Love is the Fulfilling of the Law
ON GOD; Part CXV
“Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace” (James 3: 13-18).
In the last post we basically completed our discussion on this saying and ignored the Quote of the Day section. Today we do the opposite and concentrate on the section below and will say little here on this saying by James except that we can tie both of these together at the end of our discussion below.
We will begin a new topic 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 beb 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.
We leave our Quote of the Day from yesterday again today and likely for several days so that we can understand the intent of these affirmations which are intended for use by aspirant and disciples such as we believe that we are. Our opening and general statement on these verses has been moved to the bottom.
We did not add anything to our discussion on this affirmation in yesterday’s post and, since there is little else to add to the topic in our main section, we will focus today on the next ideas that come forth from the next stanza which says: 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. There is a great Truth in the middle of this and one that is enunciated by the Christ but little observed in the world of men. Can we glimpse the intent of this saying that the Holy Will of God requires that ALL men serve. There are no defining terms included here to tell a man how to serve and there are no doubt countless ways to do so which will depend upon many factors that are intertwined with the other purposes of the Soul as he comes into incarnation. In a previous stanza we spoke about the the major purpose of the Soul and this can be seen to encompass ALL Souls as we are in the Dispensation of Love as brought about by the Christ and in our reality that “God is love” (John 4:8) as told us by the apostle. In the next stanza we find the idea of other purposes which will, when they are accomplished, make disappear the hindrances and the obstacles which contribute to the difficulties of one’s fulfillment of ALL of the purposes of the Soul.
We should see at the heart of the obstacles and the hindrances the illusion, the glamour and the deception that are their cause in the Life of the man in form. In man’s belief that the form and the personality are the reality of Life we can find the beginning of the effect on him of the illusion in which he is mired. There is no escape until the Light of the Soul is able to dissapate the illusion and there is little or no Light of the Soul until the man is able to hear and heed the still small voice of conscience and of reality. This is also the beginning of the duality that causes the man to see and to understand the existence and the power of the lower forces and to begin to appreciate the struggle that ensues in his effort to overcome the world. These things do of course happen by degree and the Path out of the fog of illusion is a slow and steady process that likely takes many lifetimes to accomplish and it is as the man progresses in each lifetime that he is able to build better and more usable forms and personalities through which the Soul can work at his next opportunity. This is of course a broad brush approach to the way that things work and our intent here is to say two things; first that if we are today aspirants to discipleship, that is that we are consciously aware of our True nature and are striving to follow the Way of Love, we can KNOW that we were brought to this point by our previous Life experiences. Secondly is to give us that proper perspective that ALL that we do here and now which is in accordance with the teachings of the Master, brings us closer to Him and gives us additional spiritual collateral for the next incarnation. It is only when we Truly reach the Kingdom of God by following ALL that the Master has told us to do that we can even think about being free from this cycle of Life and death and be of the few who escape the net and fly to heaven as we are told by the Buddha.
From this we should try to see that we do, each of us, come into this Life with some Soul purpose which is from the Soul’s perspective, the perspective of the True man, some accomplishment that will bring us closer to our ultimate goal and objective of being able to express the fullness of the Power and the Love of God through our form. There are many to whom this idea seems alien and blasphemous but we have the Master’s word on it; He tells us that:
- “The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master” (Luke 6:40).
- “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
- “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21).
- “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence , and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:21).
In these sayings we have the words of the Christ telling us of our ability as disciples to be as He is and in this we should see the idea of the fullness of the Power and the Love of God and likely much more that we can not even anticipate nor imagine. We see our ability to be perfect as the Father is perfect and regardless of how one may choose to define this word, we should see the even deeper part of being “even as your Father which is in heaven“. Entwined with this idea of perfect is also the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God and we should understand that it is the same accomplishments that bring us to the Kingdom that will bring us to discipleship and this is simply stated as we see above and in other places in His words as “he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven“. There should be no mystery here as His message is clear and we should see and have the understanding that this accomplishment is but a step on the Path to perfection and that the picture of this journey is drawn for us in the Life and times of the Apostle Peter. This starts with his acceptance of and by the Christ in the gospels, through his trials and tribulations, and up to his greater state of Holiness as told us in the Book of Acts where we read that “Insomuch that they brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that at the least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them. There came also a multitude out of the cities round about unto Jerusalem, bringing sick folks, and them which were vexed with unclean spirits: and they were healed every one” (Acts 5:15-16). Peter is moving forward as a Soul, he is becoming more and more able to express the fullness of the Power and the Love of God through his form and reaches the degree of that fullness where his mere proximity does heal the masses. Can we see how this can all work out in the Life of each of us? and, should we doubt, the Master gives us another key to our accomplishment telling us that we must take the Kingdom by force. This does not mean anything in a violent way but rather that we can at any time repent which is ever the message of the Christ and the message with which he sent forth His disciples and through them sends us.
- “From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17).
- “And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 10:7).
- “And they went out , and preached that men should repent” (Mark 6:12).
- “And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47-48)
In the first saying here we have the Master’s teaching from the beginning as told by Matthew; in the second and third we have His instructions to His disciples as he sends them out and in the last we have the Master’s own words to some disciples after His resurrection. The common thread through all of this is repent and it is repentance, True repentance, that brings us to the Kingdom; it is through repentance that we can take the Kingdom by force.
While this ultimate goal ever in the sights of the Soul as he continues through his cycles of incarnation with the objective of becoming able to express the fullness of the Power and the Love of God through his form, there are undoubtedly specific purposes in each Earth Life which should be understood as the stage where this ultimate goal must be worked out. Here we come back to our thoughts on service and the better understanding that the service of each is a part of the ongoing journey toward the ultimate goal which is revealed in one’s consciousness through the promptings of the Soul. For many these promptings are never felt above the clamor of daily living. Somewhere in these promptings is the key to the purposes of the Soul, those purposes which are aside from the expression of Love which we must all accomplish, and in these purposes is one’s sense of service.
In closing today we should try to understand this very difficult idea that even in service we are subject to the illusion and the glamour and the deceptions of Life in the world and that what we may believe is our ‘calling’ is but the ‘calling’ of the personality. Here we can put to use the ideas that we have developed in our discussions on the sayings from the Epistle of James as they appear above. This sense of ‘calling’ is within the realm of hearing from God or as James says it, Wisdom from above, and this sense of ‘calling’ can be tested against this criteria….is what we believe that we are to do for the self, to help the self in any way or is it totally for our sense of service to our Lord and God which is, as the Master teaches us, service to our fellowman.
We will continue with our thoughts on this in the next post.
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.
As we approached the time of the Wesak Festival we noted that there are Three Spiritual Festivals in three consecutive months each falling on the day of the Full Moon in the respective month. The first is the Festival of Easter, the second is the Wesak, the Festival of the Buddha and the third is the festival of the Christ which is coming next at the Full Moon of Gemini which will occur on June the 5th and which is alternatively called World Invocation Day. There is a little more that three weeks between now and the Christ’s Festival and we will try to use that time to attain a better understanding of what this day should mean to us. We will start here today with this set of affirmative sayings regarding discipleship and its requirements from the perspective of the willing disciple. We will get into the source of this saying as well as our thoughts on its meaning and intent over the next few posts and we will leave it here as the Quote of the Day until we can accomplish this. Spoken as the aspirant or disciple in form who is invoking fullness of the power of the Christ Within, he first acknowledges what he must bring to bear on the personalty, then what he must do with this purpose, power and will……LOVE.
