If you are unhappy with the world you’re in or even with yourself, read on.
Today’s Sunday message carried a revolutionary take on the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus famously began the eight opening statements with “Blessed are…”
According to Pastor Chad, 90% of the commentaries interpret the Beatitudes like this: “Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ That means we have to beat ourselves up, feel terrible about ourselves, then God will give us the kingdom of heaven.”
Now, the revolutionary take goes like this: “If you ARE poor in spirit, God invites you to join the kingdom of heaven.”
The same goes to the other Beatitudes. People would think that they have to go around with a sad face (mourning), lament what a rotten person they are (hungry and thirsty for righteousness), do their best not to sin (pure in heart), and so on. The Kingdom of God becomes something that is earned or deserved.
But what Jesus was actually teaching was this: the kingdom of this world has no place for those who are poor in spirit, mourning, pure in heart, hungry and thirsty for righteousness, working for peace, persecuted and reviled. That kingdom values wealth, power, pleasure, even corruption and violence.
He reveals another Kingdom, the Kingdom of a good and beautiful God. He, in effect, says, “If you ARE poor in spirit, if you ARE mourning, if you ARE hungry and thirsty for righteousness, then come. I have a spot for you.”
Do you see the distinction? It is “be” versus “are”. The Beatitudes are taken as “Be Attitudes”: you have to BE a certain kind of person and you have EARNED your way into God’s kingdom.
But the radical, counterintuitive view is “Blessed ARE”. If you ARE a certain kind of person, you are INVITED to God’s kingdom. One is by effort, the other by grace.
The way to be truly blessed, then, is to realize that there is nothing we can do to make Him love us more (or less, for that matter) and thus obligate Him to bless us.
God has already proven His great love at the Cross. Our full blessings are through the One Who died there. Thus, we lay ourselves to His grace, accept His invitation to enter the Kingdom, and live by faith. We do good not as a grudging duty, but a glad response.
I have two other takes to Pastor Chad’s sermon, which I consider to be his best so far during his tenure at the Union Church of Manila.
First, an alternative view of the fourth Beatitude, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”.
I paraphrase Pastor Chad thusly: “If you long to live a righteous life but keep falling into temptation… if you want to be more virtuous or be free from addictions, but can’t… if you are so miserable and disappointed with yourself that, like Peter, you tell Jesus “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man”… then come into the Kingdom, and you will find satisfaction there.”
I have a different view. “If you are dismayed by all the corruption and cruelty you see in this world… if you long to see rivers of righteousness… if you yourself have suffered what is unjust and unfair… then come into the Kingdom, and you will find satisfaction there.”
My second take? Come into the Kingdom, and you will find wholeness there.
Soli Deo Gloria!
#SermonOnTheMount #blessed #blessings #beatitude
Principle 3. Use the body as a tool to get closer to God.
Spiritual discipline, then, is leveraging the body to know, love, trust, and serve God more. Obviously, we bring our bodies with us wherever we go, whether it is the prayer room, the church sanctuary, or the Bible study group. But more subtly, how we use our bodies can enrich such activities.
Here’s a simple exercise: the next time you pray, kneel and bow deeply down with your face on the floor. Feelings of submission, humility, surrender, awe, or brokenness will flood the heart which you don’t usually experience had you just pray while sitting on a chair.
Some disciplines can also be a physical manifestation of a spiritual reality. Fasting, for example, declares “Lord, I want you so much better than food.” Thus, we use our lunch hours not wolfing down the greasy stuff at the cafeteria, but in our private nooks feasting on the presence of God.
Principle 4. Be utterly ruthless with emotions.
To involve the body puts us toe-to-toe against the curse of our moods. If many would be honest, they would rather not be praying, reading their Bibles, or fasting. Interestingly, this also happens in the physical realm: many would rather not be mindful of what they eat or spend time at the gym.
I am guilty of them all. What looks more attractive is what’s on Netflix or what’s inside the fridge. It’s the path of least resistance. It’s the dopamine kick. It’s my innate laziness.
