Lord, to each one of you. First I want to ask a question, especially in the church. I think many of you look familiar to me but probably I have not had a chance to talk to most of you. I hope that there will be more opportunity in the future.
The church is already one year old here. One year goes by very fast, doesn't it? And so it's like a one-year-old baby. I think one-year-old babies are at least able to make some sounds, not talk too clearly. But they can make their voice heard. I think the Chuen Wan Church will soon be making its voice heard in Hong Kong.
Now, those of us who have to drive cars sometimes, in our church, if we are driving cars, we know that once a year, the car has to go in for a check-up. The car I'm driving belongs to a friend. It's called Cadillac. And he was very proud of his car. He said, would you like to drive my car? I said, not really. He said, do try, do try. You know Cadillac is very fancy. That car is a very beautiful car. Outside is shining as though it's made of crystal. It's shining with light. You have to put on glasses to look at it. Especially on the nose, there is this proud shield of Cadillac.
And when you sit inside, you see buttons all over you, all around about you. You press this button, the window goes up. You press another button, the window behind goes down. You can lock all the doors with one press. Everybody is locked in. Very good if you don't want anybody to run away from you when you want to talk to them. So it has quite a lot of interesting things in it. It has automatic detectors inside the nose so that it adjusts the weight of the car automatically. For example, if you put a lot of luggage in the back of the car, like if you did that in my car, then what happens is the nose goes up and the trunk goes down. So you are driving with the nose pointing up. But the Cadillac is different. It has internal adjustment device. So no matter how much luggage you put on the back, the car will always remain level. There's a compensation pressure that goes to the back and lifts it up.
I will not continue to describe the wonders of this car, such as that when you turn the corner, one light will automatically turn around. Most cars shine front. So when you turn the corner, this side is black. And it's bright where you're not going, and dark where you're turning, so you can't see. But Cadillac has automatic turning lights. If you turn the wheel, the light turns with it. Fantastic, isn't it? It pays to serve the world. If you serve the world, you drive this kind of car. If you serve the Lord, you don't drive this kind of car.
So he thought, you know, this poor preacher, maybe in his whole life he will never have a chance to drive this car. So please drive it. Okay, since he was so insistent, I drove the car. Now I like to make the car move. I don't just cruise like this. I really make the car move. So if you drive with me, you tighten your seat belt if you are smart.
And so we went off. Of course, as soon as I put my foot down on the accelerator, I noticed it doesn't have the power that I want in the car. This car has more than 220 horsepower. Eight cylinders in it. And I put my foot down and the thing is not taking off as I expected. In fact, it doesn't drive as well as my antique. I thought, what is this car? It looks beautiful outside, everybody admires it, but when I drive it, it hasn't got power. A car that looks beautiful but has no power.
I suspect that this car is like a lot of Christians. I'm wondering whether that's me. This guy looks so good outwardly. But where is the power? Sometimes I try to function and I find that I'm not satisfied with myself. Outwardly, a Cadillac. Inwardly, an antique. It doesn't function even as good as the antique.
And then I began to think, maybe that is the problem with the whole church. What is lacking is the power. What is lacking is the motivation. That is what I aim to talk about in the remaining time. The motivation.
Let us be quiet before God first. Our gracious God, our Father, you are a God who looks into our heart. And from your eyes nothing is hidden. No man sees us only on the outside. And on the outside we may look as though we are spiritual. But what we really are inside, you alone know. Deliver us, O Lord, from every shadow of hypocrisy. Because you are a God who will not tolerate hypocrisy. Lord, speak to each one of our hearts in this time. Search us by your Holy Spirit. And kindle in our hearts a fire during this time as we attend to your word. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.
Now, the Chinese people are marvelous business people. They can make a profit from every hole in the wall. They just have a piece of wooden box there, and they will put something there to sell, and they will make money. So you have heard that the economic growth rate in China is one of the highest in the world right now. Even under communism, the economy in China is growing at an incredible 12% per annum. The United States is happy if it gets 2% overall growth rate. You can see that private enterprise is really where the economic growth is coming from. What motivates private enterprise? Money, of course. What else? So you go into China, and all the talk is about money, about business. Everybody talks about money. The word money is a powerful motivator. The love of money is a powerful motivator for the carnal person.
I think we in Hong Kong understand this very well. What motivates us in Hong Kong? They look at the market in China, they go in like a bullet. They are making more money than those in China, needless to say. Everybody knows the rich get richer. So Hong Kong is doing wonderfully. But what about spiritually? I wonder whether this whole atmosphere that we have in Hong Kong is also affecting the church.
