Monthly Archives: May 2012

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON GOD; Part CXIX

My Soul has Purpose, Power and Will; these three are needed on the Way of Liberation.

My Soul must foster Love among the sons of men; this is its major purpose.

I, therefore, will to love and tread the Way of Love. All that hinders and obstructs the showing of the Light must disappear before the purposes of the Soul.

My will is one with the great Will of God;. that Holy Will requires that all men serve. And unto the purposes of the Plan I lend my little will.

We have been for some days now discussing some of the ideas contained in a phrase that the Master repeats several times and that is the Will of God or the Will of the Father. This is necessarily a complex and mysterious word that incorporates the very purpose of our existence which is but a minuscule part of His Awesome Creation. By its use in the gospels there is no clear definition of His Will and, as we have said, one should not assume that the totality of what this word means is included in the brief declaration of what His Will is by Jesus in the Gospel of John. However, by its use in the Gospels there is also a key to what the Will of God is insofar as it applies to us as men in form and that is that we keep His words. We have applied the idea of intentional focused attention as a defining term for the Will of God, the Will of the Soul and the Will of the Soul in form which should be understood as one’s conscious attention to the things of God. In the last stanza above we had started discussing that the Holy Will requires that all men serve and it is this that led us into a discussion of the ONENESS of ALL and into our last thoughts on the types of men in form as they are addressed by the Master and then, yesterday, as they are presumed to exist in the world today. The connection of all this is in the fact that the Will of the Soul is at the same time its Purpose and in previous posts we explored the stanza above that tells us that My Soul must foster Love among the sons of men; this is its major purpose. We then connected this to the ideas of His Holy Will as regards service and the end result is that we come away with the same thought and that is LOVE; it is the Will of God and the Will of our Souls that move man along the stages that we defined yesterday to the ultimate goal of the ability to express the FULLNESS of the Godhead though form. This is the state of being of the Master and we do know that He tells us that we can do the same saying: “The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master” (Luke 6:40). This fullness can then be seen from our perspective as the fostering of Love as well as the necessity to serve and these are in so many ways the same thing.

Remembering the theme that we set on ONENESS we should look again at how we perceive it to be so that we are not engulfed by the confusion that stems from using these as separate terms. As man’s Spirit, Soul and expression in form are ONE, As the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are ONE so are the Purpose, Power and Will that is outlined in the first stanza. When we see Will, the Will of God or the Will of the Soul as intentional focused attention, we will also see within that Will the Power and the Purpose. In other words the Purpose is implemented by the Power according to the Will. As a man in form, the Power to foster Love among the sons of men emanates from the Soul and this is his Purpose as seen through his focused attention, his Will, on the Christ, the Christ Within and God which can also be seen as the same thing. Can we understand how this is intended to work out in Life? From every perspective of man as we laid out in our premise on the stages of man’s spiritual awareness, these ideas are likely seen a bit different. For us, we see them and talk about them from the perspective of the aspirant and the disciples and thereby we see the unity in ALL of the phrases that we use above; we recognize the Unity of the Trinity, the unity of the Constitution of Man, and the Unity of his Purpose, Power and Will. We can from here say that it is the Will of God that man serves and in the understanding that God IS within us as the Spirit, the Life, this should then have both a personal and a cosmic appeal to us. This is the idea put forth in the first line of this stanza My will is one with the great Will of God which should show us both the unity of which we speak and the idea that the personal Will IS a part of that Great Will; that the Spirit that IS man is of the same spiritual fabric as the Great Will of God. His Will then, and our Will as well, are to serve and, as we have previously discussed, our Purpose is to foster Love and to do this we must necessarily Love. Can we see in this the ideas that we outlined in the stage of aspirant and the stage of discipleship? Can we see the need to do His Will as it is encapsulated in keeping His word and as the Master tells us that we must do to be accounted worthy of the Kingdom. Can we see also that the accomplishment of these things is to be done in form and in the world of men and the Power by which these things are accomplished is found in the Light of the Soul as it pours through the consciousness of the man in form carrying with it the Purpose and the Will which are the Love and the sense of ONENESS through which we serve. There is no easy way to portray this ONENESS in scientific terms as we are trying to do here and this is the beauty of the words of the Master as in them we have this message. Let us look briefly again at our chart of the Constitution of man as it corresponds to the Aspects of God and then we will look at the Master’s ideas on ONENESS and on service and on Love.

