Hot Days, Cool Change, and Jesus Christ

The last three days have been very trying for me, and everyone who lives in Melbourne. The temperature soared beyond 40 degrees C for four consecutive days. This is the worst temperature in the last 100 years, according to the Bureau of Meterology. Today the media reported the temperature hit 45.1 maximum around 4.30pm. It is unbearably hot! I can prepare a sunny set up in a blink on my work desk.

Approximately 350,000 homes across Melbourne and the greater area of Victoria do not have power following a massive power blackout. Hundreds of trains have been cancelled throughout the city, causing a huge mass of commuters left stranded in various stations across Melbourne. Lots of people who can afford their time and lifestyle choose to stay overnight on the beach. There is a lot of bushfire around the outer areas, and many firefighters experienced heat stress fighting them. Some people lost their houses. I feel for them.

At a much smaller and personal level, I had my share of agony as I moved office in the last two days. Yesterday I spent hours packing my stuff into boxes until 6.30pm. Altogether there were 24 reasonably large boxes of textbooks, books, journal articles, and research data. Weird it may sound, but my old office does not any air con, as it is part of a very old building that simply can't take the load that comes with a cooling system. Understandably I perspired quite a lot.

In between packing books and getting endless cups of cold water, I cannot stop thinking about what hell must feel like. If I can't stand 43 degree for even 2 hours, what does it feel to be in hell for eternity?

The New Testament's word understood as hell is Gehenna, which is really a metaphor for hell. It was actually a burning garbage dump near Jerusalem. The place used to be a site for child sacrifice to a pagan God, a practice that was outlawed by King Josiah in the book of Second Kings. Jesus used the word Gehenna some 12 times (e.g., Matthew 10:28; Matthew 23:33). When He used Gehenna as a metaphor of hell, don't think for a minute "O in that case, there is no real hell." The whole purpose of using a garbage dump where the fire never stops was to give a word picture and evoke a certain sensation of hell. If Gehenna is hot and painful, let alone hell!

I had a preview of hell yesterday in my office, which is like a modern Gehenna minus the garbage.

The cool change that will come on Sunday is always a reminder of God's mercy towards men and women who deserve to get hot days beyond 50 degrees all the days of their lives. But in His own way of showing love and justice, and keeping them in the balance, God sent His son Jesus Christ to rot under the scorching sun, crucified. He was crushed for our iniquities, bearing the sins of the world on His shoulder, experienced hellish suffering.

A series of hot days in Melbourne should remind us of Christ who went to hell so that you and I don't have to. When the cool change comes, we know we are the recipients of that amazing grace of God in Christ Jesus.

Christian Meditation: More Metaphors

The whole quote below is taken from A Christian on the Mount by Thomas Watson, who wrote with such an impassioned eloquence!

Without meditation the truths which we know will never affect our hearts.
Deut. 6:6, "These words which I command this day shall be in your heart."
How can the Word be in the heart—unless it be wrought in by meditation?

As an hammer drives a nail to the head—so meditation drives a truth to the heart.
It is not the taking in of food—but the stomach's digesting it, which makes it turn into nourishment.
Just so, it is not the taking in of a truth at the ear—but the meditating on it,
which is the digestion of it in the mind, which makes it nourish.

Without meditation, the Word preached may increase notion, but not affection.

There is as much difference between the knowledge of a truth, and the meditation on a truth,
as there is between the light of a torch, and the light of the sun.
Set up a lamp or torch in the garden, and it has no influence.
But the sun has a sweet influence, it makes the plants to grow, and the herbs to flourish.
Just so, knowledge is like a torch lighted in the understanding,
which has little or no influence—it does not make not a man the better.
But meditation is like the shining of the sun—it operates upon the affections,
it warms the heart and makes it more holy.

Meditation fetches life in a truth.
There are many truths which lie, as it were, in the heart dead—
which when we meditate upon, they begin to have life and heat in them.
Meditation on a truth is like rubbing a man in a swoon—it fetches life.

