Skip to main content

A Godly Example

Sermon by Ps. Roland Lee in the Faith Community Baptist Church 14 Jun 2025 (Father's Day). 


Background

The world is always looking for identity,  healing, direction and real values. But what God provides is a godly example. How we live our life has an impact to others. 

Scripture: Joshua 24:4-15

Joshua has led the people for many years and in his final speech, he reaffirms his faith to his people that in whatever the circumstances, he and his family will serve the Lord. 

How can we godly examples to bless others?

1. We must live in godly fear - become a person of purity

Godly fear does not mean to be scared of God. It is to be in awe and reverence for God. It means to live in constant knowledge that he is near, that we will live according to his ways. 

Jesus summarizes this to 2 commands: to love God, and to love people. Purity is not just avoiding sin but it's our heart's devotion to God - to do what is right even when no one is looking. Our purity becomes a testimony to others as God's holiness shapes our choices. 

Note: purity is not instant perfection.  It is a heart posture that says "God, I want to honor you in my action, thoughts and actions".

2. We must live in godly faithfulness - becomes a person of purpose 

The last words  of Joshua is to declare that for he and his household,  he will serve the Lord. This is after years of leadership,  with failures,  temptations, etc. It is not about single action, but something to be repeated again and again. Jesus mentioned that if we seek the kingdom of God, he will give us everything we need (not the wants in our lives).

Although we are Christian,  we are often chasing other gods. Joshua asked us to throw away other gods and seek the Lord. We have to throw away the gods  of worldliness so that other may see the difference Christ made in us. Faithfulness is serving God is about obedience,  not that we need to be successful in all things.  We must still be faithful in setting the right example situation the next generation will continue to lead the life of faithfulness.

Our confidence is not in our ability to become pure and faithful. Our confidence is in the mercies of our God to help us to become more like him. 
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Time Management or is it really Project Management?

We have been told since young by others that in order to do something well, we need to have good time management.  As one who leads projects for a living who knows a thing or two about this, I will say that time management is a fallacy.  Purely speaking, time management  (just like managing people) refers to managing time in which we control time, i.e. we can accelerate it (to make it go faster), slow it down, or to stop time. We can do this with a lot of things but we cannot manage time - it continues to chug along, whether we like it or not. If you were to ask me the time and my answer is, say 9:00am, that time is already gone because it is 9:01am when you continue with what you are doing.  Time is like a freight train or a subway that we can only latch on to and hope we can do things within the allotted time. Ask the student who needs to submit the paper at 11:59pm Sunday night or the employee who need to submit the report Mon morning 9:00am.  In truth, what ...
Read more

The Mental You - Reducing Stress part 2

Just like there are always 2 sides to each story (the good and the bad), we can tackle issues in 2 ways - either head on or perhaps we can do something opposite altogether. The previous post is primarily concerned on how to overcome stress by reducing it. Another way is to focus on something totally unrelated to stress. So, rather than looking at fixing the bad, we focus on the good such that there is little room for the bad.  Let's work on this together... Positive Thinking  What do you see if you turn on the news, or start looking at social media? More often than not, aside from the beautiful people and cute cats, the news is mostly gloom and doom. There are wars and rumors of wars, climate change due to global warming causing floods, and other disasters, earthquakes at various parts of the world. So, it's no uncommon for us to no longer see the world in rose-tinted glasses but glasses with murky lenses. And yet, to reduce stress, this is the one thing we must do - to think ...
Read more

Parenting

How did you do it? This question has been asked by many of my friends and colleagues when they found out about my children. We had initially thought that what we went through is typical. But as we talked to more and more people, it is only then we realized that the journey is not so common after all.  Singapore has been ranked amongst the top countries in the world by PISA, short for the Program for International Student Assessment that is under the OECD umbrella. In some years, it is actually ranked number 1. In other words, to be able to get through the Singapore education system is difficult enough as it is.  The Journey to College  By the grace of God, both my kids did well in the system by being selected into the Gifted Education Program (GEP) - for the top 1% of students - and then getting into Raffles Institution (supposedly the number 1 school in Singapore), and achieving straight As in the Singapore-GCE Cambridge "A" levels, and then receiving offers from a few o...
Read more