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Tuesday, August 27, 2013\n\nShiny Happy People\n2 Corinthians 3:3-18 NLT\nClearly, you are a letter from Christ showing the result of our ministry among you. This \u201cletter\u201d is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts. We are confident of all this because of our great trust in God through Christ. It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God. He has enabled us to be ministers of his new covenant. This is a covenant not of written laws, but of the Spirit. The old written covenant ends in death; but under the new covenant, the Spirit gives life. The old way, with laws etched in stone, led to death, though it began with such glory that the people of Israel could not bear to look at Moses\u2019 face. For his face shone with the glory of God, even though the brightness was already fading away. Shouldn\u2019t we expect far greater glory under the new way, now that the Holy Spirit is giving life? If the old way, which brings condemnation, was glorious, how much more glorious is the new way, which makes us right with God! In fact, that first glory was not glorious at all compared with the overwhelming glory of the new way. So if the old way, which has been replaced, was glorious, how much more glorious is the new, which remains forever! Since this new way gives us such confidence, we can be very bold. We are not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so the people of Israel would not see the glory, even though it was destined to fade away. But the people\u2019s minds were hardened, and to this day whenever the old covenant is being read, the same veil covers their minds so they cannot understand the truth. And this veil can be removed only by believing in Christ. Yes, even today when they read Moses\u2019 writings, their hearts are covered with that veil, and they do not understand. But whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord\u2014who is the Spirit\u2014makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.\n---------------\nThe REM song Shiny Happy People is meant to be an ironic take on Chinese propaganda following Tiananmen Square uprising. The uprising happened when the Chinese government clamped down on student demonstrators, killing hundreds of them. The government attempted to tell the world and maybe it's own people that it was not a repressive and cruel regime with posters declaring the Chinese are shiny happy people. But possibly it was true that China was indeed peopled with 'shiny happy people.' The irony is that although we in the West have freedom and democracy we are not shiny or happy. We are some of the most depressed, cynical, malcontented dependants bent on pessimism inhabiting the planet. Now the biting irony comes when you look at the church in the West. They genuinely have every reason to be shiny happy people. If you read the passage above from 2 Corinthians chapter 3 and know a little bit about your Bible, you'd recognise that people following Jesus should shine more than Moses did after being in the very physical presence of God.\nOne of the ironies is that in the hotbed of communist persecution it is reported that the church in China has grown from 14 million official followers of Jesus to 70 million in unofficial underground house churches. Possibly the real Shiny Happy People are the Chinese after all, for in the face of great difficult they had sought freedom within by letting the Spirit of God set them free. Unfortunately, the oppression of the past had not been the enemy of faith as much as the economic freedom of the current China. For whether you are in the East or the West the real oppressive force is not the government. What dulls the soul is rather the greed and mate