Resonance

Category: Anger

  • Understanding the Judgement of God

    Understanding the Judgement of God

    Picture yourself in a large white room of sparkling crystals. Everyone and everything is white. All of a sudden, a person who fell into a muddy, smelly gutter runs into the room. Huge chunks of dirt is left in his tracks and oily mud drips from his clothes unto the floor. How do you feel? You will immediately run to halt the person in his tracks so he doesn’t continue to ruin the beauty of the space. You might as well sack the person, wouldn’t you? That is how it is with holiness and sin.

    The Holiness of God

    Before we can understand God’s brutal judgement against sin, we ought to understand the Holiness of God. To be holy is to be set apart, consecrated and be unique. God is in His own class called the God class. Imagine you were all-Powerful, all-Knowing, All-Sufficient, Immortal and Omnipresent; how will you feel if someone dared to disobey you? How do you feel when your subordinate, your junior associate, your little child, anyone far below you disobeys you? We have no idea who we are dealing with when we sin. That is why God is to be feared. The angels cry “Holy, Holy, Holy”, because we cannot fathom the breadth and depth of this Being.

    The Holiness of God burns against sin. It is to it like a launderer’s soap or a refiner’s fire. This burning is what is known as the Wrath of God. No, the wrath of God is not some angry judgemental being who can’t seem to let things go. This is a holy, righteous anger against sin. The judgement of God purges! Whenever a substance is corrupted beyond recovery, it is subjected to mortality and left as an insignia to all who choose to stand against the LORD. You cannot rebel against God and win.

    Does that mean God is willing to destroy, just to keep His “holy ego”? First of all, God cannot be proud. To be proud is to see yourself bigger than you are. God cannot be any bigger than He is. He is bigger than big. He is who He is! Thus, God is not exaggerating His fury against sin. Thinking sin is not a big deal is sin in itself. It is a really big deal, especially since it is against an eternal holy God. Going back to our story, imagine there’s an owner of that all-white space and He had written a notice that no dirt is allowed in. You get it now!

    The Mercy of God

    It is amazing how this Fearful One is also the Merciful One. Even Lucifer was not outrightly judged the very day iniquity was found in him. He was given time to repent as the time for his judgement was set. In fact, all angelic beings were given the choice to either stand with God or rebel with satan. When satan was reduced to mortality, God in His infinite love allowed that same offer to be extended to men; “do you choose God or you choose to be your own god?”.

    The devil did not have a devil. He fathered his own rebellion. In the case of man, we believed the devil and rebelled against God. The question many will now ask is, “why would God allow the devil to tempt man?’. Unlike us, God is fully secure in Himself. He will always give one the chance to choose due to His Love. Love gives us the opportunity to choose, even if the other option is to rebel. Do you understand what I mean? We will be given the decision to choose God everyday, not just in this life but in all ages to come. Once you create the choice for obedience, disobedience becomes an option too. We choose obedience, not because disobedience is not a possibility but because we love Him.

    If you want to understand God’s fierce judgement against sin, look at all Jesus had to go through as your substitute. That tells it all

    To be continued…

  • Negative Emotions & Realities: How To Deal With Them

    Is it possible to live in a reality that is out of place with our present circumstance? Are we supposed to allow ourselves to go through the incumbent emotions triggered by our brain due to the nature of present circumstances or we are supposed to “fake” a positive reality till we “make it”?

    The brain releases negative emotions a few moments after a negative experience. Any further negative emotion from then on is self-inflicted. Self-inflicted because we continue to dwell on the negative image our senses fed our minds over and over, thereby releasing the negative emotions over and over.

    Emotions are Symptoms

    Pain is a symptom. Anxiety is a symptom. Depression is a symptom. Whatever we feel are symptoms, insignia. It’s not the actual thing. It’s a reaction to the actual thing. The chemical reactions in our system are the same for everyone but how the reaction manifests differ from one person to another. That’s why people cry when they are sad, hurt, angry or even happy. Same reaction, different circumstances. The body will release different tears in these different circumstances but that’s not the point.

    The point is that we can inadvertently control how our body reacts in any given circumstance. Not by manipulating or tricking our brain. No. Our brain is the centre of our intelligence. It picks our reaction from previous scenarios. Any time we react calmly to a given circumstance, it teaches our brain to be calmer in similar circumstances. If you’ve been in a circumstance where you didn’t know how to react it’s because your brain didn’t have any “default settings” based on its archives. You hadn’t been in such a scenario before, therefore you found it hard to react in a certain way. You don’t know if you’re confused, happy, sad or simply indifferent, and that is okay.

    Emotional Maturity or Avoidance Coping?

