Dominic Yeo talks about how silence is one of God’s languages, and shares his personal testimony of salvation.
CN PHOTO: Michael Chan.
Senior pastor of Trinity Christian Centre as well as the General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God in Singapore and a member of the Executive Committee of the National Council of Churches, Dominic Yeo is recognized as a prophet with a strong apostolic anointing. In this interview with City News, he shares about how he was dramatically transformed by the power and love of God as a youth, and how he cultivated intimacy with God through silence and breakthrough faith.
You said in your sermon that God is a communicator, and that He’s always speaking. But what about portions in the Bible where people like Job and the psalmists are begging and crying to God to speak to them and not be silent?
God speaks also in His silence. We’ve got to understand, God can speak using silence. He speaks through silence to cause us to reflect, to press in. Silence is one of His voices—so it’s not that He’s not there when it’s silent, He’s there! Silence is also a voice of intimacy; we can look at couples who are in deeply in love and they speak without speaking. So it’s not that He doesn’t speak, it’s about our position, an open posture to receive.
You wrote a book called Potential To Fulfillment. Tell us about your own testimony and how the message of the book relates to your own life.
It’s really a testimony of God’s grace and His hand upon my life. The reality is that I was actually a school dropout. When I was about 14, I was invited to a Methodist church, but I backslided and went all the way south, until I was about 18 or 19, when I attended a crusade meeting. I had nothing to do at that time, because my best friend had his 21st birthday party but forgot to invite me so I was wallowing in pain. Then somebody called and invited me to the crusade.
So while I was there, I was creating quite a bit of ruckus and then the reverend said, ‘Leave this young man alone.’ I was impacted by the fact that somebody spoke up for me, and later on I responded to the sermon, and God delivered me instantaneously from drug addiction. So that was a dramatic conversion experience. From that point, I noticed that there were many divine encounters in my life.
So I don’t believe in being a potential. A lot of people stay in that state of potentiality. That’s not God’s intention for us. God’s intention is that when He created us, He created us for a purpose, and that purpose is one of fulfillment. All of us individually have a destiny, and you and I have a responsibility to grow that potential that is within us into fulfillment.
That book was actually God’s prophetic voice to the Church in the world, that His Church must not remain in a state of potentiality. The Church of Jesus Christ must forge forward, because every church has a redemptive gift, a redemptive purpose. In order for the church to forge forward, every individual must find their fulfillment so that collectively the church steps into fulfillment.
What are some of the biggest hindrances to one finding his fulfillment?
The devil comes to kill, steal and destroy. Some people never fulfill their destinies because like I mentioned (Sunday Mar 16) morning, the reason is that they have allowed the river brook to dry up without understanding that there is a purpose to move forward, so they wallow in pain and discouragement, and as a result, jettison God’s plan for their lives. Other (reasons) are the result of pain, conflicts in relationships and not overcoming in those areas. So we can be caught in some of these webs of deceit or pain.
You also talked about faithfulness and breakthrough faith in your book. Tell us more about these two types of faith.
When I think of the word “faithfulness’, I think of two words: one is “faithful” and the other is to be reliable, consistent. My faith is quite simple. If God says it, I believe it and it settles it in my heart, I just do it.
As I lead Trinity Christian Centre, I’ve always kept to this: it’s not about strategies and organisation and structure, while those are important to help further accelerate and help with the growth process of the church, growth is essentially a spiritual thing.
So there’s two dimensions to faith: one is being reliable in what we do, and the other is the whole apostolic faith—faith that God can bring breakthrough in areas we don’t understand.
I think of my daughter—we discovered that she had a learning disability at age 12, after her PSLE. But with great apostolic faith, we believed that God has a great destiny for her life, and that He will work it out for her. So she had to go through ‘N’ levels then ‘O’ levels, which meant that her peers would be one year ahead of her. Then she goes to polytechnic while her friends went to junior college, which means her peers would now be two years ahead of her.
With faithfulness we stayed diligent, believing that God will bring a breakthrough for her. My daughter did so well, she jumped into the final year in a university in Brisbane and graduated with a degree in theatre, so now she’s ahead of her peers by two years!
