We are going to start our Sunday Service soon. From being just a fellowship that meets in private settings, that is to say, homes, soon we will be having gatherings in a public place, at a hotel function room. We are encouraging our people to invite friends, “un-churched people” to come and see. Our first Sunday Service is on 29th May 2005.

God is really good and we know He has been with us, working in us and preparing us for this work of service in our little church. Lately, as we prayed over the start of Worship Service, we increasingly think about what we need be doing and our hopes for what New Life Vineyard will become.

One of these things, especially since New Life Vineyard will soon assume a more visible and public profile, concerns messages from the pulpit.

Illustrations from life, stories, and applications, giving practical suggestions to apply scripture in our daily lives are important. But Lye Heng is clear that about what he must first do when preaching in New Life Vineyard.

Having the end in sight, yes, there will be exhortations: how we ought have more faith and persevere; how we ought to be giving more; how we ought to be witnessing more; how we ought to be more intimate with God, praying and praising Him.

What we critically need to do is to supply the “why”. Deal first with why we should be doing these things for God. From Paul’s example as a teacher, we saw that his exhortations never begins at the beginning of a letter but somewhere down the line where he says something like, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship”. Without first hearing why from Paul it would simply be a call either on purely an emotional basis or worse, a call to be more committed to Jesus without any basis for it.

We found that in the Scriptures, the exhortations to commitment usually begin with “therefore” or similar words, like “then”. And “therefore” is never found at the beginning of a thought but rather later. The call is for a response to the rationale or arguments that came before. In other words, Paul didn’t begin the book of Romans with chapter twelve, he began with chapter one. There’s a natural progression of thought through the book of Romans till you finally get to chapter twelve where, because God has called you and justified you and glorified you, Paul urges you, therefore, to offer your bodies to God.

Similarly, writing to the church in Ephesus, Paul begins the first chapter by saying, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ”. God has blessed us and Paul spends three chapters telling us of all these spiritual blessings we have in Christ. It’s not until he gets to chapter four that again he issues the call, he says, “then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received”. And it’s not until you get to chapter five that Paul begins to exhort you how you are to walk in your relationship with your family, your wife, your servants, your employees, but again, only after he has given us the basis of what God has already done for us.

God is the Initiator. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” God initiated His love towards me. God reached out to me. God initiated my relationship with Him. He chose me in Christ before the foundation of the world. God initiated the whole thing. Again, from 2 Corinthians 8:9, we hear that, “God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work”. What you are to do, then, is to respond to God. We hope to have this sort of teaching from our pulpit in the hope that when people really begin to understand God and what God has done for them, they will want to respond to God.

Our bottom line hope is for every single person in the fellowship to really know who God is and what God has done for them. Then, you will want to love others because He first loved you. Then, you will want to give and do every good work because His grace has abounded to you.

We hope to see this process of responding to God because He is the Initiator, mark New Life Vineyard as a giving and ministering fellowship; giving to the people; ministering to the people. Right from the start, we take this position. We say that any ministry that depends entirely upon man for its existence and operation should die, and the best thing we could do is let it die. Let us be known as a fellowship of believers who are simply responding to who God is and what He has done for us individually and corporately.