It is meditation, which makes a Christian!

Christian Meditation: A Metaphor

“Remember that it is not hasty reading, but serious meditation on holy and heavenly truths, that makes them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the mere touching of the flower by the bee that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time on the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove to be the choicest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian”

~ Thomas Brooks

Occasional Shot

A two-hundred year old tree at Fitzroy Garden, Melbourne.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,

the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

~ Psalm 139:13-16

Pastor Steven Cole cited the following amazing facts and stats from Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence [Ballentine Books], pp. 23-25) about our God-knitted body:

Consider the miracle of the human body: Every second more than 100,000 chemical reactions take place in your brain. It has 10 billion nerve cells to record what you see and hear. That information comes to your brain through the miracle of the eye, which has 100 million receptor cells (rods and cones) in each eye. Your retina also has four other layers of nerve cells. Altogether the system makes the equivalent of 10 billion calculations a second before an image even gets to the optic nerve.

Once it reaches your brain, the cerebral cortex has more than a dozen separate vision centers in which to process it. Your tear ducts supply a bacteria-fighting fluid to protect your eyes from infection. The tears that fight irritants differ from the tears of sadness, which contain 24percent more proteins. That’s not to mention the miracle of the ear and how it translates sound waves into meaningful speech and sounds; or of touch, taste, and smell.

Part of your brain regulates voluntary matters, such as muscle coordination and thought processes. Other parts of the brain control involuntary processes, such as digestion, glandular secretions, the rate at which your heart beats, etc. How did it accidentally happen that your body could speed up your heart rate to the proper speed to meet increased oxygen demand when you exercise and slow it down when that need is met?

One square inch of your skin has about 625 sweat glands, 19 feet of blood vessels, and 19,000 sensory cells. Working in coordination with your brain, it maintains your body at a steady 98.6 degrees under all weather conditions.

Your stomach has 35 millionglands which secrete the right amounts of juices to allow your body to digest food and convert it
into stored energy for your muscles. To avoid digesting itself, your stomach produces a new lining every three days. Your body is an efficient machine: to ride a bicycle for an hour at ten miles per hour requires only 350 calories, the energy equivalent of only three table-spoons of gasoline.

You have more than 200 bones, each shaped for its function, connected intricately to one another through lubricated joints that cannot be perfectly duplicated by modern science. More than 500 muscles connect to these bones. Some obey willful commands; others perform their duty in response to unconscious commands from the brain. They all work together to keep us alive. The heart muscle itself beats over 103,000 times each day, pumping your blood cells a distance of 168 million miles.

Coupled with that, your lungs automatically breathe in the right amount of life-giving oxygen (about 438 cubic feet each day),
which just happens to be mixed in the right proportions (about 20% oxygen, 80% nitrogen) in our atmosphere. Each of the other vital organs and glands in your body works in complex conjunction with the others to sustain life, which science can’t explain or create.

A single human chromosome (DNA molecule) contains 20 billion bits of information . . . Twenty billion bits are the equivalent of about three billion letters. If there are approximately six letters in an average word, the information content of a human chromosome corresponds to about 500 million words. If there are about 300 words on an ordinary page of printed type, this corresponds to about two million pages. If a typical book contains 500 such pages, the information content of a single human chromosome corresponds to some 4,000 volumes.

Psalm 139

What is the Gospel?

“The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.”

~ Tim Keller, The Reason for God.

It's about the Worldview

Robert Giacalone uttered a prophetic voice from the wilderness to those who work in business schools. As one of those people, I feel his article in the Academy of Management Learning & Education (6:4) entitled Taking a red pill to disempower unethical students: Creating ethical sentinels in business school convicting and true. Here is the highlight:

"At the turn of this century, the choices confronting business educators are no less daunting and the consequences are no less severe . . . We are focused solely on the noble goals of serving our students and their organizations by giving students skills that impress potential employers . . . We are following the implicit "orders" of powerful interests and shaping student worldviews to fit those who control the resources . . . We are supplying organizations with the tools of their destruction-unethical students credentialed with our degrees who help to ruin organizations and the lives of countless stakeholders . . We have taken the easiest path, socializing and educating students cued to the organizationally desired profile.

