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Let us now listen to the word, of the Lord…

Sermon Title : 3… 2… 1…

Occasion : English Watchnight Service

Location : Paya Lebar Methodist Church Sanctuary

MPP : Make Communion with God your Primary Obsession this new year

Let us now listen to the word, of the Lord…

14 The Lord replied, “I will personally go with you, Moses, and I will give you rest—everything will be fine for you.”

15 Then Moses said, “If you don’t personally go with us, don’t make us leave this place.

16 How will anyone know that you look favorably on me—on me and on your people—if you don’t go with us? For your presence among us sets your people and me apart from all other people on the earth.”

17 The Lord replied to Moses, “I will indeed do what you have asked, for I look favorably on you, and I know you by name.” [1] ( [ NLT])

This is the word of the Lord…

Let us pray…

Good night, Church!

Not many preachers have the opportunity to say that at the beginning of the sermon but what a privilege it is to be able to share at a very significant epoch in our Christian Calendar…

And what’s more, being able to do that within the first six months of my full-time ministry…

You know, I’m so tempted to drag my sharing tonight a little longer so that I can brag to my colleagues that in my first year as a Member-on-Trial, I preached a sermon that began in 2018 and ended in 2019… a sermon that spanned two years…

But if I want to continue being a pastor beyond the first year, I’d better be obedient and keep to the time allocated to me…

Yes, time is a precious resource especially at this time of the year, when there is that much time before the new year is upon us, and I would need to steward it very carefully not just for tonight to ensure that I do not go overtime and incur the wrath of everyone here, but also for the rest of my ministry, to ensure that I am that limited resource in the best way possible so as not to waste that precious resource, referring both that allocated to me as well as that allocated to others…

For me, that means being prepared for the meetings I go to by pre-reading and pre-thinking of the issues, putting in sufficient thoughts, research and prayers for my sermons and being intentional when I call for meetings…

That’s for me… and you would like to think of what that translates to for you…

Yes, time is a resource that is very precious because as the old saying goes, “money cannot buy time” and it is moments like right now, when the clock is ticking and we are reminded have just that much time on earth… what would we do about it?

Anyway, speaking about doing research, during the time when I was preparing for tonight’s message, the show “First Man” was being screened in the theatres and being an Aerospace Engineer by training and someone having deep interest in interglacial travel I was naturally drawn to the movie…

In case you are not familiar with the movie, it is based on story of Neil Armstrong, the first person that walked on the moon, the struggles he went through, and the sacrifices and hence, the opportunities they had to forgo as he and his crew made the almost decade-long preparatory process to ready themselves for the ride to the moon…

Then, just like Neil Armstrong, I had to make a decision because of the limited resource that I had…

You see, the run for the movie was absolutely short… perhaps because not many people are interested in spacecraft and space travel just like me…

And you know it because you can observe from the websites of the various cinemas that the number of screen times for the movies are reduced at an almost exponential rate over the time…

So, I made up my mind to catch the show on my off day…

Then my wife told me that our friend and her are going to Johor Bahru for a day trip on that Monday and invited me to join them...

At that point of time, I had to evaluate the options and make a careful decision...

I figured that it was too dangerous to incur the wrath of my wife, I decided that spending time with my wife is an opportunity that I should not give up on....

Both going to JB with my wife and doing an activity I enjoy are both opportunities and because I could only fulfil one of them on my off day, choosing one over the other would therefore incur an opportunity cost over the other…

I didn’t have the opportunity capital to be able to do both…

Eventually, I recognised that I have not many opportunities to bond with my wife and our friend and therefore I decided to exercise my opportunity capital on what I thought was the more important thing… My wife…

I figured that spending time with my wife is more important than watching a movie and all the wives in congregation say…

Because sometimes when we lose certain opportunities, we may not have the same opportunities anymore…

Your children are only young once, you may never see that stranger you see on the MRT ever again, you may never have the chance to say goodbye to that friend or relative who is on his deathbed…

Not sure how that translates to you, but to me, I seek the constant counsel of the lord to make full use of the limited opportunities I’ve been presented with, and the consciousness to know that they exist.

Anyway, even though I didn’t have the chance to catch the movie, I nevertheless did some research on Apollo 11, and one thing caught my eye… which is that astronauts and cosmonauts are only able to carry with them, a limited amount of personal items for the space travel because of the immense amount of energy that is needed to propel the spacecraft as well as its inhabitants into space…

kind of like why airlines are so particular about how much of your luggage you can bring into the aircraft because if the aircraft is overweight, it cannot sustain flight…

Remembering that in this case, we are only talking about flight within the atmosphere…

So for space flight where the spacecraft would need to overcome the forces of gravity on earth…

And do you know what is the luggage entitlement of the space travellers?

It’s 680g… needs to fit into a box that has the approximate dimensions 20 cm by 13 cm by 5 cm... that’s right…. It’s tiny…

Can you imagine…

You need to travelling a distance of almost 1.5 million km and you cannot even bring along your hymnal into space because it’s too big…

With that limited amount of space and weight entitlement, you need to really think very carefully of what you are going to put inside that little box to accompany you on that long journey…

With that physical limitation of resource, you will need to look at all the wonderful and precious things you would like to take with you into space and carefully evaluate what are the things you need to trim and take out so that what is left behind is truly precious…

and all the less important things will not literally weigh you down…

and this is a picture of our us isn’t it?

