Made for Community

Sermon by Ps Charmaine Chong at the Faith Community Baptist Church 31 Oct 2026.

Moral of the story: it is smarter to travel in groups.

If we are in community, just like God is in the community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we will do well to not be alone - to prevent being attacked by the enemy. Man is not meant to be isolated and be socially withdrawn. Proverbs 18:1 days that a man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; he rages against all judgement.

We can only thrive in life if we are rooted in God's community as the early Christians who meet together, broke bread, devoted themselve in fellowship.

Why do we need to be rooted in God's community?

1. It builds our faith in God

The church helps to build our faith:

Devoted to the teachings.

Devoted to the breaking of bread

Devoted to prayer

We gather in church to listen to the pastor who has spent time seeking God for a message for his people, partaking in the Holy Communion, praising God together with the congregation of God. In the cell groups, we process and live our lives for God. We need both church and cell to grow.

2. It grows our love for one another

There is no such thing in Christianity as God and myself, but it is God, and the community, neighours caring, spurring and encouraging, building, devoting, honour one another.

Instructionns for the cell groups:

Show up for cell

Check in with one another

Pray for one another

Spend time together

Make room for newcomers

When we love one another, we show the love of Christ.

3. It gives us hope for each new day

Troubles are unavoidable - in this world, we will have trouble. As we actively doing the work of God, we have a greater purpose with the body of Christ. We have people who reminds us of God's faithfulness. In times of struggles, do not withdraw but seek God's community.

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