I've passed my PhD oral defense!

Today at 3pm was my oral defense. It took 20 mins to present a summary of my thesis, and about 40 mins to answer questions from my examiners.

They had decided passed my oral examination and to let me address and attend to their comments in my thesis amendments with 3 months.

Cheers! Thank God!

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth

Love hates Evil 愛是不喜歡不義，只喜歡真理

LOVE DOES NOT ENJOY EVIL.

Could it be that we all really do rejoice in evil? All it takes to rejoice in evil is to approve of its being here, to be content that we have some evil around, even though we may regret that evil has hurt us.

What do I mean by evil?

By evil, I mean everything that happens which hurts people needlessly , they are moral evil, natural evil, and accidental evil. We shall not talk about evils that do not hurt anyone. There are also things that hurt people necessarily ­like dentists' drills and surgeons' knives; these we do not call evils since they are necessary to bring about.

Moral evil is intentional. Intentional evil is done by devils and people. Natural evil is unintentional. Nat­ural evil is done by nature, though devils and people sometimes cooperate. Acci­dental evil is done by people when they do not mean to do it

There are subtle ways to rejoice in evil:


1. Philosophical rejoicing.

Sometimes people rejoice in evil by way of a philosophical explanation of it. Good and evil blends well in a giant picture in human history if we stand far enough and don't look too close from a personal view: like your hurt experienced as a first person. Thus, you can rejoice in evil, because it con­tributes to what, finally, has to be a very good, if not the best possible world.

But love will not join this profound praise of evil. To be sure, love will put up with untidy worlds, and will stand far enough away to see the whole mosaic, but love sees evil only as a monstrous blot on God's cre­ation. It is not seduced by profound speculations about universal harmony. Evil, in love's eye, is ob­scene, no matter how splendidly and fully it is dressed.

2. Theological rejoicing.

Did God somehow decree evil? No, God do not desire evil. Sometimes people think that without evil, God would never have been able to save a human soul from evil. No! Love does not affirm evil. It is the power standing in the way of yielding to the temptation to believe that God, in search of glory, gives evil a niche in His world. Evil is a strange, mysterious power whose ultimate origin no one can fathom; love is simply and clearly of God. Love does not rejoice in evil, not even in the name of theological profundity.

3. Religious rejoicing.

When religion builds altars to things less than God it brings out people's tendency to applaud evil. Idols always seduce us into an illicit affair with evil. Take devotion to one's country, for example. Patri­otism, love of one's nation, is how we express loyalty to the natural group which is second only to the family. When we worship the created state above the creator God, we are ready to call evil good.

4. Personal rejoicing.

We also rejoice in evil in more direct and personal ways - sometimes when other people are hurt by evil, sometimes even when they do evil. We rejoice when our enemies suffer evil. The more certain we are that our cause is right, the more pure our joy when the other side suffers (eg the loss of German in WWII). We rejoice when we think we are only indignant, disgusted, or nauseated. Take the discovery that someone we know - but have never liked very well - has fallen into a sexual sin. We may make use of the occasion in full measure of indignant fury. Others will only be dis­gusted. And so we have a chance to enjoy the evil.

Love rejects evil

Love, in contrast, is a power that moves us only to regret evil - anywhere, in any form, by any cause. This is a paradox, for agapic love, like God, does its best work in response to evil. It builds a state on which love is forgiving, healing, and redeem­ing. But love rejoices only when evil is destroyed. It rejoices with the truth. Why is it truth, not goodness, that is contrasted with evil? Truth keeps love honest, reminding it that an enemy loved is still an enemy, a sinner forgiven no less a sin­ner. Truth keeps love from sweeping the realities about people under a shaggy carpet of agapic good will. So love rejoices with the truth.

Love rejoices with the truth which is Jesus Christ, and rejoicing with Christ we re­vel in reality as it is meant to be. We are glad to be alive in a world where truth can be known uniquely as the reality that is Jesus Christ. Rejoicing with the truth puts us on the side of the future. To rejoice with the truth is to bet your life on Christ as victor over evil.

In the first place, love lets us see that evil never belongs anywhere; it has no right to exist. In the second place, love opens our minds to the possibility that evil has in fact been defeated. The truth is victory over evil; this is reality. No wonder that love rejoices with the truth. Love well knows that God is able to bring blessing out of evil.

Love knows that life now is ambiguous. But love can bear it. Love can even rejoice in this mixed­up life because it rejoices with the truth, the Truth who will "reconcile all things to himself" (Colossians 1:20) and thus make the whole world true again. Love man­ages well in a world like ours; but love never approves of the evil that makes our good world the mixed reality it is.

撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes 之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes

Love does not seek its own

愛不求自己的益處

Chinese summary of Rev Smedes' passage

(I) "Love does not seek its own things."

That is, love does not drive us to get and keep what is properly ours - our property

– for which we need not thank anyone. If we do not get these things, we are victims of an injustice. Justice is done when everyone gets what is coming to him or her. We seek justice when we seek "our own." We have justice when we get "our own."

Can we be loving and assertive?

