Barely Saved

“…he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through flames.”
1 Co 3:15

Being saved is merely the beginning of our spiritual journey, not the ending, yet many people don’t seem to believe this by the way they act after they become Christians.

“Now what?” Some newly-weds may ask this question after they tie the knot and must from then on face the nitty gritty of living together as a couple, adjusting to each other’s idiosyncrasies, which may be more difficult than they ever imagined.

“There has to be a lot more than just this,” some couples may grumble, feeling a little dismayed about the prospect of spending their entire lives with a person for whom they may have started to develop a sense of contempt.

The passion between lovers may easily turn into a fiery furnace in which they are confined if they fail to convert their erotic love for each other into agape love. Our marriage will definitely thrive if we cultivate and nurture it according to God’s commands.

We can’t help but to fall in love with Jesus if we come to know him as he is. Unfortunately many Christians only know him as a Savior, not as a soul mate with whom we may have intimate friendship and fellowship. What the Lord desires to find in his children the most isn’t necessarily holiness or faithfulness; it is their deep love for him that he truly craves. Of course we will likely have the former if we have the latter. The two are not mutually exclusive. We know the reason why he wasn’t pleased with the church in Ephesus as depicted in the book of Revelation – they had lost their first love.

Love is what sustains all things in life and pure love is the only article that can withstand the test of fire. Apart from their love for God, even martyrs die in vain. What will remain on earth after we pass on and what we will take away with us into eternity are works of charity and nothing else. They are the tasks we perform primarily for the love of God and secondary for the love of our neighbors. Nothing beyond these things will remain after they are put to the fire.

I believe what my father-in-law has done with his life has gone forward before he himself moves on into eternity. He seems to be joyful yet the earthly tent of his has ceased to serve him as it used to and he appears to be more suitable for heaven than this world. He remains on earth merely for his children’s sake, but his life will be much fuller if he moves on, for unlike some of us who are saved by the skin of our teeth because of our lack of love for God and our fellowmen, he will just enter into heaven gracefully when the time comes. I pray that the love of God will sustain me like it has grandpa till the end and I will do all things out of nothing else but my love for God.

What kind of shape will we be in when we finally return home to our Father? Will we be like the prodigal son who ran to his father after he merely escaped from the flames of the sinful world?

Revealed with Fire

“It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work.” 1 Co 3:13

Adversity does not build character, it reveals it.” This is what I have often read in the sports pages. The way we deal with stress and defeat reflects who we really are. Anybody can handle success with relative ease, but dealing with failure is another story.

What fire does is to reveal and to expose, and to turn all the filth and dross into ashes. No one, except Daniel’s three friends, could walk into the flame and come out unscathed. I am afraid when my work is tested at the end time, it will be reduced to a small pile of ashes.

“Get your works published,” my son urged me a while ago while we were discussing the subject of natural talent.

“No way,” I replied. “They are just not good enough. Besides, it would be better if I light a match to them and turn them into ashes,” I added, with the utmost seriousness. That’s exactly what’s going to take place eventually, so why not save the Lord some trouble by taking the matter into my own hands.

There is just so much narcissism and self-adsorption in my writings anyway, and it may put me to great shame when the truth is revealed by fire. Besides, I don’t want the evidence of my intellectual crime to be displayed on the bookshelf of libraries.

The hardest thing for writers to do is to escape from their personality in the process of their composing. No one likes to listen to a person who is full of himself, spewing out his unbridled emotion everywhere. Being a poet and a fan of T.S. Eliot, I haven’t really adhered to the statement he made in his essay about poetry as “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

What must be done is for our personality to be transformed into God’s personality, therefore “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” and whatever we write should be an expression of Christ in us.

We continue to be transformed in the course of our service. The more we put Christ into our spiritual buildings, the greater will be the chances of it withstanding the test of fire. Our works will emerge unscathed if they are all about Christ, and nothing about us, all about bringing glory to God, and nothing about boosting my own ego and enhancing my own image.

Isn’t it that what “living sacrifice” should mean to all of us? We place whatever we have on the altar to be burned, and the fire will consume all the dross and impurity and only the purest will be presented to God. We are being purified daily by adversities and consumed by our inability to be holy and, at the end, there is nothing left but our broken selves with contrite and repentant hearts.

Foundation

“For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.” 1 Co 3:11

“If God is the final answer to all things, then we will surely lose our intellectual curiosity about all things,” someone commented to me the other day.

“It’s not that much fun getting lost in a maze,” I replied.

I used to have a similar idea to his and was quite proud of being someone who carved his own direction and found his own answers in life. I was lost and enjoyed being lost, for it was so thrilling searching for an exit in the giant maze of life.

I was a moth that rushed to the fire, mistaking a burning flame for a guiding light and ended up scorched many times.

“The joy lies in the search, not in the approach of our final destination,” he remarked, ignoring what I had to say about the issue.

“Is he a man, is man he?” This is one of the lines of the very first poem that I wrote. I envisioned myself as a superman of sorts.

Those who try to rise above humanity sink below it. I came across this line somewhere in my reading. That’s what I was as a young man for a season. I was drowning literally, until I found a strong hand that pulled me up from a moss-covered rock.

Is God the ultimate obstacle of our self-realization and self-actualization, or is he Jacob’s ladder leading to heaven by which we can climb to highest of high? If the foundation has already been laid, why do we still labor day and night to lay a new one? Is it because we don’t believe the foundation is strong enough to support us?

I didn’t usually venture out too far in my search for truth during my youth, for I was somewhat intellectually-challenged, and I suppose a lot of smart people could go a lot farther that I ever did, but all of them ended up hitting a roadblock just the same on the way and found themselves lost and depressed. The only joy of traveling is returning home, so some people say, but constant sojourning tends to make weary travelers restless and homeless.

“The foundation has been laid!” I cry out day and night like John the Baptist once did in the wilderness, yet my message has fallen on deaf ears and closed hearts. Christ has come and gone; yet we continue to search for him in the form of arts and literature, music and drama, science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics.

Some of the drinking buddies of my youth have become scholars and professors, but I suspect that they are still wrestling with the issues that we used to discuss deep into the night over beer and wine, and the resolutions we came up with after long deliberation were drenched by our drunken stupor and have long been buried under the sands of time.

Hooding

I uttered a quick prayer of thanksgiving as I was walking on stage to hood Michael because, besides the great effort he put into his study thus far in his medical career, the Lord has been with him every step of the way and enabled him to complete what’s commonly considered the most difficult among all professional degrees. Michael has worked very hard and done quite well and for that I thank the Lord.

I am also thankful that Rob and Sahar flew back from NYC to attend Michael’s convocation and commencement. William is also home to be a part of our celebration. It has been quite a happy time for the Sea family and the first reunion of sorts since Christmas. Justin also flew in from Dallas to share with us the joy of Michael becoming a doctor. He is such a joy to us and it is the highlight of the day whenever he comes in.

I seemed to have spent five plus years to earn a doctoral degree for nothing but the privilege of hooding one of my boys, but it was well worth it and I am looking forward to hooding the other two someday. The Lord is good and may his name to be lifted up and praised.