Well, we are too spiritual to admit that we love money. If I were to ask you, do you love money? No, not me. A little bit? A little bit, maybe. We have to live, you know. Just enough to live on. We are really realistic people. Maybe 30% of your life is about money? That's reasonable. After all, 70% is spiritual. But then we run into these uncomfortable words of the Lord: you cannot serve God and Mammon. Now you are all very spiritual. Nobody here serves Mammon. I can promise you. I only need to answer the question to demonstrate the truth of my thinking. Anybody here who is serving Mammon, would you please raise your hand? You see? Nobody. Not one person here serves Mammon. How right I am.
Do I have to explain what serving Mammon means? You work in your job from 9 to 5 or 6. And you work very hard because you are a Christian and you are very responsible in your job. Now your salary is not bad. And you are in line for promotion. But serving Mammon? No, no, no. It's not about serving Mammon.
But then, excuse me. I don't know whether anybody in the world serves Mammon. Do you know somebody among your friends who serves Mammon? Oh, you say, my colleague, he serves Mammon. Really? You mean he works 7 days of the week? Oh no, he works the same length of time as I do. So you mean he gets more money than you do, more pay for the same job? Oh no, I don't mean that either. Oh, I forgot, you are a Christian. Yes. But I still have difficulty understanding when I look at your life and his life, and the way you do your job, and the reasons for which you do your job, which is to earn a living, and he's doing the same.
I think if I ask the non-Christian, he will freely admit that he loves money. He will be honest with you. Even though he earns the same salary as you do, does the same job, works the same hours, as a non-Christian he is honest enough to say, yes, I love money. But you as a Christian, no way. You don't love money. Now if I were a non-Christian conducting this inquiry, you can see I am having difficulty understanding. Besides the verbal difference, I can't see a factual difference.
If you go to some other churches here in Hong Kong, you will see that they are very honest about life. As soon as the pastor does us all the favor to sit down and finish the service, then you know what everybody talks about. How was your business during the past week? Was it good? Yes, yeah. But I would like it to do better. What do you mean by wanting to do better? More income. Can we say money? Oh yeah, yeah, money. More income, of course. Am I kidding? I'm not kidding. Go to a church and see if that's not the case. As soon as the service is over and the last hymn was sung and all those pious tones have vanished, we talk business.
What is the point of all that I'm saying? It is very difficult when you look into your own heart to be honest about your motives. You can see your own heart and yet it is very important to be honest, because God looks into your heart and looks into my heart. I can fool myself, and sometimes I do find myself fooling myself. But God looks into your heart and my heart. The Bible says the heart is deceitful above all things. We really know how to fool ourselves. Simply by saying to myself, no, I don't love money, does not mean that I really don't love money. That is the problem. When I discuss today the question of motive, I'm dealing with a very difficult subject, because it's a subject that we don't honestly want to face.
Come back to the Cadillac. My friend who owns that Cadillac certainly can afford to bring that car into the garage and check out the problem as to why this car does not have its full power. Do you think he didn't have it checked out? Of course he did. He had the garage check this and check that. They examined it and looked through the engine. They could not find the problem. The car was still without power.
Believe me, it is easier, though not always easy, to locate a problem in an engine than it is to locate a problem in a man's heart. Nowadays you have computer diagnosis. You drive the car in, they put the wires all over, and then turn on the computer and they see whether the car is working right. Even with that, they couldn't find the problem.
So serious is the problem, brothers and sisters. I don't worry about that Cadillac having no power. I am worried about the church and our own lives being powerless. Powerlessness brings with it a sense of frustration. You sit in that car, you put your foot down, and the thing will not move. It's really frustrating. Not only is it frustrating, it can be very dangerous. This was the case on one stretch of the road in Canada. I tried to overtake on a road going up a little bit. With a car of that power, I should be able to pass just like that. But I stepped on it, and the car would not overtake. And then you see the car coming from the opposite side. It's very dangerous. Power is not there just for show, you know. Power is for safety, if you use it correctly.
Now, in this time together, I really would like to ask you to be very honest with yourself. I don't want you to be thinking of the guy next to you. We didn't come here to analyze the next guy. Whenever the word of God is preached, people immediately say, oh yes, I think this message is particularly appropriate for this person I know. And that is the way we turn away from God when he wants to search our heart.
