IN THE WORDS OF JESUS–Part 265

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON GOD; Part LII

We have now spent two posts speaking of discipleship as a part of our understanding of the Holy Spirit and yesterday touched upon another important part which is the working out of the Kingdom of God on one’s Life. There is great difficulty in communicating the ideas necessary for us to totally understand this and we will focus some on this today. God is One and this should be well established in our minds based on our own revelation and the good common sense and reasoning that we possess. We may not be able to understand God or discern the True nature of things and based on the thought of the created universe and its magnitude and its order how can thinking people such as we entertain any other thought than ONE GOD who we inadequately define as:

GOD ID: Life, Existence; He is the ONE Boundless Immutable Principle; one Absolute Reality which, antecedes all manifested conditioned Being. It is beyond the range and reach of any human thought or expression**.

This is Our Infinite and Eternal God. There is an Old Testament lesson given in the Book of Deuteronomy meant to convince the ancient Israelite of the fact of One God. In that day, there was rather rampant belief in many gods and into these beliefs the Jews of the Bible were prone to go; it was the belief set of many of the people of the day who were steeped in superstition and fear of what they did not understand. Moses sought to correct this by the True understanding of the One God and He did so in commandments such as:

• “Unto thee it was shewed , that thou mightest know that the LORD he is God; there is none else beside him” (Deuteronomy 4:35).
• “Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else” (Deuteronomy 4:39).
• “Hear , O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart” (Deuteronomy 6:4-6).

As any who takes the time to read the Old Testament will know, the lesson is not learned and the Jewish people as a whole continue to venture off into belief on any number of different gods which, over time, caused the splitting up of the Jewish nation and then the total defeat of the Northern and the Southern Kingdoms of Samaria and Judah. As we have said in our posts this last part of the captivity of Judah occurs about 600 years before Christ and there is little known of the state of the Jewish people in this time between the captivity and the Christ except what is given us by a few of the later prophets. We should note however that in Christ’s day, under Roman rule and influenced by Greek society, the ideas of poly-monotheism were evident in the world but the Jews had seemed to outgrow this and were, at least from the perspective of biblical history, convinced now of the One God. This is apparent in the Master’s repeating of the last saying from Deuteronomy above and the short discourse that ensues with one of the scribes. Mark’s Gospel tells us of a time when the Master is being questioned by the Pharisees and the Herodians and then the Sadducees regarding His teachings when: “….one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he: And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question” (Mark 12:28-34).

There are several lessons in this for us today beginning with the modern outlook of the Holy Ghost and the idea of One God. In today’s church there is much talk of being Spirit-filled and this could refer to just about anything. Spirit-filled churches and persons are however the biggest references and most all of the time these are self-proclaimed or designated as such by those who hold their same doctrinal positions. Many of these groups and people use this term as a badge which places them above others who may not believe in the same way as they do. The reality of this is to be seen in the ideas of the Christ however and not in the church created realm of the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit works through a man or a church as the Power of the Christ Within or the Christ Principal as regards structured groups. We must remember our understanding of this is that the Holy Spirit is the Activity of the Christ Within in a man which we here extend this understanding to the Activity of the Christ Principal in a structured group and its doctrine. Our basis for this is the simplicity of the facts that the Master enunciated to us regarding discipleship, being worthy and the Kingdom of God that we have been reviewing now for a few days; each of these is a defining term for what can Truly be called Spirit-filled and, these are, in the reality of Our One God, all the same thing in their True meanings as told us by the Christ.

