Following God Starts from “Listening”

I thank God! On the first day of our church’s 40 days of Fasting and Prayer, C-Mo and I brought our curator staff and the senior pastors of our Hong Kong branch churches to Cheung Chau for a retreat. As we prayed together, God’s presence came down among us, revealing to us our sins and also the need for us as priests and Levites to take the lead in repentance. He revealed to us the keys in leading the whole church in fasting and prayer: worship, repentance and mercy.

God has been leading us since the conception of this fast. A while back, we were reading “Judges” in Morning Devotion, which said “in those days there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” There was no king among the people, as the priests and Levites did not fulfill their responsibilities to speak up! This is the background of the time of Judges. By the time of Chapter 17, a Levite finally did speak, and immediately he plunged the nation into an even darker time of chaos. The Israelites began to worship idols and even went on to destroy a whole tribe. They were full of sins. So confession of sins and repentance must start with the priests and Levites!

Next in Morning Devotion, we came to “Hebrews,” which said that Jesus is the One who leads us to the Heavenly tabernacle. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need! God has prepared rest for us, but because we would not listen, we failed to enter into His rest. So in these 40 days of fasting and praying, the first sin that we have to confess is “not listening”. When we don’t listen, we cannot follow God. But most of the times we think of ourselves as listening, even though we are not.

During our retreat in Cheung Chau, we found that the house where C-Mo and I stayed at right after getting married, was just behind a “boundary stone.” 15 of these “boundary stones” marked an area designated by the British Government for foreign citizens to reside. This ordinance was passed in the early 20th century – and ever since, many Western missionaries to China lived in this designated area.

When C-Mo and I lived there, we would often pass by these stones without knowing about this history of the area and its missionaries. This revealed to me that God has been speaking without me hearing! We need to really confess that we are deaf and blind. God has spoken to us, yet we have neither listened nor seen. During this period of fasting and prayer, we as priests and Levites must confess our sin of not listening, and we must take the lead to listen to God’s word, in order to follow Him.

In preparing the whole church for the 40-day fasting and praying, C-Mo and Pastor Anna have both received Isaiah 58, which mentions observation of the Sabbath day. Coincidentally, I have been preparing to preach in March the Fourth Commandment: “Observe the Sabbath day, keep it holy”. Is this really a coincidence? God is speaking, let us listen!

Dear brothers and sisters, as we face the pandemic its economic difficulty, let us try harder to find rest before God. Recently, the hot topic has been “which vaccine shall I take? When shall I take it?” In man’s eyes, vaccines are very important. But in the eyes of believers – we do not need to refuse or argue about these things, as we take priority to believe that God will help us. I pray that we will become a people who listen to God through fasting, prayer, and repentance, so that we can follow God and find rest in Him. [2021.02.28]