Love
The search for God is a search for the unstinted bestowal of divine love.
The religionist has faith in a God of love. Love is the essence of religion and the wellspring of superior civilization.
Jesus revealed a God of love, and love is all-embracing of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Advanced mortals…have learned that love is the greatest thing in the universe--and they know that God is love. Love is the desire to do good to others.
Love supplies the soil for religious growth that ennobles the commonplace drudgery of daily living.
The divine love functions in unified association with divine wisdom and all other infinite characteristics of the perfect nature of the Universal Father. God is love, but love is not God. The greatest manifestation of the divine love for mortal beings is observed in the bestowal of the indwelling spirit of God.
Your greatest revelation of the Father's love is seen in the bestowal life of Jesus of Nazareth as he lived on earth the ideal spiritual life. But it is the indwelling God-Spirit that individualizes the love of God to each human soul.
Meanings and Values
If there were no survival of eternal values in the evolving soul of man, then mortal existence would be without meaning and life itself would be a tragic illusion, even a grotesque absurdity.
Man is a part of nature--he exists in nature--and yet he is able to transcend nature. Man is finite, but he is indwelt by a spark of infinity.
Meanings are derived from a combination of recognition and understanding. Meanings are nonexistent in a wholly sensory or material world. Meanings and values are only perceived in the inner or super-material spheres of human experience.
The act of the creature's choosing to do the will of the Creator is a cosmic value and has universe meaning.
The standard of true values must be looked for in the spiritual word and on divine levels of eternal reality.
Miracles
God is so all real and absolute that no material sign of proof or no demonstration of so-called miracle may be offered in testimony of his reality.
Religion is never enhanced by an appeal to the so-called miraculous. The quest for miracles is a harking back to the primitive religions of magic. True religion has nothing to do with alleged miracles, and never does revealed religion point to miracles as proof of authority.
Morality
Morality discloses an almighty Controller, a Deity to be served; religion discloses an all-loving Father, a God to be worshipped and loved. And this is because the spiritual potentiality of religion is dominant over the Deity actuality of the morality of evolution.
Morality is the essential pre-existent soil of personal God-consciousness, the personal realization of the indwelling Spirit's inner presence, but such morality is not the source of religious experience and the resultant spiritual insight. The moral nature is super-animal but sub-spiritual. Morality is equivalent to the recognition of duty, the realization of the existence of right and wrong. The moral zone intervenes between the animal and the human types of mind as morontia functions between the material and the spiritual spheres of personality attainment.[note: morontia is a hybrid state existing between the finite and the transcendent.]
Morality is not necessarily spiritual; it may be wholly and purely human, albeit real religion enhances all moral values, makes them more meaningful. Morality without religion fails to reveal ultimate goodness, and it also fails to provide for the survival of even its own moral values. Religion provides for the enhancement, glorification, and assured survival of everything morality recognizes and approves.
|
