Life. Its a beautiful thing. It’s complexity is astounding. From the awesome order of the universe to the intricacies of human anatomy and nature, life should take our breath away (yes, a terrible pun!) and give us great joy. And yet so often life is anything but joyful. Bad choices and destructive decisions by ourselves and by every other person has made this world a dangerous and often sad place where life always ends in death.
Loneliness. Many if not most of us have been there. The world we live in can be an unfriendly place, but often if we are honest we haven’t helped much. We often have burned bridges with family and friends. We enjoy pessimism, cynicism, and skepticism in almost everything. We think we are entitled to the best life possible, but we want the best given to us. Some try and work hard, but money and status become the focus and loneliness and depression wins. We feel alone and at times without meaning or purpose. What can fix it?
Love. Love can fix the loneliness. ‘Love is all you need’ sang the Beatles. It is the subject of songs, books, and plays a central part in most movies. And yet, love is so little understood. Think about it. What is love? Is it just hormones in action? That’s casual sex. Is it a feeling at first sight? More often than not that is attraction at best, lust at worst. The reason we feel like we lack love is because viewing love as purely romantic, or an attitude to family and friends falls short of a full understanding of love.
Light. If only we could know the right way to go in life. Enlightenment. A theoretical torch to shine the way in a world of death, depression, despising, and darkness – the opposites of what we need to have life to the full. If only…
Life, an end to loneliness, love, and enlightenment. We don’t like to admit it, but each one of us is needy. The good news is that those needs can be met. Ask yourself how well your own attempts have worked. How has burning your bridges with family and friends helped? Has money and status satisfied? Have substances made life better and easier? If you are an atheist, has it actually made things better? Have you considered how in the past century, atheistic ideology was at the centre of up to 260 million violent deaths? How has turning to man to fix man’s mess helped anything? If you are religious what is your definition of religion? Occasional religious meeting attendance and going through rites and rituals helps no one. Religion, by the Bible’s definition is filled with faith and good works (James ) but for most people there is little faith and even fewer good works.
There is hope and help if looked for in the right place, which happens to be in the life of one, Jesus Christ. Here are His answers to our needs.
When it comes to life Jesus said “I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
In a way that can end loneliness, people who follow Jesus’ teaching are tasked with forming selfless communities that regularly meet together to stir one another up to love and good works – the proper way of ‘church’.
Jesus said that genuine selfless love would characterise his true disciples and assures us that ‘God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ For the one who comes to experience this love from God and lives it out, nothing can take it away or separate from it. As for enlightenment, we can find the right way of life through understanding God’s will as recorded in the Bible. It has been compared to a lamp that shows the way down an apparently dark path. Jesus said ‘I am the light of the world’. If we reject Jesus we are choosing to remain in the darkness caused by our own sin and that of others and will rather than experiencing Jesus’ new heaven and Earth will be in what the Bible describes as eternal darkness, hell. That doesn’t have to happen if you look for hope and help in Jesus.
To look further into Jesus and His claims or to arrange a time to talk visit the ‘Connect with us‘ page.