Skip to main content

Intentionally Placed

Sermon by Senior Ps Daniel Khong at the Faith Community Baptist Church at 10th Aug 2025.



Question: should Christians be patriotic or should they just focus on the kingdom of heaven? 


Scripture: Jeremiah 29 talks about the letter that Jeremy send to the exiles from Jerusalem to Babylon. The letter asked that the people live well, marry and work hard, and pray for the prosperity for the city.

Jerusalem 29:11 is probably one of the most famous versus in the Bible where it talks about God having a plan to prosper and not to harm. Despite Jerusalem being destroyed and and many people exiled to Babylon, the letter instructed the people of Israel to seek the peace and prosperity of the city. God intentionally placed all of us in Singapore, and it is not a coincidence. 

Why should we care for our country?

1. God prepared our country for us 

Where we are born is spiritually significant. Psalm 139 tells us that God is intentionally crafted us from our mother's womb, so God also decides where we are born. The Israelites have sinned and God has given them to the Babylonians. It may not their true home, but God asked them to seek the prosperity of Babylon, and the Israelites will also prosper. 

2. God calls us to our country 

What makes the country are its people. Jer 29:4 says that God carried carried the people into exile to Babylon. When God calls Singapore,  he is calling the people of Singapore. 

3. God fulfills his plan for our country through us

God promises that he will bring us to a new home, and reminded that we have a hope and a future. Babylon as a result was blessed by 4 men who were exiles sent to Babylon.  Because of these 4 - Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego - even the king admitted that he is blessed. Babylon and Singapore is not perfect but God is perfect. 


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