Love does not move us to seek justice for ourselves. Love will drive us to move heaven and earth to seek justice for others.

Love does not cancel anyone's rights. But agapic love moves one freely to forgo one's claim on what one has a right to have. God's love does this to every person it touches. It comes as a power in life that moves us to pass up our chances to seize what belongs to us.

There is a way to cope with this tension which rec­ognizes the priority of self-denying love and also ad­mits the legitimacy of self-asserting justice.

1. Seeking our rights for the sake of others' rights. If I can help my neighbor get his rights by asserting my own, agapic love is on the side of asserting them. But if sacrificing my rights is required in order to help my neighbor get his rights, agapic love will move me to make the sac­rifice. Seeking your own rights is thus consistent with agapic love to the extent that doing so helps a neighbor.

2. Seeking our rights to fulfill our calling to stewardship.

A second occasion for seeking our own rights goes deeply into the very reason we exist. we must sometimes assert our rights in order to fulfil that calling. We are born into the world with a job to do. And the job we have to do is the job of taking care of God's world and God's people. Agapic love moves us to be good stewards. Thus, whenever someone gets in the way of my stewardship, I must somehow remove that obstacle. I must demand my rights so that I can take care of my corner of God's earth.

3. Seeking the right to truth of what we are. We have an undeniable right to be what we truly are and to be known as what we are. What we are is the image of God. God himself is our model. He asserts himself by in­sisting on his own divine holiness. Holiness is God's zeal for the truth about himself. His revelation of holi­ness is a manifesto of his inalienable right to be known as the exclusive Lord of creation.

What are the guidelines for sacrificing rights?

1. We may not force other people to sacrifice their rights.

2. We ought not to sacrifice our rights if doing so would hinder the progress of rights for others.

3. Any sacrifice of our rights must leave us in a state to love effectively another day. Love is without limit, but lovers are limited. Each of us has a certain supply of energy and only so much time and power to expend it. Prudence will sometimes set limits to self-giving for the sake of effective love.

Love needs discernment / spiritual wisdom

Being willing to sacrifice our rights is one thing; know­ing when is another. Love needs the sensitive gift of discernment. Discern­ment is insight into the mixture of motives moving our own hearts. Love needs the gift of discernment to focus its drive toward others in helping service.

Discernment is an answer to prayer. Paul tells us he prayed that his fellow Christians would be "filled with the knowledge of his [God's] will in spiritual wis­dom and understanding" (Colossians 1:9). He was praying for discernment. Spiritual wisdom helps us decide when to speak and when to keep silent, when to act and when to wait, when to fight and when to surrender. Spiritual wisdom - fallible and subjective - is the power to know what is really going on when others are camou­flaging the issues. And it is the power to know what is really going on inside our own hearts.

(II) "Love does not seek its own self."

Love is the power that moves us to seek others. This being true, love appears to resist one of the deepest drives within any healthy being - the drive to discover and become one's own ideal self.

What is it that we seek when we seek ourselves?

1. We seek self-knowledge. We cannot be at peace with ourselves until we know who we really are, i.e., to know our own identity.

2. We seek to become ourselves. This is the goal of every person awake to his or her own potential.

If we' make our self the end, the ultimate goal, the final aim of our striving, we are in conflict with agapic love. Love does not seek its self as the living end. Instead love is the power that drives us to seek our selves as a means to being agents of love.

Love needs self-seeking

1. Agapic love takes a lot of energy. To be in loving condition for the rigors of agape, we need to be physically and spiritually fit.

2. Love must do its work now through the reality of our actual selves. Love cannot wait until we find and become our ideal selves. For this reason, our self-seek­ing must also take the form of a search for and an ac­ceptance of our real selves.

3. Love requires us to seek a self that is wise, discreet, and politic, so that it can do its work through us. Ef­fective love is as much an art as it is a good intention, and like all art, it comes with hard work, persistent seeking for our most effective selves.

Love gives us freedom from self-seeking.

The ideal self is an intolerant self. It will never forgive us for failing to be what we ought ideally to be. It becomes our demanding idol. But most of us are uncertain as to what our ideal self is really like. Is the ideal self the assertive self? or the sexy self? or the powerful self? or perhaps the self of moral virtue? Maybe it is a composite of all these. Unsure, we bow frantically to them all, being confused about our search, and deeply anxious to become all that his/her ideal self demands. It is the essence of what Paul called the commandment that promises life but kills us in the end (Romans 7:10), let the ideal defeat us, and force us into quiet despair and secret guilt.

Love liberates us from the idol of our ideal selves. It does not deny that there is an ideal self; it only refuses to move us to seek the ideal self as an ultimate goal. W ith the gift of love, we can accept our real selves, far removed from the ideal, and live lovingly through these limited and warped and blemished selves. It convinces us that God accepts our actual self in forgiveness and adoption as his children. God's love, then, shows us that our actual, blemished self is the only self that can be an agent of love.

Love liberates us from this idol by showing that the ideal self can and will be handled by God. Jesus Christ is the model of our ideal self; he is what we are meant to be. And God will lead us to that self in his own time. Love itself will give us the ideal self, love does not need to seek its own self as the ultimate goal in life.

