Good Morning Garden

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT

Read Exodus 20:4-6.

Thou shalt not take unto thee any graven image…(exodus 20:4).

A primitive people needed to be thus instructed because they were much given to making idols of a palpable sort. We do not do these things, but whenever we give power to anything but God, we are making that thing into a graven image. For example, we give power to ailments, particularly if it is a favorite ailment. We all know people who say, “My rheumatism,” and they say it quite lovingly. Been with them a long time! Has become a conversation piece! Others say, “My indigestion.” We are making a graven image of these things. It is only when we take power away from them that we can heal them.

If you forget God and worship graven images of any kind, you are going to suffer. You can demolish a stone statue; you can burn a wooden one. The way to destroy mental images is to stop thinking of them and giving them power.

This commandment goes on to say, “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.” Moses does not mean that God is jealous like a man, but that God must have first place. The trouble with many pious people is that they want God to be vice-president, keeping the presidency for themselves. So the Bible uses the word “jealous” in the sense that if you give power to anything but God, you have lost God altogether. You cannot have a percentage of God. Either God is the only power or nothing at all.

Yesterday we spoke of the “me” as the most likely false God in our lives. Today we speak of graven and mental images that can divert our focus from the true God. This is more subtle and complex than the elevation of self and therefore more difficult to identify and overcome. Situational images such as status, power, wealth and position can quickly become the goal rather than a means to achieve a goal. Possessions often enslave us to a form of worship while vanity, pride and ego are human characteristics that take us away from communion with and worship of God. And yes, even ailments and mindsets can become the object of our attention and focus. “I can’t do that…its impossible…my infirmities are too great…I am too weak…I don’t want to do that…its not fair” are all phrases that reflect mental or attitudinal images which deny the omnipotence and power of God in our lives.

Affirming God,
Z gardener

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THE FIRST COMMANDMENT

I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me (Exodus 20:2,3).

Moses lived in Egypt over three thousand years ago, and he led some six hundred thousand people out of Egypt and through the wilderness. That is historical. But, Moses also stands for a faculty in yourself, and the things that Moses did typify your state of mind.

The mountain means prayer—the elevated consciousness. We are told that the general public were not allowed to go up Mount Sinai, but that does not mean that certain people were not good enough to go up. It means that if we want to go up the mountain—if we want to raise our consciousness, if we want to get closer to God—we must prepare ourselves by prayer. If we want to go up the mountain, we have to become a high priest spiritually and we must rid ourselves of our faults and weaknesses—otherwise we cannot elevate our consciousness and get our contact with God.

Moses had his revelation, and then he realized it as the experience that God and man are one. When he got that revelation, Moses brought back the laws of life, beginning with the First Commandment, as we call it..

What is the beginning of the First Commandment? I am the Lord thy God. Our trouble in our religious life nearly always is that we think, “In the beginning Me.” That is very human but is does not get us the revelation that Moses got. After affirming I am the Lord thy God… the First Commandment says thou shalt have no other gods before me.

The God that we most often put before the true God is the God called “me”. It is the self that most often replaces God as a false idol in our lives. When we learn to lay down the self and replace it with God, then we are truly putting God first, and putting no other Gods before the true God. When we replace the “me” with the “we”, the self with the selfless and the “I” with the “Thy”, we will be following the first commandment.

Putting God first,
Z gardener

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Read Exodus 19:6-20:20.

Moses was a man of extraordinary understanding of God and of man. He was also one of the great historical leaders of the human race. He was born in Egypt, which was in those days the most highly civilized country in the world. But at the time, the authorities gave orders to kill the male children of the Israelites, and Moses’ mother tried to save his life by placing him in a little basket and hiding it at the river’s edge where Pharaoh’s daughter could not help but see it when she came to the river to bathe. The sister of Moses was told to hide among the tall reeds to guard the baby. The king’s daughter saw this little basket, opened it, and when the child cried, her heart was touched. She looked around, and out came the sister, and you know the rest of the story, how the sister was sent to fetch a woman to take care of the child, and brought Moses’ own mother.

Now there is a remarkable text here. Pharaoh’s daughter says to the woman:

Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages
(Exodus 2:9).

In the Bible sense you are the King’s Daughters as soon as you reach out for the Truth. The infant Moses is that higher teaching that draws out your heart. Now, how do we nourish our infant Moses? By prayer and meditation. Otherwise the child will starve. However, if we take the child and nurse it, we shall get our wages,and our wages shall be freedom, peace of mind, harmony, understanding, and the fellowship of God Himself.

