Call to Obey

Sermon by Ps Poh Wee Long at the Faith Community Baptist Church on 1 Nov 2025. For the full service, please click the link here

Scripture: Hebrews 11:8-12 talks about Abraham who is called by God in his old age, to have descendents as numerous as the stars and the sand.

There are 3 types of callings and they differ by clarity and priority.

As Christians, our general calling is to:

1. Obey in Faith

Just like Abraham, we have to first answer the general calling to obey, before responding to the specific callings as part of the church and the call as individuals. Abraham was called to leave his country, his people and his father's household, even though he did not know where he was going. He was 75 at the time.

The mistakes most Christians have is that we did not move at all. We want to know every thing We must take the first steps of faith before the path is clear

2. Obey in Holiness

Holiness is not perfection but means to be set apart for God, that we will set apart for God and away from what the world is doing. When Abram and Lot decide to choose sides, Lot chose by sight that the land is good. But the land is near Sodom where the people are exceedingly wicked. We should choose to be willing to be different from the world.

Question: is there a difference in us or are we the same as everyone else around us?

Among all the colleagues, students, or any vocations, we need to be different. We must become a better person, or have we become too comfortable in this life that we do not want to leave? Ps Craig Groeschel says that calling is about who you are before what you do.

3. Obey in Faithfulness

Even though Abraham did not see God's promise to have many descendents, he continued to be faithful. He waited 25 years before his son was born.

Many do not wait because of the fear that they will miss the boat. Are we cheerful and joyful or do we wait in faithfulness? We know that when God moves, the timing will be perfect. Waiting is a character-refining tool. Instead of waiting, we tend to compromise or rationalise.

We are saved for obedience as in 1 Peter 1:2 - when we obey, we become more like Jesus.

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 ...

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 ...

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...

Paving the Wei

Search This Blog