A letter from the crown prince

Imagine you received a letter from the Crown Prince of a very rich country. Dear …. Greetings. I am the Crown Prince. Listen, I have specially chosen you and prepared a very high position for you in my company. If you accept my offer, I guarantee you a salary you could never dream of in a job you will love so much you will never leave. Moreover, you can stay in my palace with your whole family, eat my royal food from a buffet everyday. On top of that, my father, the Sultan will also adopt you as his own child and you will be part of my royal family. 

But for now, I want you to stay where you are and I will your Sifu, and start training you. Start to do things the way I teach you. Start to have the attitude that will make me and the Sultan happy. To start off helping you, I will give you a manual. Read it often. Also, I am sending my best servant to help you. If you need any help or advice, ask him. I also have other trainees that I have called. Meet with them and support each other. All of you will be part of my family. Also, remember I am just a phone call away and so is my father the Sultan. You can even start calling him Daddy. Call me often, and get to know me, and I also want to get to know you. I know life is sometimes difficult for you now, and following me is not easy, but you must be patient. If you keep following what I tell you, when the time comes, your reward will definitely be worth it!

Listen, my offer is for a limited time. So make up your mind quickly, and if you accept, start following me seriously and don’t give up! Press on and finish this program, and look forward to a great life forever with us as your new family!

Wow! Wouldn’t it be so wonderful to receive such an offer? Would we believe it? Could we trust the Crown Prince? Well, the truth is that all of us here today have in fact been issued exactly such as invitation. But it is not the Crown Prince of just a rich country who has invited us. It is far, far, far better because it is the Crown Prince of Heaven Jesus Christ who has invited us!

The Bible says the Jesus has gone on to prepare a beautiful place for us to stay in Heaven, a wonderful job for us that we will be completely happy with, and has invited us to be part of His royal family, and the privilege to call our Great Creator God, Abba Father.  

However, that is for the future. For now, we must start training for that new position, and we are not to simply do it on our own. Instead, we are to follow our Crown prince Jesus as our Sifu. We need to get to know him, and understand from Him how we should live, and how we can please Him. He has given us the Bible to help us, which is Basic Information Before Leaving Earth. He has also given us His Chief Servant the Holy Spirit, who is our great Advisor and Teacher to help us and remind us what the Crown Prince said and what is important to Him. He also asks us to meet up with other trainees He has invited to work for Him and join His family, and we meet in places like church and this Chapter to encourage each other and support one another.

Now, our training ground is actually our life itself on earth. And our new position will be in a new kingdom that Jesus will establish when He comes again for the second time. However, coming back to our training on earth itself, we must realize that God did not promise us that it would be easy. Just like the students of a kungfu master have to go through a lot of hard training to learn and grow strong, a lot of discipline is required. However, how successful we are depends on how well we listen to our Master Jesus, and how well we follow His instructions. Jesus is not a distant master, who hardly talks to his students. He wants us to be close to Him, to listen and interact with Him, and the more we do that, the more we will grow and learn from Him. The more we know Him, the easier following Him becomes, and He gives us the power to overcome all our difficulties and challenges. It is the strength of our relationship with our Master Jesus that will carry us through. Two simple things – Know Him, Follow Him. What does know mean? The “know” in the Bible does not merely mean “I know who Bill Gates is” or I met Warren Buffett once. Instead, the meaning of “know” here refers to a very deep relationship like between husband and wife, or closest of brothers or best of friends. To know Jesus means being in an intimate, deep, close relationship with Him. What does “follow” mean? It means to set our life apart to learn how to live the way Jesus wants, to do things the way Jesus would do. That is our lifelong aim, and how we will make it through.

What happens if we reject this offer from Jesus? Well, God is looking for people who will be useful in His kingdom, who will listen to Him, and live by His principles. People who don’t want to follow Him, who want to live their own way, and refuse to change are of no use to God. In Israel, there is a place called Gehenna, where people throw all their rubbish and unwanted things. There are always people burning unwanted things there. Jesus used the word Gehenna to describe hell, a dark place under the earth where everything of no use to God is thrown away. Sadly, people who reject the Jesus will also have to go there. All people who don’t want God and don’t want to believe in Jesus, will go to the place where all God’s goodness and blessing and presence is removed. On earth, our training ground, it is still rich with God’s blessings even though man has destroyed a lot of it. Clean air that we can breathe easily, strength in our bodies to move and walk around, the warmth of the sunshine, the peace of being able to sleep. We take all that for granted. In hell, even these things are not there. People whom God has allowed to experience hell for even a few minutes speak of a place of terrible darkness, of having no energy at all to move, of hardly being able to breathe, always incredibly hungry, incredibly thirsty, and so tired yet unable to sleep. Even worse, there are horrible demonic creatures that torture people there and fire that keeps burning and burning painfully with no relief. And this horrible situation in hell will go on forever and ever just as the beauty and eternal happiness of Heaven goes on forever and ever.