From this we learn that merely accepting and embracing the truth are not enough. We must nurture, feed and grow the truth in our lives, hearts and minds. Along with prayer and meditation we must also act to ensure the health and strength of the truth. Just as we must cultivate a garden with work such a digging, fertilizing, pruning, weeding and watering, so we must act on the truth. When we do, we will find our gardens filled with beauty, safety, peace and plenty. The wages of nourishing the truth is life.

Z gardener

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There is an instructive legend of the Middle Ages. It seems that a certain citizen was arrested by one of the barons and shut up in a dungeon by a ferocious looking jailer who carried a great key. The door of his cell shut with a bang. He lay in the dark dungeon for twenty years. Each day the big door would be opened with a great creaking; water and bread would be thrust in and the door closed again.

After twenty years the prisoner decided that he wanted to die but he did not want to commit suicide, so the next day when the jailer came he would attack him, and the jailer would then kill him. In preparation he thought he should examine the door, so he turned the handle, and to his amazement the door opened. He found that there was no lock. He groped along the corridor and felt his way upstairs. At the top of the stairs two soldiers where chatting, and they made no attempt to stop him. He crossed the great yard. There was an armed guard on the drawbridge but paid no attention to him, and he walked out a free man. He went home unmolested. He had been a captive, not of stone and iron, but of false belief. He had only thought he was locked in.

Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the righteous shall compass me about; for thou shalt deal bountifully with me (Psalm 142:7).

False perceptions imprison us more than most of the real constraints we face each day. Those false perceptions are ingrained in us from an early age by our culture, family and friends. The most common ones are caused by our limited knowledge and understanding of the world in which we live. For instance, man thought for centuries that the world was flat and the earth was the center of the universe. As our knowledge increased, these false perceptions were revealed and the New World was discovered.

Leaping in faith,
Z gardener

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What you concentrate upon you bring into your life. Many people fail to concentrate successfully because they think that concentration means will power. They suppose that the harder they press the faster they get through. But that is quite wrong.

Think of the photographic process. The secret of a clear picture lies in focus. You focus your camera lens steadily for the necessary length of time. Suppose I want to photograph a vase of flowers. I place them in front of the camera and keep them there. But suppose that after a few moments I snatch away the vase and hold a book in front of the camera, and then snatch that away, and hold up a chair, and then put the flowers back for a few moments. You know what will happen to my photograph. It will be a crazy blur. Is not that what people do to their minds when they cannot keep their thoughts concentrated for any length of time? They think health for a few minutes and then they think sickness or fear. They think prosperity and then they think depression. Is it any wonder that man is so apt to demonstrate the “marred image”?

It is always good to make a practical experiment, so I advise you to take a single problem in your life—and just change your mind concerning your problem and keep it changed for a month, and you will be astonished at the results. If you really do keep your thought changed you will not have to wait a month for results.

…He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved (Matthew 24:13).

We might be surprised at how passive our concentration is most of the time. Many times we allow our focus to be determined by external occurrences instead of internal direction. The crisis of the moment, the rude guy in traffic or the client coming to town tend to direct our focus more than an affirmative determination on our part to drive that upon which we will dwell. It is so easy to let our focus to drift along without exerting the effort to direct our concentration and without maintaining the mental discipline to control our focus. Yet, even as difficult as it is to concentrate affirmatively, when we do so, miraculous things begin to happen. We will find that we can change our minds about almost anything that is bothering us or holding us back. We will also find another key to living in the gardens God created for us.

Seeking focus,
Z gardener

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The key to life is to build in the mental equivalents of what you want, and to expunge the equivalents of what you do not want. You build in the mental equivalents by thinking with clearness or definiteness, and interest. Remember clarity and interest; those are the two poles. If you want to be healthy, happy, prosperous, doing a constructive work, having a continuous understanding of God, you think, feel, and get interested in these ends. What we call “feeling” in connection with thought is really interest. Ninety-nine times in a hundred the reason why Christians do not demonstrate is that they lack feeling in their desires or prayers.

How are you going to expunge the wrong mental equivalents? Suppose you have a mental equivalent of resentment, or of unemployment, or of criticism, or of not understanding God. The only way to expunge a wrong mental equivalent is to supply the opposite. The right thought automatically expunges the wrong thought. If you say: “I am not going to think resentment any more,” what are you thinking about except resentment? The key to the management of your thinking, and therefore, the key to the management of your destiny, is to substitute an affirmative thought for a negative thought.

The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me….(Psalm 138:8).

