July 2, 2008
by Grace Kim
Pastor Francis Chan wonders what it would be like to be a caterpillar. He thinks it would be strange to live on one tiny strip of dirt as a fat caterpillar, take a long nap, and wake up with wings and be able to fly as to be a beautiful butterfly.
“Have you ever seen a butterfly crawling around in the dirt?” he asked at Wednesday morning’s General Session to illustrate how a person transforms radically when he becomes a Christian.
Pastor Chan is baffled, he said, when people tell him that they don’t believe that even God could help them through their problems and struggles. “I don’t know what your issues are, but the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives inside of us,” he said. Jesus told His disciples that He was going to go so that this Holy Spirit would be coming for the advantage of the disciples. And Pastor Chan said that whoever benefits us more than Jesus has to be pretty awesome.
After we’re transformed through this Spirit, we have the ability to impact others by showing them the glory of Christ. Pastor Chan asked, “Have you ever pulled that off, where you shine your light in such a way that people don’t praise you but they praise your Father in heaven?”
He said that this is evident in his own ministry, that people who knew him as a student, even in seminary, cannot believe now that he is a pastor. His siblings ask him why people bother to even listen to him.
He started his talk with an introduction of Compassion International, one of the ministries partnering with JAMA at this conference. Compassion works around the world with children in need by clothing and feeding them, educating them in schools, and teaching them about Jesus. Pastor Chan said that he learned from Compassion representatives on his visit to Africa that 29,000 children under the age of 5 will die today. “Is my soul more valuable than one of those children who will die today?” he asked.
When the crowd answered that their souls are not more valuable than these kids’, Pastor Chan asked, “Then why do we spend so much on ourselves? Why do I think I need to preserve myself?”
He read Proverbs 30:7, which is a prayer asking God to “give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.” This prayer goes against our natural instincts. “It’s not an American prayer,” he said. “It’s a Christian prayer.”
He then shared his struggles to separate his Christian values from his American and Chinese values, that he should not live by what he learned in church or from his culture but from the Bible itself, and nothing else. Only then, he said, will he be able to live as God wants him to.
