By: Dr. Brian Lim, an excerpt from his sermon given on Sunday, October 19, 2014.
To the community of faith at East Toronto Chinese Baptist Church in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace and peace to you. Grace, for we remember that we all live daily under grace, that none of us live solely by our own strength and on our own abilities. Peace, because shalom, which is wholeness in our relationships with God, with each other and with the Earth, is what we were created for. Grace and peace to you.
We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. All of you. Not only those of you for whom work and career are rewarding, whose relationships are rich and full, whose pastimes and pursuits because you have time, energy and money are stimulating and interesting. But those sisters and brothers who struggle with chronic illness, depression or with the illness of a loved one that makes daily life a struggle. Those who grieve the passing and loss of a family member or of a dear friend. Those whose homes are more like mere shelters from the elements than places of acceptance, security and protection. Those of you who are filled with anxiety and worries about uncertain futures. We thank God for all of you and mention you in our prayers.
We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. We remember your work of blessing others through your careers, your work of healing others, of creating new things because of your faith that there are new and more fruitful ways to live. We remember your labor in sharing encouragement and hope and the good news through your words and through your lives because of your love for family, friends, colleagues and your community. We remember your endurance as you walk with compassion alongside those who are disappointed in life, who are suffering, who are hopeless – your endurance which comes from the hope you still have in our Lord Jesus Christ, the hope that he has overcome death and dead end ways of life, and that we will overcome these things with Jesus. Faith, hope and love, these three. And the greatest of these is love.
For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you. We know that God has chosen you because the gospel, the good news of the Kingdom of God, came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction – in other words, the gospel is alive in your lives, in the way you live your lives. You know that the gospel is not just your intellectual assent to a set of beliefs, your mouthing of prayers, your singing of songs, your knowledge of the bible. You know the gospel is the power to change lives – your own, as well as those around you. We see the power of the gospel in your work to help feed the hungry through the foodbank, in your efforts to help build the community of Victoria Village through what you do at the Hub, and the space you provide for the Role Model Moms program. We see the power of the gospel in the way that you encourage people to live healthy and active lives through fitness. We see the power of the gospel in the music you perform and the art you produce which points us to the awe and reverence of God. You send out sisters and brothers to care for people with Ebola in Sierra Leone, to mentor and love children and young people in Guatemala. We know that God has chosen you if you see ever-increasing fruit of the Holy Spirit in your lives – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. You have been chosen if you have the deep conviction in your heart that God requires you to love mercy and to work for justice, to care for Creation.
May you become imitators the Lord Jesus Christ, who came to serve and not be served, who is rejected and suffers because he refuses to follow the seemingly normal way of doing things, because he refuses to just play along with the system. Know that you too will suffer and face opposition in cases where you refuse to just follow the normal way of doing things. And if you see that Jesus is not welcomed at the banquet, may you know that whatever acts of mercy and justice you do for those who are considered the least of us, the least important and least powerful of us, you did it to Jesus as well.
May you become a model to all the believers in Victoria Village, and east Toronto, and the GTA. May your faith in God become known everywhere – in the schools where you teach and attend, in the offices in which you work, in the communities in which you shop or play or serve. May you remember to continue to turn to God away from the idols that surround us, those things that were created good, but now demand the worship, energy, money, time and lives that rightfully belong to God. May you continue to turn away from the idol of a consumerism which fails to ask where the things we buy come from and who made them. May you turn away from the idol of unbounded professionalism which seeks status and recognition. May you turn away from self-satisfied individualism which fails to reflect and challenge one’s self about the best use of your time, energy and money and which fails to take up your responsibility to be your brother’s and sister’s keeper.
May you remember the story you live in, the story in which we were created to be God’s image bearers. May you continue to serve the living and true God as you wait with hope and endurance for Jesus, the one who has saved us from death and dead end ways of living, and the one who will save us and will complete the good work that has been started in us.