The Icing on the Cake

Monday, 24th September 2007

What I have become more convinced recently is that the way we view our Abba Father affects the way things happen around us.

If our opinion of God is that He is conditional in His love for us, then we would not expect good things to happen to us because we get tripped up by the devil practically every single day.

On the other hand, if our opinion of God is that because He has already extinguished all His righteous judgement on the body of His Son 2,000 years ago, and because of that, He can justly love us as depicted in the story of the Prodigal Son, the strange thing is that somehow, things line up wonderfully in our life.

I believe all of you already know by now that I was removed from cell leadership as well as serving as the Treasurer of my church because of my overt stand on grace teachings. In spite of this, my opinion of God was not negatively affected and I even told my senior pastor a couple of times that I hold fast to Rom 8:28 -- that somehow God will cause all things to turn out well.

And indeed He has!

I have blogged about the wonderful things that have happened as a result of that incident here, so I won't go into details here again.

Even though a window has been shut in terms of my being able to serve the LORD in a leadership capacity in my church, God has opened several doors in that I have gotten to know several other wonderful brothers and sisters in the LORD!

In another earlier post about doors, windows and a good opinion of God, I mentioned that a pastor of a mega-church in Singapore had seen the YouTube video I put up, and invited me out to lunch. I said that I would get down to blogging about what happened, so here we go...

This pastor had initially assumed I was from his church, but after reading my blog, he discovered I wasn't. Anyway, we had a wonderful time of fellowship sharing our own spiritual journey with each other. For the longest time, I had not had a mutually-edifying conversation with a shepherd of the flock, so I really treasured the one that I had with this pastor, because we were on the same frequency throughout regarding the grace gospel and Jesus' finished work!!!

He expressed surprise that I was removed from leadership because he thought that PLMC would be receptive to grace teachings, since Rhema Bible College is operating from our church's premises. I explained to him that this arrangement was set up by the previous pastor-in-charge, who has since been promoted to become the President, overseeing all the English-speaking churches.

I also shared with him that I see the LORD asking me to remain in PLMC to change things from the inside, and asked him to pray for me because in the natural realm, this task seems quite a challenge, now that my "circle of influence" among the church leadership has been reduced. But I take comfort that our God is a supernatural one, so that when the spiritual awakening happens, people will give all credit to the LORD and not to any individual person. I must decrease and God must increase.

Anyway, at the end of that lunch, I requested a favour from this pastor. I passed him my personal copy of Destined to Reign for it to be autographed.

Which brings me back to the subject of today's post. The culmination of great happenings thus far is that I just got the book back, and this is the icing on the cake...

What really moves my heart is that the autograph Pastor Prince signed was not just a generic one. He actually took the effort to make it personal (and even spelt my name correctly some more -- many people still mis-spell it as Malcom rather than Malcolm)

I am humbled that a shepherd of a flock of now close to 16,000 took such an effort!

Meanwhile, I have been trying to fix up a lunch with my own senior pastor for the past 9 months since Jan 07. I am not giving up on this though, because my opinion of God gets better each day, and I am sure that He will allow this to come to pass. Amen?