    The goal is not to stop yourself from feeling any negative emotions ever. That’s insane. In fact, it has been scientifically proven that it’s necessary to feel both positive and negative emotions occasionally instead of feeling either of them all the time. What we can do is to channel that negative emotion into positive action. That’s the real deal. Elizabeth Scott, MS said it this way, “Managing negative emotions is more about embracing the fact that we are feeling them, determining why we are feeling this way, and allowing ourselves to receive the messages that they are sending us before we release them and move forward”.

    positive and negative emotions

    Stopping yourself from feeling hurt, disappointed, grieved or simply down is not emotional intelligence. It is avoidance coping. It can heavily backfire if we don’t tackle it. It’s like hunger. Hunger is a symptom, a sign that you need to feed your body with food. Avoiding the feeling of hunger and doing nothing about it creates more problems. If you kill the symptom, the underlying problem still persists. True emotional maturity is allowing yourself to feel the feels but not letting it change your mindset and stance into a negative reality.

    I love you

  • I Don’t Care: Breaking Free from the Apathy & Indifference

    I Don’t Care: Breaking Free from the Apathy & Indifference

    Ever met or been that person who is always like, “As for me, I don’t care. I don’t feel anything.” And we admired such people because they looked to us like strength. The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart. The Presence of God is known and it is also felt. Knowing God in our minds is boring and repressive. Having mental knowledge of God without ever experiencing Him is basically a religion. Joy, Peace, Love, Gratitude, Responsibility, Humility etc are expressions. Whatever we express is emotionally relevant. This means that anytime we try to act all cool and don’t really care who even died in our family, it’s because we have squirmed into ourselves.

    I have been a victim of “I don’t care”. Whenever I live constantly like that, I feel like I am a wall upon which all emotions around me are being thrown. I don’t feel like a person. I feel like an object in that situation. So I become invisible by becoming silent and I hide in plain sight. I don’t let people in. I am in a state of avoidance; being physically not present. So I go away so there’s nothing to relate to anymore. I hold strong boundaries or walls, keeping my feelings contained or even suppressed. And as long as I took this path of emotionlessness, I barely experienced God for myself. I interpret everything on a logical level. Even prophetic and worship meetings were full of my mind telling me how pretentious what was happening was.

    There are so many cover-up emotions today. This is where we can’t tolerate one emotion so we cover it up by feeling something else, usually something more acceptable. We can’t feel rage, so we feel frustration. I can’t tolerate intense betrayal, so I feel hurt instead. We can’t allow ourselves to feel unquenchable grief, so we feel sadness instead. I can’t even express or identify what we are feeling, so I stay silent. Because we do not know how to define what we are feeling or expressing, we would defend, hide, avoid, or escape it. But underneath these “defences” are often feelings of vulnerability. We too often identify a vulnerability with weakness, shame or being too emotional, in an attempt to cover a raw aspect of ourselves.

    No one was born a stoic. All creations are emotional creatures, birds and dogs alike. Because emotions do not come from our bodies though they do have a direct link with them; emotions are what makes us persons connected to the orchestrations of the universe as a whole.

    The truth is, once you close your heart to hurt, you also close yourself to love. Also, closing your heart will never stop you from feeling the negative emotions that come with life. It will rather stop you from fully expressing and benefitting from good emotions. There is hope in the shadows, there is peace in the storm, there is patience in the pain, and there is joy in the sorrow. Open up your heart. The Holy Spirit wants you to enjoy His fruits regardless of the circumstances.


    If you know for yourself that you’re in this “I don’t care anymore” state or you’re heading towards that in any important area of your life, I want you to put your hand on your heart and pray this prayer;
    Heart, you have permission to be wide open towards the LORD, to be fully present, to fully feel, to be fully affected. Heart, you have permission to know that He is emotional about you. You have permission to know that you don’t need to shut down. You don’t need to lock up. Lord, any place where I have stopped feeling because of pain, because of vows that I’ve made, I give you permission to open my heart back to you. I want to have a heart that is fully after yours. In Jesus’ Name, I pray, Amen.

    I love you ♥

  • Keeping Your Shit Together

    Keeping Your Shit Together

    If you live in the past too long, you will be depressed. If you live in the future too long, you will be anxious. The only place you are designed to live is in the present, with your back towards your past and your face looking towards the future. Hope is imagining your future with God in it. Hope is one of the things – hope, faith and love – that will last forever, amazingly. That means God is so awesome that He expects us to look forward to His wondrous glory even in the times of the New Heaven and New Earth. He never ceases to amaze us.