Personally, friends, getting to know Jesus is the best thing that has happened in my life. Although I grew up in a Christian family and went to Sunday School and church, my heart was not serious in wanting to know Jesus and to follow Him. I would try to be good and follow the rules, but I really didn’t know Jesus well, and there was an emptiness inside me, and I was often unhappy in my teenage years and university years. It was only after I started work in my first year at IOI that I really began to understand that Christianity is not a religion of following rules, but that its really about knowing God and knowing Jesus and learning to do what makes Him happy.

Two things greatly impacted me during that first year in IOI. Firstly, I was impressed by my colleague who went outstation with me. Although he didn’t know much about the Bible, he would thank God very easily for every little blessing that came his way. God was real to him, and I wanted that. Secondly, as internal auditors, we had to stay in an old colonial bungalow that was haunted, and one night, I started hearing little children running upstairs when there was no one there, and then I felt a very evil presence in the room. I cried out as I had been taught in church “Go away in Jesus name”, but the presence was still there although it did not harm me, and I was very scared. I realized that I had not been really serious about knowing Him, not really interested to follow Him. So how could I expect to have His protection? 

From that time, something changed in my heart, and I really began to want to know God and to know Jesus for real! The breakthrough came during a very special church camp where Pastor Chew Weng Chee was the speaker, and I really started to have a fresh and special relationship with God. Over the years, He then helped me to become a teacher of secondary school students in my church and also start a Christian Fellowship in IOI. He also brought me to FGB Jaya One here, and helped me and Jason Tan keep this chapter running for 3 years now. After the change in my heart that made me be serious about knowing Jesus and following Him, I became no longer scared of those haunted houses. Sometimes, I would fast dinner and stay back alone in the haunted house, and once, the lights went off when all alone, but I was not afraid but kept worshipping God. I realized that God is real and that His Spirit in me was more powerful than all the evil spirits. Meanwhile, some of my colleagues talked off their beds being shaken violently when they slept, the alarm clock going off when not plugged in, something lifting them up and putting them at a different part of the house….

In closing, I want to encourage everyone of us to take up that offer that Jesus gives us. The Bible says that no eye has seen and no ear has heard the great and marvelous blessings that God has prepared for those who love Him. Beautiful mansions in Heaven, streets of gold, no more pain, no more suffering, no disease, no sadness. This life is so short, but the next life is forever and is so wonderful for those who follow Jesus! Friends, the Bible says that God sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross for us so that our sins can be forgiven and that we can have eternal life in Heaven. It is truly so wonderful, and so precious to have our sins forgiven, to have our past wiped clean, all our mistakes, all our sins. Being forgiven really will give us such a deep and marvelous peace!

Now, how some of you may ask, how do I know God and Jesus is real when I can’t see Him? Honestly, friends, I myself have not seen God, and most Christians would not have seen God yet. But we know God is real, because of the peace that He has given us in our hearts. Its not that we don’t worry and don’t have problems, but no matter what happens, we know we have that joy in knowing and being able to pray to God, to pray to Jesus. Looking back over my life, and seeing all that God has helped me to do, I am convinced that God is definitely real. How he led me to meet different people, how he took away all my fear in the haunted houses, how he led me to start the Christian Fellowship in IOI, how he led me to work near Jaya One. It can only be God!

In the Bible, Jesus said that all you need is faith as small as a mustard seed. If in your heart, you feel even the smallest possibility that God may be real and Jesus may be real, that your sins can be forgiven, just pray to Jesus right now in your own way. Just say “Lord Jesus, I want to believe you are real.  Please show me you are real. Please forgive me for my sins. Please help me know you. Please help me follow you. In Jesus name, Amen!” May the Lord Jesus lead you to know Him personally and follow Him and help you find and keep the precious truth of His grace forever.