Blessed are the Flexible

This post is based on an informal talk I gave to a group of tertiary–campus leaders in my church.

I became a Christian on 20 July 1990 – so it’s been over 35 years.

But as I’ve been reflecting on my journey as a Christian over that time, I began to land on a few thoughts, which I suppose I could summarise with the mantra, often attributed to John Wimber – “blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken”.

My teenage years and university years were periods of great growth in my Christian walk.

When I was in the equivalent of Youth Group (mind you, we were a small group of just five guys and a girl – and all we wanted to do was play basketball), our youth leader (Richard) held a strong belief that we could be everything God wanted us to be – that we could change our world for Christ.

I still see him from time to time – his family owns a big building company – but you’d never know it (even though a few times we hung out at his house which actually had 4 houses on the one property – that should have been the giveway). Yet, he was tender before God and had a simple faith.

He would say – if the Bible says we should eagerly desire the gift of prophecy (which it does), then we should eagerly desire the gift of prophecy. We sat around in a circle, and sought the Lord for a prophetic word to give to the person next to us.

These days I have a more developed view of prophetic protocol – but that moment stayed with me – not because I received an amazing word for the guy next to me that came to pass – but because I began to grow a passion for the things of God.

We went deep into the Bible too. We were encouraged to wake up early in the morning (because Jesus did that in Luke 2) and read the scripture and journal our thoughts – everyday!

When we got together (apart from the occasional prophetic session), we’d study whole books of the Bible together – before it was a trendy thing to do.

My fellow podcaster and worship minister, Lester S, actually marvels at my breadth of Scriptural knowledge because I’m sure at some stage, he thought I was a flaky charismatic.

But from a young age, it was modelled for me by Richard – love the Word, study it, but also be led by the Spirit. And even though I’m not a particularly extreme charismatic now (there were various times I’ve been more extreme than I am now), Scripture has always been the anchor. 

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When I was at university, I had a massive challenge to my belief system.

I had no aspirations by the way of ever becoming a lawyer (I have now practised law for over 20 years). I thought the best way to integrate my faith with a career (because what Asian child wasn’t taught to pursue a career) was to be like (a Christian version of) Keating in Dead Poet’s Society, where a teacher stands there and uses literature to talk about life and values.

But studying literature (which is one of the more extreme humanist courses in univerity) makes you think very critically – even to the point of questioning some of the things you might accept as Biblically true.

And of course, you are taught to think through a secular, humanist paradigm that is often posited against religion and spirituality.

That nearly broke me because it called into question a lot of things I believed from the Bible – things which to do this day, I cannot reconcile.

And so I learnt – blessed are the flexible. I don’t have to understand it all. I can accept that things are in tension; that maybe on this earth they may never be resolved. And that’s okay.

And I learned how to think more deeply about the Christian faith and also to contextualise it within culture.

Working the other way, it also made me think critically of how cloistered and tone deaf the Church can become – how incapable we were of engaging with culture around us other than to forcefully preach the gospel through tracts and apologetics (which I was never very good at, which is probably why I disliked evangelism so much!).

Flexibility, and holding things lightly, allowed me to reconstruct my faith several times over.

I use that word “reconstruction” only recently because I didn’t really know what it meant until now.

I remember a friend I had grown up in at church telling me he was no longer a Christian. He had thought long and hard about it and his faith had been deconstructed. He said he believed in God – in a higher being – but he couldn’t be sure it was the Christian God. He called himself agnostic.

To be honest, I had no idea what he was talking about.

As someone who loved reading though, I found myself reading broadly across the whole spectrum of Christian denominations – from reformers; to classic Christian authors; to revivalists; to biographies; to devotionals; to stuff from the New Apostolic Reformation; to John Macarthur’s Strange Fire; to Joseph Prince’s Destined to Reign to Michael Brown’s Hypergrace.

At one stage, I was very much into spiritual warfare and deliverance and the spectacle of all of it. But also the idea that through spiritual warfare principles, we could see a whole city turn to God.

At another point in life, I got into the “Emergent Church” movement, which was about faith in a post-modern world – emphasising relationship over dogma, questioning traditional structures and methods, and all done beautifully through new creative expressions.

Then yes, when I got very affected by the performance mentality of cause-and-effect Christianity, Joseph Prince’s teaching on effortless increase through resting in Christ’s finished work and His grace made me fall in love with Jesus all over again.

For a season, I read all his books and listened to lots of his CDs.

I even enjoyed staying up late on Sunday night to get a Joel Osteen “shot in the arm”.

I’ve since learned that its okay to deconstruct but only if you do it for the purposes of reconstruction.

Tim Keller reckons it’s healthy to look at deconstruction through the image of a building.

Deconstruction or dismantling happens, at least in part, when we are remodeling a building. Parts of the building—especially the foundation itself—are left intact while other parts are taken down or removed in order to put up an overall better edifice. In some cases, the deconstruction is so extensive that no one can reside or work in the building for a period, but in those cases the final reconstruction is often the best and most extensive. In this metaphor, deconstruction enables reconstruction—strengthening and improvement—which could not occur otherwise.

And so, I’ve learned – blessed are the flexible.

