The Universe

The Universe is shaped on the unyielding anvil of Universal Law by the hammer of the will of the Almighty to serve the eternal purpose conceived by the Infinite Mind.

Simple

How do I, in the simplest language, tell you the Good News?
Simply put, YOU are a child of God and this God loves you more than you can even imagine. Your divine parent reached out and plucked you from the Seas of Endless Probability and has placed you in the arms of his angels. He has charged them with the task of cleaning you up, making you strong and, when you are ready, to set you upon the path to your divine destiny.
Your Father, and mine, for he is the Universal Father (the Father of All), is engaged in the realisation of a stupendous plan, his plans are infinite while his goals of attainment are eternal and YOU are an irreplaceable feature of it, and you are of more value than you could imagine.

Happiness

A person may find Happiness by accident but it can never remain theirs by accident. Real Happiness requires strenous effort: self-awareness, self-control, self-forgetting, and wise self-direction.

Liberty

Liberty is the form of Love, Love is the substance of Liberty.

The Father of the Kingdom

‘The Kingdom is within’ is one of the greatest pronouncements ever made by Joshua ben Joseph of Nazareth. For those that have the eyes to see, the gospel contains such an amazing super-abundance of superlative and liberating truths that the fullness thereof will forever remain unfathomable to the human mind. However, the onus is upon us to search out these liberating truths lest we suffer the ignominy of self inflicted sorrows and heartache through the wilful embrace of ignorance and the wretched indulgence of indolence. 

There lives within you the power that formed the universe. There lives within you the ever positive voice of the Architect of all Creation. Behold the Heavens, even the Heaven of Heavens! There are as many galaxies as there are stars in a galaxy. Great is the power of the Almighty, who holds the stars of heaven in His palm and plants them where He wills. Behold your Infinite Cosmic Father. Bring Him your troubles, to Him that created the galaxy of galaxies and the electron, nothing is too small or too big. If He, with a shout, can shake the heavens how much more shall your troubles tremble before his might?!

He is the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, of Time and Space, doubt not that He can make a little time for you. Fear not the winds of change when they scream and rage all about you, threatening to tear asunder all that you have known and hold dear, for within you shines a glorious temple whose builder and maker is God and when the dust finally settles it will emerge unmoved and majestic.

Open your heart to His instruction, trust wholeheartedly in the righteousness and efficacy of His ways. You see only part but He sees all. His plans are infinite and His goals are eternal, so let not the small things of time perturb you. Learn of Him and His ways. Make the world a better place by being more like Him. Lend your shoulder to His great work, give those that thirst something to drink, those that hunger something that nourishes, give protection to them that are exposed and vulnerable, open eyes blinded by spiritual darkness, liberate those captivated by fear, loose the tongue that seeks o sing His praise.

You are his beloved child and you are loved more than you can imagine. It is the Father’s delight to shoo away the Bogey Man of your fears, to give you peace, courage, and hope but until you learn to trust Him you will remain trapped in the dark realm of your own fears.

The Father will not vanquish your demons for you. He desires that His children stand on their own two feet but neither will he let you go through your struggles alone, He will stand with you 100%. He believes in you, even when everyone else would give up on you. You may doubt yourself but he never doubts you. The Father will not rob you of the dignity of your achievements by doing all things for you. Moreover, He knows well what you are capable of and has set his angels the task of trying and testing you – charged them with the sacred duty of making you the best and strongest person that you can be. With such a commission it would not be reasonable to expect an easy life, more likely a life of struggle and effort relieved now and then by the occasional islands of respite and rest. The Father loves us but not so unwisely as to unthinkingly indulge a child and make them weak. His is a fearless love, it does not shrink from necessary hardships nor flinch in sending instructive discipline upon his wayward lambs.

You should not fear to bring him your joys and hopes, your laughter and excitement, your dreams and adventures, for what father does not relish listening to his child tell their tales with great excitement and energy? What father is not touched when his child offer sincere thanks and appreciative gratitude for all that has been done for them, or is not puffed large when the child is humbled by and swears to honour the endless generosity, kindness, wisdom, and faith of which it has been the beneficiary? Even as the Father can fill your cup of joy to overflowing, so can you fill His cup by sincerely, faithfully, humbly, even joyfully and gladly, put at His service everything that He has enabled you to become.

The Prisoner

Paul declared that ‘in God we live, move, and have our being’ but to match this a fragment of the Father dwells within the cosmic expanse of our own being; He lives, moves, and has His being in each one of us. We discover that this spirit has a somewhat solitary career; that it is, by and large, incarcerated in the human mind, where it must contend with ignorance, selfishness, and profound moral darkness, and it commits to live and work in these conditions from the moment of our first moral decision until that moment when our mortal coil loses this ability, whereupon it returns to the councils of Paradise to give an account of its labours to effect that salvation of the soul of its indwelling and where it must wait until a judgement determines whether its labours were sufficient or not.

Reflecting on this, I was struck by the words used to describe the predicament of the indwelling spirit, words like: incarceration, imprisoned, a prisoner of love. We read of a devotion akin to a parent that has not just forsaken nights out, or sleep, or generally ever having ‘a life’ but has in fact sallied forth from Paradise, abandoned all glory, in the solemn and sacred attempt to save the soul of a child of time, a commitment that it undertakes from the cradle to the grave.