This church is one year old. What is going to be the effectiveness of this church during the next year? The church has grown. It's only one year old and I think you started with 15 people or something. Now this little room is already quite full. But are the numbers important or the quality? What about your life? Is it going to be rich, meaningful? Or is it going to be frustrating, powerless?
I often look around and I can see that many of you have a lack of motivation. There is no inner power. A sense of frustration. You know, if a church is an army, the Lord's army, any army that has a loss of morale is going to be defeated. Morale is the most important thing in an army.
Take the Vietnam war. A superpower was fighting a third-world country. Many of the Vietnamese soldiers were simply teenagers whose rifle was as long as themselves. And those rifles were antiques. But you know what was the outcome of that war. When you saw the United States soldiers being interviewed, many of them said, we don't know what we're here for. What are we fighting this war for? This war is not our war. We shouldn't be here. All they want to do is survive that time that they are forced to be there and get out of it in one piece, hopefully. To fight a war that you don't believe in, no matter how sophisticated your weaponry, that is disastrous.
But you know that the Vietnamese believed in the war they were fighting. They believed in that cause. That was their territory. You came and bombed my territory. You were fighting on my land, killing my people. The United States Army suffered the most humiliating defeat at the hands of a teenage bunch of soldiers. The morale was so high. The suffering that these young people could endure. For the sake of fighting for their country. How many of you could take it?
But where the morale is high, the army becomes invincible. No matter how badly equipped, how small, how inexperienced. This is the reason I'm talking to you today. We have several churches in Hong Kong. If we see each one as a unit of the Lord's army, and we look at these armies and look at the morale of these armies, can our churches fight the Lord's battle?
If this were a time for discussion, I'd like to pass the microphone around and hear your opinion. Because an army is composed of individual soldiers. If you were the officer in charge, would you dare to lead this army to battle and hope to win?
I think many of you do have a real love for the Lord. That is not in doubt. My question is, how deep and how strong is that love? That is where the problem is.
In the book of Ezekiel, chapter 22 and verse 30, is a verse that always makes my heart very sad. I'll ask Pastor Fred to read it for us. Ezekiel 22, verse 30.
# Spiritual Motivation (Part 2)
God was beginning to find it necessary to destroy Israel for its sins. And the stunning word is, I looked, I searched through the whole nation of Israel, looking for one man. Not five, not fifty. One. We often think that God asks too much, doesn't he? His expectations are unrealistic. His demands upon us in discipleship, take up your cross, follow me, is unrealistic. It can't be reached. Was God asking too much to find just one man? And what was this man to do? To stand in the breach, in the gap, between a rebellious Israel on the one hand and a God whose patience was about to run out on the other. But in the whole nation, there was no one.
Let's take a look at Psalm 106, verse 23. In the history of Israel, it was a better time because at that time there was one man who stood in the gap. So he said he would destroy them, had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him to turn away his anger. Moses at that time was the one who stood in the gap and saved Israel.
Maybe it's unrealistic to expect another Moses to arise. God didn't say he was looking for somebody necessarily of the stature of Moses. I think God was so anxious to save Israel that he would have accepted anyone well below the stature of Moses. But there wasn't one. I wonder what God felt in his heart. How would you feel? But where is the one man?
Look at our day. Is the church walking in obedience with God? I mean the church throughout the world? Israel at that time thought they weren't perfect, but they weren't that bad. But by God's standards, they were very bad. If we think that what we are today is better than what the Israelites were in Ezekiel's day, I believe we are fooling ourselves. The leaders in Israel's day, many of them were corrupt. The prophets said, there is no justice to be found in the courts of Israel. There is no fairness for the poor and the needy. The rich are arrogant.
I have served in the church for a very long time. Let me tell you, I don't see any difference between the church today and Israel in Ezekiel's day. If I were not in the leadership of the church, I wouldn't have the right to say any of this. I know how corrupt so many pastors are. Ezekiel was not claiming that every leader in Israel was corrupt. It's just that so many were.
You know, if the cover over the church could be torn away, you would be shocked at what you can see. In the leadership, the corruption, the love for money, is sometimes enough to make your mouth drop open in astonishment. If you sat on the board of deacons in some churches, you wouldn't believe the kind of arguments that go on between the pastor and the board, where the pastor demands more pay, more pay, more pay. You should sit in one of those meetings to believe it, that I am not exaggerating. And who are these people on the board of deacons? All the rich people. People who have influence in society. Who swagger about in their arrogance. If you were not rich, you wouldn't even be considered as a member of the board. You have first to be somebody before you can become a member of the board. And if you think I'm exaggerating, go there and find out for yourself. The church is corrupt at the top and therefore also corrupt all the way to the bottom. Idolatry is what is in the church today. The whole place is corrupt. And what do they worship? Mammon, the wonderful god Mammon. Riches, possessions. And therefore it's the rich who become the top people in the church.
