By Rev. Ian Arnold

The reason why the Lord alone endures the conflicts brought on by temptations and is Conqueror is that the Divine alone can conquer the hells. If the Divine did not counteract them they would rush in like a mighty ocean, one hell after another; and man is utterly powerless to resist them.

Even so, this does not mean that (we) should stay our hands and wait for immediate influx; rather (we) should fight as though we acted from (ourselves), but nevertheless should acknowledge and believe that we act from the Lord. (Arcana Caelestia 8175 and 8176)

RESPONDING positively and practically TO WHAT INTIMIDATES and negatively looms large over US.

From this story of David and Goliath I’ve chosen two verses, and they highlight two very different moods and attitudes. First of all in verse 11:

“When Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid.”

And then in verse 48, towards the end of this story and the end of the chapter:

“So it was that when the Philistine arose and came and drew near to meet David, that David hurried and ran toward the army to meet the Philistine.”

Thats verse 11 and verse 48 highlighting and giving expression to two very different attitudes and moods in the story.

Friends, as many people of my generation did, I grew up being intimidated by, and in awe of, professional people. As a very young child I had a lot to do with hospitals and doctors and specialists for over three years, and it left an indelible imprint on me as to the way in which I was ever thereafter to regard, look up to, and respect the members of the medical profession. It began when I was a boy of two, and it ended when I was five. As I grew older, I can remember a time when I was intimidated by, and in awe of, bank managers. And to this day, being no different from you Im sure, I am intimidated by a policeman in uniform, especially when a police car pulls up alongside of me and indicates to me to pull me over! I go hot and cold. The last time it happened, I was in such a state I couldnt even remember my date of birth!

Its not just people, is it friends, who intimidate us? I can also think of situations. I can also think of circumstances. Forty years on its something that comes easily to me, that I can stand up in a church and lead a service and give a sermon. And I have to, as it were, extract myself from that to understand how much that could intimidate somebody else. How much in awe they might be of a request, of an invitation, to lead a service or to read a sermon. Again, you yourself may be able to call on memories about times when you were called forward, like in school because you have achieved in some way or another, or worst of all if you were called up to some platform to shake some adults hand. For some people, that is enormously intimidating.

As we begin to look within ourselves, friends, we are able to identify many things, even on a relatively external level, which intimidate us and we are in awe of. I can think of disappointments, I can think of mistakes that I have made in the past, I can think of unwise decisions as I now see them to be. I can think of resentments that have bubbled along in the past, and perhaps still rankle to his day. We can still be in awe of these things, still be intimidated by them: why did I make that decision, how could I have chosen as I did do? And we really feel the power that that particular decision, or mistake as we now believe it to be, holds over us.

And if we go on a little bit further within ourselves, and look and explore and investigate, we can find other things that intimidate us. We can find habits that seem to be so ingrained, so very much part now of who we are, that we stand back from them, feeling powerless. Or we can look and explore and investigate, and we can see our proprium much too active in certain ways; more active perhaps than we are wanting to admit or acknowledge; and we feel intimidated that we havent become stronger in our resistance to the way in which the proprium the self dictates, rules, governs and directs our responses and the way we handle our life and relationships.

It is possible that in coming face to face with these things some people are, or could be, indifferent. But what is much more common, as is highlighted here in this story, is a feeling of being defeated by these things before they have even begun to do anything about them.

What did the army of ancient Israel do when Goliath burst of the scene? The answer is, the soldiers ran around telling themselves they were powerless, that there was no way out. It was as if they were paralysed by it all. They felt disempowered. They didnt know what to do! How could they match this giant? They were sure they would just have to succumb, to give in. They acted as people who were defeated before they began.