While this approach makes organizational executives smile, it relieves us of our role as experts and leaders. Experts should not tell their clients what they want to hear, unquestioningly give clients what they want to buy, or automatically deliver what clients think they need. Experts inform, educate, and enlarge the worldview of those with whom they collaborate; they do not appease" (Giacalone, 2007:534-535).

Confessing Your Sins to Others

I always believe that vulnerability is a great asset that leaders can have. Leaders who are willing to be vulnerable garner a level of trust that followers would otherwise never develop towards their leaders. The reason is simple. When the leaders are willing to be vulnerable (admitting mistakes, limitations, and weaknesses, or simply sincerely saying "I am sorry. That's completely my fault"), followers can associate themselves with their leaders in a far more profound way.

In the context of Christian community, that may mean leaders who are willing to confess their sins to a (few of) Christian brothers and sisters in their accountability circles. The practice of confessing sins is without question very hard to do in cultures that uphold face-saving. Confessing sin is a big way to lose face, one runs the risk of losing his/her reputation for good. Sure the risk is minimized or even absent in the context of a Christian accountability group. But the risk is still there on the part of the confessor. But what is interesting is that this tendency is not exclusive to those cultures. Because of the prevalent presence of pride in every person, no one likes to confess sins. The following quote from Bonhoeffer's Life Together says it best:

“Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, andthe more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation… This can happen even in the midst of a pious community. In confession the light of the Gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart. The sin must be brought into the light. The unexpressed must be openly spoken and acknowledged. All that is secret and hidden is made manifest. It is a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted. But God breaks gates of brass and bars of iron (Ps. 107:16)…”

“The root of all sin is pride… I want to be my own law, I have a right to my self, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death. The mind and flesh of man are set on fire by pride; for it is precisely in his wickedness that man wants to be as God … In the confession of concrete sins the old man dies a painful, shameful death before the eyes of a brother. Because this humiliation is so hard we continually scheme to evade confessing to a brother. Our eyes are so blinded that they no longer see the promise and the glory in such abasement.”

“Since the confession of sin is made in the presence of a Christian brother, the last stronghold of self-justification is abandoned. The sinner surrenders; he gives up all his evil. He gives his heart to God, and he finds the forgiveness of all his sin in the fellowship of Jesus Christ and his brother… Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.”

Coffee as A Means of Grace

I can't live without coffee (though thankfully it has not become my idol). When I worked on my doctorate years ago, I felt like a machine that turned coffee into dissertation. Today I still feel the same way though the outputs are different. The coffee are turned into journal articles and sermon texts.

If you can relate to my experience, you may want to read the following theological reflection from Michael Svigel on the doctine of drinking coffee. Svigel took his humor painstakingly serious. Read his full-text academic paper on the doctrine of coffee drinking here. But here are the highlights of the spiritual benefits of coffee (apart from the obvious, physical ones):

1. Drinking Coffee Prepares the Flesh for Suffering.
According to the New Testament, suffering is an honor, a virtue, and a means of sanctification. We are to endure it with joy. Drinking coffee helps our sinful flesh to prepare for joyful suffering. It upsets the stomach and has a diarrheic effect on the digestive system. It can irritate ulcers and causes a jittery nervousness. Withdrawal from long coffee binges causes dreadful headaches that no amount of medication can relieve. Besides this, any honest coffee drinker will admit that coffee is a horrid beverage. If the brew is too weak, it tastes like dirty water; if it is too strong, it tastes like motor oil. To temper the inherent and unavoidable nastiness, one must add cream, milk, sugar, blue stuff, pink stuff, clumps, lumps, drops, syrups, froth, or foam. The whole ordeal can cause mental or emotional anguish to the indecisive and possibly separation anxiety when a failed mix of coffee and condiments must be poured down the drain.