Flexible enough to be curious about what those on other parts of the spectrum of faith have to say without shutting them down. Flexible to accept that I don’t know everything, and I may never do so this side of eternity. Flexible enough to recognise that I can’t see the whole picture. Like Paul says in 1 Cor 13:12 – “for now we see through a glass dimly”.

In other words, we are not omniscient. Our understanding of God is incomplete. Our interpretation of scripture – while sincere – is not perfect.

I see young people these days who see a truth drift – and it’s a real problem. But sometimes the answer is not in attacking and forcefully resisting, but in gracious dialogue and mutual understanding.

If our knowledge is incomplete, our posture must be humble.

A rigid person says: “I already know”. A flexible disciple says: “Teach me, Lord.”

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Once, one of a good friend of mine (who was also on the worshp team) came out, figuratively, and told me he was gay.

This friend had been one of the worship leaders in the church. When he was leading worship, everyone used to say how anointed he was. The boy could sing!

Now all those people who said he was anointed probably walked back their assessment and attributed it simply to good singing and emotional manipulation rather than the anointing. After all, we were taught that being gay was a sin and the Holy Spirit would have been grieved.

I had been a lot more dogmatic about my position – until it happened to someone so close to me. I honestly didn’t know how to deal with it. I tried to be supportive of him – I tried to tell him what I believe was Scriptural truth and yet not isolate him. That old mantra of “love the sinner, hate the sin”, I realised, was actually impossible to really put into practice.

And so I read. I read several book chapters on the topic. And I came to the conclusion that even Christian thinkers couldn’t come to a unified position.

So I left things in tension. I continued to be flexible.

I’d like to tell you my friend came back to the church and is now serving the Lord faithfully. But I can’t. At least he knows several Christians who continue to love him to at least preserve the faith that he is still holding in his heart.

It’d be nice to have a neat resolution, but life is not like that. Faith always makes room for mystery.

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If by now, you’re wondering if what I’m saying is legit and in case you want to take me outside and stone me, which is a very Pharasaical thing to do by the way, I’m not saying that truth is negotiable; doctrine is optional; or that we can reinterpret Scripture however we like.

No, the Word of God is unchanging (Isaiah 40:8). Jesus is unchangeable (Hebrews 13:8).
The Gospel is non-negotiable (Galatians 1:8).

When I say we ought to be flexible, I’m saying that we keep our hearts soft before the Lord; we hold our interpretations with humility; we are willing to be corrected by Scripture; we don’t force God to fit into our own system.

Jesus rebuked the Pharisees not because they lacked Bible knowledge, but because they were inflexible, unable to receive anything that didn’t fit their framework. Jesus said of them, “You search the Scriptures… yet you refuse to come to Me.” (John 5:39–40)

If we are Bible experts, and we fail to see the God of the Bible, we’ve missed the point.

I’ve learned that God cannot be put into a box.

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When I was in Year 12, I laboured under the apprehension that if I served God wholeheartedly, he would bless me. This all happened at one of the most critical junctures of my life (or so I thought) because the entire trajectory of your life depends on getting into your first preference course at university. So even though I was doing the six hardest subjects at school, I was serving as a youth group leader and serving as a worship leader on Sunday. Never mind that I was stressed beyond belief, but I just knew that God would come through.

And of course, I was a gun at English literature so the way the average scores from my school marks were going, I was a shoo-in to get into my Law/Literature double degree at university.

A few weeks after the final exams, I came home after a day out with friends to see my mum, grim-faced, saying that my marks had come out and she had (with her x-ray vision) noticed that I had scored a 49 in something, which was clearly impossible. But there it was – as I opened the envelope – right before my eyes I saw that I had failed literature. This completely brought down my average so that, compared to last year’s entry score to get into Law, I would fall short by about 20 points.

It drove me to despair, desperation and repentance. Through that season, I came to realise that faith in God isn’t a formula of cause and effect – that you don’t do good to get good – that if God responded to formulae, he wouldn’t be God at all – I would be.

And the Scripture that became very real for me was 2 Cor 12;9, where Jesus says to Paul, “my grace is sufficient you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” And so Paul says, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

This is really a statement about humility.

It is true about faith, and it is true about everything else. In fact, as a lawyer, I started thinking I knew a lot; only to realise I didn’t know so much; but even now, even though I know a lot more, I’ve realised that there’s even more that I don’t know.

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It is something when you meet someone who is meek and humble. You are immediately drawn to that person maybe because in part, you realise that you’re seeing a form of Christ.

There was a time I wanted to be known; famous; influential. I wanted my name on book covers, album covers, for people to pay for me to speak at their events. I still want that – to the extent that it will help people and draw them closer to Jesus – but otherwise, I am content to keep tenderly walking towards humility.

The key is this: blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken.

David says in Psalm 51, “my sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit. A broken spirit and a contrite heart you, O God, will not despite”.

Sometimes when pride takes hold and we become too rigid in our ways and our thoughts, that’s when God has to break us. He certainly did that to me.

So I’m learning to keep bending – bending when I might have to do something that I don’t particularly want to; bending to listen to what others have to say when I don’t agree with them; bending when God leads me a particular way – when He says do this, or do that. If I remain humble before Him, then at least I will be flexible and not break. Well, that’s the idea anyway.