There is a lesson here for us, friends, lesson number one: that in the face of what intimidates us, in the face of what seems to have such power over us, the very worst thing we can do is to run around telling ourselves that we are powerless, we can do nothing about this, we cannot match the challenge that this particular thing represents. What happened with this army? They looked, they cracked, their knees knocked, and they told themselves that the situation was hopeless. What a bunch of dummies! They made a vital mistake: they had looked around at all the soldiers who had come, all the resources they had brought with them, and they saw nothing that would enable them to rise to the challenge that Goliath represented; a fatal mistake. The fatal mistake you see, is to look around, cast around, only for the resources that you can see, that you can put your eyes and hands on; and they are never adequate. They are never, ever adequate.

As recently as yesterday, in “The Weekend Australian”, there were two or three superb articles dealing with the challenge of Islamic terrorism. But I felt less impressed by the time I finished reading them, because they are looking only to human resources to meet the onset of this challenge that is emerging throughout much of the world. If we look only to human resources, we will never adequately respond to this challenge, and indeed we run all the risk of being defeated by it. That was the mistake that the Israelite army made: looking to human resources, human ingenuity, thinking that they had to find what would match their perception of the challenge. We so easily do the same, in so many ways and with respect to so many challenges, right down to the much more personal challenges that we face. Its our over-active proprium struggling against the dispensation of divine providence, the perception that life isnt unfolding as we hoped or anticipated that it would do. These sorts of things will arise as challenges in our lives, and if we are not careful, we will be defeated by them, if we think that there are, and has to be, only human resources to combat them.

But then David arrived on the scene. Its always wonderful, by the way, when someone comes along with a fresh new perspective, because they somehow seem to be able to cut through all that seems to be blanketing the whole situation, and they can see something that we havent seen before and, bang, we see the way that we should respond to or go about meeting this particular challenge. Yes, David represents a fresh perspective, but he represents more than that; he represents something within us. Young we was, yes, a youth as he was, but he came along with a profound conviction that human resources would always be inadequate: “What are you people doing? You are forgetting that there are divine resources available to us, and I will trust in them!” And so he went about it; and so he defeated the challenge he and his people were facing.

There were four things, please note, with which David went into battle with Goliath. Firstly, there was his trust in the Lord: his overriding conviction that human resources had nothing to do with it, that Divine resources were going to be the key. Secondly, there was his unhesitating willingness to turn and face the challenge. Recall for a moment, will you, lesson number one: we want to run away from what looms large negatively over us, we want to deny it; but David turned and faced it. That’s rule number two: turn and face your challenges. Dont be intimidated and awed by them to the extent that you feel paralysed and helpless. Thirdly, David took action.

And fourthly he called upon, and made use of, unadorned, straightforward and very simple weapons and resources that had been around for millennia, and to this day those same stones somewhere still are; unadorned, simple, straightforward weapons and resources that are available to us, and have been openly available to us for millennia back. They are, as you might have by now have guessed, the truths of the Divine Word. Simple truths. In my pastoral work as a minister, let me tell you I have seen people sweating, challenged, paralysed, and uncertain because of the way they have been hurt by somebody else. What did Jesus say? “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.” Why don’t you do it, why don’t you do it? Dont sit there, saying you can do nothing. Get on the phone; yes, its hard, but let them know. A simple, straightforward, unadorned, but O so obvious truth from the Word becomes the weapon with which to do battle with this state that has developed and has enveloped you.

Whenever we feel challenged and intimidated, or when life unexpectedly goes wrong, for whatever reason or under whatever circumstances there are always simple truths from the Word we can use in the situation. Anxious about the future? Think, then, on this: “Why do you worry?, the Lord said, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Do you feel lost or insignificant, or that the events of your life are of no consequence to the Lord? Then think on this: “The very hairs on your head are all numbered.” Is life chaotic at the moment? Many decisions to be made? Things crowding in? Bring this to mind: “Be still, and know that I am God.” They’re all simple, straightforward, unadorned weapons and resources that are made available to us in abundance from the Lord in His Divine Word. This is the key to meeting these inner challenges, those things whose shadows fall so negatively across our life, leading us to feel unable to do anything to change the situation.

