I believe many people do not know the true Nature of God. I believe they see Him as a taskmaster who will strike you with leprosy and cancer if you fall into sin. I believe they have a legalistic mindset that fails to capture the essence and depth of God’s Love for mankind.
Unfortunately, this view of God is what continues to push people outside the church away from God, while leaving the people in the church frustrated with the seemingly endless list of chores they have to do to make Him happy.
I believe many do not know that God IS already happy with them, in the same way a Father is pleased with His children.
I believe many don’t realize that the real Gospel is that God desires to pursue a loving relationship with every individual on the face of the planet, and that the sin issue HAS BEEN settled.
I believe God is not looking at humans and thinking, “Filthy, puny humans. I’ll destroy them with cancer”.
I believe He’s not looking at humans and just seeing filth and sin. Rather, I believe God’s heart is aching for a loving Father-to-child relationship. I believe that many pastors don’t do a good job in teaching God’s true Nature, as expressed in the Bible.
But that’s not all.
In the absence of good teaching from the Church, I believe many people have learnt to adopt a monistic, materialistic outlook that fails to acknowledge the existence of both a physical and spiritual world.
Despite having a Ph.D. in the social sciences, I still believe that reality is much more than the three-dimensional space and time.
To borrow from Kantian philosophy, I believe there are the phenomena which we can experience with our five senses and logic, and there are the noumena, which is beyond the scope of our senses.
I believe these noumena are described explicitly in the Bible. Yet, I believe most people continue to miss it because of their paradigm – even more so in West.
I believe there are realms of joy, love, peace and happiness that will never be experienced until one accepts that there is a spiritual reality that is accessible to humans. Sadly, this is not taught in many churches and as a result, I believe many people lead spiritually dry lives devoid of freshness that the Holy Spirit provides.
To bridge this gap, I believe many have resorted to tools and gimmicks that may provide some diagnostic utility, but never really answer the underlying problem. Until we become sensitive to the existence of a spiritual realm, I believe we will keep running after different fads to solve a problem only the Holy Spirit can cure