Category: Faith

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Letters of the Law: a letter to my 19-year-old self

Had the privilege to participate in this meaningful initiative by some law students. I hope my juniors at their crossroads will be at least a little aided by this reflection, a letter addressed to my 19-year-old self who just resigned himself to accepting NUS Law.

http://www.lettersofthelaw.org/read-a…/ronald-jj-wong-lawyer

“Dear Ronald,

It may be rough for you right now, I know. You are struggling with intellectual skepticism of just about everything. There’s a gnawing void in your heart and soul. You messed up your application to Oxford. You have neither the funds nor a scholarship to go to any of the U.S. colleges offered to you. Your fanciful idea of becoming an investment banker and earning heaps of money so you can retire early seems out of reach. And you might feel disappointed about having to take up the offer from NUS Law. Everything doesn’t make sense to you now.

Believe me. Those things are some of the best things that will happen to you. Because it is in the ashes of those broken ambitions and the intellectual and emotional vacuum of fallen mental frameworks and fractured relationships that you will soon find purpose, meaning and community.

You will finally encounter in a metaphysical way the one through whom everything will become clear. You will find enjoyment not just in studying the law but also in the justice that undergirds it. You will experience a holy dissatisfaction with the conception of justice, or injustice, you will witness. And you will dig in ancient places for the justice which satisfies. Through that, you will find purpose and significance in the one who out of justice and mercy redeems you from the injustice you are complicit in, who calls you to pursue justice and mercy among those who are often left at the margins. This will be better than money or status or whatever idea of the good life you think you could have with your silly fanciful ambitions.

Don’t fuss about grades. Instead, work hard to receive a proper education. Learn as much as you can to be a good lawyer. And when it is time, you will have to make a difficult decision, a leap of faith, as it were, to follow through with the convictions which will brew inside you after the restlessness you will experience from the dissonance between purpose and reality. Uncertainty is the best place in which faith will reap much harvest. So don’t fear the dark. Go with what has been revealed in the light.

Pursuing the things which are good and right is tiring and difficult. Friendships and community and being are more valuable than activism and fighting and working. That will help you to be faithful to whatever you are called to.

And you will have joy. It’s not the ecstatic kind of joy. It’s a quiet joy. It will co-exist with the sehnsucht which will always simmer in your heart. It is both the joy and the yearning which will sustain you to carry on.

Don’t fear. Have faith. It will all be alright at the end of all things.

Peace,

Ronald”

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Faith and Works of Transformation and Action (James 2)

“You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works” – James 2:22

The faith vs works tension has been debated by the Universal Church since its birth.

Some people think, even Bible translations like the NLT translate, works as “good works”, that is acts of kindness, charity, justice and mercy.

But the 2 examples James, the Bishop of Jerusalem, raised in the passage suggest it is not “good works”. Instead, the “works” refer to any choices and actions of a person.

Continue reading “Faith and Works of Transformation and Action (James 2)”

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Book Review: Dev Menon, Stirring Stale Waters: How Martin Luther Helps Us Find Joy In Our Baptism

Dev Menon's Stirring Stale Waters: How Martin Luther Helps Us Find Joy In Our Baptism
Just finished reading Dev Menon‘s “Stirring Stale Waters: How Martin Luther Helps Us Find Joy In Our Baptism”. 
 
I dare say this is the best treatment of baptism I have ever come across (well, I haven’t come across that many).
 
It is accessible: at only 80 short pages, I finished it in less than an hour.
 
It is pastoral: I finished it feeling like having gone through baptism was one of the best things that happened to me. He addresses various typical attitudes to baptism: (i) those who feel they are never good enough for it; (ii) those who were confident of their faith, fell away, and now wants a restart; (iii) those who think baptism is unnecessary; (iv) those who question child baptism; and (v) those of us who sit through baptism services feeling like it’s completely irrelevant to us.
 
It is theological: Dev draws from the wells of the Reformation dude, Martin Luther (incidentally, it’s the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation next year) but simplifies it for us.
 
I shamelessly plug for him. Read this book. You will cherish your baptism. You will want to be baptised. You will rejoice at every baptism service. Because you will know the promise of God that you are His beloved.
 
It only costs S$10. Get a copy from him at dev@zionbishan.org.sg.
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Advocating for Survivors of ISIS’s Genocide of Christians and Yzidis in Syria and Comforting the Oppressed and Trafficked in the Middle East

Advocating for Survivors of ISIS’s Genocide of Christians and Yzidis in Syria and Comforting the Oppressed and Trafficked in the Middle East

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ALf_6FLNg44

This short film tells the stories of many Syrian Christians who watched their loved ones tortured and killed at the hands of men who hated their religion and their God. The martyrs were unfazed at the hands of their tormentors. “I am blessed because I am persecuted for my Yeshua,” cried a lady who was tied to a pole in the middle of the street in Aleppo, spat on and punched day after day. A man was crucified in the city, having the glory to die in the same manner as his own saviour. These were the stories I heard tonight from Jacqueline and Yvette Isaac, a mother-daughter team of Egyptian Christians who started Roads of Success, a humanitarian NGO which provides support and care to the downtrodden and oppressed, and advocates for those whose stories have been suppressed.

Continue reading “Advocating for Survivors of ISIS’s Genocide of Christians and Yzidis in Syria and Comforting the Oppressed and Trafficked in the Middle East”

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Face the fiery furnace in faith than cower in fear

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.”

– Daniel 3:16-18

At times we may be tempted to, and other times forced to, fall on our knees to worship things which do not deserve our worship. Money, career, bosses, social pressures and expectations, state, and so on. And there’s a fear that if we say no to worshipping these, we will be thrown into the fiery furnace. Indeed, the world lives on fear. Fear of superiors, fear of harm, fear of losing out to others, fear of insufficiency, fear of missing out, fear of being left out. And fear makes us do things which we shouldn’t. But we justify it and say, it’s the way of life. We have no choice.

There is a choice. The choice is to say no in faith. Faith does not say, I’ll do this and certainly succeed, or I’ll certainly prosper. No, faith says, I’ll do this and trust that my God will do what’s best. And even if I should suffer for it, I will stick to my guns, because I am certain of my convictions; I am certain of my God who ultimately works for my good for I do this out of faith and love, and I am called according to His good purposes.

Thus, faith assures us shalom. Even in the middle of the fiery furnace, we can have peace and joy. Because we know, whether we see him or not, there is someone who’s beside us in the furnace, one who is awesome and powerful, who is the Son of God.

May we always choose to face the fiery furnace in faith than cower in fear.

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Unger, Phang, Politics & Prayer

“When philosophy has gained the truth of which it is capable, it passes into politics and prayer, politics through which the world is changed, prayer through which men ask God to complete the change of the world by carrying them into His presence and giving them what, left to themselves, they would always lack.”

  • Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1975) at 294.

“And, as the reader might have discerned by now, I do believe in God and in the higher knowledge that cannot be ours. And that explains why I believe that Unger (or any other theorist) cannot postulate an even close to perfect theory. That this is so is demonstrated by the complex mesh of critique and counter-critique that have, as their central focus, the influential theory or theories of the day. Indeed, Unger himself believed that to be so in Knowledge and Politics, although his present views are rather less obvious. I see nothing terribly frightening in this acknowledgment of the fallibility of human knowledge which we nevertheless continue to use whilst functioning as human beings. It also mandates a humility which has, in any event, always been the hallmark of the great scholars of our time.”

  • Andrew Phang, “Toward Critique and Reconstruction. Roberto Unger on Law, Passion and Politics”, Hull University Law School, Studies in Law (1993) at 78