In conclusion friends, I just want to pick up something with you, and I hope you can commit it to memory. And its from this particular volume, the sixth volume of Arcana Caelestia, and it simply says this, its paragraph 4353: “Action comes first.”

You know sometimes I’m stuck identifying a theme, a text, something that I hope will bring a meaningful sermon. Action comes first. If I do nothing, nothing will happen and my problem will only grow. And it’s the same right through: do nothing, and the situation grows in it’s capacity to intimidate and paralyse us. Do something, take action, and then the fight with Goliath begins.

Dont listen to the despair, the breast-beating, the wailing, and the certainty of defeat and of having to succumb to this challenge. Remember David. David went to meet his adversary with his profound trust in the Lord, his willingness to turn and face the enemy. David took with him five smooth stones, it is said, from the brook; the simple but eternal truths given to us, so plainly stated, in the Word and that hold the key to defeating what looms negatively and darkly over our lives.

“Then David put his hand in his bag and took out a stone; and he slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead, so that the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the earth. So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, and struck the Philistine and killed him. But there was no sword in the hand of David.”

Amen.

By Rev. Ian Arnold

With regard to the raising up of truths and of the affections for these, and the arrangement of them within things that are general, truths and affections are raised up when the things of eternal life and of the Lords kingdom are thought to be more important than those of life in the body and of the kingdom of this world.

When a person acknowledges the former to be first and foremost, and the latter to be secondary and subordinate, the truths he knows and his affections for them are raised up. For as is his acknowledgement, so in the same measure is the person conveyed into the light of heaven, which light holds intelligence and wisdom within it; and so also in the same measure do things belonging to the light of this world become for him images and so to speak mirrors in which he sees the things belonging to the light of heaven.

The contrary takes place when he thinks the things of the life of the body and of the kingdom of this world to be more important those of eternal life and of the Lords kingdom. He does this when he believes that the latter do not exist because he dos not see them and because nobody has come from there and given an account of them or if he believes that they may exist, nothing worse will happen to him than to others and in so believing confirms himself in these ideas, leads a worldly life, and despises charity and faith altogether. With such a person, truths and the affections for them are not raised up, but are either smothered, or rejected, or perverted. For he dwells in natural light into which no heavenly light at all flows in. This is what is meant by a raising up of truths and of affection for them. (Arcana Caelestia, paragraph 4104.3)

RECAPTURING earlier IDEALS, insights and enthusiasms.

Turning, friends, to the 26th chapter of the book of Genesis, and reading from verse 18:

“Isaac dug again the wells of water which they had dug in the days of Abraham his father, for the Philistines had stopped them up after the death of Abraham.”

Friends, probably every one of us here this morning is aware of how it so often is with businesses, corporations, and indeed with organisations generally, that they start off with a commitment to high ideals, to business integrity, and to the founding vision which motivates them in those early stages; and yet, for one reason or another, and due to difference circumstances, there is an undermining of those founding ideals, a weakening of commitment to stringent business ethics, a losing sight of what it was that caused this business, this organisation, this operation to come into being in the first place.

A very current example of what I am talking about is the United Nations. Its not too many weeks ago that the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, announced a thoroughgoing reform of an organisation which seems to have lost its sense of direction, and run off the tracks. And so serious is it, that he believes that a huge amount of energy needs to be put into the recovery of what it was the United Nations was first founded for.

There is a biblical example of what I am talking about as well, in the reign of the boy-king of Judah, Josiah, in the middle of the 600s Before Christ. A boy of only eight when he came to the throne, yet for whatever reason, whether it was wise advisors, or his own innocent sense of how it should be, he instituted a reform of the religious and legal practices of his country. And in the process of doing that, they recovered what is believed to have been a copy of the book of Deuteronomy, which had been lost for generations. The founding raison-d’etre of the country over which he was reigning monarch, those founding laws and principles and visions that are contained in the book of Deuteronomy had been lost, and were now recovered; and he set about, as with the United Nations today with Kofi Annan, he set about the most thoroughgoing reform of practices, religious practices in the temple, and legal practices, and its administration, unjust and corrupt as it had become.

