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As Meek As Moses

Posted in Good Morning, tagged on August 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Moses—who overcame the old age belief to the extent of manifesting the physical body of a young man in the prime of life when, according to the calendar, he was one hundred and twenty years old, and then transcended matter altogether, or “dematerialized” without dying—was known preeminently for this quality; “as meek as Moses.” Apart from his own personal demonstration, Moses also did a marvelous work for his whole nation, getting it out of Egyptian bondage in the face of incredible difficulties. Moses had an open mind, ready to be taught new things and new ways of thinking and working. He was not, in the beginning at least, free from serious faults of character, but he gradually rose above these defects as the new truth worked in his soul.

Moses thoroughly understood that to conform oneself rigorously to the will of God, far from involving the loss of any good, could only mean a better and more splendid life. He did not, therefore, think of his task as self-sacrifice, for he knew it to be the highest form of self-glorification—the glorification of God.

…the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works…I am in the Father, and the Father is in me (John 14:10-11).

There is a marvelous Oriental saying that “meekness compels God himself.”

When we empty out our self-centered consciousness and open ourselves to God’s universal consciousness, we are performing the ultimate act of meekness. When we release our human spirit and allow God’s Holy Spirit to fill us we become meek. When we adopt God’s divine will and abandon our human will, God’s power will mani fest itself through our meekness. to paraphrase an old saying, “meekness is next to Godliness”.

Seeking meekness,
Z gardener

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Inheriting the Earth

Posted in Good Morning, tagged , on August 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Let us see how we are to go about inheriting the earth. This Beatitude says that dominion, that is, power over the conditions of our lives, is to be obtained in a certain way, by nothing less than meekness.

The word meek in the Bible connotes a mental attitude for which there is no other single word available. It is a combination of open-mindedness, faith in God, and the realization that the will of God for us is always something joyous and interesting and vital. This state of mind also includes a perfect willingness to allow this will of God to come about in whatever way divine Wisdom considers to be best, rather than in some particular way that we have chosen for ourselves.

This mental attitude of teachableness, willingness to be led, is the key to dominion, or success in demonstration. There is no word for it in common speech, because the thing does not exist except for those who are up on the spiritual basis of the20teaching of Jesus Christ. If we desire to inherit the earth we must absolutely acquire this “meekness.”

The Lord reigneth; let the earth rejoice…(Psalm 97:1).

Another aspect of meekness is acceptance of God’s will and sublimation of self-will. We will only express the full power of God when we fully become attuned to and demonstrate God’s will. When we are open to God and willing to be a vehicle for God’s will, our meekness allows God to manifest through us. This is dominion through obedience. It begins by giving all power to God and finds full expression through God expressing himself through us. It brings new meaning to the term passive aggressive. It really means being passive to our will and active toward God’s will. Although this is exactly contrary to human nature, God gives us dominion through attunement to our divine nature, not through force of our will.

In tune,
Z gardener

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The Blessed Meek (1 in series of three on Meekness)

Posted in Good Morning, tagged on August 7, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5).

On the surface, this Beatitude seems to be contradicted by the facts of everyday life. But either Jesus knew what he was talking about, and is to be taken seriously, or his teaching should be dropped altogether. If he is to be relied upon, then let us pay him the compliment of assuming that he knew best about the art of living.

The fact is that when correctly understood, the teaching of Jesus is found to be the most practicable of all doctrines; and the whole essence of his teaching and of its application is summed up in this text. When you possess the spiritual meaning of this text you have the secret of dominion—the secret of overcoming every kind of difficulty.

We notice that there are two polar words in the text—meek and earth. First of all, the word earth in the Bible really means the whole of your outer experience, and to “inherit the earth” means to have dominion over that outer experience. So we see that when the Bible talks about possessing the earth, governing the earth, making the earth glorious, it is referring to the conditions of our lives, from our bodily health outward to the farthest point in our affairs. So this text undertakes to tell us how we may possess, or govern, or be masters of our environment.

How are we exercising dominion over “our earth”? Are our lives filled with hope, joy and gladness? Do we live in the Eden God gave us, or in a world filled with fear, anxiety and despair? The beatitudes set out the guideposts for life in the garden, even in the midst of the world’s troubles. If we are to govern our world and be masters of our environment, we must do so from within. We must seek and understand God’s will and pleasure within first, and then apply those same principals without. Then we will be following the guideposts and then we will possess, have dominion over all and will be masters of “our individual earths”.

Working from within,
Z gardener

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Comfort for mourning

Posted in Good Morning, tagged on August 5, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted (Matthew 5:4).

