Genesis of Thought and Feelings ...

 

Have you ever considered how your thoughts work?  Or perhaps wondered where feelings come from?  Your body is largely water, it has a few trace minerals in it.  From a composition standpoint there is nothing in the periodic table that would lend itself to the process of original thinking or feeling.  Electrical impulses maybe, but that is mere mechanism.  Your house is full of wiring that powers the lights, the TV’s, and air conditioning.  Just having an electrical impulse down a carrier wire does not create thought, intelligence, and far from emotion.  These days A.I. is all the rage, trying to make a computer emulate the human brain.  As far as logic goes, we are too close for comfort.  But as far as ethics go, we are close enough to create Sky-Net and watch Terminators come to life.  But to make something as inanimate as a computer understand feelings is still beyond our capacity.  We can make a computer “pretend” to respond based on certain sets of stimuli, but to originate a feeling is again beyond our current capacities.  And in that sense the origination of thought is also barely understood.  What makes Beethoven, Beethoven (the musician)?  Why do his thoughts not lead him to become Picasso (the painter), instead of the musician?  Why does his version of creativity, or the origination of thought and desire, not lead him anywhere instead of in just a singular venue?  These are still mysteries we do not fully comprehend.

So then, if you are you, because of how your thoughts and feelings are uniquely composed and cataloged – but the “why” of who you are we still do not understand – then when Jesus says the “Kingdom of God” is within you, could He be talking about a literal phenomenon, not just a figurative?  Could the Kingdom of God be more than just what we believe, what we think, or what we feel?  Could it literally be the presence of God influencing all of the above?  After all, we do not know why a particular thought originates in our brain.  We believe most of them happen due to external stimulus, influenced by conditioning, habit, preference, and bio-chemical responses.  But perhaps there is one more very critical factor in the very genesis of our thoughts and feelings.  Take faith for example.  Does faith come from you, or does it move through you, like some combination of thoughts and feelings you do not fully understand yet cling to in spite of facts, logic, and common sense.  How is that possible?  Reality would dictate that faith is illogical, or self-deception.  But faith rewarded only becomes stronger, and with it trust in what cannot be seen.  So when thoughts and feelings of faith overwhelm you, is that truly some sort of self-delusion, or rather is it divinely inspired from the throne room of God Himself, alive in you, alive in the origination of thoughts and feelings in your brain?  More the latter if you ask me.

Does a Kingdom have to be something we can see, and touch?  Must it have limits defined by its physical presence, or could the Kingdom of God be truly limitless unbound by what we can merely see or touch, but as real as anything else we can experience?  Love is not something we see, but it is more real to us than anything else we experience.  An overabundance of love, is a life beyond all descriptions of happiness.  An undersupply of love, is a life of pain nothing else can bring comfort to.  So love is not bounded by a physical presence in the “real world”, but it remains something very real in our experience, existing perhaps in the same plain of existence where God also reigns.  Love drives behavior, it has been known to cause us to willingly self-sacrifice for the benefit of another.  Love is not about self-preservation, so in that sense it defies all logic as well.  And we say that God is Love, but how seldom do we connect the dots, of knowing God, by knowing what it is to love our spouses, love our children, love our friends and family, and even to learn to love our enemies.  Things greater than ourselves, greater even than what exists in the world of see and touch.  This is something Jesus wanted us to understand.  It begins with a story of faith.

Luke writes to us of this story in the 17^th chapter of his gospel letter, picking up in verse 11 saying … “And it came to pass, as he went to Jerusalem, that he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. [verse 12] And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off: [verse 13] And they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”  Think about this, Lepers, men and women with a terminal disease from which all cures have been lost.  The disease is a death sentence, a long slow living death.  Flesh rots until the whole of body is shut down painfully.  And the disease is horribly contagious forcing one who has it into isolation.  There will be no doctor’s visits.  There will be no pharmaceutical remedy to dull the pain.  There will be complete loneliness, physical pain, and a long slow march towards death.  Priests who were supposed to know how to heal this, and frankly any other condition or malady (remedies given to them by God), had long since forgotten how.  Or perhaps even more sad, had lost faith those remedies which rely upon the supernatural would work.  But are we any different? 

But these lepers had faith in the impossible, as it existed in the person of Jesus Christ.  So they stayed away as much as they could and found Jesus as He begins to enter the next town or village on His route.  They cry out, hoping against hope, believing in someone they do not understand why, being overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings they simply cannot reconcile with any form of logic.  Luke continues in verse 14 saying … “And when he saw them, he said unto them, Go shew yourselves unto the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed.”  First, when Jesus asks them to go to the priests as was part of the custom for cleansing that had been lost, but Jesus was not going to let go – they were not clean yet.  They started walking away from Jesus, still losing body parts, still being infectious, still suffering from a terminal disease.  There was no reason to go see the priests.  The disease was still with them.  Yet they went.  Without question.  It is what they were told.  Perhaps they would be healed when they got there.  It did not matter.  They were told to go, and go they went.  And along the journey while they were walking, their bodies were fully restored.  All the missing parts re-appeared as if re-created by our Creator God Himself, as it truly was.  Full strength returned, perhaps even better than it had ever been.  I am certain it overwhelmed them all. 

We don’t know if these ten lepers were a mix of Jews and Samaritans, or a mix of young and old, or a mix of men and women.  We only know about one.  One leper disobeyed what he was told by Jesus.  But he disobeyed because he could not help himself.  Perhaps he was the one who was healed of the most serious case of the leprosy among the ten.  Those who are forgiven the most, tend to be the most grateful.  But this one leper just could not follow what he was told.  While the other nine did as instructed.  Luke continues in verse 15 saying … “And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, [verse 16] And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan.”  The one man who returned was a Samaritan.  Luke points this out, because while the Jews looked down upon Samaritans, it was the Samaritan whose heart was broken by this healing and just had to return to Jesus, glorifying God, falling at the feet of Christ, and thanking Him with tears and a heart shattered by the love of God.

Luke continues in verse 17 saying … “And Jesus answering said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine? [verse 18] There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger. [verse 19] And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.”  This is not a condemnation of Jesus of the other nine.  They remained healed.  They are actually continuing to do what Jesus had asked them to do, to present themselves to the priests, to the Pharisees, as a testimony to them that healing was back in Israel.  Even if the Pharisees had lost faith that terminal illnesses could be cured, Jesus had not, nor had these men, who were now living testimonies to the healing power of Jesus Christ and His Father God.  But Jesus asks about the other nine, and draws attention to the fact that this man is a stranger (a Samaritan), to draw contrast to how the “more devout” children of Abraham responded to an encounter with God.  The Samaritan just had to come back and thank Jesus.  How many of us are more like the other nine?  We may do as we are told, because our hearts do not drive us back in great joy and worship.  We worship when it is time to.  We sing when it is time to.  Pray when it is time.  Our brains have us conditioned to do what we are supposed to, when we are supposed to.  But the heart of this man drove him to do what he did despite instructions to the contrary.  He just had to thank God first.  He would still go the priests, but He needed more Jesus first.  How few of us think this way, or feel this way, and how sad that is.

Luke continues in verse 20 saying … “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: [verse 21] Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”  The priests got the message and were none too happy about it.  It was rather humiliating to have ten lepers show up who were no longer lepers because of an encounter with Jesus who still knew they could be healed.  To rub salt in the wound, these lepers were also fully restored something only Jesus could do, that is, only the Creator could do.  So the Pharisees were determined to bust Jesus on something.  If He were God, He would know when heaven was supposed to come back to this world.  So the priests wanted a specific answer from Jesus, when would they be saved, when would Israel be saved.  Note the emphasis on “when”, not on “how”.

But think about the answer of Jesus.  Heaven does NOT come because you watch for it.  In just a few verses later, Jesus will discuss how the time of Noah, and the time of Lot, were also very analogous to the return of God to our earth, and the re-installation of heaven for us all.  But that day will NOT ever be seen without understanding “how” salvation works.  For salvation to work, the Kingdom of God must live within you.  The thoughts of your brain need influence, they need the direction of the Holy Spirit, they need God to interact with them.  Your feelings need not be based solely on bio-chemical reactions, but instead be fully influenced by Jesus Christ through the mechanism of the Kingdom of God within you.  How else will you ever come to know empathy for the downtrodden instead of apathy?  How else will you ever learn what it is to love others so passionately that you would gladly self-sacrifice without a moments hesitation or regret?  Not just feelings of worship highs, but deep feelings aligned with the Kingdom of God that make a difference in the lives of others, that have tangible benefits for others in the here and the now.

We need the power of God’s force to influence our very weak minds, to create thoughts where none might have existed to do what love would drive us to do.  Faith, despite all logic.  Trust, despite a complete lack of what we can see or touch.  Thoughts, aligned with feelings, aligned completely with a boundless Kingdom of God founded in a love we will never fully understand.  While we may never understand how our thoughts are created or why; the genesis of our thoughts can be better understood in the light of the Kingdom of God within us.  Our lives can be made better.  Our freedom can be granted to us by the power of Jesus, made free, made whole, saved beyond what we could have imagined.  Despite the impossibility of it all, yet it remains real.  The “when” of God’s return cannot ever be fully appreciated until the “how” of our salvation is understood.  Genesis was not only a book about creation, it is a living process instilled within you by a willing heart and mind, to accept the salvation you need, and by allowing it we come to want more and more.