Aspect of God	Potency	Expressed as Fire	Aspect of Man
Father	Will or Power	Electric Fire	Spirit or Life
Son, The Christ	Love and Wisdom	Solar Fire	Soul or Christ Within
Holy Spirit	Light or Activity	Fire by Friction	Life Within the Form

Looking at our affirmation above and at the chart we should see that the idea of the Soul itself contains again a Trinity of Aspects: as Purpose, which from the perspective of the chart is the paramount potency of the Soul or Love; as Power, which is not the Power listed as the aspect of Spirit but rather the Power that would correspond the the Life, the Light, the Activity, as an aspect then of the Soul; and as Will which has the same correspondence as we see in the chart on the line of the Spirit and the Father. Again, this is necessarily confusing but if we look at this as it is with the Purpose being of the Soul, the Power being from the Soul and the Will being the incoming energy or the very nature of the Soul as the manifestation of the Spirit; in other words the Soul IS the Will of the Spirit to be. We should add here that if we can get but a brief glimpse of these realities we can understand much although we likely will not be able to adequately express the ideas.

Before we go into the Master’s words on service we should look at what this word means.

•  The lexicon tells us that the Greek word douleuo which is translated as serve means: to be a slave, serve, do service; of a nation in subjection to other nations; metaph. to obey, submit to; in a good sense, to yield obedience; in a bad sense, of those who become slaves to some base power, to yield to, give one’s self up to².  We should see the confusion in trying to affix these defining terms to a saying such as “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Strong’s gives us little on this word saying that douleuo means to serve (as a slave)³; our problem here is that we cannot see this idea in serving God while, at the same time, we can see a man being a slave to the things of the world, of mammon.
• Another word that is translated a serve according to the lexicon is diakoneo and the lexicon tells us of this that it means: to be a servant, attendant, domestic, to serve, wait upon; to minister to one, render ministering offices to; to be served, ministered unto; to wait at a table and offer food and drink to the guests, of women preparing food; to minister i.e. supply food and necessities of life; to relieve one’s necessities (e.g. by collecting alms), to provide take care of, distribute, the things necessary to sustain life; to take care of the poor and the sick, who administer the office of a deacon; in Christian churches to serve as deacons; to minister; to attend to anything, that may serve another’s interests; to minister a thing to one, to serve one or by supplying any thing². We should see that this idea is used mostly in the context of ministering as noted in another of our target sayings: “Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?“. Strong’s tells us on this word that it means: to serve, wait on, help, attend to, this often refers to spiritual and practical ministry in the church. “To wait upon tables” (Acts 6:2) may mean to literally help in serving food, though some believe it refers (also) to the handling of finances³.

We should understand here the confusion in this word as it applies to scripture. None of the defining terms accurately reflect the ideas of the Master from our perspective of Love and Purpose and we are left to find this deeper meaning on our own. We can try to substitute our understanding of to minister but this does not really give us the understanding that we need either. Left to our own devices can we sense the meaning of the Master in our own terms?

• “No man can serve  use intentional focused attention on two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve use intentional focused attention on God and mammon”. Can we see this idea?
• “Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister use intentional focused attention on unto thee?“

Can we see that by applying our idea from above in this affirmation to these sayings from the bible, that His Will is clearer as  our Service and that we can build a better understanding of His teachings to us.

We will leave off here for today and complete our thoughts in the next post.

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.

Keeping the Lord’s Prayer as our Quote of the Day we come now to the idea of His name which we KNOW from the Old Testament as “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). What then are we saying here? We are acknowledging that God IS that He IS everything and everywhere and that in this name of unfathomable meaning we see the Unity and the Purity and the Truth of this Awesome Creation.

We will continue with our thoughts in the next post.

Our Father, which art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name;

thy kingdom come;

thy will be done,

in earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive them that trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation;

but deliver us from evil.

[For thine is the kingdom,

the power, and the glory,

for ever and ever.]

Amen.*

We will leave this prayer for a few days and try to get a better understanding of it and then move on to The Great Invocation which is, as we are told, given to us by the Christ as well. More than 2000 years separate the receipt of these invocations by the world of men and their language and tenor reflect the changes in the nature of man and his societies over this course of time. The Lord’s Prayer and a brief interpretation are included in the Prayers and Meditations section of the front page of this Blog.

• *     From the Gospels of Matthew and Luke; this version is from the Book of Common Prayer of 1662
• ² New Testament Greek Lexicon on BibleStudyTools.com
• ³ Strongest Strongs Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible – 2001