When we say here that it is the Activity of the Christ that is being expressed as the Holy Spirit, what exactly do we mean? First, the Christ is the manifestation of the One God and insofar as a man or a structured group is concerned it is the manifestation of the Spirit. Spirit is God and although this is a difficult concept, each IS the One reality, although as Spirit, one is part and parcel of the One God; that is that each exists within the One God and, at the same time that One God is the Life in each. Again we must understand that language fails us in attempting to put these mysteries into words and this is likely the purpose of the Master’s teaching on God as the Father which is a figure that we can understand and discuss. While this idea of Father can give us comfort in discussions regarding God it does not really explain it at all but it can be found as the basis for a piece of the overall Truth. Each man, that is each True man as a Soul, is a Son of the Father in the sense that we come forth from Him; to Him we owe our very Life as there would be none in His absence. At the same time, this does not explain the hows and the whys of what we call above part and parcel; this is however discussed in parable by the Master, in parable because we have to put ourselves into the role of the Christ being the Christ Within and understanding our likeness and similarity to Him. The Master tells us these things:

• “Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works’ sake“. (John 14:10-11)
• “At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you” (John 14:20).
• “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” (John 14:23).
• “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will , and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples” (John 15:4-2).

Each of these sayings is a testimony to the ideas that we put forth above regarding the nature of man and his relationship to God. Some of these are spoken to the perspective of the man as a Soul, as the Christ Within and others are spoken to the man in form showing him that it is only when a man keeps His words that he can realize his Oneness with God. Remember too that God is One and that these things that the Master speaks of Himself are then True of the Father and the Holy Spirit although each has a different position in Life if we can use such a term. Can we see the importance of keeping His words? Can we see that this is the key to discipleship and being worthy and to the Kingdom? Keeping His words or as we also know this, following Him and believing on Him are one’s focus of his consciousness upon the Christ and the Christ Within and then taking one’s motivations from the Soul and not from the world. This brings us then back to our point of the reality of being Spirit-filled; as a person this is rather simple…..follow Him and keep His words which is to focus upon the ways of God and in doing so the Light of the Soul, the Christ Within, will flow through one’s consciousness, one’s conscious personality, and the Activity of this Light in form is the Holy Spirit. This is the reality of being Spirit Filled. There is really no other way regardless of what we may hear others declare.

This same premise holds true for the structured group although here there is a twofold approach that is also in the way of the man it is better implied in his actions as he does what he believes. For the group this is not quite so clear insofar as there are doctrines and creeds and then there are the following of the doctrines and creeds by the members of any group. So what then is the measure of it all? It is the measure of the doctrines and the creeds as compared to the Master’s teaching that we have discussed over the last several days and, when a doctrine or a creed meets that lofty goal of being in line with His teachings, the measure is  then also what any specific group is doing to uphold and to teach it to those who follow. In today’s world much like in days past the average man relies upon the doctrines and the creeds that attract him as a man; a man hearing the call of the Soul will gravitate to doctrines and creeds that have an emphasis on Godly things and a man hearing only the call of the world will gravitate to the more worldly. Here we can get a glimpse of how one man is attracted to a spiritual life in the church and another is attracted to a group that may harbor hatreds and prejudices and how another who hears no call or does not pay attention to it will wander about somewhere in the middle.

So then who and what is Spirit-filled? The one who hears the call of the Soul and heeds it and this man can be from any religion or group throughout the world. The Soul transcends religion; the Soul is Truth and Truth knows no bounds; the teachings of the Christ are the basic tenets of the Soul which can be briefly understood as the Good, the Beautiful and the True. No group or religion has a proprietary right to these as these are Universal Values that flow through the consciousness of any and all who are Soul Conscious or who are becoming such. For the Christian the idea can be resolved into following the teachings of the Master and, since we are essentially Christian, we read and we write from this perspective but there is no commandment or criteria to do so. We should ever understand that from the Souls perspective, the perceptive of the Christ Within, Love is Love and righteousness is righteousness and Truth is One. We should understand also that the Christ Within should be seen as the Love of God, the Love that IS God, made manifest to men and that He too transcends ALL religion and all custom. As we said above it is difficult to put much of the ideas that relate to the man in form and himself as the Soul into words that can deliver cogent thoughts and understandings and this is because we are at once both the consciousness that is in the form and the source of that consciousness which is the Soul. When we read these posts we must ever be aware of this and try to visualize what it is that we are reading from the right perspective. The lines are muddy here as they are also in the parabolic teachings of the Master and His disciples.

We will continue with our thoughts on the Holy Spirit in the next post.

Note on the Quote of the Day