A Response to Rev Kong Hee's "Questionable Teachings"

Sunday, 31st May 2009

A month ago, I mentioned that Rev Kong Hee had contributed to sg.christianpost.com entitled "Balance is the Key of Life (Part 3)". In that article, Rev Kong had listed down 11 teachings that he considered to be questionable, namely:

#1: You Don't Have To Confess Your Sins To Be Forgiven!
#2: Being Taught The 10 Commandments Is Like Taking Poison!
#3: Sin Will Never Break Your Fellowship With God!
#4: Your Sin Is Drawing You Closer To God!
#5: God Will Always Hear You, Even If You Regard Sin In Your Heart!
#6: Under Grace, Holiness Is Transferable Through Personal Contacts!
#7: The Only Sin The Holy Spirit Would Ever Convict Is Unbelief!
#8: Faith Is Just Believing, Nothing Else!
#9: By Just Having Faith, All Your Bad Habits Would Disappear Effortlessly!
#10: A Christian Can Never Be In The Flesh!
#11: The Moment You Receive Christ, You Immediately Achieve Perfection!

You can download Rev Kong's article here.

Well, the Holy Spirit has prompted fellow Best Christian Blog of the Year winner Stanley Wong to respond to that article with a series of blog entries which he aptly entitled Questionable "Questionable Teachings". It is indeed a great labour of love on the part of Stan because he painstakingly took more than a month to complete it .

Stan has so graciously granted me permission to compile it into a PDF document (that contains 17,653 words and runs for 51 pages, by the way), which you can download here. It certainly deserves a wider audience within the Body of Christ.

Those of you out there from City Harvest Church or who know Rev Kong personally, please feel free to pass him a copy of this so that he can respond appropriately, and we can all mutually learn together.

On my part, I have sent the following email to Edmond Chua, the editor of sg.christianpost.com to let him know the availability of this document so that he can likewise inform his readers and thus benefit from this truly anointed piece of work too.

Dear Edmond

Greetings in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

About a couple of months back, your website featured an article written by Rev Kong Hee entitled "Balance is the Key of Life". In part 3 of that article, Rev Kong had listed down what he considered to be 11 "questionable teachings".

Well, a fellow blogger Stanley Wong has written a series of blog entries responding to that article by Rev Kong. He has also given me permission to compile these entries into a single PDF document, which is attached to this email and also available for download at the following link

http://www.box.net/shared/ja91j9bdq8

Please be so kind as to let your readers know about the availability of this document so that they are aware that there are others in the Body of Christ that have a different perspective from Rev Kong. Please also forward a copy of this to Rev Kong so that he can make the appropriate response he considers necessary.

Blessings
Malcolm

Edmond has so kindly responded as follows:

Hi Malcolm,

Thank you for your emails and for alerting us to the response by Mr Wong.

Unfortunately, we cannot publish his response in our Editorial/Column section because that section is reserved only for pastors and Christian leaders who are either our guest columnists or contributors.

However, such a response could be published in our upcoming citizen journalism section. This section is currently under construction.

I appreciate and understand where you are coming from and apologise that we are not able to publish the response immediately.

Thank you. God bless you.

In Christ Jesus,
Edmond Chua
Chief Executive Officer and Publisher
The Christian Post (Singapore) - www.christianpost.com.sg
Partner of The Christian Post International network - www.christianpost.com

Following (Jump)Suit

Saturday, 30th May 2009

Back in Apr 2007, I blogged about how my daughter has won lots of trophies.

Well, praise God because now my son is also following (jump)suit!

Yesterday was the last day of the 2nd school semester and what better way for ACS Junior to mark the end of that than with a talent competition. Junior Superstars 2009 is their version of American Idol /Britain's Got Talent. Amongst the judges were Jacinta Abisheganaden and Michael Loh of Budak Pantai.

My son and his classmate Joshua had signed up for the auditions that was held about two months back "just for the fun of it". There was no expectations of any kind. Well, he came back that day to tell us that they had cleared the auditions and would be participating in the finals!

To give our moral support, my whole family decided to buy tickets (that were priced at $15). He seemed nonchalant about the whole thing but as the day drew nearer, he began to feel slightly nervous and so we said a prayer for him, and told him that what was more important was that he enjoyed himself and did his best.

Well, God had better things in store for him, because he and Joshua, who called themselves The Blue Jumpsuit Apparatus (or TBJA for short) --- hence, the title of today's post about "following (jump)suit" --- actually won the Group Vocalists category with their rendition of We The Kings' Check Yes Juliet.

For doing so, they won a golden trophy and an iPod Shuffle each.

Check out their award-winning performance on YouTube...





But what really made the event different from other talent competitions that I have seen was that the Master of Ceremony Benedict Tan actually started it off with a word of prayer to commit it to the Lord, and ended it by getting everyone to stand and sing the school anthem "ACS Forever". And yes, there were many alumni among the crowd who sang along :-)

P.S. If you are on Facebook, you can check out photos of ACS Junior Superstars 2009 at the following link:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=80900&id=751059341&l=ad3e37a957

Dead Works v Good Works

Friday, 29th May 2009

Last week, I blogged about grace being the source of good works. You can read about that here.

In other words, we do good works not "in order to" but we do works "as a result of".

Under the Old Covenant, man had to do good in order to earn God's approval and acceptance.

Under the New Covenant, God has already given us His acceptance, and because we are accepted, the gratitude overflows and we respond by doing good to others.

I recently received a message on Facebook from someone I would refer to as P.

