Faith Lessons Learnt From Faith Preaching...

On Sunday morning, after only a 2 hour nap, I went to preach in the Mandarin Service. I was really sleepy and to be honest, I was not expecting anything great from my sermon. I was just looking forward to the end of the sermon so that I can rest.

In fact, on Saturday afternoon, I had already informed James (our Mandarin pastor) that I would be preaching in English instead of Mandarin and that he could help me in the translation.

I was tired after the Euro-trip and because of fatigue, I was afraid to venture to using Mandarin. I was well aware that I had much limitation of my command of the Chinese language. I rationalised that it was a move based on knowing one's limit.

Then during the preaching time, after some greetings in Mandarin, I asked James to come on stage to help me translate as I preached in English. After preaching with translation for around 5 minutes. I sensed that it was not getting through to them as much as if I would to preach in Mandarin directly. James was dong a great job but it was just that the audience would have preferred to hear it directly from me in their heart language.

I decided to step off by faith and not be limited my own tiredness. Preaching is more than keeping to my text; it is also an impartation of faith. This is even more so as I am preaching on the theme of faith. I need to preach about faith by faith!

So with my English text, I took a risk for the Kingdom's sake by preaching the rest of the sermon in Mandarin. It was really a stretch for me but I tried not to focus on the fact that I was preaching in Mandarin as much as the fact that people needed to be informed and transformed by God's word.

I had made a few obvious boo boo. For example, instead of saying that God commanded that there be light (Guang 1), I said that God commanded that there be lamp (Deng 1)!

I pressed on until the end of the sermon with faith and much difficulty. During the altar call, I simply closed my eyes (partly because I was not very looking forward to seeing the response) and challenged the people with all the limited Chinese words that I know.

Praise be to God! Almost 80% of the believers responded to being more Global Christians and the same number also committed to building a Mandarin church that will touch the Mandarin-speaking world. Quite a few of them also responded to being go-ers!

For the last part of the altar call, I gave an invitation for those that wanted to ask Jesus into their lives for the very first time. To my amazement, more than 6 people responded that morning.

I had learnt that faith is doing what is best for the Kingdom in spite of tiredness and our own limitation. I learnt that faith brings us into an arena when our physical self ebbs away and God's spirit reigns. I learnt that without faith, we are unable to do very much to bear spiritual fruit.

May all of us serve and live by faith!