When you are young, God seems to always hear your prayers

Does anyone ever remember when they were young and your prayers always seem to be answered? I mean, not all prayers of course, but some (which is good enough as far as I’m concerned). I know not everyone agrees with me, but I believe more prayers are answered when we were younger than when we are adults. Maybe it’s because our requests are simpler when we are young and our expectations less complicated. When I say young I mean right from the time we gain a level of understanding about life and God to know that there is a higher entity we can call out to e.g. probably from 3 or 4 years old onwards. I was not born a Christian, my mother was converted by our Catholic neighbors when I was 15 years old when my father was based in Kuching Sarawak. Of course being a ‘mama’s boy’ (as I am still known today) I followed (my father converted only 10 years later). But even before then, while growing up, the concept of Christianity and ‘God’ was all around me and slowly influencing me, so following my mother seemed a natural progression. When I was about 10, I remember desiring one of those ‘air-fix’ model airplanes i.e. the type where you have to use glue to piece together. I was playing inside my mother’s car, and I took a rubber band that I found, popped my head out the window and shot the rubber band into the sky saying in my heart “God, if you can hear me, I want an air-fix”. Sounds silly, but that’s what I did, and later that day, we went shopping somewhere and mom actually bought me an air-fix! Maybe it was a simple fact that I asked for it when I saw it and mom decided it was cheap enough and bought it for me, but the fact is I asked…and I received. God doesn’t always answer our prayers with wondrous signs and wonders, with pomp and pageantry or explosions and fireworks. Sometimes God answers us in ways that seem so natural and common place that we don’t realize the hand of God is involved. That is just an example of the simple things I asked God for when I was little, and God really answered. Of course as I grew older, I would ask for more complicated things - for deliverance from situations and for certain achievements, and invariably God wouldn’t say ’Yes’ so readily. I guess that’s life. I don’t have the answers. Maybe when we are little we are more innocent and have less accumulated sin than when we are older. Maybe God just loves children so much that He readily grants their wishes, and it’s probably easy to grant them because children usually ask for very harmless things like: God grant me a toy, bring my parents home safely, bring me a friend to play with etc. Just imagine you have two children who beg you to take them to the mall and give them some money: one is your 3 year old daughter who wants to sit the merry go-round at the children’s area at a dollar a ride, and the other is your 16 year old daughter who just maxed out your supplementary credit card and scored poor grades in her exams, she wants to go shopping. You love both children, and you will undoubtedly give them both the best in life. But who are you more likely to give in to? Is God like that? Maybe.

God says “here is your graduation degree, now go & attend your lectures and take your exams”

I usually relate to what Christ did for us on the cross as a loving father who ‘purchases’ a graduation degree for us right from the start. Imagine that we have a Father who ‘owns’ a university, lets call it the University of Heaven (UoH). Our Father loves us so much. He knows that the courses, projects and exams at UoH are going to be very-very tough and challenging. He wants us to graduate as He wants us all to hold degrees from UoH and most importantly be part of its alumni. The trouble with us, His children, is that He knows we are weak, He knows some of us are lazy, He knows some of us are a little slow in understanding and He knows many of us may fail and not graduate. He has seen how we have failed our ‘tests’ over the course of history and how we waste our opportunities by failing to attend lectures, skipping tutorials, cheat in our exams, get distracted by leisure activities and even attack each other. So our Father decides, once and for all, that we are too precious for Him to lose on account of our weakness and failures. He decides, as owner of UoH, to grant all his children graduation degrees. All we have to do…….is ask for it. If we ask for it we shall receive, if we knock on this door of opportunity it will be opened and if we seek out this act of grace we shall find it. Therefore once we have received it, we graduate and our graduation degrees will have our names printed on them, waiting at the hands of our dear Father until we complete our years at UoH. So regardless of how many years we spend at UoH - regardless of whether we spend the full course of time there or whether we drop out early, regardless of whether we pass or fail our exams, regardless of the mistakes, regardless of our weaknesses or acts of mischief, our Father has assured that we will all graduate and receive our degrees. All we need to do is try to pass every test and exam - He wants to see our passion, commitment and faith. It doesn’t matter how smart we are. This is our Fathers act of love and grace for us. This is exactly what we have all received by Jesus suffering and dying on the cross and then rising again on the third day. Our Father in Heaven has given up his only son as a sacrifice, that whosoever believes in Him shall have eternal life. We are all weak and on our own we may not ‘graduate’, but we are assured of ‘graduation’ and become alumni members of Heaven only if we ask for his salvation. He has therefore ‘purchased’ for us our ticket to Heaven. We only need to ask and receive, then do our very best in life, knowing with faith that regardless of how we do, we WILL receive the inheritance of Christ. And it is our love for our Father and His son Jesus that should be sufficient to drive us to ‘attend every lecture’ ,‘study hard’ for every test and ‘diligently complete every project’ so that regardless of the results we can say we lived our lives for Him. This is how much God loves us! We truly live in the age of grace!

Hope for Christian

Have you ever run out of hope before? Isn't it like trying to drain water out of a bottle with a narrow snout, there will always be little drops remaining. Only time will dry up every single drop. Hope never dies immediately, a little of it always remains. Especially when you are a Christian hope is very hard to kill. As a Christian you always hold out for a miracle, even when the world presents no hope and every evidence points to the worst, you know that there is always hope in Christ. Jesus suffered, died and rose again from the dead. He raised Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter from the dead. He healed the sick and gave sight to the blind. He overcame the world and freed us from the penalty of sin. So how can any of us who believe in these truths, ever think that our problems in life cannot be solved? Even when we seem defeated by the world, lose everything we physically posses or even lose our very lives, we still WIN if Jesus is our Lord and Saviour. Our worldly defeats turn into victories if we surrender all to Him, our physical losses will be replenished and renewed and whenever we die we enter His eternal kingdom thus achieving the ultimate prize. So how can we think that the evils of this world can ever defeat us? All their victories are temporary and hollow. Ours is a victory that has already been won. The moment Jesus died and rose from the dead the war against the devil was won. We only need to win as many daily victories as possible, fight the good fight and finish the race. God has already prepared a place for us in His Kingdom. So you can also say that the hope of a Christian is like a natural spring that never runs dry…..you can drain as much water from it as you can, but it will always flow. Hope never dies for a Christian.