But if we want to draw closer to God and be the person He wants us to be, we embark on this central vision no matter what we feel. Consider Paul’s mindset of beating his body and make it his slave, so that he may not be disqualified in his service unto God (1 Corinthians 9:27). Or appealing to his protégé to “train yourself to be godly” (1 Timothy 4:7). As we use our bodies to pursue this good and beautiful God – despite our unruly appetites – we will grow stronger and shine brighter.
But the spiritual disciplines are not mere asceticism, i.e. the more severe you are upon yourself, the holier you must be. Neither are they a Mister Spock stoicism where you switch off your emotions and “just do it.” Rather, what Smith calls soul training is to set aside the baser pleasures in favor of those that are only found in His right hand forevermore (Psalm 16:11). Therein lies the balance and the true payoff.
To be concluded.
Dallas Willard wrote in his book The Spirit of Disciplines, “Nothing is more apparent today than our inability to live as we know we should… But this is the age for spiritual heroes… A baseball player who expects to excel in the game without adequate exercise of his body is no more ridiculous than the Christian who hopes to be able to act in the manner of Christ when put to the test without the appropriate exercise in godly things.”
The traditional view is that the body (“flesh”) opposes the spirit. But it is the undisciplined body that does so. This leads to the familiar battle that is essentially negative and reactive: forcing the body not to sin. But since it is hard to not do what you want to do, it is not surprising that relying on sheer will power leads to a high defeat rate.
So what do we do while we are in sin-flawed earth? The real view is that the body should support the spirit. This leads to the lifestyle of spiritual disciplines, which James Bryan Smith has re-branded as soul training. The battle now becomes positive and proactive. Simply put, we do things not to earn brownie points and get blessings from God. If you are a child of God through faith in Jesus Christ, you are already blessed. Spiritual disciplines put you in the pathway of that blessing.
But behind it is a balanced theology of the body. Let me offer six basic principles.
Principle 1. A person is both body and soul.
I do not merely have a body; I am a body. Also, I do not have a soul; I am a soul. So what kind of a person is Nelson Dy? Observe how he treats his body and you’ll know. To view spiritual disciplines as benefitting only the soul while neglecting the body is an artificial dichotomy. In this paradigm, spiritual disciplines will not work; at least, not in the long run. Thus, a person may pray, go to church, and read his Bible all he wants. But if he doesn’t control his appetites (food, sex, wealth, power, and so on), he will still fail to be the person God wants him to be.
Principle 2. The body affects the soul.
Bodily ailments affect spiritual appetites. My spiritual mentor once said, “When I have a terrible cold, evangelism goes out the window.” It is also well-known that when we are fatigued or depressed, we are most prone to falling into temptation, whether it is physical (gorging on junk food), emotional (snapping at people), or spiritual (skipping our quiet time).
A more specific example is gluttony: we pay for our over-indulgence with food with weakened self-control and less sensitivity to God. This helps explain the usefulness of fasting. We need to move to the other end of the spectrum by doing the right things with our bodies. The reward is watching our soul flourish like a well-tended garden.
To be continued.
Photo credit: https://joelkime.com/2017/03/22/do-you-need-a-spiritual-hiit-trainer/
Strategy 3: Will it matter?
Suppose that I have the useless habit of mindlessly surfing the internet, say, checking out showbiz gossip. Besides, I don’t really care who is dating whom. I’m just doing this out of boredom or procrastination.
A question would be: if I were to read that juicy stuff today, will it matter tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Next year? Five years from now?
Of course not. I may not even remember what I’ve read yesterday, let alone five years ago. And who is dating whom will change over the next five years.
So why bother? It’s a bad habit I will gladly discard. The next time I’m bored, I’ll just switch to something interesting rather than something useless. Rather than scrolling down my Facebook feed and forgetting what I had liked or ha-ha’d, I am writing this Linkedin post right now. Plus, I am creating valuable content.
But there is a reverse scenario. Suppose this time I have the bad habit of nervous snacking. I am now drooling over a luscious piece of doughnut. If I were to devour it, will it matter tomorrow?