Mental discipline is one of the toughest assignments we receive from the Almighty. It requires infinitely more effort, thought and control than physical discipline. It is much easier to abstain from bad behavior than to refrain from bad thoughts. But, remember, as within so also without. Those who effectively manage their thoughts will find that same discipline manifesting itself in their lives. They will discover that the key to living in the garden God created for us is to create that garden within first, then they can live in that garden in the physical world regardless of the circumstances.

Seeking discipline,
Z gardener

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There is one thing that means more to us than all the other things in the world, and that is our search for God and the understanding of His nature. Our aim is to learn the practice of the presence of God. We practice the presence of God by seeing Him everywhere, in all things and in all people.

Some years ago I coined the phrase “mental equivalent.” For anything that you want in your life—a healthy body, a satisfactory vocation, friends, opportunities, and above all the understanding of God—you must furnish a mental equivalent. Supply yourself with a mental equivalent, and the thing must come to you. This expression “mental equivalent” is borrowed from physics and chemistry. We speak of the mechanical equivalent of one kind of energy in another kind of energy. They have to find out how much coal will be needed to produce so much electricity, and so on. In like manner there is a mental equivalent of every object or occurrence on the physical plane.

The secret of successful living is to build up the mental equivalent that you want; and to get rid of, to expunge, the mental equivalent that you do not want.

I will meditate in thy precepts, and have respect unto thy ways (Psalm 119:15).

This truth is one of the keys to unlocking our Gardens and living in the presence of God. When we arm ourselves with the mental equivalent of God’s laws, then we are creating the first step to their becoming a reality in our physical plane. So we must strengthen the good ones and weaken the bad ones until they are gone. When all our mental equivalents are tuned to God and immune to Satan, then we will see God in all things and will be living in God’s presence.

Seeking good and God,
Z gardener

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When you set out to solve a problem by means of prayer you should take all the ordinary normal steps in addition. Do not simply pray and then sit down and wait for something dramatic to happen. For instance, if you are praying for a position, you should pray for it as well as you know how each day, and then go out and visit agencies or prospective employers, write applications, or insert advertisements in suitable periodicals.

If you want a healing, treat about it in whatever way you usually find to be best and, in addition, take whatever material steps seem to be appropriate.

If your business is not prospering, have a checkup to discovery if you are managing it efficiently. If you find weak points, as you almost certainly will, you must correct them forthwith.

We certainly cannot expect to go on breaking the laws of the plane on which we live, and expect prayer to compensate for this foolishness.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might… (Ecclesiastes 9:10).

Action is faith put to work. Faith without works is dry. If we are to experience all of God’s power in our lives, we must do the work that is dictated by our faith.

At work,
Z gardener

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Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness (Psalm 29:2).

God is bigger than any problem.
God in you is greater than any difficulty that you have to meet.
God cares for you more than it is possible for any human being to realize.
God can help you in proportion to the degree in which you worship Him. You worship God by really putting your trust in Him instead of in outer conditions, or in fear, or in depression, or in seeming dangers, and so forth.
You worship God by recognizing His presence everywhere, in all people and conditions that you meet; and by praying regularly.
You pray well when you pray with joy.

Glory ye in his holy name: let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord (Psalm 105:3).

When we recognize and worship God in all things with prayer that is charged with feeling, joy and the expectation of good, then all problems yield, all difficulties are overcome and God’s unlimited power will arise to ensure our best good.

Praying with joy, expecting victory,
Z gardener

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Read Matthew 7:24-27.

Therefore whosoever heareth these saying of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock (Matthew 7:24).

One of the oldest symbols for the human soul is that of a building, sometimes a dwelling house, and sometimes a temple. The first thing that has to be done by the builder of a house is to select a sound foundation. On the shifting sands of the desert it is impossible to build anything at all, and so when the desert dweller intends to put up a permanent structure he looks about for a rock. Now the Rock is one of the Bible terms for the Christ, and the implication is very obvious. Christ is the one and only foundation upon which we can build the temple of the regenerated soul with safety. As long as we are depending upon something less than that Rock—upon will power, upon so-called material security, upon the good will of others, or upon our own personal resources—we are building upon sand, and great will be our fall.

What a comfort it is to know that our eternal welfare does not depend on our human capabilities. To know that we have a sure foundation of hope, peace and fulfillment here and forever with God. Yet many of us continue to build our hopes on our abilities, will and resources. We succumb to human nature, pride or other human weaknesses to avoid living according to God’s will and plan. Whe we do this, we are building a castle made of sand on a foundation of sand. And as the lyricist wrote, “Castles made of sand slip into the sea, eventually”.

Building wisely,
Z gardener

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