These words and sentiments struck me. This spirit is imprisoned in my life. I, consciously or unconsciously, exercise my free will in ways that can either liberate or effectively incarcerate the divine gift but how do we so live as to afford the spirit the fullest possible extent of freedom and liberty of action? At its simplest, the answer is Love: love one, love all, love deeply, sincerely, wholeheartedly, and selflessly.

Love is composed three atomic elements: truth, beauty, and goodness. These are the three guiding stars to the spiritually replete life. These elements can be lived and that is what so important about them. When truths is metabolised into your life it breaks down and manifests itself as honesty, sincerity, it becomes an aspirational principle that shapes your dealings with your fellows.

Goodness becomes an avenue to give expression for the indwelling urge to ministry and mercy, to so live that all gain the greatest possible benefit from every breath you draw. It becomes kindness, gentleness, humility, tenderness, forgiveness, forbearance, tolerance, even generosity.

Beauty can, likewise, be experienced, lived, shared, it can be created/discovered, infused, to it we can aspire and through it we can inspire, it can, most precious of all, be stored up in our souls.

Material riches are not required to enjoy the spiritually replete life. The joys of the Kingdom are freely available to all, rich and poor, free and bond, woman and man, and all that will may enter.

Wake Up

Your life is the dream that your true self is having and yet, even in the midst of your dreams, there twinkles the glorious Sun of Eternal Truth. It burns, relentlessly, down upon the fog of your illusions, mercilessly revealing their flaws, contradictions, and imperfections. Just as our sun ignites the heliotropic urge in the seeds of the earth so too does the Divine Sun of Eternal Truth ignite the theotropic urge within us, calling unto the seed of divine truth buried deep within you, beckoning to the divine within to step forth, to blossom and bloom, to share its glory with the world, to leave behind the darkness and the dirt and henceforth to live and soak in the life giving light of the Eternal.

The God of Time and Space

The acts of God in time and space are conditioned by these both in terms of their evolution and their functional relationship with the meta-narrative of all Creation. We can know that they happen but our understanding thereof will always be limited, relative, and subject to radical revision as our experiential insight and appreciation of the meta-narrative evolves. These facts, among so many others, should admonish us always to be humble in our theologies. Humility is a far truer star for the theologian to be guided by than the Jack O'Lantern of theological arrogance.

Spiritual Assurance

The assurance experienced by the believer is an indirect effect of the action of the indwelling spirit, who opens the eyes of the child of clay to the illuminating and liberating truth that they are a child of the ever living, ever loving, all wise, God of all creation. When this truth is experienced peace, joy, and gratitude flood the soul. In this awakening the child of time is loosed from the shackles of fear and discovers an eternal universe of ever lasting life and endless adventure exploring the limitless deeps of the Infinite One.

Abba

The teaching that Jesus was in some way hostile to the traditions of his people is erroneous. Jesus had sacrificed all to focus on and highlight certain essential spiritual truth. The first and foremost of these truths was to relate to each person the experience of knowing God – ‘You that have seen me have seen the Father’; and secondly to relate the concept-idea and, more importantly, to somehow facilitate the conscious realisation of the experience of knowing, personally, that ‘God is your Father.’ Indeed, he asked that when we speak to God we should call him ‘Abba.’ 

While this is something I had read countless times, I never really appreciated its spiritual value until one fine day as I sat by a swimming pool in Israel. I remember children were playing and splashing, as parents soaked in the warm rays of the Mediterranean sun. At one point a little girl came screeching passed, being chased by her brother; as she ran she shouted excitedly, ‘Abba, Abba, Abba!’ managing, at last, to  leap into the safety of her father’s arms, where she wriggled in gleeful delight that she had escaped the clutches of her villainous brother. That single moment illuminated, for me, more of Jesus’ spiritual intent than one hundred scholarly works ever did. 

Jesus invites us to share in this consciousness of the Fatherhood of God, that is the Kin-dom; that sense of sure safety; the open and welcome arms and the courage those arms and that relationship instils. Jesus asked that we endeavour to be possessed of childlike faith; that we be willing to take that faith leap into the loving arms of our waiting spiritual Father and, through that faith discover for ourselves and within ourselves the experience of spiritual assurance that communicates to your soul that abiding peace which surpasses all understanding; that sense that no real harm can ever befall you; that you have been found by the Father and that he will never let you go; that you are fully and finally secure in his arms and free from fear. Liberty indeed!

Jesus said, ‘I leave you peace; my peace I give you.’ The people of the world are limited in what and how much they can give to others but the peace that Jesus gives is limited only by your capacity to receive. Thus, as you grow in grace and wisdom, as the rivers of faith and love flow through the chambers of your heart it is by this spiritual force that those very chambers are widened so that you can receive more and your life is blessed with spiritual abundance.

Having found the Kin-dom, it is only natural to want to share the joy born of that sense of safety and security. Knowing such joy you will naturally and freely reach out to your fellows, especially those that are harassed by fear and lost in spiritual darkness. You will never want to add to their burden of troubles and endeavour always to increase their quotient of happiness. This tender and passionate love for one’s fellows and the service it inspires authenticates the truth that you have found the Kin-dom and have truly entered therein. This is the love that declares to all the world that you are a disciple of the Master, that you are a faith filled, love inspired child of God, that knows – without a shadow of a doubt – that when you call ‘Abba!’ your cry is heard and responded to instantly.