quite worried. Not to mention teaching Sunday School for the first time this week! And leading a bible study group means having to do stuff every week! I dont spend 3 hours a week on any of my subjects!

Went to a baptism yesterday and it was the longest meeting I ever sat through. Its one thing to have a bilingual meeting, but trilingual is just too much. At least the sermon was bilingual, but it still almost 45 minutes long. It was so funny when the translator was trying to translate the caucasian pastor (in describing God's love): "its not like being in the cool group in high school; you know the cool girls, who'd like you one day but hate you the next because you did your hair in a weird way". It was funny seeing him struggle to figure out what that meant..even though I didnt understand the mandarin.

And 5 people did testimonies that lasted 5-10 minutes each, some in canto, some in mando, and some in english. The worse about the mandarin one was that not only could I not understand anything, I couldnt even know when to start expecting it to finish. But worse of all were the songs, some of which were sung 3 times, once in each language! All up the meeting was almost 2.5 hours. o.. and the funniest thing was when they were dunking people, all these adult men got up with their digital cameras and video cameras and crowded up around the pool, so that no one could see anything! How typically Chinese..


this is not the worse one.. there was one where people were sticking their hands over the ledge almost..

I remember watching the Simpsons the other day and Homer said to Lisa, you better turn on something (the tv) quickly, I'm starting to think!
When he said that I started to realised that I was becoming a bit unthinking because of technology. We have a TV in our room of the house, and I can use my hard disk to record anything on TV, and then theres also cable TV. And with digital TV now, I can watch shows 2 hours after its on, so even more options. On some days I can watch about 12 episodes of Simpsons in one day.

And whenever I'm not watching TV, I'm always listening to my iPod. When I'm at uni and not talking to someone, I'm always listening to my iPod. Once my last class finish, I plug in my earphones and then I have it on on the train and bus until I get home, and turn on my TV. Scarily, when I sleep and I turn off my TV, I turn my iPod on again and put it on sleep so that it automatically turns off after 15 minutes, and I sleep with my iPod playing.

Continuing on from my hearts addiction.. the other day I was watching the Simpsons with the volume off, listening to MYC 2001 on my iPod, playing hearts, and chatting on MSN at the same time. One night I tried sleeping without my iPod, and I started to think... woah..


Comments on the pope:
I watched a special on the pope on sky news, and they talked about how when he visited the Archbishop of Cantebury (formerly George Carey), he was angry about how the Anglican Church had ordained women as priests. They even interviewed George Carey who talked about how he knew the pope was very unhappy about women's ordination. Evil though that is, how stupid, how stupid.. how stupid is it that they would talk about women's ordination. You have one guy who thinks he is infallible and that you are saved by works, and another who ought to believe in the 39 articles, but who knows what he believes.. and the best thing they have to talk about is women's ordination. Shocking.
It is partly a reminder though that there are more important things to talk about when we speak to people who may or may not be Christians. We should continue to speak about Jesus, about the Cross, about justification by faith alone. These are the really big issues.

Secondly, its annoying that people think he is so good. I'm afraid Catholics in my bible study group ask me what I think of the Pope and I'm forced to say he's in hell right now. This is a quote from a letter from Tim Costello criticising the Jensen brothers: "To the amazement
of colleagues, Phillip Jensen declared at an evangelism conference in Amsterdam in the early 1990s that Mother Teresa was an instrument of the Devil!" I dont know who would be amazed, because even if the report was true, I don't think there's anything surprising with that comment. But when people are perceived as good, Christians will get so knocked for criticising them.

edit:
I'm so excited I had to blog!! I just read the briefing for April and I read the first "couldnt help noticing" by Tony Payne on a certain church that I love so much. For the link of the page he refers to, go here. Reading that made my day.. Amen, brother.