Well, we can switch our thinking, friends, from the secular world across to the spiritual world. And there’s no doubt that with this, as well, when we come to the spiritual, and spiritual affairs, you can detect and see examples of similar processes: of how things have begun with high ideals and great enthusiasms, a founding vision, and yet there has been a falling away. We as a human race have lived through a succession of religious ages or epochs; and there is no question that each of them has started with high ideals, with a pristine, clear, uncorrupted sense of what it was about; and yet over time, there was a falling away, a crumbling, of that early idealism. It was what confronted our Lord when He came into the world: that the Old Testament church, that we know of as the Jewish Church, had crumbled away from where it had begun and started. And He was confronted with a church that had fallen from its ideals, which as we know from His comments and teachings had so externalised the practices of religion. “You people who stand on street corners to pray so that you may be seen of others: my goodness, what had become of spirituality amongst you?” He might have said.

And so it has been when we stop and contemplate and reflect on such things as those ridiculous, blood-thirsty, unwarranted Crusades and the Inquisition, which went on for centuries during the Middle Ages there is no question that the Christian Church and the Christian Era, which also began with a pristine and clear sense of what it was all about, fell away. You can even read about it in the book of Acts, you can read about the ideals which had Christians coming together in communities, sharing what they had, giving to those who were poorer than themselves, a kind of kibbutz, a living together; but human proprium got in amongst it. There was theft, people taking more than their share. So many instances and examples to be given, the way in which what began so promisingly, then fell away. Fell away. The dirt began to be shovelled in on the top of those early ideals and enthusiasms.

And so it is, friends, for you and I. Idealism and early enthusiasms, a commitment to a vision that energises us in the beginning, steers us, causes us to rally to it, is so often eroded and undermined with the passage of time, whether it be days or weeks or months or years. It can be a project, just a project that weve embarked on, or it can be something that the Lord Himself has drawn to our attention in the pages of His Word. Were switched on, were alert and we are awake, and we see possibilities in those early beginning states. But then there’s a dropping away and corrupting; and we are no longer energised by, nor are we drawing life-giving strength from, those ideals, that vision, as we were in the past.

Now already, friends, you may realise that I’m touching the edges of the spiritual meaning of this passage from Genesis chapter 26: and I am! Abraham, you see, represents an early, innocent, perhaps at times naive, and uncomplicated phase of our lives. A recurring phase (this is not a linear development); a recurring phase when wells, and plenty of them, are dug in our lives: wells from which we draw that which gives us life and energy, and encouragement and enthusiasm to go forward in new directions, to embark on new projects, to believe in new relationships. We get it through those Abraham states time and time again. Those states when the wells are dug, and they are dug deeply, and the water in them is fresh and clear: we can see what this could achieve, we can see where we are going, we are attracted to the possibilities, and the wells are wonderful. But over time, the dirt gets shovelled in, and they are smothered and covered over. Choked, so that they can no longer yield to us all the wonder and potential they otherwise hold.

Now who are the Philistines? Let me remind you, friends, that the Philistines owned the wells. They knew about them, they were quite content to see that they held possibilities for people in those days, but they did not want anyone else to benefit from them. The Philistines are a feature of our own makeup which is quite able to see the possibilities of these ideals, of these new enthusiasms, of these visions which get hold of us; but they are determined that we shall not benefit from them. There are voices, are there not, within us which are cynical and resistant to any thought of new projects, of things being achieved, of making new headways and new directions? “Well yes, they’re there, but we’re going to make sure that you dont benefit from them in any way at all!”

Technically and doctrinally, the Philistines are, we are told, faith alone. Faith alone is big on ideas, but just about zilch on action. It can see the ideals, but it can immediately see a thousand problems as to why those ideals can never be accomplished or come into actuality. They are the Philistines, and there are Philistines within each and every one of us. Theyre the ones who, as we saw, caused the wells to be stopped up.

The story however, does not stop with the filling up of the wells so that they could not yield water, life-giving water, to other people. The story in fact is about the reopening of those wells. And so I want to move you on, friends, from what sounds and seems somewhat dark and negative in this story, to what is full of promise and hope: that though the wells get covered over, yet they can be reopened. And they were reopened by Abraham’s son, Isaac. And Isaac represents a more insightful, and a more regenerate approach and understanding to life and its challenges and its possibilities. It was in the time of Isaac that the wells began to be reopened.

I’ll give you an example for a moment, friends, and it’s from that reading from the fifth volume of the Arcana Caelestia: that as a child, in earlier Abraham-dominated states, you found no difficulty in believing in the life after death. Your grandma had died, and your parents told you that Grandma had gone to heaven, and you accepted it. But as you grew up, that well had dirt shovelled in on top of it: your sense-based experience of the world around you caused you to question whether there can be another dimension of existence other than this physical and material one. But then as you matured and realised that life in this world is not everything, and that physicality is not everything, you revisited that well, and you began to reopen it and draw from it what is life-giving and sustaining so far as your spiritual progress is concerned. Under Isaac, the wells began to be reopened.

But even so there is resistance. Of course there is! Because by this time, when you are becoming a maturer person, there are other voices that come to you and say, “Why bother? Who cares? Why does it matter? I’ll wait until I get there!” I’ve heard that a hundred times: “I’m not that interested in life beyond death: I’ll wait ’til I get there to see if it’s true or not.” So the wells don’t open, though we may try to open them, they don’t open and yield in the way they could do. But some do. Some do, and that’s what we’ve got to hold on to: that whilst there are some wells that we may never adequately reopen and draw upon, there will be others that we do; such as that God exists, and that God cares. That God provides. That God gives strength. Those wells that became blocked up, we recover them and we draw upon them again what is life-giving and sustaining.

How do we keep them open? The answer is this: we keep them open by ourselves keeping as close as we can to where they come from: those ideals, those visions, those convictions, those early first states and the sense of promise that infused and excited us. We need to keep close to where they come from. And I’ll give you another example. How many people go through stages in their life when they do wonder about the care of the Lord and the closeness of the Lord? And how many of those same people, by turning back to something as familiar as Psalm 23, the shepherds psalm, are reenergized, and find again that their original conviction about the Lord’s care, His love, His monitoring of our life that their original conviction is strengthened again and is able to yield to them that which will sustain and energise them.

Genesis chapter 26 friends, and this incident that I am focussing on this morning, is about what I referred to as first states or beginning states: we all know about them, we can all relate to them. In dozens of different ways in our lives, the times we are excited, the times we are captured by a vision, the times when ideals really lift us up, the possibilities grab hold of us: yes, they can come to have the dirt shovelled in on top of them, so that they are no longer a source of life and energy for us. But here is the Lord assuring us that the essential ones can be recovered, be reopened and recovered; so that again we can draw from them the life-giving waters of everlasting life and spiritual prosperity.

“And Isaac dug again the wells of water which they had dug in the days of Abraham his father, for the Philistines had stopped them up after the death of Abraham.” (Genesis 26, verse 18)

Amen.

By Rev. Brian W. Keith

Life can seem terribly dreary. Familiar patterns are repeated over and over again. Ruts appear. Dishes keep getting dirty. Bills keep coming. The house always needs something done to it. And as we grow older, our bodies signal the rapid passing of time. Energy levels decline. Aches and pains come from nowhere. From being unthinkable, one’s own death is seen as a real possibility.

Emotionally we can feel trapped by what has gone before. Previous actions, mistakes, and evils close in on our minds. We can be haunted by what has happened. The depressing patterns of petty frustrations and useless arguments scar and desensitize us. We can become numbed wandering through the day trying not to feel anything.

Ezekiel had a vision addressed to such a lifeless and hopeless frame of mind. He saw a valley full of dried out bones. As he prophesied, the bones came together, flesh was put upon them, and breath entered them. From dry bones came a great army. And the Lord said to Ezekiel,

“These bones are the whole house of Israel. They indeed say, `Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off!’ Therefore prophesy and say to them, ` … Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. Then you shall know that I am the Lord when I have opened your graves, O My people, and brought you up from your graves'” (37:11-13).

Our bones are dry. Our hope is lost. How pitiful! And how false! Life is repetitive and dreary only if we choose to look at it that way. For all around us there is a renewal of life. New beginnings are taking place constantly.

Consider the natural world. Plants and animals are constantly reproducing, much more than this world could support. Every day the sun comes up anew. Each new year is ushered in with festivity. Even in the fall when the leaves turn and life seems to drain away, there is the promise of rebirth. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain” (John 12:24).

Consider also some events in the life cycle. A child leaves home for school. A person leaves school for a job. Single life is given up for marriage. Children grow up and establish their own homes. Retirement comes. Each of these changes involves loss and gain a new beginning. Even death itself is growth. The Heavenly Doctrines show that when a person awakens in the other world, “at this point his life begins” (AC 186), and his entrance into his eternal heavenly home “marks a new beginning” in his life (AC 1273).

Even as natural life has changes new beginnings so spiritually there can be a constant renewal of life. Above our consciousness the Lord is gently guiding our thoughts and feelings. While we are unaware of it, He is inspiring new ways of looking at life, stimulating new feelings of warmth and concern (see AC 6645e). The Lord is working with our spirits so that we are renewed every moment of every day. The fact is, there are new beginnings in our lives all the time. The Lord is raising up our apparently dry bones, putting flesh upon them, and breathing life into them.

We can choose to feel trapped by the past or dulled by routines. Or we can look at what is happening as the opportunity for one of the many new beginnings in life. For the Lord does not control what happens to us. Yes, His Providence is overseeing all that happens, but that does not mean He is causing specific events to occur good or bad. In one sense He is not concerned for what happens; rather He is concerned with how we respond, for that determines what good He can then bring about. Retirement, for example, is not important, but how a person then uses his or her time is. The response can be gloomy, for the loss of co-workers, status, or income; or it can be of renewal more time for friends, family, church work, or others. A newness of life can be born in any situation any time, anywhere.

Our participation in renewal is critical. The Lord never forces us to grow. He never forces us to change our minds or actions. While He is always working, urging and pressing to influence us in heavenly ways, He will not change our outlook if we do not want Him to. We can remain in the trenches. We can look upon life as a deterioration of our physical and mental abilities. We can see the dark side of every event, pessimistically awaiting the next cruel blow of fate. We can cry about dry bones and hopelessness. But those dry bones can have flesh on them, breath in them.

Regardless of what has occurred in the past, new beginnings are possible if we are willing. They do not start outside of ourselves. They start with our thoughts and intentions (see AC 1317). We have the freedom to think about life in any way we wish. We can think negatively or positively. We can desire, intend, anything we wish. We can want what is good. We can want what is evil. We are not trapped by previous choices or patterns of behavior. We are trapped only by our fears and refusals to think and try.

Our attitude makes all the difference in how we view the world and how easy we make it for the Lord to renew us. From a negative, doubting viewpoint we see the world and ourselves through a warped lens. We reject or give up on the ideals the Lord has shown us in His Word. But if we attempt to trust in what He has said, if we will be positive, affirmative to Him, then wonders can be worked (see AC 3913:5). “If you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, `Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20).

