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Text :
Sermon Title : אֵ֥ל עוֹלָֽם – El Olam
Occasion : English Sanctuary Service
Location : Paya Lebar Methodist Sanctuary
MPP : We can trust in the God because of his eternality
<pray>
Good morning/afternoon,
A few months ago, I attended a Christian men’s retreat that was organised by the Methodist Church called the Emmaus Walk…
How I found myself there is another story all of its own and perhaps I’ll share that story some other time… but not today…
The point is that at the retreat,
most of the attendees do not know each other,
since we came from the various Methodist churches in Singapore…
So, when we were gathered into groups,
One of the first things we did was to chit-chat
To try to get to know each other a little more…
And I’m not sure whether you have the same experience as me…
But when you put a bunch of Singaporean men together who are not familiar with one another,
but forced to talk to one another,
we will try to look for something common to talk about…
For Christians, other than sharing their names, the ministries they are serving in,
The conversation will almost indivertibly go back to an experience that every Singaporean Son born after 1949 would go through…
That’s right…
National Service… NS…
Almost every conversation that a group of Singaporean males engage in when you don’t know what to say, other than politics of course…
Will end up in a discussion on their NS experience…
This is true no matter where you are in the world,
Or your background…
No matter whether you’re in London or Lausanne,
Hawaii or Hong Kong,
Even in Timbuktu
It is the same…
after exchanging names,
and occupations,
How bad the weather is,
It will end up about how bad your sergeant is for making you do stand-by bed…
How you had to starch your uniforms until it could be placed upright without support…
How you had to be confined over the weekend because your rifle wasn’t clean enough…
Well, the point is this was exactly what happened at the retreat as well…
And one of the things we talked about was how instructional methods have evolved over the years,
Specifically, with regard to how new recruits were taught to swim…
One of the more senior members of our group
(let’s call him Boon) said
“you know ah… you guys have it so good nowadays…
Nowadays there’s so much emphasis on safety and lesson plans…
Everything is so well planned out…
Do you know what was swimming lesson like for us or not?
We will be divided into two groups…
The swimmers and the non-swimmers…
Turning to the swimmers the instructor will say ‘ok… you whole lot go ahead and swim 20 laps then when you’re done, you guys can go for canteen break…’
Then he will turn to the non-swimmers like Boon,
He said ‘ok… you all jump into the pool now’
Boon then said he and the rest of the recruits started walking towards the shallow end of the pool…
To which the instructor say…
‘no lah… jump in here…’
‘Here?’ <B>
‘yes, here…’ <I>
‘but we can’t swim’ <B>
‘that’s why you need to jump in’ <I>
Boon then shared with us that obviously it didn’t make sense to him…
But as you know lah…
In the earlier days, we all recruits don’t ask questions one…
Instructor say jump, we jump first then think later…
So that’s what happened…
Boon was asked to jump… he jumped…
And into the pool they went and because they all couldn’t swim, they were all struggling…
Then what happened?
The instructor threw a rope to them…
Wah… at least this instructor has a heart…
At least this instructor was able to pull the rope to safety…
So Boon grabbed the rope desperately,
And pulled on the rope…
He pulled and he pulled
And you know what happened?
<pause>
Before he knew, he realised that he was holding on to the end of the rope…
<pause>
The rope wasn’t tied to anything or held on by anyone…
The rope was just that… a rope…
To someone struggling to stay afloat in the water… it was quite useless…
The rope was finite and wasn’t connected to anything else…
And with the finiteness of the rope, accordingly, there was a finiteness of the hope, and dependability…
The rope was only an illusion of safety and dependability…
Well, in case you need closure from the story,
Boon managed to get to the side of the pool eventually and eventually climbed out of the pool gasping and coughing…
At least point of time, I would like to assure you two things…
One is that the standard and methodology of military training for our recruits had improved leaps and bounds since then…
No more Hokkien 兵instructors…
So parents… 放心 (don’t worry)
And the second is that there is a point in this story…
Which is that unlike a finite entity like the rope that is truly unreliable,
And really an illusion…
Our God is an infinite and eternal being…
And it is this nature of God as revealed to us through His name as
אֵ֥ל עוֹלָֽם (El Olam) Eternal God
That we are going to focus on today…
And to help guide our meditation this morning, let us now turn to Isaiah 40:28-31
and let us read these few verses together:
“Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God (אֱלֹהֵ֨י עוֹלָ֤ם [Elo-he-Olam]),
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