What I learnt at Fusion Fellowship

I original idea was to write a blog ‘What I like about Fusion’. Then it occurred to me that I can like many things ranging from the movie ‘District 9’ to Hamburgers, but I cannot 'really' like something enough to be appreciative of it unless I really learnt something from it which got me closer to living my life to ‘all its Fullness’. So I decided to title this blog as ‘What I learnt from Fusion Fellowship’. I think I would like to surmise at least four truths that I think I learnt through Fusion over the course of the past few months.

In the book club on John Piper’s, “Don’t Waste Your life”, I learnt that glorifying God is not about going to Church and participating in the worship session and then doing some ‘Christian good works’ outside church. Rather, glorifying God is to be ‘supremely satisfied’ in the relationship with God, even if it means loosing all comforts and privileges of life. A soldier forsakes all the comforts and secure privileges that life has to offer because he is ‘supremely satisfied’ in the cause of his serving his home land. A country that has such soldiers is the one that is truly glorified. When God has soldier-minded conscientious Christian who are so satisfied in God that they’ll sacrifice anything for Him, He is indeed glorified. Even the legitimate pleasures that we enjoy in such a Soldier-like way glorifies God because the soldier is grateful enough to realize that legitimate pleasures in life don't come cheap - they are bought with the blood of Christ. A life crux of which is in such glorification of God, isn’t a wasted life. It would be a life lived to 'all its fullness'.

In Kemper’s class on the Maledictory Psalms, I learnt that to indubitably acknowledge the Maledcitory Psalms (breaking heads of babies… etc) as the inspired Word of God is to acknowledge in humility the inability of the unaided human reason to make a correct moral judgment on that which is right and that which is wrong, that which is fair and that which is unfair and even that which is of good taste and that which isn’t. Perhaps Kemper intended folks listening to learn a lot more than that, but this is all that has remained ‘stuck’ in my mind.

Truth Three: Ever since my early youth I have at times wondered ‘how’ I knew what I thought I knew. I wondered to myself, “if I do not know that ‘how’, then how could I trust that I ‘really’ know that which I think I know”. If I followed this David Hume-ian polemic, it would cause me to question how I could really ‘trust’ my faith in God. Why couldn’t my faith in God be an illusion created by my unaided reason. After all, history tells me that at one time, led by unaided human reason, people in the west thought the earth was flat, people in the east thought the earth was the back of a tortise.

During Chuck’s class I learnt that faith is God isn’t so much about ‘my’ faith in God as much as it is about God engendering in me a faith on Him. So, this revelation, that my faith in God has little to do with my unaided reason but more to do with God’s work in me, was liberating. It absolves me of the need to try to figure out if my faith is indeed trustworthy or not.

Lastly, but most importantly, I learnt from Cheryl that I could use the word ‘happy’ before any noun in the English language. Happiness is not just a habit, it is the overflowing expression of the well-being of the soul. It is only when the relationship with God fosters the well-being of the soul that such expressions of overflowing happiness is possible.

So as we look forward to a 'happy' new season of Fusion Fellowship, I look forward to learning more age-old 'happy' truths, that are new to me, which I think would help me look at life from a better vantage point and as promised, live out life to all its 'happy' Fullness.