Mourning or sorrow is not in itself a good thing, for the will of God is that everyone should experience happiness and joyous success. Jesus says:
…I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly (John 10:10).

Nevertheless, trouble and suffering are often extremely useful, because many people will not bother to learn the Truth until driven to do so by sorrow and failure. Sorrow then becomes relatively a good thing. Sooner or later every human being will have to discover the truth about God, and make his own contact with Him at first hand. He will have to acquire the understanding of Truth, which will set him free, once and for all, from our three-dimensional limitations and their concomitants—sin, sickness, and death. There is really n o need for man to have trouble, because if he will only seek God first, the trouble need never come. He always has the choice of learning by spiritual unfoldment or of learning by painful experience. Family troubles, quarrels and estrangements, sin and remorse, need never come at all if we seek first the Kingdom of God and Right Understanding; but if we will not do so, then come they must, and for us this mourning will be a blessing in disguise, for through it we shall be “comforted.” And by comfort the Bible means the experience of the Presence of God, which is the end of all mourning.

The good news is that we have command over sorrow and failure. The bad news is that we have responsibility for sorrow and failure. The reality is that joy, success and peace is really up to us and the responsibility for it is upon us. But take heart, we are not alone in this. When we seek God and become the people we are intended to be, we avoid most sorrow and failure, while finding contentment, happiness and joy. And, even when we do encounter setbacks or loss, we will navigate our way through it in peace and emerge better for it. For it is written “I am come that that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” We hold the keys that open the gates of Eden…we just have to use them.

Turning the key,
Z gardener

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Great Possessions

Posted in Good Morning, tagged , on August 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »

One of the saddest passages in all literature is the story of the Rich Young Man who missed one of the great opportunities of history, and
…went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions (Matthew 19:22).

This is really the story of mankind in general. We reject the salvation that Jesus offers us—our chance of finding God—because we “have great possessions,”; not so much that we are very rich in terms of money, for indeed most people are not, but because we have great possessions in the way of preconceived ideas—confidence in our own judgment, and in the ideas with which we happen to be familiar. We have pride, born of academic distinction; sentimental or material attachment to institutions and organizations; habits of life that we have no desire to renounce; concern for human respect; or perhaps fear of public ridicule. And these possessions keep us chained to the rock of suffering that is our exile from God.

The poor in spirit suffer from none of these embarrassments, either because they never had them, or because they have risen above them on the tide of spiritual understanding.

Most of us do not fully understand that the material, worldly or cultural priorities we have have block our communion and communication with God. When we focus on the material, the worldly and the limited human aspect, we become an obstacle to the power, spirit and Grace of God. It is when we attune ourselves to the spiritual plane that we become one with the Holy Spirit and then remove the static that blocks God’s signals to us and God’s pathways into our consciousness. It is when we empty ourselves of the spirit of self, and fill ourselves with God’s spirit that we find ourselves freed of the worldly yoke and empowered by the will and grace of God. Then our eyes will be opened, and then we will see the Garden God gave to us.

Attuned to the Holy Spirit,

Z gardener

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The Poor In Spirit

Posted in Good Morning, tagged on July 30, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3).

To be poor in spirit does not in the least mean the thing we call “poor spirited.” To be poor in spirit means to have emptied yourself of all desire to exercise personal self-will, and, what is just as important, to have renounced all preconceived opinions in the whole-hearted search for God. It means to be willing to set aside your present habits of thought, your present views and prejudices, your present way of life if necessary; to jettison, in fact anything and everything that can stand in the way of your finding God.

When we empty ourselves of self-will and self-centeredness, we clear the channels for God’s grace and power to flow into our lives. If the storm drain next to a house is clogged with debris, the life giving rains will back up and overflow into the streets creating a flood. Even though there may be all the water in the world flooding the street, none of it will flow into the drain. The will and power of God is as plentiful as the flood, yet it will not flow into our lives effectively until we clear out the debris of self that blocks its flow into our lives.

Clearing the drain,
Z gardener

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The Beatitudes

Posted in Good Morning, tagged , on July 29, 2009| Leave a Comment »

The sermon on the Mount opens with the eight Beatitudes. They are actually a prose poem in eight verses and constitute a general summary of the Christian teaching. A general summing up, such as this, is highly characteristic of the old Oriental mode of approach to a religious and philosophical teaching, and it naturally recalls the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, the Ten Commandments of Moses,and other such compact groupings of ideas.

Jesus concerned himself exclusively with the teaching of general principles, and these general principles always had to do with mental states, for he knew that if one’s mental states are right, everything else might be right too. Unlike the other great religious teachers, he gives us no detailed instructions about what we are to do or not to do.

