Getting Real: Real People, Real Emotions

“If anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me as he has grieved all of you, to some extent – not to put it too severely. The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient for him. Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. I urge you, therefore, to reaffirm your love for him.”                 – 2 Corinthians 2:5-8

Sometimes, we get too preoccupied with showing how much we love God by getting religious things done not knowing that we are already missing out on His second commandment: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

As Christians, we must not only have that burden to, time and time again, affirm and confirm our love for Christ (because He first loved us but we also must be constantly compelled to love others as we love ourselves. Note the phrase “as we love ourselves.” Apparently, the love-others command goes beyond everything that is superficial. We need to understand that people are as real as we are, and that they have real emotions too.

We cannot just go on fulfilling the Great Commission not knowing that the people we are working with have already become what I would choose to call “spiritual zombies” – people who have that intense desire to do what Christ wants them to do and could not just stop for a while even if they are in themselves shattered, depressed, and broken. We need to know who these people are. We need to be sensitive to their needs.

Real people have real emotions and together with the knowledge of the sufficient grace of God, they would need other real people who would choose to understand that it is okay to have these emotions. We are humans. We cannot cease to be such. When God called and chose us to be His children, it was never part of His plan to strip us of our human attributes. Instead, He patiently reveals to us His grace and mercy by constantly working on our imperfections. His power is made perfect when He is able to create in us a beautiful being despite our horrible beginnings.

If we desire to possess Christ-likeness, we always need to yearn for Him to teach us how He loves. We need to get serious about wanting to carry each other’s burdens. What we need here is wisdom and understanding and discernment.

Again, I say : Real people have real emotions and one of the ways in which they could confirm the realness of our God is when they have real people who would listen to and commit to pray for them.

Does God Exist?

Human beings are (I would refuse to say by nature) as entirely inquisitive as they are equally determined to get the answer to their questions.

(Note: I would have to save the discussion of why I say man’s ability to develop endless inquiries is not natural.)

The scientific method is man’s attempt to answer every question there is, and if we try to look at it deeper, this man-made approach tries, in one way or another, to disprove the existence of a God.

Paul E. Little says this: ” We must be clear from the onset that we cannot put God in a test tube or prove Him by scientific method just as we cannot prove that Napoleon really existed. In order for something to be proved by the scientific method, it must be repeatable. But the fact that certain events can’t be proved by repetition does not disprove the reality of those events.”

We call the Theory of Evolution a theory because, in itself, it is a “hunch” backed by a series of admittedly only almost accurate calculations, yet many people are blinded by it and have consequently succumbed to the idea that our present human appearance developed by chance. Are we, therefore, also to embrace the idea that in a few million years, our appearances – our body structure and our system functions – would change by any chance?

Consider this: “As biochemists discover more and more about the awesome complexity of life, it is apparent that its chances of originating by accident are so minute that they can be completely ruled out. Life cannot have arisen by chance (Sir Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe).”

Let us now take the issue of cause and effect into consideration. Everything has to have been caused by something. Flowers bloom because of the process of pollination. But how did it have to be this way? Why is there such design? Why are certain events, certain organisms interconnected?

Yes, the law of cause and effect exists but we cannot and must not subject the cause of all causes to such law. God would cease to be God if He is caused by something. We have to cease seeing God as a corruptible, measurable, and an intangible being and begin to acknowledge His ultimate dominion over everything in and beyond this world. God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, holy. God is eternal. He cannot be created by anything or anyone.

The scientific method is only for things that can be measured but He can be experienced. We cannot at all fathom the mysteries of God, after all, “Secret things belong to the Lord (Deut. 29:29).” Unless we acknowledge that a God exists,”we are doomed to confusion and conjecture.”

” I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” Revelations 22:13