Worship: Zhi Sen| Music: Team B| Sharing: Preservation, Perseverance and Warning against Apostasy (5:11–6:20) by Tse Wei | Teens: Rosalind & Caitlin | Bulletin: Sharon Yap| Refreshments: Heng Vee

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We note… Pulpit Ministry: Study on Spiritual Gifts 12 Mar- Entering God’s rest (Heb 4) by Eric Yap 19 Mar- Preservation, Perseverance and Warning against Apostasy (5:11–6:20) by Tse Wei 26 Mar- Jesus compared to Melchizedek (7:1–8:13) by Tse Wei 2 Apr- Jesus’ Sacrifice is Once for All and for Always (9:1–10:18) by Freddie Ho 9 Apr- The Call to Faith (10:19–11:40) guest Speaker (TBA)

2017 Church Retreat from 7-10 June. Theme: Caring for the Needy. Please register you name with Heng Vee or Leng Chai/Jennifer Choy. Please submit Passport number and passport expiry date. Our last retreat was 2 years ago and it will be great for us to unite as a body

of Christ and commit to this retreat!

Anyone interested to visit and befriend elderly relatives of our members, please let Sharon Yap or Yew Huat know. These are the events organized for this week. If you are able to participate, please contact the Coordinater directly. • Any day between 13-17 Mar to visit Mr Xie & Mr Koh. Coordinator- Sharon Yap • 22 March at 10.30am- visit to Flower Dome. Coordinator- Soo Lan

Church Information SUNDAY SERVICE: 4.30pm @ 819 Upp Serangoon Rd (Helping Hand) PRAYER & CELL GROUPS: Contact Yew Huat 90290032 LEADERSHIP: Richard Chia 96772741, Freddie Ho 94387437, Phang Yew Huat 90290032, Wong Heng Vee , Winston Kon: 91385737 WEBSITE: https://sites.google.com/a/mymscc.com/mscc/

5 Mar 2017

Worship: Jennifer Choy| Music: Team B | Sharing: Strive to enter God’s rest by Eric Yap (Hebs 4)| Teens: Winston & Serene| Bulletin: Sharon Yap | Refreshments: Soo Lan

Honours God

We reflect…

Being a Church that

NEXT WEEK

THIS WEEK

We serve…

We give thanks and pray… MSCC- Pray for us at MSCC to surrender our lives fully to the Lord and to earnestly yearn to draw closer to Him this year. We pray for a renewed passion for the Word of God and for deep prayers. Pray this for all members of MSCC. Pray for growth in love for God and growth in ministry and physical growth in numbers.

Leadership Team- Pray for each of our leaders to be

filled and enabled by the Holy Spirit to lead this church. Pray for unity of spirit and mind and for protection so that the all that God has purposed for us will come to pass. Pray for our Church Retreat • Pray that God will put the desire in each of our hearts to want to spend 3 days together to worship Him and to seek His face. • Pray that God will prepare the hearts of camp participants to anticipate and expect His cleansing work in our hearts so that we can each be REVIVED! • Pray that God, who is Sovereign to clear our busy schedules so that we can all come togther as one body. • Pray that God will prepare the speakers to speak boldly and directly into our hearts. Thank God for granting Mr Xie with successful surgery and swift healing. Continue to pray for Mr & Mrs Xie’s hearts to be opened to the love of Jesus Christ.

Mr Koh (Karen Yeo’s father) requires outpatient

Dialysis. Pray for God’s direction in care planning and also, pray for healing and salvation. Remember Karen in your prayers as she looks after her elderly parents.

Joel Yap is in Thailand for the whole month of March.

Please pray for safety in all training and for endurance to finish the exercise well.