In short, coffee drinking is suffering.

However, it is also joy. It stimulates the body and the mind. It acts as an anti-depressant and creates a bond of fellowship and community among consumers. A hot, steamy cup warms the heart on a frosty day; a cold, icy glass cools the soul when it’s hot. It wakes us up and keeps us alert. It gives us something to hold firmly in our hands and sip soothingly with our lips for peace and security in uncomfortable and stressful times.

2. Drinking Coffee Prepares the Body for Prayer.
We are told to pray without ceasing; to offer up prayers of every kind to God. However, there is always an obstacle that seems to separate us from true, heart-felt prayer to God: the weak flesh. On the night he was betrayed, our Lord instructed his disciples to be alert and to pray, lest they fall into temptation (Matt 26:40-45; Luke 22:45-46). Unfortunately, on three occasions he returned to find his disciples asleep!

Until I accepted coffee as a means of grace, I struggled both internally and externally with the entire concept of waking up early in the morning to seek the Lord in prayer. Internally, I could never believe the tales of people who said they woke up at 4:00 a.m. and prayed for hours. I thought, “How could anybody get up that early and then stay awake that long?!” Externally, whenever I attempted to follow this model, I ended up asleep using my folded hands as a pillow. No, certainly there had to be an answer to this difficult question.

When one factors in coffee as a means of waking up the believer and then keeping him or her alert, all of the practical problems with rising early and seeking the Lord are solved. Coffee has a very positive effect on the prayer life of the believer. In some cases, it is indispensable.

3. Drinking Coffee Contributes to the Edification of the Church.
A story was once told to me about Lewis Sperry Chafer, the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary. The story goes that early in his career Dr. Chafer was morally opposed to the consumption of coffee, believing its effects were detrimental to the spiritual life of the believer. He avoided all forms of caffeine.

However, as he began to work on his magnum opus, his multi-volume Systematic Theology, he began to tamper with the beverage: a sip here, a taste there. Surely, the experience tried his conscience, but slowly the Spirit led him out from under his self-imposed spiritual bondage to a legalistic view of coffee consumption. In no time, Dr. Chafer was drinking coffee every day. It is said that without his coffee throughout the day, Dr. Chafer could never have completed his Systematic Theology and the Church would have never benefited from his work.

What Makes Pastors Unhealthy?

I came across a fairly recent article by Little, Simmons, and Nelson (2007) in the Journal of Management Studies (one of the top management journals in the world) which reported a study on the leaders' psychological health. The title of the article is Health Among Leaders: Positive and Negative Affect, Engagement, and Burnout, Forgiveness, and Revenge. What is unique about the study is that it utilized pastors as its sample.

Ninety four all-male pastors from various congregations belonging to a denomination in a five-state region in the US participated and completed the survey questionnaire. Nearly 40% were senior pastors; the rest were pastors, exec pastors, worship pastors, youth pastors, etc. Hierarchical regression analyses were employed to analyze the data obtained from completed questionnaires which measure family-work conflict (family interferes with work-related responsibilities), work-family conflict (work interferes with family-related responsibilities), negative affect, positive affect, burnout, engagement, revenge behavior, forgiveness behavior, and perception of health.

The purpose of the study is to examine the positive psychological state engagement, the negative psychological state burnout, the positive behavior forgiveness, and the negative behavior revenge and their influence on the leaders' health. The study was based on the assumption that the health of a leader has significant effects on the organization, its members, and the leader him/herself.

To cut to the chase, their studies found the following points:

1. Only two of six variables that were hypothesized to predict health (positive affect and revenge behavior) were statistiscally significant predictors of health. What it means is as follows.

2. Positive Affect (PA) was found to be positively and significantly related to health. PA reflects the extent to which a person feels enthusiastic, active, and alert at work and derives pleasure from their general work environment and responsibilities. This study confirmed previous finding that a leader's PA level does affect his or her psychological health and effective functioning.

3. Revenge behavior was another factor that significantly predicts health, but in a negative way. The study used the definion of revenge as "the infliction of harm in return for a perceived wrong" (Bradfield and Aquino, 1999). The pastors were asked to think back over the last six months when another person offended them, then to write a few sentences describing the offence prior to completing the measure on revenge behavior which has the following items:
- I told them something was wrong with them
- I tried to make something bad happen to them
- I did something to make them get what they deserved
- I got even with them
- I prayed for God to deal severely with them

Interestingly, contrary to common belief, burnout was not significantly and negatively related to health. More interestingly, while the pastors in this study engaged in (thankfully) very little revenge behavior, when they did it even in a small degree it had a major negative impact on their health.

Another finding worth considering is that while work-family and family-work conflicts do not have a direct relationship with health, they are positively related to revenge behavior. Thus, when the pastor is being called at night to meet with bereaved families, hence miss his family time, the propensity to engage others in great emotional intensity (revenge) increases. Similarly, when the pastor's child complains that his dad is always absent from his soccer game because of ministry duties, the pastor is likely to respond vengefully towards the child (e.g., "There is nothing I can do about this. I am a pastor - don't you understand?")

The lessons are clear. If pastors want to maintain their psychological health, they need to ensure that (1) they really need to enjoy their work immensely as a matter of delight (not duty) and (2) guard their hearts against the raw emotions that might erupt as a result of the conflicts they have with their family and the congregations no matter how insignificant they may appear to be in the first place.

All things Calvin

These past two weeks Reformed bloggers have been buzzing with the coverage of many important events surrounding the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth this year. Yes, Calvin is turning 500 this year! It's his quincentennary! To be exact, his birthday will be celebrated on July 10, 2009.

The sixteenth century Reformator is no doubt the most influential figure in the history of the church. His life, piety, theology, and action have had continuing, profound effects in various private and public domains both within and beyond the church which were transformed as a result.

This year is a very opportune time to read the Institutes for those of us who haven't done so, or just read a few sections of his masterpiece. It is also a good time to go deep into the essential tenets of the Reformed theology, knowing that there is a great incentive to do so namely there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who are doing the same thing this year.

Below is my attempt to list all things Calvin online as of today (albeit it is incomplete). You will likely to encounter household names in the Reformed circle offering their thoughts on how Calvin has influenced them and the world.

1. The Calvin 500 blog. Fostering a healthy discussion for an international community about events, conferences, tours, reviews, studies, discussions, and developments related to the 2009 quincentenary of Calvin’s birth.

2. Monergism on John Calvin. One of the best sources for commentaries, essays, articles, multimedia on Calvin.

3. Martin Downes collects audio links to Calvin.

4. Knowing the Truth radio program features many scholars who will discuss Calvin during the month of January.

5. Reformation 21 is blogging the Institutes.

6. Princeton Seminary is also blogging the Institutes

7. Scott Clark offers his take on Calvin-related books.

8. Martin Lynk reads the Institutes and provides his daily reflections on it.

What is interesting is the big anticipation of heaps of books that will be published this year on Calvin. Here is a case in point, which have enjoyed positive reviews and one that I have been wanting to purchase: John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, Doxology, edited by Burk Parsons. See the Table of Content and Sample Chapter. Also an interview with Dr Parsons on the book.












Finally, I thought I end this post with the statues of the leading Reformation figures in the Reformation Wall Geneva: (left to right) Theodore Beza (1519 – 1605), John Calvin (1509 – 1564), William Farel (1489 – 1565), and John Knox (c.1513 – 1572).