The result is that the church today is demoralized. You cannot take an army like this to war. It will be beaten. You cannot take a soldier like this to fight. He will surrender under pressure, very quickly. Are you a soldier of Christ? I wonder how many here, in God's eyes, would be counted as a true soldier of Christ. But not to be, you pay the price every day, yesterday, today, tomorrow. You will live a flat, tasteless, frustrating, empty, powerless Christian life. Very sad.
Did you ever once let your life, for a short time, be highly motivated by the love of God? Do you remember the taste of that first love? Or is that a far away memory you can't remember anymore?
I have the privilege of serving with the sixth team. And they are in training right now for preaching and leading various meetings. You know, I have the joy as I watch them preaching, to see a certain flash in their eye when they preach. It's so good to see those newly entering into the Lord's battle. They are at this time totally following the Lord. They have put their careers behind them. They move forward to follow the Lord and his army. And though they are very conscious of their weaknesses, yet unconscious to themselves, the Lord is working through them. And when they stand behind the pulpit and speak that word, I look at their eyes, and indeed there is the flash of the heavenly fire. I have listened to many preachers, but there isn't a flash. There isn't the fire burning. I don't mean that their fire is enough. That needs much more. But at least it's there. There is a power.
But there is a danger as time goes on, that the first love begins to fail. The vision becomes less clear. The problems and pressures build up on you. You are hit from left and right, front and back, you are hit from every direction. You become tired. Your level of motivation drops. You stand up and preach, and you are so dry. You relate to other Christians, and you feel there is nothing to share. The morale is gone. The energy is gone.
And you know, the dreadful thing is that you affect other people. Never think that your lack of morale is your private business. It is not. You are affecting other people. Your lack of morale is going to affect one after the other. Just like one bit of yeast in a whole lump is going to affect the whole thing. You need to have only one soldier in the group who says, I don't know what I'm here for, really. Or he has a long face. And you will feel affected. You were feeling quite good when you got up, but you look at his long face and you're also going down.
So there are two kinds of people in the church. There's one who's a spark. He lights one person after another, catching on fire. But that kind of person is so rare, it is hard to find in the church. Everybody is affected downward. That's strange, isn't it? It's so hard to pull another person up. It's so easy to go down. It's the spiritual gravity that pulls you down, just like the physical one. Very few people have something called initiative. Are you one of those people with initiative? Because if you don't have initiative, you are always affected by the other person. You don't affect others. You are affected by others.
Everybody knows that in a team, there is sometimes one person who is full of initiative. This kind of person is so valuable to the team. A team may be losing at a particular point, and everyone is down, and there is one person who is full of initiative, saying, we are not going to lose. He somehow carries the rest of the team with him on to victory. Which kind are you? Are you one kind of person who is always waiting for somebody else to encourage you? Well, let me tell you, you're going to wait for the whole of your life. Because everybody is also waiting. You wait for me and I wait for you and nobody encourages each other.
If there is one person who has initiative, that person will change the whole thing. That is the person who stands in the gap. Now when I make that connection, then you understand how few there are who have initiative.
In Hebrews chapter 11, the whole chapter is about faith. Abraham had faith, and so he did this and that. Moses had faith, and he initiated this and that. Faith is dynamic. The faith of God makes us to be full of spiritual initiative. Moreover, the things that they did are extraordinary things. Sarah 90 years old, Abraham nearly 100 years old, childless. Faith goes out and says, yes, it will be done. So the point is that faith and initiative are inseparably linked. Because God works in you so powerfully, if there is true faith, things begin to happen, things will take place. Do you find a sort of drive, a sort of compulsion, a kind of initiative coming from God, arising in your heart? Do you ever feel that? If you have initiative, that drive, that means you have faith. If you have faith, you will find there is a constant inner dynamic. From this you can know whether you have faith or not.
Now you understand what the Lord Jesus said, when I come back again, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth? The answer is, no. You can see. You look around and you see there is no dynamic. There is no faith. That is it. So nothing happened. The church is either dead or dying.
I'm holding up a mirror for you to look into. The Bible is a mirror. The Bible itself tells us, and we look in that mirror and see what we are really like.