Sabbath as Resistance

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Extracts from the book of the same title, by Walter Brueggemann (2014) How should we view the Sabbath? The Sabbath and its observance may cultivate a theological mindfulness…. How so? The Sabbath sanctifies time through sanctioned forms of rest and inaction. On this day certain workaday activities and ordinary busyness are suspended and brought to a halt. In their stead, a whole host of ways of resting the body and mind are cultivated. One enters the sphere of inaction through divestment, and this release affects all the elements of the workaday sphere. Business activity and exchange of money are forbidden, and one is urged not just to desist from commerce but to develop more interior spheres of settling the mind from this type of agitation. The Sabbath is thus a period of sacred stasis, a duration of sanctity through the cultivation of inaction in body and spirit How does the Sabbath relate to Creation? “That divine rest on the seventh day of creation has made clear (a) that YHWH is not a workaholic, (b) that YHWH is not anxious about the full functioning of creation, and (c) that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work.” The world is an anxiety-free one of well-being because the creator is anxiety-free and publicly exhibits that freedom from anxiety by not checking things out. God is not a workaholic. God is not a Pharaoh. God does not keep jacking up production schedules. To the contrary, God rests, confident, serene, at peace. God’s rest, moreover, bestows on creatureliness a restfulness that contradicts the “drivenness” of the system of Pharaoh. What are the other gods that the Sabbath calls us away from? These gods of commoditization for the most part go unchallenged in our world. As a result, their exploitative systems go unchallenged and unnoticed. The abuse becomes normal. Restlessness is unexceptional. Anxiety is a given, and violence is unexamined as “the cost of doing business.” It is all a virtual reality in which we become narcotized into a system that seems to be a given rather than a construction. These gods have created a contemporary circumstance in our society that generates an endless pursuit of greater security and greater happiness, a pursuit that is always unsatisfied, because we have never gotten or done enough … yet. The gods (“other gods”) of this system are the gods of market ideology that summon to endless desires and needs that are never met but that always require yet greater effort. “Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.” It's not easy to keep the Sabbath in the modern day Such faithful practice of work stoppage is an act of resistance. It declares in bodily ways that we will not participate in the anxiety system that pervades our social environment. We will not be defined by busyness

and by acquisitiveness and by pursuit of more, in either our economics or our personal relations or anywhere in our lives. Because our life does not consist in commodity. But Sabbath is not only resistance. It is alternative. It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising… The alternative on offer is the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God. To be so situated is a staggering option, because we are accustomed to being on the initiating end of all things. We neither expect nor even want a gift to be given, so inured are we to accomplishing and achieving and possessing. We may consider the sabbath as an alternative to the endless demands of economic reality, more specifically the demands of market ideology that depend, as Adam Smith had already seen, on the generation of needs and desires that will leave us endlessly “rest-less,” inadequate, unfulfilled, and in pursuit of that which may satiate desire. Those requirements concern endless predation so that we are a society of 24/7 multitasking in order to achieve, accomplish, perform, and possess. But the demands of market ideology pertain as much to consumption as they do to production. Thus the system of commodity requires that we want more, have more, own more, use more, eat and drink more. The rat race of such predation and usurpation is a restlessness that issues inescapably in anxiety that is often at the edge of being unmanageable; when pursued vigorously enough, moreover, one is propelled to violence against the neighbor in eagerness for what properly belongs to the neighbor. What is God giving us through the Sabbath? “Weariness, being heavy-laden, yoke” are all ways of speaking of the commodity society of endless productivity. In context, this might have referred to the strenuous taxation system of the Roman Empire, for “yoke” often refers to imperial imposition. Alternatively, this may have referred to the endless requirements of an over-coded religious system that required endless attentiveness. With reference to imperial imposition or over-coded religion, Jesus offers an alternative: come to me and rest! Into this arena of restlessness comes the God of rest who offers relief from that anxiety-producing system. This God has no hunger for commodities and does not legitimate commodity systems. This God is attentive rather to the cries of those “left behind” and comes to open futures by exit (exodus) from systems of restlessness into the restfulness of neighborliness. The limit is set by the weekly work pause that breaks the production cycle. And those who participate in it break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competitor. And as the work stoppage permits a waning of anxiety, so energy is redeployed to the neighborhood. The odd insistence of the God of Sinai is to counter anxious productivity with committed neighborliness. The latter practice does not produce so much; but it creates an environment of security and respect and dignity that redefines the human