Our basic assumptions can never be proven. And if we assume, have faith, that the Lord speaks to us in His Word, and our lives will be improved if we listen, then a new beginning can occur. For regeneration is the new creation of life spiritual life. It begins when a person affirms the truth and intends to live according to it. This is the start of regeneration. It does not occur at any set time in life, nor does it happen only once. Each and every time we positively turn our minds to the Lord’s way, a new beginning occurs.

Such beginnings are like seedlings. They are planted in the soil of our lives. With watering, with light and warmth, they take root. As they grow, as we walk in the Lord’s way, the earth of our life is made more secure. The interlocking root systems stop the erosion of false ideas, evil desires. The more that take root the better, for the roots hinder the washing away of good by selfishness.

But for seedlings to grow strong they need weathering. The storms and bitter cold which could harm the trees actually serve to strengthen them. So in regeneration. Each new beginning of spiritual life will be challenged. Where honesty is growing, the harsh wind of theft will blow and try to destroy it. Where compassion is developing, cold disregard for others and apathy will also be present.

Spiritual struggles ensue. These raging storms are painful, as the new beginnings of spiritual life are threatened and buffeted. Yet, as we endure, as we resist the forces of hell, a greater strength is acquired. More spiritual life grows perhaps a clearer idea of His ways, a deeper appreciation of our need for the Lord’s presence, or a greater intensity of affection for His good (see AC 2272). Whatever is gained, our spirits are growing flesh upon dry bones, breath giving life. As the Lord promised:

“I will bring the blind by a way they did not know; I will lead them in paths they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, and crooked places straight” (Isaiah 42:16).

The Lord leads us through all the many byways of life, through the valleys up to the peaks. He would have each day be a new beginning for us, not in a dramatic sense, for we are not meant to have radical changes often. The new birth, or regeneration, is not a series of sudden changes in direction. Yes, it can begin with that when a person first realizes the importance of spiritual values, when a person experiences the grief of repentance. But rebirth is an evolving process. It is made up of many small beginnings.

The small beginnings of regeneration are a series of purifications the regular washing away of evils in the spirit, of saying, “No, I won’t do that because it is wrong.” And as the Heavenly Doctrines note, ” … such purification ought to go on all the time and so always to be taking place as if from a new beginning” (AC 2044).

“As if from a new beginning.” In one sense, each time we resist an evil, each time we intend on doing something good, it is a new beginning. Something new has started in our lives. But in another sense, every positive step is a continuation of what was begun before. It is a resurfacing of the seeds planted years before from parents, from teachers, from whatever good we had willingly done. The Lord keeps working with the good He has established in everyone’s life. While it may not be seen for a time, it is carefully preserved, awaiting the occasion to be seen again. Hellish choices and life styles shut it up, but it is still there. The Lord is very patient, always leading us so that the good we have might be protected, develop, and eventually blossom in the fruit of an angelic life.

What this means is that life is never pointless. While we will certainly go through times when we feel our life is dry or our lot hopeless, the Lord can put flesh on our bones, breath in our lungs. All our patterns which seem so fixed and limiting, all the painful baggage we carry from the past, need not defeat us. For every day the Lord is providing us with new beginnings small, almost imperceptible opportunities to renew our lives. If we are not utterly downcast, if we have not given up if we will be open and affirmative to what He has said then new life may grow. Seedlings are planted which, though they may not bear visible fruit until the next life, will give us strength, will renew our spirits. And the prophecy of Isaiah will come true for us:

“But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not be faint” (40:31).

Amen.

By Rev. Patrick Rose

“For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (Matt.11:30)

Perhaps one of the most cheerful teachings in the Writings is this: that the path which leads to heaven is far easier than most people imagine. It is, though, a teaching we tend to forget. At times we can feel within ourselves that we are so evil and sinful that we begin to doubt whether we shall ever enter heaven. We compare what the Writings teach with the way we are actually living, and feel that we are failing. We doubt the possibility of our salvation. It seems so difficult to live the life we know we should live, and as a result we are burdened with feelings of despair and guilt.

