My dear readers,

Call of Pr Ko Lingkang to serve in Sydney B-P Church

The lives of God’s people are in the hand of our loving heavenly Father. We are left on earth to speak for Christ, minister for Christ and go for Christ. We belong to Christ! Galatians 2:20: “ I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” We thank God for calling Pr Ko and his family to serve the Lord in Sydney B-P Church. Please pray for him and his family as it is always a spiritual battle. Pray that the Lord will use Pr Ko to faithfully and courageously preach and teach God's Word that the church may grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ in the years to come and till the Lord returns! Please find Pr Ko’s personal testimony below for your blessing and prayer.

Call to serve in Sydney (by Pr Ko Lingkang)

From as early as 2012, I had been invited to Sydney BPC for short stints of one to two weeks to help man the pulpit while Eld and Mrs Koh Kim Hiang returned to Singapore for a short break. I knew that they were in search of a pastor and Eld Koh did speak with me to consider serving there. In 2015, after I completed my MDiv at FEBC, Rev Quek also asked me to think about serving in Sydney BPC. However, I did not give it much serious consideration. I felt that I was still young, and somehow assumed that someone else would be called. I did not feel ready for such a heavy responsibility, and especially after the birth of our first child, and personally I did not relish the thought of relocating to another country. Yet that possibility did remain at the back of my mind.

At the end of 2018, Rev Quek spoke with me and asked me to seriously consider serving the Lord in Sydney. He shared with me his (and the Calvary Pandan BOE’s) burden for the church there, and the urgent need that they had to find someone to shoulder the load of the ministry together with Eld Koh. I agreed to prayerfully consider this matter and to get back to him about it.

I have to admit that my initial reaction was a selfish one. My family and I had just returned from the US a year earlier and had only started to settle back to life and ministry in Singapore. My thoughts and concerns were for my two young children and their future. Singapore has always been my home, and my desire was that they too would grow up here and experience the same things that I had experienced. Home is familiar, comfortable and is where all our families and friends are. The thought of moving to a new country, to find our place in a new community, and to raise our children in a foreign land was something frightening, disconcerting, and entirely out of our comfort zone.

However, I did share this matter with my wife, and together we prayed and sought the Lord for His will to be made clear to us. By His grace, God did answer through His Word, and rebuked me for my selfishness and faithlessness. There were instances in particular where the Lord made His will known to me.

At that time, I was in the midst of editing one of the issues of the Teens RPG that I had written quite a number of years ago. It was a series on the Ten Commandments. As I read through the devotions on the first commandment, page after page was challenging me to examine myself to see if God was truly first in my life, and whether I had allowed other things like self, family, my personal comforts, etc to become idols in my life and as a result hinder me in my service for the Lord. The Lord rebuked me and led me to realize that much of my reluctance to move to Sydney was because I was not giving the Lord the pre-eminence in my life and was concerned about so many other things.

The second instance was in the midst of speaking at a Bible study at FCM. We had just started on the book of Amos, and I began with the short narrative in Amos 7:10-17. Amos recounted his own experience of how the Lord called him to go from Tekoa to Bethel and to preach there. It did not strike me personally when I prepared for the Bible study, but it was only as I was preaching, and making an application about how it would have been difficult for Amos to move from Judah to Israel and serve the Lord there, that I realized that I ought to be preaching to myself! And so as I was standing there speaking about how Amos obeyed the call of God and faithfully did all that the Lord tasked him to, I was once again rebuked by the Lord through His Word. I was reminded of how many men of old (both in the Bible and throughout church history) had been tasked to far more difficult ministries in much more challenging places, and they had all responded by faith – and why was I yet still so hesitant to do the same?

The final instance was during our nightly family devotion. With my son just turning two, we were trying to involve him more in our daily devotions and so we started on a simple children’s devotional book that had many pictures and very few words. One night we came to the story of Abraham, of how the Lord had called him: “Get out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee” (Gen 12:1). The words of the book read as such: “God told Abraham and his wife, Sarah, to move to another country. God promised to do good things for them.

Abraham obeyed God. He knew God would help him, and he was not afraid.” As I read those words, looking up, looking at my wife, and then looking down I read those words out loud again. They were such simple words, meant to be read to children, but those words struck deep within me that evening. As Hebrews 11:8 recounts, “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.” Through the prompting of the Holy Spirit, the Lord granted me the clear understanding then that we must go by faith. Though we have our concerns and anxieties, the assurance is that as long as it is God’s will for us, there is no reason to be fearful, we must simply trust in the Lord.

I shared these thoughts with my wife, explaining to her why I thought that the Lord was indeed calling us to serve Him in Sydney. I did not want to share with her earlier, as I needed to be sure of the Lord’s calling personally, and I also did not want to influence or pressure her either way. By His providence, and much to my joy and relief, she then shared that there were also three distinct ways in which the Lord had guided her to come to the same conclusion. As she shared her part of similar fears and concerns, we were comforted to know that the Lord had led us in a very much similar way. It was a sure confirmation that the Lord was working in both of us, personally convicting us that the calling was not just to me as an individual, but for our whole family.

The past year has not been an easy one, as we made the various preparations for our transition to move to Sydney. It is not easy to say goodbye to our loved ones and families, and also to the church which my wife and I grew up in. But at the same time there is a peace that passeth all understanding, being assured to know that we are going in the will of the Lord, and there is certainly no better place to be! We have also been overwhelmed by the words of encouragement, support, and prayers that we have received from the brethren here and in Sydney BPC. We are thankful for the years of fellowship that we had in the Lord, and the many avenues in which the Lord has used Calvary Pandan to be a source of blessing and spiritual growth for me and my family. We hope that you will continue to pray for us as we move down under, that we will continue to be faithful to the Lord, and serve Him till He returns.