Pastor Bell's Words To Live By

Emotional Intelligence, or EI, describes an ability or capacity to perceive, assess, and manage the emotions of one’s self, and of others.  Our EQ, or Emotional Quotient, is how one measures Emotional Intelligence. Emotions have the potential to get in the way of our most important business and personal relationships. Emotional intelligence raise the individual’s skills in areas such as how to listen better and the ability to help those being led to resolve problems on their own; how to empower and inspire others, and how to become more effective personal leaders. Essentially though, emotions have no intelligence by itself. Your emotions are an integral part of your psychological state of mind and not an isolated entity. Our emotions are a part of feelings are therefore dependent on a myriad of different conditions such as the environment, the physical season, who we are with and so on. Reacting to our emotions can and does lead to grave mistakes being made. Your spirituality is to ‘know’ who you are and Spiritual Intelligence is to ‘realize’ who you are and to live life in that awareness. You have always been who you are and, in truth, you can never be other than who you are, but it requires ‘realisation’ i.e. that moment when you ‘see it’, when you ‘get it’ and then you ‘be it’. Spirituality is the knowledge of yourself as spirit/soul/body, and the understanding of your highest spiritual qualities and attributes, which are love, peace, purity and bliss. There is a tendency to try to separate spirit/soul/body and to present them as separate entities. This tendency will lead to dualism and then into error as our ancient forefathers found out. Spiritual Intelligence is the expression of these innate spiritual qualities through our thoughts, attitudes and behaviour. Being spiritual means the ego has dissolved, virtue has been restored to character and spiritual values connect your inner and outer worlds, that is, your thought to action. It is the ability to see every other human being as soul/spirit/body, a whole unit, and thereby transcend all the false identities of race, colour, gender, nationality, profession and religion. Essentially every human being has the same raw materials and the same propensity to have intimacy with the creator. It is in this awareness that we are then able to recognise and connect with the Supreme Power, Jesus Christ. To develop spiritual and emotional intelligence dictates that we become self actuated people. We all subscribe to the hierarchy of needs as proposed by American Psychologist Dr. Abraham Maslow (1908 -1970). When these needs are met we seek to satisfy the next level of needs until we become people who are meeting the needs others, This means that once our basic needs are met we seek to meet our emotional and spiritual needs. Once these are being satisfied we use the Blessing to become ‘Blessors’and hence spiritually and emotionally intelligent people. Read Joshua 7 to see how he dealt with Achan!