A Baby is Born. A Book is Published.

Making of many books is weariness of the flesh, says Ecclesiastes. But making books is my new found passion. And by God's grace, I published my fifth book in four years. But writing a book is like conceiving and being pregnant with a child with all its travails and trials over 9 months and when times comes, the labour pains begin and the baby is duly born. My labour pains are not just writing but editing and proof-reading and going through many drafts and changes before finalising everything and sending it to the printers. Even then, there is delay like this current book. It was ready and printed 7 days ago, but the first few copies were only delivered today by courier. But the delay is painful, after waiting for weeks like a mother suffering labour pains and the final act of giving birth is almost a struggle between life and death.

Yet God is in our midst and we can only give Him glory if what we do is solely to glorify His name. Why books? Why theology? My new book is a collection of essays. For 30 years I have thought about theological education since I started at University of Auckland learning Hebrew and Greek in early 1993. In my third Seminary now, the struggle seems to get even stronger, between life and death. In the Malay-speaking churches, we have not produced a single PhD in the Bible ( OT or NT), yet the Malay-speaking church is 80 years old and even counting our golden years of revival as we are celebrating our 50th year of our revival in 1973 that lasted until 1976. Churches multiplied and thousands were saved during those few years in the 1970s. But in terms of theological sophistication and maturity, there is dearth of leaders able to make a case for Christianity, maybe not even in English, let alone in Bahasa or in Malay our national language. My new book addresses these issues about theological education, plus a commonly misunderstood doctrine of the Trinity in 5,500 words, about marriage, divorce, and re-marriage, about the Bible and also a few sermons which I had written in long hand, perhaps 5 sermons out of at least 1,000 sermons that I had preached.