PRE-EXISTENCE Taking Possession of Our Birthright

Transcription

1 PRE-EXISTENCE Taking Possession of Our Birthright Association Address of 1940 BY SAMUEL GREENWOOD

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7 Every day of our lives there is a point in attainment in that direction which we have the ability to reach. Is it Christianly wise to be satisfied with less? We are in a measure responsible for our own limitations, and to that extent it is possible for us to remove them. Then in stead of deploring or excusing our limited sense of God's allness, could we not be more active in increasing that sense, in being more willing to be genuinely good, and in opening consciousness to a larger sense of divine grace and good will? The demand to be Godlike is the inescapable necessity of our divine origin and nature; and if we will be true to that, and be happy in it, we shall conquer our limitations, and gain the freedom to be our divine selfhood. This work is ours, not God's, and it is futile to expect Him to do it for us. In the divine consciousness man has existed from the beginning as God's likeness; but the conditions which to the human sense obscure that likeness are the product, not of Truth, but of a false view of things. The task of removing these falsities naturally rests with those who have consented to have them there. This means you and me and other human beings, who believe they see man as something unlike the divine; it does not refer to God who neither sees nor acknowledges anything opposite to Himself. This is evidently what Paul means by working out our own salvation; and it is God, he says, who works with us, but only as we consent to work with Him. The power and ability are His, but the workis ours; that is, it is our part to use or apply the power. It will not ofitself operate in our behalf. This is where and how the partnership between God and man comes in. In the Christian Sci ence textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mrs. Eddy says, "The rule is already established, and it is our task to work out the solution." Nothing can be simpler than this. To look to God to do our work for us would be to make a dummy of man. This partnership is evident throughout the universe, where nothing expresses activity of itself, but responds to the directing intelligence back of it. The sun, for example, does notact of itself but obeys the mandate of Mind, and its rays bring us its warmth and light. Divine Love has been present throughout the ages, but only as it found response in the hearts and lives of men has its influence been felt. Thus the sons of God have their place and work as executors of His will and agents of His government. Now an executor is one appointed to see that the conditions of a will are carried out. "The Father," Jesus said, "hath committed all judgment unto the Son." As rays of divine light, our work is to make manifest the nature of God, to express to the world all that He is, and what it means to know Him as their Father. This is logically the mission of every child of God; and we cannot evade it if we would. Jesus said that they who will be entitled to enter the kingdom of heaven, are those who do the will of the Father, that is, those who carry out the conditions of His will.

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15 the eternal idea of God, that was and is neither young nor old, neither dead nor risen." Let me quote again a most significant statement from Miscellaneous Writings which refers to Jesus. We read, "His physical sufferings, which came from the testimony of the senses, were over when he resumed his individual spiritual being, after showing us the way to escape from the material body." Breaking the Mesmerism of Mortality The present human world picture is no part of the spiritual universe. In its better aspects it expresses the transitional thought of mortals in their progress out of the limitations and deceptions of material sense toward an apprehension of divine creation. The true idea of man is not known to a materially minded world. To the material thoughts of his time Jesus appeared only as a fleshly per sonality, even as you and I do today. From the standpoint of the bodily senses, we do not see or know each other as we exist in the realm of God; for if we did, we would see the universe as spiritual and eternal, and ourselves as beyond the touch of sin and mortality. Jesus came to restore that view of persons and things. The false view of man as born into a world of sin and suffering, has objectified, and perpetuated itself in the experience of humanity, and still holds the race in its despotic grasp. And what can break this mesmerism of evil, and lift consciousness above things sensual, except Jesus' revelation of God as the Father of all; and his revela tion of man as made in the divine image? Jesus came to restore the lost sense of man's existence as entirely separate from the flesh, and as antedating the so-called Adam dream of materiality. When Jesus said, "I ascend unto my father, and your father," he placed us in the same relation to God and to our origin as himself, and plainly implied the truth of our individual preexistence. To my sense, this statement alone should seal our faith in this truth, and heal us of the belief of having begun life materially, or of being linked to any mortal ancestry. When the Master said to Martha, "I am the resurrection, and the life," he was evidently trying to show her that in himself, in what he was, and in what he came to earth for, was being exemplified the unqualified immortality of man; that even though material belief said her brother was dead, he was still alive. To the Master's understanding, neither material living nor dying had any relation to the actual life of man, and could not limit or interfere with it. What greater resurrection could mortals ask for than to rise to the consciousness of Life which Christ Jesus demon strated before the world, and which still stands as an example for all Christians? His realization of man's spiritual oneness with the Fatner must become the resurrection and the life to all mankind. Is not our resurrection today, to definitely awaken to the facts of man's spiritual origin as a present reality, and to rise out of the 11

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