Initiative, which comes from God, is always a love that comes from God. Paul was full of faith. He was full of initiative. We look at his life, we have his life story told us here in the New Testament. And you see a person that is so dynamic. He wants to stand in the gap between Israel and God. He says, put me in there, even if I die, I am ready to stand in that gap. This is the man that stands in the gap. Wherever the gospel has not been preached, Paul wants to go. Even no matter how dangerous it is, Paul is the first to go. You don't know how you can hold such a man down. He is full of dynamic. How many people do you find like this? I pray to God, Lord, please find one. Just one. Maybe one of you today is going to be that one. And this message has not been in vain.
I want to close. And so doing, we read 2 Corinthians 5, verse 14. And here we read in the first part, for the love of Christ compels us. We are familiar with that verse, except we don't know what it means. The English translation is very weak. The love of Christ controls me completely would be a closer translation. The love of Christ has got me as its happy prisoner. Does the love of Christ mean anything to you? Does the fact that Christ loves you mean anything to you, or is this just a phrase you've heard too many times before?
Verse 15, he died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him. Let me ask you plainly, who do you live for? No formalistic answers, oh yes, I live for Christ. Do you? If you answered me that, and I came to your home and examined your life and watched how you did everything every day, would you be willing to be examined in this way? He didn't die just so that we can be saved. He died so that we live for him. That's what it says here. And the power of that love propelled Paul so he could go forth in victory.
I want to leave one challenge with you as I close. We often say that we have some love. Really? I really wonder. Does the love of God motivate us? When we don't even have a minimum of love, of course it cannot motivate us. My challenge is this. Try it just for a few hours. To throw yourself totally into the love of God. No reservation, just for a few hours. Let's start where it's easier. The person you are sharing your apartment with. The guy who is giving you so much problems because of his or her inconvenience. The guy who is driving you mad every day because of his callousness, his disorderliness and the like. Just for one hour, forget about his untidiness. You can remember it afterwards, of course. But try for one hour to forget. What do you do? You are actually going to love that person.
You would say, well, how do I love that person? Good question. So spend the first five minutes of that one hour thinking, how do I love this person? And suddenly you discover you really don't know how to love the person. You thought you had love, but put it into practice, and suddenly you discover you don't have it.
How about trying going up to the person, to his or her utter astonishment, and put your arm around him and give him a hug and say, I love you. Can I cook supper for you tonight? A couple of suggestions. Otherwise we talk love, love, love, but what does love mean? Love means nothing, we're tired of this word love. Buy him a little present. Notice that his belt is a bit worn, buy him a belt. If we can only think, how, just for one hour. You know what, that one hour could forever change your relationship with that person. It will never be the same again. Having made a start in love, that relationship has a future.
For some of us, we have to try it with our wives, because we already relate to our wives after years of marriage in a very fixed pattern. Everything works by habit. We stop thinking, never mind thinking about love, we stop thinking about anything. But the Bible says, if we are in Christ, we are a new creation. That's why I said, for one hour, try something new. Get the taste of being a new person, entering into a new relationship.
You know, in John chapter 3, the Lord said that the Spirit blows where he wills, and nobody knows where he's coming from or going to. And then he makes the astonishing statement, so is everyone born of the Spirit. You know what that means? Of course not. We go by fixed patterns. Look at us, we are all so formal. We stand here with our ties. Everyone seated nicely, behaving properly in your chair. If I said suddenly, everybody stand up and jump around for 10 minutes, you think this guy is crazy.
Live the Christian life with a dynamic, spiritual imagination. Yes. That is initiative. What we need is initiative. And gradually God can use you to stand in the gap. I would like to see the church full of excited, dynamic, visionary Christians. People who see the future as glorious because of what they're experiencing now. Then your love gets bigger and wider.
How do you read your Bible? You find it so boring. Try a different version. Listen on tape. Read some testimony. Study one particular word for a change. What does that word mean? Or ask yourself, how do I live this anyway? The Christian life will start getting exciting. Because you're going to do some very revolutionary things. You remember the person that used to live with you but moved away now? Give that person a shock. Give them a phone call. And finish the phone call by saying, I really love you. Live the Christian life with a dynamic, spiritual imagination. That is initiative. What we need is initiative. And gradually God can use you to stand in the gap.
I would like to see the church full of excited, dynamic, visionary Christians. People who see the future glorious because of what they're experiencing now. Then your love gets bigger and wider. Let God's love motivate you. Let us pray.