Love is the Fulfilling of the Law
ON LOVE; PART LXXXVIII
ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•Α
GoodWill IS Love in Action
ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•Α
“And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it. If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live , ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings: and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me. These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:13-26).
We made it through the titles and subtitles that we use in our daily essays and which are intended to give meaning to our effort in writing and in reading these posts.
- Title: IN THE WORDS OF JESUS. This is intended to focus us upon the words of the Master as the reality of the Christian experience as well as the experience of most any religion as it is the Christ who is the last of the Great Avatars and Sons of God to appear on the Earth and it is also the Christ who by His very purity was able to be born into this world as the expression of “all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9). It is in this reality that the Christ was able to completely control not only His own Life and being but was able to ‘do as He willed done‘ and, accomplish the goal of us ALL which we find in His words “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). We cannot say when this overcoming was accomplished but only that is was accomplished and there is evidence of this great accomplishment in the beginnings of His ministry as is told us through His trials in the wilderness. We read here that the Master is tempted by the devil or by satan and in this we understand that the temptation is of the ways and the things of the world which He could have taken for Himself because He had the ultimate power.
- “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold , angels came and ministered unto him” (Matthew 4:1-11).
This is Jesus the Christ, the Love and the Power of God made manifest here on this Earth in the person of Jesus. It is the presence of the Christ in Him bodily from birth that gives to Him that uniqueness which is captured by the Apostle John who tells us that “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). IN THE WORDS OF JESUS we find the key to our own salvation which is in reality to accomplish as the Master did as our own individual Christ Within, the True us, is expressed through our bodily form making us able to fulfill what He says of us: “the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do” (John 14:12). There is of course a criteria here that we must follow and that is found in the beginning of this verse from John saying: “He that believeth on me” and, we must understand that the reality of this idea is in following Him and keeping His words which is, as Vincent tells us: to accept and adopt His precepts and example as binding upon the life.4
- First Subtitle: LOVE IS THE FULFILLING OF THE LAW. Here we take opportunity to remind ourselves of the importance of Love and the reality of Love as the cause of ALL and this we frame from John’s telling us that “God is love” (1 John 4:16). If Love is the cause of ALL then it is the root of ALL as well and here we should try to see the reality of the “tree of life” as the True Man and the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:9) as the man in form. We have heretofore positioned this as the True Man, the Soul giving Life and lending consciousness to the form Life in the world. The Life is within the form and the form uses it to continue in this world; when the Life leaves the form the Life in this world is over. In this we should be able to see that this form Life IS the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil“. Taking this thought further we have the True man, the Soul, the Christ Within, as the “tree of life” which is ‘off limits’ to the man in form which we read as “cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis 3:24). Of course taking these words literally we can only rely upon superstition and fanciful stories to understand these realities of Life which are offered to us couched in mystery. What is actually guarding the “tree of life” is a hard thing to say but we can offer here the idea that it is illusion and glamourthat keep the man in form from seeing the Truth, the Soul that IS the man and, if we can look at this story from Genesis and relate it to the words of the Apostle Paul that we have been using frequently, we can likely get a better picture of the reality of Life.
- Genesis tells us that “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” (Genesis 3:22-24). We know from our further reading that God does not forsake Adam and Eve but nurtures them in the Earth and continues with them as their generations showing them the way back to God, back to the Garden.
- Paul tells us in Romans that: “For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8;19-21).
Now we get no greater revelation here regarding the why of it ALL but we can get a better understanding of the how. Bringing this back to Love as the root of ALL we should try to see that the “tree of life” is grounded in Love, it is the symbol of the Soul and the Christ and when this tree is allowed to grow into the form Life of the man it overwhelms and overcomes the nature that is already present which is symbolized by the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” Hence it is the Love that IS and when this Love is made manifest in form it overtakes the carnal nature and the knowledge of things in the world. Paul tells us from a seemingly different perspective that “Now as touching things offered unto idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up , but charity edifieth. And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know. But if any man love God, the same is known of him” (1 Corinthians 8:1-3). We should here understand that the reference to idols can be any thing than takes the focus and the attention of the man in form and we should also remember that the word translated here as charity is the same word that is generally translated as Love. In short we can say here that our subtitle tells us simply that Love fulfills ALL of the word of God and this must become a Truth to ALL men as must the reality that GOD IS LOVE.
- Second Subtitle: ON LOVE. In these words we set the tone of the ensuing essay and since these words have been used, the essays have been in regard to Love; we say this regardless of what the specific subject has been. Any essay on God is an essay on Love, there is no way around this reality and, again, this is because we KNOW that “God is love” (1 John 4:16). Our use of these words is intended to remind and inform us that Love IS as God IS and there is no way to separate these ideas. It is only in the carnal nature of the man in the world that this idea gets muddied by the illusion and the glamour, the vanity according to Paul, that controls the waking Life of us ALL. ALL are subjected to these forces and phenomenon as we read in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans above and we should understand the resolution for us ALL, our individual and corporate deliverance “from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” is the sole function of our ability to stand with the Master and to say “I have overcome the world“. This is no easy task but it is one that we are admonished to strive toward and this IS our objective and our goal. Understanding the reality and the function of illusion and glamour, of vanity, in the Life of every man, our realization of their very existence, should give us the wherewithal to see more clearly, to look above the fog and the mist in which we daily live. This looking above is the very nature of striving as we try to break away from the pull of the ways of the world into which we are well indoctrinated and this same idea works for most all societies and cultures and religions and upbringings for there is illusion and glamourin ALL things that are not in the reality of God, not religion, but God who IS Love. John makes this clear for us saying that:
- “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also” (1 John 4:20-21).
