Children of The Light#4 Present day Nehemiahs(20th Oct 2014)
Dear....
Then I told them of the hand of my God which was good upon me; as also the king's words that he had spoken unto me. And they said, Let us rise up and build.
Nehemiah 2:18
The day God lifted the veil upon your heart, and whether you tentatively or gladly accepted the long unopened gift of salvation, it is just but a progression to the next phase of the path He has set for you.
A compelling reason there must be for us to come to the faith, but just like the Israelites of Moses's time, miracles alone, and they had plenty, still wasn't good enough to capture the full attention and confidence of them nor us.
How does one grow in the faith?
And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.
Exodus 13:21
Time in the desert, learning to follow God. For the Israelites, it was the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night. For Christians, it is the Word of God working in tandem with the Holy Spirit residing in the hearts of the believers.
The Lord our God spake unto us in Horeb, saying, Ye have dwelt long enough in this mount: Turn you, and take your journey, and go to the mount of the Amorites, and unto all the places nigh thereunto, in the plain, in the hills, and in the vale, and in the south, and by the sea side, to the land of the Canaanites....
Deuteronomy 1:6-7
Behold The Lord thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and possess it, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged.
Deuteronomy 1:21
As we mature in our faith, the time will come when God will deem us ready to claim the land for His kingdom. Our next upgrade. When God calls, we will know His will, much as we often struggle to want to respond. For it will mean moving out of our comfort zone. And let's not make the same sinful mistakes as the Israelites who did not want to enter Canaan, because they were more afraid of the enemies resident there than our Sovereign God.
And conspired all of them together to come and to fight against Jerusalem, and to hinder it.
Nehemiah 4:8
I, like some of you have obeyed God's call to claim the land. It has been difficult because God needed to first move me from self dependent to God dependent. Like Nehemiah who encountered challenges from the enemy, all of us who seek to do God's will must face the same. And how did Nehemiah still manage to complete the wall in such a short duration?
Nevertheless we made our prayer unto our God, and set a watch against them day and night, because of them.
Nehemiah 4:9
That is only possible by the grace of God. What about me? It has been 14 years of diligently seeking God since His Spirit fell upon me that wonderful night in Bangkok.
Have I completed my walls that God has set me to? Will there be new walls to build even as we work on the existing ones?
A review of my walls
1. Prayer ministry
祷告因为你的❤️我需要
The power of prayer. You might have read about America's great spiritual revival in the 19th century, which started when one faithful man, Jeremiah Lanphier by faith started a lunchtime prayer meeting in NewYork City.
(http://www.intheworkplace.com/apps/articles/default.asp?articleid=51927&columnid=1935)
"Orison" - which means "a prayer,"that was the word God gave me in the vision He showed me a decade back.
From this word, God has since led me into a wonderful decade of involvement in prayer ministry. But for the years of building this prayer wall, have I fallen short? I have not achieved the same magnitude of revival as witnessed in New York. In fact, we seem to be in the minority when it comes to actively seeking God in prayers as a corporate body.
And after so many years of active involvement in the prayer ministry, I am still far short of a virtuoso display when it comes to praying in public.
But it matters not what we or our detractors think. What matters is the will of God.
God looks at our hearts. Imperfect as it will be, is it a heart that seeks fully after Him?
2. Faith at work
The impossible indeed is true to its word. But thanks be to God, He makes it possible His way. Its been two years since by faith response to His call, I embarked on laying the foundation for a path where corporate life need not have to take on the incarnation of the beast. Living a Christlike life in the present corporate jungle will not lead to one's early demise.
I can better empathize with Nehemiah and his fellow Jews now. The challenges from within as well as without, yet they were never left to fend for themselves, for God was always omnipresent. This Mandarin worship song ”有一天” ( http://youtu.be/7OAkr_Flq6A)
is indeed God send. May it bless and spur you on as you labor in faithful obedience, brick by brick.
Will I complete the wall in the remaining one year of the three years that I have set from day one?
Will God place me on to other new walls or will He prolong my stay in this present wall?
Nothing is certain in life. But thankfully God is faithful
3. Watering the profusion of green shoots sprouting in Japan
http://jforjapan.com/
A very hard ground, that is the general consensus amongst the faithful who have seek through the years to bring the faith to the Land of the rising sun.
Back in year 2009, in the worst days of the subprime crisis, our good Lord impressed upon me that Japan will be my ministry. How is that possible, for other than loving Japanese food and a taste for exquisite Japanese art, Japan is totally disconnected with me?
It has been two years(Nov 2012) since God told me to get going in Japan.
It has been two miraculous years for He has brought to life His blueprint for revival Japan.
It has been a privilege to witness His hands at work.
Indeed till the ends of the world has the chance to know the Gospel, then will Christ return.
Japan is a spiritual desert since the near full stamping out of the short but intense flowering of the Christian faith in the seventeen century. Not many are aware that at its peak, 10% of the Japanese population were Christians. And that cruxification of the faithful was not the sole domain of the Roman Empire. For 26 Christians were martyred on the cross in present day Nagasaki in the 16th Century. And interestingly Nagasaki was not the city of first choice for the atomic bomb during the closing days of WW2. If not for cloudy days in Kokura, the targeted city, Nagasaki would not have had the dubious honor of being one of two cities in the world to have suffered the horrors of an atomic bombing.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/bombing_of_nagasaki.htm
Tomorrow, I leave for my 3rd trip to Fukuoka City. The capital city of Kyushu Island, the southernmost part of mainland Japan. Kyushu Island was where the Christian faith first entered Japan in the 16th century. The Portuguese has since long left this land.
Today, God is using Singaporeans to be the lamp upon which His light will displace the once seemingly impenetrable darkness that encapsulates Japan.
And how apt it is, for Singapore was once renamed "Syonan-to" ( Light of the East) by our then WW2 Japanese masters.
Where will this wall lead to? I know it will lead the sheep to our waiting chief shepherd, Christ our Lord, the gate to the promised Land.
And like all other walls that God embarked us on. He is there with us always.
And unlike the Great Wall of China which was built with much grief and pain, and yet failed to achieve her intended purpose of keeping out the barbarians on China's borders. Walls ordained by God will bring to her builders, great joy and peace, independent of our circumstances. And what God built, no men nor Satan can cause to fall asunder
God blesses
Eng Hieang
20 Oct 2014
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