How To Be Human: an introduction
Weak? Vulnerable? Small? These aren't flaws; they're features.
June 28, 2026
Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder • Kingdom Church Troy
The Trouble With Being Human
We tend to talk about being human as if it’s a contradiction we have to solve. On one hand, people do remarkable things — feats of courage and creativity that leave us in awe. On the other hand, people can be devastating to each other and to themselves. So which is it? Are we meant to celebrate our humanity, or escape it?
Paul doesn’t let us split the difference that easily. Writing to the church in Philippi, he names something deeper than the awesome-or-awful split: a quiet confusion between the temporal and the eternal. We mistake the game for the whole of life, forgetting that when the game is over, it all goes back in the box. Some people, he writes, “walk as enemies of the cross of Christ… with minds set on earthly things” (Philippians 3:18–19). The danger isn’t ambition or appetite themselves. It’s mistaking either one for the point of being alive.
Belly Gods and Borrowed Glory
Paul singles out two things in particular: a belly that has become a god, and a glory that’s really just shame wearing a disguise. Strip away the church language and it sounds familiar. A belly god is appetite turned into ultimate authority — comfort, consumption, the relentless pursuit of “I want.” Glory in shame is what happens when we build our worth out of likes, credentials, and recognition — the applause of whatever room we’re standing in.
What makes this so disorienting is that none of it is, by itself, evil. We were made to receive, and we’d rather possess. We were made dependent on God and each other, and we’d rather be self-sufficient. We were made to serve, and we’d rather be served. We were knit together in soft, vulnerable flesh, and we spend enormous energy covering that vulnerability up. We were made to flourish in community, and the moment things get hard, we scatter. None of this is a new flaw bolted onto our design — it’s a distortion of a design that was good to begin with.
Philippians 3:20–21 — “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.”
Strangers Who Saw From Afar
That’s the hope Paul is pointing to — not an escape from being human, but a transformation of it. It’s the same hope the writer of Hebrews finds in the lives of Israel’s ancestors. Faith, Hebrews says, is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) — not having the thing yet, but being so certain of it that you live differently because of it.
The patriarchs, the text says, died in faith, “having seen them and greeted them from afar,” acknowledging themselves as strangers and exiles on the earth, because they were seeking a better country, a heavenly one (Hebrews 11:13–16). They could have turned back. They had a homeland behind them. But they kept walking toward something they couldn’t yet hold. Here’s the line worth sitting with: that heavenly city they were walking toward is a human city. Heaven isn’t the opposite of humanity — it’s humanity finally, fully at home.
The Privilege of Suffering
This is where Paul’s own story becomes instructive. He had every earthly credential available to a first-century Jew — pedigree, religious zeal, legal standing, social capital. And he calls all of it loss, even rubbish, compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ (Philippians 3:7–9). Not because credentials are inherently bad, but because none of them were ever going to be the foundation.
What he wants instead is almost startling: “that I may know him in the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10–11). Notice the order. Resurrection power doesn’t skip past suffering — it runs straight through it. To be human, in this account, is to suffer. That’s not a flaw to be optimized away. It’s a feature of a life joined to Christ, a privilege of walking the same road he walked.
Already on the Way Home
Maybe that’s an uncomfortable thing to preach. Would any of us sign up for a faith that promises suffering before it promises strength? But it’s a far more honest hope than the version we’re usually sold — the one where becoming a Christian means our weakness vanishes and we’re left with nothing but power. The real promise is stranger and better than that: we are citizens of another country, already on our way home, being transformed even now by the same power that raised Christ from the dead.
Strangers here. Citizens of heaven. Already on the way home.