Gospel

God is NOT Anti-System

July 31, 2018 By Daniel Im

In 1995, astronomers thought there were were only 3000 galaxies.

Close to 10 years later, they realized there were 10,000. And now, through the Hubble telescope, they are estimating 100 billion!

Consider the vastness of our solar system, and how intricately connected it is to each other and to other systems in the universe. If the sun were to die out, it would blow away half of its mass, inflate itself, and swallow the earth. After that, this would push Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune way out and off their orbit. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

Don’t you find it fascinating that one of the first things God created was in fact, a system? The solar system? The system of the universe?

This goes to show us that He is not anti-systems in anyway.

One of the first things God created was a system—the solar system.

Click To Tweet

I recently came across another system that you might not have heard about…

I learnt about it from a TED talk on how trees talk to each other—the system is called a mycorrhizal network.

The Lost Art of People Watching…and Why it Still Matters

February 13, 2018 By Daniel Im

I used to be good at people watching.

Now I never called it that because it was never a thing that people did intentionally.

Before smart phones, if you were going to get together with your friends or family, you would just set a time and a place and expect people to be there. If you got there before everyone else, you wouldn’t take your phone out and check Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, since that didn’t exist (I know, it is hard to remember that there was even such a time).

Instead, you just looked around.

If someone were doing something out of the ordinary, you would notice. If a mother were scolding her child for throwing a fit in public, you would look in that direction or slightly to the side, so as to not give the impression that you were eavesdropping. If a couple were on a date, you would try to guess where they were going, the status of their relationship, and if they were a good fit.

With the advent of smart phones and social media, you might have thought that people watching has turned into a lost art. Not so! People watching has merely moved from the physical sphere to the digital space.

A Both/And Approach to Sharing the Gospel

October 17, 2017 By Daniel Im

I remember walking through my college cafeteria with the Four Spiritual Laws in hand looking for people who might be interested in having a spiritual conversation with me.

Sometimes I’d open up the conversation with, “If you were to die tonight, do you know where you would go?” Or I’d ask, “On a scale of 1–10, how interested are you in spiritual conversations?”

I was often rejected…

Other times, I was met with skepticism. And on the odd occasion, I was actually able to share the gospel and see that individual discover a new life in Christ.

While evangelism strategies that rely solely on the verbal proclamation of the gospel still have their place, they are definitely waning in influence.

The solution is not necessarily to swing the pendulum the other way and just live out the gospel and love people to conversion, either.

Tim Keller frames it well,

If the gospel were primarily about what we must do to be saved, it could be communicated as well by actions (to be imitated) as by words. But if the gospel is primarily about what God has done to save us, and how we can receive it through faith, it can only be expressed through words. Faith cannot come without hearing.[1]

Since the gospel is more about what God has done than what we can do, it needs to be proclaimed through words.

But since crusades, street preaching, and spontaneous evangelism are waning in their effectiveness and influence in many parts of the West, we need to figure out different ways to invite non-Christians into the types of environments where they can hear the gospel proclaimed to them.

This is why we need a both/and approach to sharing the gospel!

There needs to be something different about the way Christians live that forces non-Christians to ask questions. If a non-Christian looks at your life and sees the same fruit, or lack thereof, as theirs, they will see your faith as mere empty religious behavior. Isn’t that why Peter urges us to live as “foreigners and exiles” and “to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul” (1 Pet. 2:11)?

We need to live as outsiders and be distinctly different from society. We need to “live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Pet. 2:12)!

Becoming Fluent in the Gospel

July 4, 2017 By Daniel Im

Three months…

It was going to be three months of doing my own laundry. Three months of cooking my own meals. Three months of working a real job. And three months in French…

It was the summer before my senior year in university, and I had signed up for a three-month mission trip with Campus Crusade for Christ. It was called Montreal Project.

The idea is that we would learn how to see life as mission and mission as life.

During the day, we would work a real job. During the evenings, we would be discipled, disciple others, and evangelize. On the weekends, we would do outreach and bless the community.

It was a missional missions trip before missional was cool.

Do you see life as mission and mission as life?