We have a limitation of mind-space, emotional-space, and over time we have the tendency to pick up things that occupy our minds… which is affected by what we allow our minds to think about…. And allow our minds to be filled with…

In other words, what we can allow to take centre-stage in our minds is limited…

(it’s true… we’re not as good as multi-tasking as we think we are… and we are not as brilliant as we think… I mean how many of you can solve the Navier-stokes equation? How many of you even know what’s a Navier Stokes equation?)

And the same it is for emotional-space for there is only so much that we can process before one gets entirely drained…

Just ask the counsellors and social workers in our midst…

They can tell you how tired they are at the end of day speaking to people and just processing through the emotions and issues of their clients…

Friends, I have just brought you through 3 examples of how we have limited resources…

I talked about the limitation of time, the limitation of opportunities and the limitation of emotional and cognitive space…

This is the “3” part of my sharing today…

Of course I’m sure there are many other limitations that you can think of and perhaps even face right now…

But in trying to be good stewards of the limited time I have tonight, I see them as sufficient to bring home the point that we are faced with limitations all the time, and many a times we feel that we are stuck with these things…

And being aware of these limitations might perhaps make us feel inadequate or insufficiently incompetent to face the task at hand…

And you’re anxious…

Perhaps the new year will bring for you lots of uncertainty, perhaps you’re going to a new school, transiting from primary to secondary school, or secondary to poly or junior college, perhaps you got a new posting at work, new responsibilities at work, getting a new job, getting a new boss, perhaps you are starting a new phase in your relationship, getting married, having a child, having a grandchild, or going to a new year without someone who had been journeying with you for many years, but will no longer do so because they have migrated somewhere or because they have gone back to the Lord…

Well, if that’s how you feel, friends, let me assure you that you are not alone because if you look at the preceding section of our scriptural text today, Moses was worried and felt inadequate because he was asked to lead the people of Israel and he felt that he just failed because they had just had a terrible episode of idolatry, worshipping an image that they created with their hands and Moses felt like he failed as leader and didn’t know how to continue…

He felt that he wasn’t up to it anymore and wanted to give up….

He felt like how a pastor feels on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning after delivering a bad sermon on Sunday…

But you know what?

Moses pressed into God…

He didn’t give up…

He didn’t turn to something tangible and physical he could see and control with his hands, but he decided to continue to rely on the provision and the guidance of the living God… He made his communion with God his primary obsession…

He recognised that without God, Moses was not able to carry out the tasks at hand and he recognised that with all his limitations, he would not be able to succeed unless God was with him…

And recognised that unless the very presence of God was with Moses, he would not be able to succeed…

He made his communion with God his primary obsession…

Friends, we should learn from Moses tonight as we go into the new year… recognising that we are absolutely limited in our time, opportunities presented to us and our minds…

And as I bring this sermon to a close, let me share with you what the rest of the 2 numbers mean…

First, I have two suggested responses for us as we are confronted with all the uncertainties of the new year,

The first is that we all need to continue to lean on the assurance of God and not turn to the works of our hands…

Do not be like the Israelites and yield to temptation and rather than that the God that they saw bring them out of Egypt with the miraculous acts, they rather trust the gods that they can make with their hands…

Just because Moses their leader was having a bit of a chit-chat with God on Mt Sinai, and took a little longer in his retreat with God, the people decided to literally take matters into their own hands, and fashioned idols that they think they can manipulate to try to determine their future…

Their actions, are driven by their lack of trust in God and by their fear of the unknown… of uncertainties that lie ahead…

Of course, this is not the only situation in the bible where the lack of trust result in less than desirable consequences…

Think of Abraham having a child with Hagar because he did not trust God enough for the promised child, King Saul offering incense when he did not trust God enough to send Samuel to come and offer sacrifices… and the list goes on…

I don’t know how this applies to your particular situation in your life for the coming year…

But the message to all of us tonight is to trust God and to resist the temptation to create our own gods, but we must learn to make our communion with God our primary obsession this coming year

Which naturally brings me to my second part of my suggested response… which is that we all need to learn to rest in Him, learn to discern His voice and seek to obey Him…

The first part of the response was the turning from… now is the turning to…

I’m sure you all heard this millions of times that you need to rest in the Lord, to find your Sabbath and to spend time with the Lord…

But how many of us actually do that?

How do we expect to hear the guidance of God if we do not train to tune our ears to His voice?

Rather than only coming to God whenever we need a favour and treating Him like a genie rather than God, rather than asking Him to bless your business and your life after you made your decisions, treating Him like business vendor or subordinate, let us learn as develop a relationship with God as Moses did until you can discern the heart of God as Moses did… until God can say as He did in v17 “I know you…” and “I am pleased with you”…

Let us trust Him enough and know Him enough so that we can truly say with conviction in our heart as we will say later in our covenant prayer,

Lord, make me what you will. I put myself fully into your hands: put me to doing, put me to suffering, let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you, let me be full, let me be empty, let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and with a willing heart give it all to your pleasure and disposal.

This new year, make communion with God our primary obsession this coming year…

Now that I’ve covered 3 and 2…

What’s 1?

That’s to leave you with just one thing and actually I’ve already repeated it many times tonight…

If you’ve forgotten all that I’ve spoken over the last 20 minutes, you are granted absolution because it is after all, close to midnight… but this one thing you must not forget as we countdown to the new year…

Which is that as we go to the new year…

Let us make communion with God our primary obsession this coming year…

So as I bring this sermon to a close, and as we wait in silence for the new year, let us come to the Lord in the quietness of the night, and incline our ears to Him and seek from Him just one thing we can do… just one thing we can focus on… just one thing…

To help us make communion with God our primary obsession this coming year… Amen…

[1] Tyndale House Publishers, Holy Bible: New Living Translation (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2013), .