Be Faithful with the Little Signs
Kong Tak-yeung
(B.Th.)
Tak-yeung with his wife and father
Faithfulness Seen in Every Little Sign
I once met a teacher at HKBTS who was composed, meek and lowly in heart and had an incredible memory. When he taught the original languages of the Bible, he was particularly strict. I remember complaining to him in the second semester of Year 2 when I was about to take his Greek lessons, “Dr. Shum, I fell far behind in the class, like ‘having a wheel fall off the wagon’ when I learnt Hebrew in the first semester!” Gently and calmly, he responded, “Then, let the other wheels fall off in the second semester as well!” In fact, when I did the exercises in every Greek lesson then, he would say, “Tak-yeung, is that really so?” “Class, don’t help him! Let him think about it himself,” or “Well…think over it again seriously. Are you sure?” Eventually, I also failed to catch up in this class, and indeed it was like all my wheels falling off!
Later, our class was fortunate enough to take his last Main Program course at HKBTS—Intensive Summer Course on Greek. Although the course lasted only for one week, it was a very difficult and intense course. Every day, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., I was reading loads of marks and symbols in the text of the Bible in its original language, observing the trivial changes in wording to decide different tenses of the words before thinking how to interpret them. When I finally came up with an idea, the teacher had already started a new chapter. Since then, I had come down with the “phobia of intensive training.” However, when I made it to the last afternoon for the course, Dr. Shum, who had been so eager to do his best to teach us everything in the books, took a moment to deliver a heartfelt message. With all our eyes fixed on him, he pushed his glasses into place and said with a lump in his throat, “When you graduate, ask yourselves clearly what kind of person you are! Don’t look down on yourselves! Be faithful! God loves those who are faithful very, very much!” Looking up at the sky, he shed a tear. “Cool” as this teacher had seemed, he couldn’t help shedding tears when he mentioned faithfulness to God. All of a sudden, I realized why he was so punctilious in the study of the original biblical languages. He was in fact practicing faithfulness—being faithful to the true meaning that God’s Word was meant to convey. He gave weight to every word and every sentence and devoted his faithfulness to every little mark and sign.
From Learning the Original Biblical Languages to Learning Faithfulness
Afterward, when I made every endeavor to be a faithful servant before God, I found that faithfulness does require practice in every trivial matter because to be faithful is difficult indeed. Time and again, people kept testing my limits but still I tried to love them. I saw people who were actually extremely lazy pretend to work hard to serve God but still I tried to tolerate them. When faced with a brother seemingly excellent in theological knowledge taking the lead in the fellowship to confront the leaders at church, still I tried to respond in a meek and lowly way. When the sheep I pastored did not respect me and repeatedly committed mistakes, I still tried to strive on. All these turned out to be more difficult than learning the original biblical languages. Every time I wanted to react on impulse, Dr. Shum’s questions popped up on my mind: “Tak-yeung, is that really so? Are you sure?” Then I would calm down and think again how to respond in order to be more faithful. In this way, I began to understand that every little mark and sign in the biblical texts was giving me a lesson on how to be faithful in small matters so that I can also be faithful in larger ones.
Understanding God’s Great Love More Deeply
Although it is difficult to be faithful, I experience the sweetness of God’s grace when I do my best to be so. Stupid, ignorant and weak as it may seem to the world, it is through this kind of faithful experience that God makes me understand the meaning of the gospel, what is meant by His laying down His life for our salvation when we were still sinners and that He has suffered what we suffer, and even more, so that the suffering makes us know more how deep His love for us is. I realize that when faithfulness ends up in troubles for us, we need not have all those troubles removed in order to see God’s love—we may experience more profoundly how God loved us deeply in the past and loves us today when we are suffering.
May each pastor-to-be serve the Lord faithfully! When we devote ourselves to serving the Lord faithfully, our Lord will also let us experience Himself more deeply.