Hi Malcolm,

i am having problem identifying "dead works" in my day to day life (i'm certain i have plenty of those as soon as i can tell the difference!). i read something recently from angie's blog and she cited some examples of dead works, eg. helping to ferry a neighbour's child from school. i have to admit that it confused me somewhat.

when does doing something good out of the kindness of your heart become a "dead work"? i'm hoping you can help shed some light.

thanks and shalom,
P


This was my response to her:

Hi P

For me, I will go by the presence and absence of peace.

Depending on the time and season, a work may be good at some stage but become a dead one at another.

For example, I gave out quite a number of copies of D2R two years ago and D2RD last year, and even went to the extent of going to the post office to mail out some of them. Back then, I felt a sense of purpose and fulfilment in doing so because it came out of an overflow, of being grateful to God for the extent of the undeserved favour He had bestowed upon me. There was much joy and peace that accompanied these acts.

Nowadays, I still get requests every now and then for the books but have decided to turn them down politely because it has become somewhat of an obligatory chore to do so.

The source has to be God's grace, and our deeds a response to that grace. If it is done out of an obligation, then it is better not to do so.

What I strongly believe is that the Holy Spirit in us, will give us both the joy and desire to carry out good works. If there is neither, then a work, however noble, is but a dead one.

After replying to her, the LORD brought to mind something that happened 2 weeks ago. I am currently on a sabbatical from my own church and as a result had informed my senior pastor that I will not be tithing to my church during the period of my sabbatical. You can read about that here.

Whenever Ps Reuben preaches, my wife and I will attend our home church, but when the offering bag is passed, I will not put anything in it. But 2 weeks ago, when I was attending the youth service and Ps Reuben was preaching on Jonah 3, somehow I felt the LORD prompting me to put a $50 into the bag. As the bag was approaching, there was another voice telling me "Hello? Aren't you on a sabbatical? Are you giving the right signal to your senior pastor if you do that? Save that and sow it into One-North instead."

Even though I struggled in my mind, yet there was sense of peace in my heart. So I went ahead to drop the note into the bag, even though I was under no legal obligation to do so. At that point, I was reminded of what Paul said about God loving a cheerful giver. If we give out a sense of duty and obligation, then it is better not to because it is not done in the right spirit.

And so what would have been a dead work on another occasion was a good work this time around :-)

CC14 and CC23

Sunday, 24th May 2009

In the mornings, after sending my daughter to school, I would drive to Lavendar MRT, and then let my wife take over the car to drive to work. I would then take the MRT to alight at Raffles Place.

In the evenings, If I can leave the office on time, I will then take a bus down and alight along Nicoll Highway (where my wife's office is) so that I can catch a ride home. Otherwise, my wife takes the BMW home, while I have to take the bmw (bus-MRT-walk) home.

When friends and colleagues ask me whereabouts I stay, I would tell them somewhere between Toa Payoh and Ang Mo Kio. The nearest operational MRT to my home would actually be Braddell station on the N-S line, but there are no buses plying from there to my home. Hence, if I happen to travel by train, I would alight at either the Toa Payoh station (from which I take a 20-minute bus ride, stop opposite New Tech Park and walk through a 5-minute shortcut around St Gabriel's Primary School) or at Bishan station (from which I take a 15-minute bus ride and stop along Braddell Road and walk for 10 minutes into the estate).

Well, on 28 May 2009, this is all going to change. The Circle (CC) Line will be officially launched beginning with 5 stations: Bartley, Serangoon, Lorong Chuan, Bishan and Marymount. And daily ridership is expected to be 55,000!

Finally, an MRT station that is within 5 minutes' walk from home, namely the Lorong Chuan Station. Thank you LORD! Which means I can dispense with the b, leaving just mw :-)

But that is not all. The Circle Line is being constructed in stages and I notice with great interest that there is one station that is going to be located at One-North in the not too distant future.

I am believing that it will be completed in time for NewCre's move there. Amen?

Oh ya, just in case you were wondering about today's blog entry title. CC14 and CC23 are the station names for Lorong Chuan and One-North respectively, and a reader actually made the observation that 1+ 4 = 5 and 2+3 = 5 too :-D

The Source of Good Works

Saturday, 23rd May 2009

Most religions, if not all, teach us to do good to our fellow men.

As Methodists, there is a very strong emphasis on "good works". Hence, there are outreach programs, funds set up for the poor and needy, evangelistic events during Easter and Christmas, and so on.

But how do we distinguish between what is "good works" which is pleasing to God, and what is "dead works" which is nothing more than filthy rags in His sight?

I like the illustration that Ps Prince gave in a sermon he preached two weeks ago entitled "Put the "Amazing" Back into Grace" in which he spoke about the River Nile.

Most people would associate the river Nile with Egypt. This is because it spans the entire nation from the south to the north and provides its people with the irrigation required for its crops. In fact, the ancient Egyptians went to the extent of worshipping the Nile and that is why God turned it into blood, to show Pharaoh that He was the true God.

However, if one were to trace the Nile southwards towards its true source, one would be surprised that it goes all the way past Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda to the mountains in Burundi, which is in Central Africa! This is not obvious to most people. What is obvious is where it ends, ie. in the Mediterranean Sea just above where Egypt is.

And so likewise it is with good works, which is what is visible to others. The source of good works is not immediately obvious to most people too, even fellow Christians.

Paul tells us in Eph 2:10 that we are God's masterpieces, created in Christ Jesus to do "good works".

But let us trace that back to the earlier two verses to see what the source of good works is...

8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—
9 not by works, so that no one can boast.
10 For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Verse 8 tells us that God's grace is the source of our good works!

Yes, dear brothers and sisters, without His grace being the source and motivation for us, anything and everything we do, however noble, will all be in vain. That is what is so amazing about grace. Amen?