This is a strong statement and one that is not nearly appreciated for its True meaning seeing as it follows closely upon the apostles double declaration that “God is love” (1 John 4:8 and 4:16). It is muddied by the church and by doctrine which attempts to dilute the intensity of the idea of Love so as to portray the brother as a fellow Christian or in some places as a fellow disciple The Master and His apostles never put any such criteria on Love and, as we have traced from the Old Testament, the ideas of brother and stranger and neighbor are used interchangeably This is the True meaning of Love and any other perception of it is one that is grounded in the illusion and glamour and vanity that cloud our vision of things divine and keep us in the throngs of the world. It is to remind us of these things in writing and in reading these essays that this subtitle ON LOVE is added to the others which are essentially on Love as well.
- Third Subtitle: GOODWILL IS LOVE IN ACTION. The purpose of this saying is to remind us of the True nature of Love, that it is not affection and feelings for one another but our active use of GoodWill in our dealings and our interactions with others. This is the effective use of the Golden Rule which says clearly for us that “all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12) or, as we read it in Luke’s Gospel “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” (Luke 6:31). We have repeated this Golden Rule many times in both forms throughout our essays and we do so with the hope that this will become the governing rule for our lives, again, individually and corporately, as there is no other thing that we can do as men that is a greater expression of GoodWill and it is in our honest view and use of these words that we can cure ALL of the ills of the world of men. Emmet Fox writes about this in his Fifteen Points; he says: I PRACTICE, the Golden Rule of Jesus instead of merely admiring it. He said, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” The important point about the Golden Rule is that I am to practice it whether the other fellow does so or not**. This sense of GoodWill is the strength of Love as it is taught by the Master and its understanding is found in this Golden Rule; it is an action, an activity, and not merely a sentiment, it is a guiding principal in the Life of the man who desires to progress.
We did not intend to spend another day in these titles and subtitles but we did. They do state our position and clarify our intent as we move forward day by day, striving toward that strait gate that opens into the Kingdom of God; a Kingdom that resides within each of us as our Souls and the Christ Within. We close today with some thoughts that come to us from World Goodwill, the originators of the saying that we use above. They are not however the originator of the meaning of this saying that GoodWill IS Love in Action as the meaning is inherent in the teachings of the Master. Speaking about Values to Live by in a pamphlet published under that name we find this:
Translated into national terms, these realisations take the conflict and competition out of the many facets of society. While each group fights for itself and its own self-interest there can be no “social harmony,” no tranquility, no security or unity, no freedom or wellbeing. The fundamental human value needed today as the basis for a better life in the society in which we live is the simple, practical use of the energy of goodwill. Goodwill is an inclusive, cooperative attitude of mind; it is “love in action”; it encourages justice and integrity in those with influence and authority. It is truly the cornerstone of a human society responding to the values of the new age. Let us support in thought and action those who act with goodwill on behalf of “the general welfare of all the people.”***The main points of these Values to Live By as we have previously posted and explained them (In the Words of Jesus parts 367 – 370) are:
Values to Live By
A Love of Truth—essential
for a just, inclusive and progressive society;
A Sense of Justice—recognition
of the rights and needs, of all.
Spirit of Cooperation—based
on active goodwill and the principle of right human
relationships;
A Sense of Personal Responsibility—for
group, community and national affairs;
Serving the Common Good— through
the sacrifice of selfishness. Only what is good for all
is good for each one.
The world of the future depends on what each one of us chooses to do today.
Note on the Quote of the Day
This daily blog also has a Quote of the Day which may not be in any way related to the essay. Many of these will be from the Bible and some just prayers or meditations that may have an influence on you and are in line with the subject matter of this blog. As the quote will change daily and will not store with the post, it is repeated in this section with the book reference and comment.:
Today we post a World Prayer that is also included in the Prayers and Meditation section with some explanation of its source and its use. We are entering a time of the year which we can consider more sacred by way of the newness of Spring which should reflect in our newness of Life. This is the Festival of Easter and a time of rejoicing; not only for the Resurrection of the Lord from the Christian perspective but also for the teaching that is incorporated in the Master’s sacrifice 2000 years ago and in His continued sacrifice. We should remember His parting words: “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20)
From the point of Light within the Mind of God
Let light stream forth into the minds of men.
Let Light descend on Earth.
From the point of Love within the Heart of God
Let love stream forth into the hearts of men.
May Christ return to Earth.
From the centre where the Will of God is known
Let purpose guide the little wills of men–
The purpose which the Masters know and serve.
From the centre which we call the race of men
Let the Plan of Love and Light work out
And may it seal the door where evil dwells.
Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.
- 4 Word Studies in the New Testament; Marvin R Vincent D.D. 2nd edition, 1888
- ** From The Fifteen Points by Emmet Fox; © 1932 HarperCollins Publishers Inc
- *** From the pamphlet Values to Live By published by World Goodwill and Lucis Trust
