Planning for 2023

I have been occupied with preaching since early Dec till New Year’s Day that I had no time to plan for 2023. I do not wish to rush anything as I had just completed a Galatians’ commentary last month and if anything comes about, it will be at least mid February before I start to write another book. When I thought about 2023, I am going to preach on Lunar New Year falling on a Sunday this year just as Christmas 2022 was on Sunday.

I will preach on the Jeremiah’s verse that “it is not in man to determine his own steps” (Jer 10) and that it is God who orders our steps and years in Him. “Tuhan menentukan jalan-jalan dan tahun-tahun kita” as the Malay title proposes. 

Amazing that I can’t remember preaching an English sermon since I returned to Sabah in 2014 except a couple of talks with the Full Gospel Business Men in my first few months back home in Sabah. What do I plan to do in 2023? I felt such surge of energy when I think of God’s plans for me; plans for good and not evil; plans for me to glorify Him; plans to maximise my gifts and talents for His glory. I felt I had to be in the East to welcome the New Year and it happened that I was invited to my niece’s wedding in Sandakan and then invited by the church to preach on New Year’s Day. 

But celebrating New Year in the East and then flying back to the West fulfilled a prophetic act that God’s glory comes from the East (Ezekiel 43:1) and that His angels ascend from the East (Rev 7:2). I am taking a couple of weeks’ rest in between sermons as I am preaching on New Year’s Day again, only that this will be Chinese New Year.