Actually, this time the answer is yes. I may be smacking my lips today, but I will pay for it tomorrow by way of higher cholesterol and blood sugar. If I keep indulging in those sugar-and-starch bombs, a year from now I will be overweight and diabetic. And I won’t have to wonder why.
So it depends on the habit. It may not matter years from now. On the other hand, it may. But this mental time travel can stop us on our tracks before indulging in that undesirable behavior.
This is related to the concept of temporal discounting. It is a person’s tendency to regard a desired result in the future as less valuable than one in the present. Thus, looking back at a life well lived takes a backseat to pouring through showbiz brouhaha. Or being healthy five years from now doesn’t feel as important as chomping on that doughnut today.
So the next time you want to do something you know is useless or undesirable, ask yourself: will it matter five years from now?
Because it does matter.
Strategy two. Know want versus like.
Have you ever experienced wanting to eat a luscious piece of pie, then after getting to eat it, you feel disappointed with yourself?
When it comes to pleasure, there are actually two hormones at work: dopamine that makes you crave for the pie and opioids that make you actually enjoy it.
But one can be independent of the other. Therefore, the hack is to tell yourself, “I want it but I don’t like it. So why do it in the first place?”
In the 1980s, American scientist Kent Berridge tested the then-popular belief that dopamine was the pleasure hormone. He took a bunch of rodents and fired sugar water into their mouths. The rats would lick their paws or stick their tongues out. It was their way of saying “yummy!”
Next, Berridge treated the rats with drugs that reduced their dopamine levels, then fired sugar water into their mouths. He expected those dopamine-impaired rats to hate the sugar water. But to his surprise, the rats still gave the “yummy!” feedback.
He went to the extreme of destroying the area of their brains that trigger dopamine. While the rats were listless as a result, they still gave the “yummy!” when he fed them with sugar water. That confused Berridge even more.
Then he went the other extreme. He pumped them with an overload of dopamine. This time the rats were gorging on the sugar water, but their facial expressions were reversed. It as though they were gagging and crying out “I hate this stuff but I can’t stop myself!”
Application? Realize that just because you want it, you don’t have to like it. If you don’t really like it, you don’t have to go through with it.
One of my bad habits is worrying. Left unchecked, I tend towards catastrophic thinking. “The factory is going to explode!” “My car will break down in the middle of the highway!” “I’m gonna retire on stale bread and rainwater!”
Then I realized: why worry when I’m sick and tired of worrying? Nowadays, as long as I took the proper precautions, when I am tempted to worry, I don’t even bother.
What are the habits you are compelled to do but don’t really enjoy? Perhaps this, along with Strategy 1, is your hack to freedom.
To be concluded.
“I know I’m not supposed to do it, but I just can’t help doing it!”
If this is your frequent litany of woe, I can relate. For example, I spend too much time checking my social media, pig out on the wrong kind of food, or worry myself into catastrophic thinking.
You may have tried the usual strategies: know your triggers, substitute the bad habit with a good one, or getting an accountability partner.
But if you still struggle and relapse every now and then, here are three hacks that helped me tone down my own bad habits. They may or may not work for you. But I bet you can always use another tip or trick to stop doing what you want to stop doing.
Strategy one. Don’t call it a bad habit.
Surprised? Sometimes it is the “forbidden fruit” syndrome at work. You know it’s bad but because it’s bad, you want to do it. It’s like seeing an object tagged with a “do not touch” sign and you strangely feel the urge to touch it anyway.
Try this: there are no good and bad habits, only the useful and useless.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in moral values; there are habits that are not only inherently bad, but downright evil and destructive. But if “forbidden fruit” explains your compulsion, well, tell yourself: “I won’t do [the bad habit] not because it is bad, but because it is useless.”
For example, I used to take 30 minutes or more scrolling down my Facebook. It’s the FOMO in me: perhaps there is an exciting post down the road. Before long, I was behind in what I needed to do at work or in personal pursuits.
