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TWENTY-THIRD
DAY
CHRIST
THE DEMOSTRATION OF THE POWER OF LOVE
Spirit loq. The Bible contains all we have told
you within it. The spiritual rendering of the Bible has been concealed by man’s
own lack of spiritual grasp. To those who seeing can perceive, and hearing can
understand, the Bible has ever been the treasure-house of spiritual life and
(p. 45)
spiritual knowledge. Their
powerlessness to realize spiritual things has prevented, and still prevents, men
from laying hold of the spiritual existence which glows as a fire of power,
purification, and love within the Bibles of the Earth, and finds in Christ Jesus
its fullest expression. No wonder ye cast aside as impracticable His teachings,
satisfied to express your admiration in words. No marvel that your “Christians”
ever find life a toil, and death unspeakable sorrow. What have they but sense,
perishing and failing, to make life worth having? It is all cross and no
resurrection, all love and no power issuing from love, all uncertain belief and no
faith, no visions clear as daylight to raise your drooping souls.
Christ came, not only to promise but to fulfill, to show man that the kingdom of
Heaven might and must exist on Earth, for those who can possess themselves of
it, and who can believe that matter and all pertaining to matter can be
transfigured by it into Heaven and Spirit; that pain, sickness, sin, and sorrow,
even death itself are due to man’s blindness and want of perception of the real
nature of things, of the real nature of his own being and the real powers due to
his own connection with the Divine. The cross Christ’s followers must bear was
the suffering incident to the crucifixion of their lower sense-nature which
withheld from them the power or Spirit of God. For this Spirit alone can redeem
matter and endue it with Godlike powers.
The idea that Christ implied any suffering to Earth, beyond the suffering
incident to this struggle between the higher and the lower nature in man, is
false. The idea that Christ did not come to redeem Earth itself, and man while
on Earth, from all which prevents Earth from being Heaven, is utterly false, and
this it is which makes your Christ-worship so feeble, so ineffectual. The idea
that there was any value in Christ’s own death, any merit in it to man, except
as an example, showing Christ the God-begotten soul, willing to sacrifice his
(p. 46)
own lower or bodily nature to his
spiritual teachings and sure faith in God, is a chief
cause of man’s profound discouragement in Christ. Deceive yourselves no longer.
Christ overcame the world. He demonstrated as man – by his
divine love and its inseparable ally his divine power – that man inspired with
God’s spirit has dominion over earth and over all that is on earth, and can
become through this spirit the redeemer of his own life and of his fellows’
lives from sin, from suffering, from death itself. What were Christ’s miracles –
as you call them – but evidences of this vast truth, and what the meaning of his
reproaches to his friends because they could not perform the same? What was his
resurrection but the evidence of the power of the Christ in man over death
itself?
Jesus was the full manifestation of God in man, the Liberator or Savior of man
from all evil, physical as well as spiritual evil, from the darkness in which he
dwells when dissevered from God. Anointed with the fullness of the Holy Breath,
he was truly termed Christ Jesus, “Anointed Liberator.” Yet, are you not freed
yet, neither shall you be so until Earth rings with the peal of earthly and
heavenly voices combined, announcing your freedom, O men, from sin, from sorrow,
from death.
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