… the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.
…the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship him.

God is a spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth
(John 4:21, 23-24).

As humans, we yearn to be told what we should and should not do. Jesus knew that what we do results from how we think and feel. His instructions address theses causes of our actions. Until we are addressing the cause of our actions, we are merely treating the symptoms. When we become a new person in Christ, we are effectively changing what we think and how we think. The behavior that results from such activity will always be correct if we worship in spirit and in truth instead of action based on our limited human understanding.

Praying in spirit for truth,
Z gardener

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The Sermon on the Mount

Posted in Good Morning, tagged , on July 28, 2009| 2 Comments »

The setting forth of the Sermon on the Mount is an almost perfect codification of the religion of Jesus Christ. It covers the essentials. It is practical and personal. It is definite, specific, and yet widely illuminating. Once the true meaning of the instructions has been grasped, it is only necessary to begin putting them into practice to get immediate results. The magnitude and extent of these results will depend solely upon the sincerity and thoroughness with which they are applied. That is a matter which each individual has to settle for himself.

If you really do wish to become a different person altogether in the sight of God and man, then Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, has clearly shown you how it is to be done.

If you are prepared to break with the old man, and start upon the creation of the new one, then the study of the great Sermon will indeed be to you the Mountain of Liberation.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves
(James 1:22).

The most important decision any of us will ever make is whether or not we will become the new person that God intended us to be. Multitudes upon multitudes have already embarked on this journey of being reborn as a child of God. Many more have not made the decision or have faltered in their transformation. Our success in this most critical process depends upon a true understanding that is put into practice with sincerity and thoroughness.

The sermon on the Mount is a great place to gain the true understanding needed to build this new person. Over the next few days, we will review this sermon in an attempt to facilitate a full understanding of it, with the prayer that we might help illuminate the path that the sermon so clearly describes. That path, well traveled, leads inexorably to the Eden God created for us here and forever in heaven.

On the Mount,
Z gardener

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Truth Demonstrated

Posted in Good Morning, tagged on July 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Truth never changes, but what we have to deal with on this plane is man’s apprehension of the Truth, and throughout historical time, this has been steadily and continuously becoming more plain to us.

Jesus Christ summed up this Truth, taught it completely and thoroughly, and, above all, demonstrated it in his own person. Most of us now can glimpse intellectually the idea of what it must mean in its fullness. To accept the Truth is the great first step, but not until we have proved it in doing is it ours. Jesus proved everything that he taught, even to the overcoming of death in what we call the resurrection. By surmounting every sort of limitation to which mankind is subject, he performed a work of unique and incalculable value to the race, and is therefore justly entitled the Savior of the world.

…when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth…(John 16:13).

When we put these truths into practice, thereby claiming them as our own, then we are filled with the Holy Spirit and can accomplish all things through God. Two of the key truths are that we are children of the creator and that outward reality is determined by inward thoughts, word and deeds.

Practicing the truth,

Z gardener

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The Purpose of the Bible

Posted in Good Morning, tagged , on July 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Externally, the Bible is a collection of inspired documents written by men of all kinds, in all sorts of circumstances, and over hundreds of years of time. The documents are seldom originals, but redactions and compilations of older fragments; and the names of the actual writers are seldom known for certain. This, however, does not affect the spiritual purpose of the Bible. The book, as we have it, is inexhaustible reservoir of spiritual Truth, compiled under divine inspiration, and the actual route by which it reached its present form does not matter.

History, biography, lyrical and other poetic forms are various mediums through which the spiritual message is given in the Bible; and, above all, the parable is used to convey spiritual and metaphysical truth. In some cases what was never intended to be more than a parable was, at one time, taken for literal statement of fact; and this often made the Bible seem to teach things that are oppose d to common sense.

The spiritual key to the Bible rescues us from these difficulties, dilemmas, and seeming inconsistencies. And the Truth turns out to be nothing less than the amazing but undeniable fact that the whole outer world—whether it be the physical body, the common things of life, the winds and the rain, the clouds, the earth itself—is amenable to man’s thought, and that he has dominion over it when he knows it.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet (Psalm 8:6).

In short, the Bible is God’s operating manual for humans so that we may live in the Eden created for us here below, and with God in heaven forever after this life. Regardless of the seeming mysteries, differing translations or interpretations, the important truths are clear and simple, easily understood and reflect the intelligence, will and laws given to us by the creator of the universe. Surely God is capable of communicating such things to us regardless of human errors, omissions and interpretations. Otherwise, it would not be God.

Following the manual,
Z gardener

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