People often accuse Christianity of being “condemning” to other people. But this is the core, right after the famous verse, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him. The one who believes in him is not condemned. The one who does not believe has been condemned already” -- we’re not in the business of condemnation, but in the business of trying to get people out of condemnation.
3:22-36 Again, we see the unselfishness of John the Baptist. “Rabbi, the one who was with you on the other side of the Jordan River, about whom you testified – see, he is baptizing, and everyone is flocking to him!” But John replied “He must become more important while I become less important.”
Long ago, my friend Lim Cheh Miang and I translated the song “Betapa Hatiku” from Bahasa Indonesia into English, and later, I introduced it to the Graduate InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Someone from 2100 Productions came to the fellowship to speak one day and heard the song and loved it and took it back with her, promising to give us credit for the translation. However, when the video https://youtu.be/ru4i2jOeHPA came out and was publicized at the Urbana Missions Conference (the largest missions conference in the world), our names were left out of it. (The lady who took it from us later apologized, saying that she had left the project and the new person who took over didn’t know about our work.)
My first reaction was to be upset, for my work wasn’t recognized. But heck, did I translate this song for the fame? No, it was for the glory of God. It is a lovely praise song and it’s now released to the English-speaking world and no longer restricted to the Bahasa-speaking world. Ultimately, the glory of God is what’s important. So “He must become more important while I become less important.”
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