"It's Good Friday leh, aren't you supposed to be grieving Jesus' death?" he asked.
I was utterly stunned that it had never occurred to me that I should be doing that over this Easter period. And it had to come from somebody who isn't "very active with his faith" no less.
I wondered why it affected me so much this time round. Deep down below, I wondered why I was so self-righteous to think that I cannot be corrected by somebody whom I perceived to have backslidden quite a bit.
Perhaps that I was caught totally ignorant by his words should have sent a signal to me that all is not dainty with my spiritual state of health.
Maybe I was not exactly in denial of how I stand with God, but I certainly was in denial of the full extent of my lack of a standing with Him.
Friday morning at Good Friday service at my home church, I found myself quickly vacillating from critically shaking my head at what the guest speaker was incorrectly referring to the mob that called for Jesus' death outside Pontius Pilate's office as being "social cohesion," to shaking and tearing uncontrollably when this song played.
My Lord, what love is this
That pays so dearly
That I, the guilty one
May go free
Chorus
Amazing love, O what sacrifice
The Son of God, given for me;
My debts He pays and my death He dies,
That I might live, that I might live.
And so they watched Him die,
Despised, rejected;
But O the blood He shed
Flowed for me.
And now this love of Christ
Shall flow like rivers;
Come wash your guilt away,
Live again.
It was like God extending an invitation for me to �live again.�
Somehow images from the Mel Gibson's film, "Passion of Christ" and the memory of how I flinched so much and was so overcome with emotion when I first watched the film a few years ago flashed across my mind.
And then I recalled what I told Ade Fam on Thursday why I like the 1999 Hillsongs album "By Your Side" so much.
"Because that album reminds me of a time when everything was much simpler and my faith and trust in God was so much stronger," I said.
Why have I allowed things like that to come to pass? To fester and accumulate and now that it's really killing me bit by bit each day, I find myself not being to exercise positive choice when it comes to choosing God on a daily basis.
While it is by God's grace that I haven't fallen by the wayside yet, it is really because I lacked the guts to go against God.
I held back each time because I was fearful of the consequences. My �clean� record now is not a result of my actively choosing God. It is really more a case of negative choice. I haven't fallen simply I haven't had the guts to go against God � yet.
But with my ambivalence increasing day by day, I reckon it would not be long before I finally deny God if nothing is done about the mess right now.
At service just now, I was reminded of how much God loves me. I felt so guilty for forgetting, for being so petulant on insisting on doing the things that I want and for choosing to feel alone when He had already done that for me all those years across when He was crucified.
�Jesus was abandoned by the very one He trusted all His life, so that we might not be alone,� said Pastor Rennis, as he took over the pulpit from the guest speaker at the third exposition.
�But he still found strength in God. He was surrendering in death�God was in Christ, reconciling Himself with the world,� he added.
I took incredible comfort in that.
These were nothing new to me. They have just slipped my mind. And they slipped because I have been so far away. And I have been so far away because I found it a chore to spend time with Him and read His word everyday.
These things are sometimes just so obvious sometimes, but I miss them because they are located in blind spots.
I don�t want to fall away. I really do not want to lead a lonesome existence when I have otherwise. I really do not want to give up eternity for my current parenthetical existence.
It�s just not worth it in the overall scheme of things. It really isn�t.
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