I realized that 30-minute scrolling is a lot of non-productive time. So nowadays I just flick down my screen and glance at no more than five posts. I add a little fatalism here: if there is a post I am meant to see, then I will see it. If not, I won’t even know what I am missing, let alone wonder about it.
Define what is useless or unhelpful for you. Does the habit waste your time, drain your finances, undermine your work, make you loathe yourself? If you don’t hesitate to trash a useless document, then why not discard an useless habit?
To be continued.
Do you dream of being your own boss? Running a fast-growing company? Becoming a sought-after public speaker and consultant?
How about being CEO before hitting age 30?
Sean Si pulled it off and shares how he did it his book CEO at 22: The Risks, Challenges, Success and Failures of Starting Up Young. He describes himself as a serial entrepreneur who has founded four companies. He established the first, SEO Hacker, while he was only 22 and the other three before he turned 29.
Because of Sean’s prowess in systems, solutions and leadership, he has done consulting work for numerous firms and often changed the way they worked. He also speaks on entrepreneurship, digital marketing, SEO, youth empowerment, lean start-up, team building, email marketing, and business management and development.
A great way of approaching CEO at 22 is to keep in mind that while the book offers a blueprint for warp-speed success, the real blueprint is Sean Si himself. If you have a self-limiting belief that to be a (scandalously) young CEO, you need to be born to a prestigious family, earn dazzling academic credentials, or cut your teeth in years of corporate service, Sean breaks the stereotype:
- Raised in a Chinese middle-class company
- Failed 28 units in college
- Hooked on a computer game named DOTA
- Got a dream job at Hewlett Packard… and resigned five months later
Sean left HP to start SEO Hacker, Inc., which has grown to be the premier SEO services company in the Philippines, catering to both Filipino and international clients. It was not a whimsical or bahala na decision. He tells how he had to work out a business plan and get the blessings of his elders. So if you are having cold feet to leave the comfort zone of a 9-to-5 job, as the millennials would say, Sean can relate.
The author crafts the book the same way he writes his highly searched blogs: conversational, authentic, story-based. While it dispenses explicit principles from time to time, much of the lessons are between the lines. Here are two of my personal reflections which I scribbled on some pages:
- Failure is not the opposite of success; it is part of success.
- Your job as a leader is not to be liked. Your job is to lead.
There is no sugar-coating in this book. Sean readily admits to his hiring boo-boos in the early, heady days of SEO Hacker. Among them, he hired people who then didn’t even show up at work. (And you thought you had recruitment problems!)
Another refreshing candor is how he went through harrowing periods when clients did not renew their contracts and he wondered where to get money for payroll. Check out an “edge of your seat” anecdote on how he was tempted to get a loan, which was against his principles (page 90-91).
One of Sean’s mantra is “Don’t work smart. Work hard.” This may surprise the multitude who believe the popular opposite. But his logic is that since everyone has access to basically the same technology, the arena is no longer knowledge, but grit.
Values is also a prominent topic in the book. Sean generously ascribes them to the Bible, among them honoring your parents and a humble dependence on God’s help. He also writes the show-not-tell version. In Chapter 6, he shares the core values of SEO Hacker and how he turns them into practice.
He adds that if you have established your principles early, you will save 75% of time in making decisions. That’s because you will be filtering opportunities and issues through these non-negotiables and save yourself a lot of second-guessing and hand-wringing.
The book is loaded with practical wisdom and thus serve as a friendly guide to the would-be entrepreneur, no matter what the age:
- Why staying put in a secure job is the riskiest thing you can ever do (page 50)
- Why you should serve your company first, then your customers (page 68-70)
- How Steve Jobs inspired Sean to do “whiteboard management” and ensure focus for the team (page 82-84)
- How to network to form business alliances and rich friendships (page 108-111)
- How to pursue personal growth (check out how he really learns from a book, page 114)
- How to recruit mentors (page 120-122)
- How to ensure low turnover rates (page 130, hint: know how to cast a vision)
- Why it doesn’t always pay to be on “hero mode” (page 143-144)
- Why everyone loves a leader, but why few people love managers (pages 150-151)
- Why one must subject himself to an anonymous 360… and have a thick skin (pages 152-154)
- How one can successfully manage a remote team (pages 155-160)
We usually visualize a CEO as this wizened dude finally landing on the C-suite after decades of slogging through Corporate. But that does not have to be you. As Sean Si would say, it’s not a matter of age. It’s a matter of guts, discipline, leadership, and most of all, a steadfast faith in God.