Love's liberation allows us to regard our ideal self with a sense of humor. We can strive with God's help to be a better self, to become more of our ideal, our true, Christian self. We know that the only purpose for seek­ing our ideal selves is to become better at seeking oth­ers. And we, in love, can now seek others with our real selves. We can seek others the better, in fact, the more we leave the ideal self with God and let love move us the way we are.

撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes

X'mas Party in my office on 22 Dec 07

The 42nd Hong Kong Brands and Products Expo Fair 工展會

It took two whole days to clear the remains of the Expo Fair!!
The Expo ended on 1 Jan 2008!
It is now the noon-time on 4 Jan 2008!!!

www.hkbpe.com.hk

End of the Expo Fair on 3 Jan 08 Morning

Rubbish everywhere! Tons of rubbish. This is 2 days after the Expo!

Fireworks 1 Jan 08

Fireworks from my room!!! Celebration at 0:01 am of 1 January 2008!!!!
Tens of tall buildings around the harbour joined in the firework!

Also the 工展會 Annual market at my park downstairs!

See, not many people at the market when the
fireworks took place, everybody rush to the
seashore for the building lighting and New Year 2008 Fireworks!

Hopes!

Hi P & E,

My therapy of hope! I want to buy a copy too, if you see this book in HK! It definately helped me through the trough of sadness and tells me LOVE HOPES!!!

Paul's Song of Love elaborated by Rev Smedes:

"Gradually the parents let go of their hearts' demand that she
be different from what she is. They let the conditional demand for change melt into unconditional acceptance of what is .

Love hopes in a new way.

This totally accepting love brings hope, not for a miracle of healing, but for the miracle of joy, which is the miracle of gratitude.

This love brings hope that life is good, that it has point and meaning, and that the future ahead is one which we can walk into expectantly. In love we learn to expect to be surprised by God and joy - along with pain. Love is the power of a new hope that can co-exist with pain.

Hope fails when love is a demand instead of a gift.

Agapic love lets things and people be, and in the gift of letting things and people be, love becomes a power that creates a hope that will not disappoint
us."

(Quotes from L. B. Smedes (1979) Love within Limits, Ch12).
Rev. LB. Smedes : Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary.

~~~~~~~~
Love Hopes All Things

LOVE IS THE POWER of hope. As long as a person loves, he is able to hope. Love keeps us hopeful, in all situations, against all evi­dence. On the human level hope keeps love alive. When such hope is lost, love eventually goes with it. To be hopeful is to face the future with some gladness, some thankfulness, some sense that the present is worth liv­ing because we expect the future to bring what we deeply desire.

For Paul, however, hope has an added dimension beyond desire and even expectancy. Hope is certainty. He speaks of "a hope [that] does not disappoint us" (Romans 5:5)

The promise of Christ is that he is our hope. This hope cannot fail
because Christ will not and cannot fail. This is why Christian hope is often symbolized by an anchor, "a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul" (He­brews 6:19).

Hope in Christian experience means: "I am sure as I face the
future." Now we should note that this is true "because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit" (Romans 5:5).

Love is the power behind the hope that" does not disappoint us." Love stimulates the certainty of Christian hope.

Hope at its deepest is not focused on particulars.

At its core hope looks beyond a solution for a problem, an escape from pain, for assurance from
God that life has point and meaning in spite of disease, problems, and pain. Hope looks to the promise of the final victory of Jesus Christ over all that hurts and kills. Love breeds this hope in both the person loved and the loving person.

Love gives hope to the person loved.

Caring is a form of love, and to know you are being truly cared for is to know you are being loved. When a person knows he is loved, he has hope. This does not mean that he will expect a cure for his cancer, but he is given courage to feel that life is good and that to­morrow is God's gift of the future. Perhaps through the touch of human care the patient may discover anew the saving love of Christ, the Lord treating him as a pre­cious person.

And perhaps his hope will focus beyond this life on unending life with God. Love has given the power to hope that life can be worth living in the midst of problems.


Love gives hope to the loving person.

If we love the world we are compelled to hope for its redemption. The experience of God's love gives us a deep but paradoxical discontent with the way things are. The paradox in love's discon­tent is that we rejoice in our world as it is. We are glad to be in and of this world.

Love sees possibilities that apathy and indifference cannot see. Driven by self-giving love to seek a happier personhood for another, we are able to hear signals in the other person that hint of a will to change. Love keeps us open to possibilities within the loved one.

How can love keep a person hoping while a relentless hammering of disappointments beats at his life?

Only if it becomes a love that gives without demanding a return on love's investment.
The first test of agapic love is whether it can give the gift of freedom.

Love is a power to let selfish hopes die .

Hope fails when love is a demand instead of a gift. Agapic love lets things and people be, and in the gift of letting things and people be, love becomes a power that creates a hope that will not disappoint us.

______________________________________________________________________
Summary from Rev. LB. Smedes : "Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world". Chapter 12. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes