THE ESSENCE OF LIFE
Life can mean different things to different people, depending on their life orientations, experiences, and religious, or held beliefs and practices. Therefore, life seems to elucidate different answers from different perspectives and standpoints. In another's context, life entails all that is there to be seen, conquered, and experienced, in an atmosphere of personal fulfillment; based on a given set of human standards and measures of success.
A student of conventional inquisitive studies and discovery, may easily and obviously reach a conclusion that there is no definite answer in the subject of what id life? Again, he/she falls victim of skewed interpretation of what life really is. The cycle continues on and on.
When this is the case, all human competition across cultures, is goaled towards achieving that is which the essence of life, based on the contextualized definition of life. Further still, some may adopt a hybrid type of definition of life, as borrowed from distant human cultures in history; or a observed through media and the present day global interactions.
Over the centuries, the question of what life really is has dogged philosophers, religious, and political systems without count. Any serious Soul seeking to find out what the essence of life is, will make a departure from existing simplistic and narrow paths seeking to define the essence of life.
With such an effort, need arises to get to the root and the very genesis of things. If for and by way of philosophy, nothing can be or exist by itself whatsoever, then life cannot be by itself. An effort to understand world history, takes a student of history to down to the achieves of history in order such for answers from past and present historians perspectives.
In the same way, a journey to the discovery of the essence of life takes serious students to the creator of all things. How does He define life, and the essence of life. In an by all means, this discovery can only be made possible from the creator's own manual, the Bible. An encounter with statements made by Jesus, the very author of life will help one to comprehensively and logically reach a conviction about not only the meaning of life, but the very essence of life.
In John 14:6, Jesus made a very heavy and loud statement, " I am the way, the truth and the life".. (NIV). The question then could be, how can Jesus claim to be the way, the truth, and the life? In a world full of many "ways" of doing things, where truth is considered relevant to one's orientation, and the meaning of life has numerous answers, Jesus seems very confident, in this discourse with his disciples.
What I find interesting is in verse John 14:29. That he says these things before they happen so that the disciples can believe when they come to be. That a time was going to unfold when he would be the way. the truth, and the life. At least for them not to be troubled with our present day.
In the John 17:2, Jesus dialogues with His father in prayer, as his disciples listen to him. Again, he claims that God gave him authority over all people, that he might give eternal life to those that the father had given him. Beautiful. At least he clears the mystery of who the way to the father is, and who gives eternal life.
The essence of life is simply knowing Christ, the author of both earthly life, and eternal life. To know him, be found in him, and to make him known to others, by way of preaching the gospel, the way of Salvation. This is what NGCS students endeavor to achieve in and with their training at NGCS.
