Treasure Hunting
What a great way to celebrate family day weekend by having both our east and west congregations worship together in our West Worship Centre. One of the worship songs, ‘Great is the Lord’ helped us look back and deeply thank the Lord for all the works He has done in our lives.
It perfectly sets the tone for the message that day on finding our treasure.
As Pastor Jong pointed out, what we do in life is due to our desire to have a better life. If we think about it, it is true or else why do we do the things we do — work, study hard, want to find a partner in life, live in another country, let go of a bad relationship, etc?
Like a treasure hunt, it is a quest for the good life. The good news from last Sunday is we can avail of the key to this treasure.
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure that a man discovered hidden in a field. In his excitement, he hid it again and sold everything he owned to get enough money to buy the field.” Matthew 13:44
The verse is saying that the key to finding our treasure is the lordship of God in one’s life. Jesus, in this parable, was referring to the Kingdom of Heaven as the lordship of God in our lives. If we have God in our life and we let him direct the path, we have everything. We are assured that when He asks us to do something, we can trust in His sovereignty and that He has our best interest in mind. In our finite minds, we don’t always see the big picture. We can’t even see our own future, that when God asks us to give up something, we hesitate. We were reminded from the sermon, that when God asks you to give up something, He is simply making room for more blessings.
One caveat though to allowing that lordship means having to sacrifice. To want what God wants, not what we want. Does this make our lives miserable? The parable describes the farmer as excited and in other translations, it says, “in his joy he went away and sold everything.” Jesus was warning us from this parable about joyless Christianity. He does not want us to be like the Pharisees at that time who were doing everything religious but were missing the point. If we see more of the wintery cold Sunday mornings to go to church or of those times after work to do ministry work, rather than seeing it as a way to commune with the Lord, then we too, could be missing the point. If we love, we don’t mind the steps we had to take to the point that they no longer feels like sacrifices. It is joy enough to be with Him.
Pastor Jong also testified on how the Lord had asked him to go as a full time pastor many years back. It was a very hard decision at that time. Having seen what other pastors go through, he was afraid to go hungry one day. Fast forward to today, he recounted the many countries that God has allowed him to see, for free because of the invitations to preach. He was not just well-fed, God has even brought him and his family to Canada, one of the ideal places to live. They were not even aspired for or planned for, he was just doing what God had asked him to do. For sure, there a lot of testimonies of God’s goodness such as these. God can surely show us great and mighty things far more than we can imagine – don’t settle for less.
– Ailene Oliveros