Learning How to Live from Death

If you are like many people who try to get your life back in shape, by now you would have done your end-of-year reflection and built a list of resolutions or some sort of action items organized and set to put into action (with some anxiety whether or not inertia will soon kick in).

What I found very convicting recently was the way Moses reflected his life as a spiritual father of the Israelites. In Psalm 90 he was enabled to face his life forward by looking forward. In fact, he stated that the significance of his fleeting life when he pondered about death. Sound too morbid?

We know that Moses led approximately 2 million Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to usher them into the promised land. Their disobedience to God however has stopped them from entering the land. Moses was the man who dealt with death of one generation among these people in the wilderness. Number 1 tells us about the census of every man who were able to go to war. According to verse 45-46 "So all those listed of the people of Israel, by their fathers' houses, from twenty years old and upward, every man able to go to war in Israel — all those listed were 603,550."

If you include the women and children as well, there must be are least 1.2 million people who died during those 40 years. And if you do the math, that averaged 30,000 every year, or about 82 per day! Tragically however we read in Numbers (e.g., 16:49; 25:9) that in certain days there far more people who were killed due to their sins.

Can you imagine how Moses looked with his own eyes body after body falling to the ground? Can you try to comprehend what could have been in his mind when he had to lead mass funerals for his people?

He knew however that these deaths was the consequence of their sins which were met with God’s wrath. This should remind us that death is never a natural part of the life cycle, as the secular values teach us to believe. It entered this world as God’s direct judgment on the sin of the human race (Gen. 2:17; 3:19).

The reality of death and sin that confronted Moses propelled him to reflect deeply on how his (and our) fleeing life can have meaning? Thankfully he was not driven to despair and cynicism in his reflection. Instead, he was driven to worship and prayer, and his prayer came to us today in the form of Psalm 90.

Moses reminded us that life is futile if we do not truly know this eternal God as our personal dwelling place. Life is futile if we are outside Christ as we will be under God’s condemnation for our sins. Understanding this background makes me appreciate more his famous line: "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom" (90:12).

Social Entrepreneurs: The Next Big Thing?

Around this time last year, John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan released an interesting book on how social entrepreneurs deal with and solve some of the world's most pressing economic, social, and environmental problems almost simultaneously and (this is the neat thing) while doing so creating new markets across the globe.

Pamela Hartigan is the head of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Her co-author, John Elkington, is the founder of a consulting firm SustainAbility and a progressive thinker whose work I have read since many years ago as an MBA student. His most famous one is perhaps Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

Why does the term 'social entrepreneurs' become one of today's buzzwords?
a. Because the challenges we face today as human beings are getting extremely complex
b. Governments are too slow to respond to these challenges; the bureaucrats are once again clueless
c. Businesses are finding themselves in a dire need to revitalize themselves in the declining global market

The combination of the three facts above set the stage of social entrepreneurs; those who know how to do well by doing good. They are both socially responsible and commercially adept at spotting profitable opportunities in unlikely places. They are able to solve large scale issues in developing countries with very limited resources, very creative solutions, and very tangible, lasting benefits for the wider society.

The title of the book, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World, was inspired by a quote by George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

The book outlines cases of how these social entrepreneurs capitalize on the dire situations confronting the poorest consumers at the "bottom of the pyramid". Following the footsteps of the grandad of social entrepreneurs and the nobel prize winner Mr Mohammed Yunus, they turned the poorest clients into profitable customers.

Several cases in point cited in the book. ParqueSoft is an innovative technology incubator that reaches out to young people from poor areas of Columbia to develop software teams for companies in optics, artificial intelligence, “edutainment,” bioinformatics, and nanotechnology. At the same time that the incubator supports research and development and teaches business concepts. Another social experiment cited in the book is a for-profit organization called Sekem which developed new farming methods in Egypt to support six new businesses in the area of food production. It also improves the value chain and builds transparency and fairness that did not exist before; hence enhancing the overall welfare of the farmers.