You will find CEO at 22 an instructive and inspiring read. It will ignite your dreams and forge your own path… way before you’re wizened.
About the author: Aside from being a serial entrepreneur, Sean Si is an angel investor, podcast host (Leadership Stack), and business consultant. For more about him, check out https://www.linkedin.com/in/seansi/
Contact him via Linkedin or his website https://sean.si/
Ordering information: Buy the book via https://sean.si/book/
In the past 20 years while my mom still drew breath, I have learned to hug her, tell her how much she meant to me, and kiss her on the forehead. I grew up as an only child immersed in books and thus I was neither expressive nor social. (Marriage changed all that, but that is another story.)
I am grateful, because when I planted my last kiss on her forehead, she was already cold.
I felt surreal during the past four days. From the phone call I got last Monday at 1 a.m., telling me that my mom stopped breathing, to this morning, witnessing her remains entering the maw of the incinerator, I felt like I was floating through a black-and-white episode of the Twilight Zone.
I chose to be Stoic for the meantime: do what you can, accept what you cannot change. I refused to be paralyzed by grief. I had to keep mental clarity for the decisions to be made and problems to be solved. I will have plenty of time to mourn later.
Yet I must admit to dark musings. Is this all there is? Sure, while we are young and energetic, we carve a great life. We rack up awards, taste worldly pleasures, and enjoy community.
But what awaits some – sooner if not later – will be the uphill battle against a protracted, agonizing illness. For others, it will be the dark chamber: the dulling of mental faculties, the loss of executive functions. For many, it will be attending more and more funerals, until one reaches his own.
So what is the point of that great life, if it will all succumb to pain and tears?
Still, I am grateful:
- That my mom died peacefully in her sleep. It could have been much worse.
- That my wife Lucy and my cousins Eugene, Eric, and Ellen supported me in the administrative matters.
- That my first cousins flew in from Cebu to pay their respects. I have not seen them for 30 years and during the wake, they regaled me with stories about my mom’s kindness. While they studied in Manila, my mom cooked their baon, provided allowances, and even shouldered their taxi fare because she didn’t trust the buses. “Koko” was their second mom – and I didn’t know it then!
- That I have a good boss who covered for me and a solid team who didn’t bother me with work problems. (But I checked my work emails and Viber from time to time.)
- That the funeral, columbarium, and catering service-providers were efficient. (Hint: it helps to be process-oriented.)
- That Lucy and I had the energy to manage the wake. (Sustained by the Spirit, powered by coffee.)
So, yes. Life can seem futile in the end. “We were with child, we writhed in pain, but we gave birth to wind” (Isaiah 26:18).
But life carries its own gifts and glories, and for that we can be grateful amidst the grief. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens… a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4).
And what I am most grateful for? For those in Jesus Christ, Death does not have the final word. The Ravager will, one day, be himself ravaged. He is the defeated foe. In due time, God will make everything right.
Everything.
As I type this, I feel like I can sleep for a week. At last, I get the solitude I have been craving for (fellow introverts can relate). My mom is now at her final resting place. The flowers at the funeral chapel are being thrown away. The mourners have gone home.
Time to decompress. Time to reflect. The void is real. She really is gone. The enormity of being orphaned is now sinking in. The quiet heartache will finally get the attention it deserves.
For those who poured out their condolences to me and my family, thank you.
For those who took the time to pay their respects, thank you.
For my family, especially the cousins, both from Manila and Cebu, thank you.
Only in the darkest valleys can love shine the brightest.
June 19, 2022
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