By Rev. Gerard Seow
Gerard was called from an early age into full-time service through a divine encounter with the Lamb, both he, his wife and 4 daughters, serve the street communities in Singapore and believe in the unity of the church and the essential mission of every believer to extend the Kingdom of God in heart and mind.
What is Needed to Serve the Poor?
One of the international Geneva conventions has identified major obstacles, many of them still unresolved to this day, including prostitution, debt-bondage, child-labour, human trafficking, etc under the sombre title heading of ‘Contemporary forms of slavery.’
Much research and funding is still needed to refine definitions and raise awareness, especially in enlightened minds, how a civilized society might look like without men pimping women and girls on the street.
What is the role of the Church in all this? A good starting point is to understand the nature of evil in society. What is the injury sustained whenever one of these prostituted sisters gets entangled in a mesh of illegitimacy?
Think of prostitution, domestic abuse, child-labour as part of the same web of deceit along side with insurance scams, buying and selling of human organ, and Bernie Madoff. They are all of the same genre, pick-pockets and petty theives.
Remember, the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist? He was just one of many recruited by Fagin into a fellowship of under-aged con-artists. Through sleight-of-hand trickery, today’s dodgers are just as skilful in evading the law and helping themselves to the contents of your wallet.
You cannot look at the individual pimp or the trafficker without seeing an entire system of control, shame, intimidation that seeks to malign the human spirit into defilement through fear and degradation of the flesh.
The buggery, bigotry and the bastard spirit, these are the minions Satan uses, like Fagin of old, to cheat men and women of their inheritance, entrap the weak minded, devour the sickly and ruin the elect if that were possible.
No thinking individual should seek to engage in such a frontal attack, not least the officers of the Church. To do so is complete foolishness. We walk the streets of the poor not to condemn the world but to awaken the Church out of her slumber.
The real demon is indifference.
It is a careless attitude that fails to understand the demonic nature of passivity. Let us eat from God’s table, drink the wine of the Holy Spirit and be merry in our holy huddles and convocations…and, let the rest of the world … go to hell.
That is the very separatist attitude of the Pharisees who put their own cleanness and religious standards above the pain and woundedness of the abused. Why care for the lost and lonely as long as I have my confirmed ticket to heaven, seems to be the popular view of Christianity these days. Not eschatology but escapology!
The apostolic correction to this misunderstanding is described in John 21 verse 18. Here the zealous convert is zipping here and there, exercising gifts and consuming talents in a most haphazard manner, ‘helping Jesus’ like little junior with his plastic hammer trying to help Daddy build the house.
This kind of prayer is like a cat meowing for its master to open the door. No wisdom, no idea of what is really required.
Prayer is the act of ‘making room for God to act.’
It is when God gets his Holy hands ‘dirty’ so to speak, when He ‘rolls up his Holy sleeves’, that things start to change. What is God doing your neighbourhood? Find that out, and then get your shoulders behind that rock, then push with all your might.
That is the key note for intercessory warfare that is going to hit the enemy where it hurts him the most, using stealth from the flanks or from the rear, not a frontal attack, but one using aggresive mercy to turn your enemy and cause him to lose balance.
It is said that the more precious the stone is, and the more valuable the mineral deposits are, the deeper one needs to look.
What is truly precious is not to be found on the surface. The most expensive ruby found in Burma, less than the size of a child’s knuckle bone was found at a depth of over 2,000 feet in the mountainous regions to the immediate east of the Himalayan chain.
The diamond mines of South Africa routinely dig past 3,000 feet. The higher the price, it seems, the deeper the dig. Look beyond the surface.