    Sinach’s single epitomizes God’s assurance of everlasting Hope (1 Cor 13:13)

    That’s why I love Sinach’s song “He Did It Again”. There’s a line that goes, “and when I thought that He had done too much, Jesus did it again.” I have realised that the relevance of Hope is sadly missing. Over-ambition is not hope. Hope is confidence in patience. You can have faith and lack hope. In other words, you can totally believe in what God can do and still see hopelessness in your situation. You are not doubting God. You are just imagining a future without God in it. If a “makeup world” you have imagined is causing you distress, why don’t you just simply make up something good?

    It is so easy to wallow in hopelessness. We just lie down and think of all the problems we have in the world just because we are starving and do not have enough money. One small mistake we make, make us think about all the stupid decisions we have ever made and how bad we are when it comes to such situations.

    The more we wallow in hopelessness, the more we feel like the most miserable person in the world.

    When we remember out of nowhere how someone misunderstood us; then we link to when we were misunderstood by another guy sometime back; then another link to a very similar experience 2 years ago; then we link it to 6 more examples at once; then we are like, “I’m the most misunderstood person in the world
    😩😩”.

    All this happens under 5 minutes. It all started from one small not-even-a-big-deal problem. Then one seemingly harmless thought. Before you realise, you’ve had a bad day. This happens way too often. And today, we are leaving this attitude with all its accompanying emotions of hopelessness behind us. If my mind brings up a problem and another problem tries to connect to it, say “no! Not today.” We are learning to tackle one issue at a time, one step at a time.

    If doctors were told how many patients they will attend to in even a day, hopelessness may set in. But they attend to all these patients one at a time wonderfully. If teachers made a big fuss about the number of papers they had to mark, no one would like to be a lecturer of a huge class.

    You can never tackle all your problems at once so don’t think of all of them at once

    Some moments are just not the right time to think about important issues. When you wake up at the wrong side of your bed, don’t think about the reason why you were born. It may seem like a good thing to do but it will filter towards you and leave you with negative emotions and hopelessness. Someone may then ask, when is the right time to think about your problems? When you have properly dealt with your anxiety about the problems.

    Going over and over allll your problems will not help you, it will not heal you, it will not even get anything fixed. It is just a pity-party.

    If you want to talk about your problems, make sure the person listening is a person with hope; someone who will make up for your hopelessness. Don’t also think you always need someone to talk to. Once you get attached to that thinking and no one is ready to listen, it will add insult to your injury. Know when to deal with your personal issues personally. Know when to invite a 3rd party. Either ways, God is willing to talk about it with you. Yes He already knows but He wants to hear you pour your heart out to Him. He is closer to the brokenhearted. Just like David the psalmist, we are looking within ourselves on this day and telling our soul, “Hope in God”. Remain hopeful and praise God, for He is your God and your Help. Amen

    Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, My Help and My God.
    Psalm 42:11

    I love you ❤

  • Stop Raping Women

    Dear men,

    Treating a girl like shit doesn’t make you a man. It makes you more of an animal.

    Every girl has experienced sexual harassment in some form. It will shock you to know the number of girls you know that have been sexually abused. As a guy, you also know at least one guy who brags about taking advantage of girls. Therefore, this rape culture is not far-fetched. Don’t act like it’s happening elsewhere.

    You may not be the problem but make sure you’re not part of it. Stop hyping yourself for never taking advantage of a girl against her will. If you hype what is meant to be normalized, you normalize what is meant to be discouraged. Treating a girl like a human being is normal. It’s not an achievement. It’s the bare minimum.

    Don’t wait till someone rapes your relative or friend until you realize the severity of this problem. Imagine being a girl and having to be constantly taking precautions literally from birth to avoid getting raped? How about we denormalize rape? Adding insult to injury, society blames the girl for falling victim as if those who rape cannot be stopped.

    If girls don’t feel comfortable around you, you’re part of the problem. If you’re always demeaning women, you’re part of the problem. You coerce girls to do things with you, you’re part of the problem. If you still hang out with friends who undermine women, you’re still part of the problem. If your first instinct is to question what the girl did or didn’t do when she fell victim, dude you’re a BIG part of the problem.

    Stop treating women like they are some sex objects, a minority group or second-class citizens. And if you STILL don’t see where the problem is, you’re the worst part of the problem.

    If you’re not supporting the #saynotorape movement, then it speaks volumes about you. Stop avoiding the subject. Stop running away from the real issue. It’s not about what women should do anymore. The question is, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? What you’re doing is either encouraging the culture or annihilating it.

    If you still think that “real” men aren’t the problem, how about you fight side by side with women? What about that? How about you let go of those shallow-minded, unwilling-to-learn-yet-really-dumb friends you have. You have a voice. Use it!