Now to some extent, despair and guilt are inevitable. Despair, we are taught, is permitted when we are in spiritual temptation, so that we might come to see that by ourselves we can do nothing, and that salvation is of the Lord alone. Guilt is also necessary. If we do not make ourselves guilty of the evils we have committed, we will remain in them. Nevertheless, we would be mistaken to think that the path to heaven is a hard and arduous burden, and that it must be walked in sadness, guilt and depression. The fact is, the Lord loves us. He wants us to go to heaven. Therefore, He makes it easy for us. After all, why would the Lord create us for heaven, and then place obstacles in the path that leads there?

It is a ridiculous fallacy to believe that it must of necessity be difficult for a man to enter heaven. More than this, it is a cruel and hateful falsity, for it implies that the Lord would rather see us suffer to eternity in hell than enjoy everlasting happiness in heaven. Why, then, did such a fallacy arise? Why do so many people fall into believing the notion that heaven is an almost impossible dream?

The answer lies in the nature of human freedom. Heaven is happiness, and happiness, to be happiness, cannot be forced upon a man. It is something which he must freely choose. Therefore it is that the Lord does not create man as an angel. When we are born, we are placed here on earth, outside of heaven, so that we can choose for ourselves whether or not we want to become angels. Before each one of us the Lord sets a path, a simple and direct path, leading straight to heaven. If we want to walk along it, we can. On the other hand, if we prefer to remain outside of heaven, we can do so. It is up to us. We have complete freedom in the matter. The only thing which will prevent a man from walking easily towards heaven is a desire to remain in evil.

This is the origin of the idea that the path to heaven is difficult. Evil men who want to remain in evil find that it is indeed difficult to walk along this path. In fact, they find it impossible. The obstacle, though, is not in the path which the Lord has set before them. The difficulty is one they have created for themselves. It lies in the fact that they, quite simply, want to remain where they are. This, though, they are loathe to admit. They would rather blame the Lord than admit to the fact that they are insane enough to want to remain in evil. Therefore it is that evil men and evil spirits embrace the idea that to go to heaven is difficult. It is, after all, a useful excuse for remaining in the evil they love.

It is, therefore, a false idea, an idea originating in evil. It is not difficult to go to heaven. For those who truly desire heaven, the path that leads there can be surprisingly easy indeed. All that is required is that man undertake the simple work of repentance.

Now this might sound as if it is easier said than done. Repentance may appear to be a very difficult task. But it is not difficult to repent. Even if we have a tendency to remain in our evils, we can still repent if we so desire. Repentance is, generally, a relatively easy process, and it is intended to be so, for it is the way the Lord leads us to heaven.

When we read what the Writings have to say about repentance, we see that repentance consists of a series of steps, each one of which is relatively simple. Now what are these steps or stages of repentance? There are four of them. We are taught that repentance consists in examining oneself, in recognizing and acknowledging one’s sins, in praying to the Lord, and beginning a new life (TCR 528).

It begins with self-examination. This is the first step. Self-examination is not to be confused with a general feeling of being evil. It is indeed easy for a person to weigh himself down with guilt, with the feeling that he is nothing but a miserable sinner. But what does this accomplish? By itself, absolutely nothing! After all, there are many people who can feel terribly guilty about their evil nature, and yet who keep right on doing evil. They have this feeling of guilt, but nothing changes. There is no improvement. All they have accomplished is a feeling of guilt. Self-examination is not like this. It is not a process by which all we do is discover how sinful and miserable we are. It is, rather, a way in which we come to discover and to see specific evils within ourselves. It is radically different from merely burdening ourselves with guilt. To sit burdened with a general feeling of guilt at how sinful we are, is to sit at the beginning of the path to heaven, and to remain there. On the other hand, to see and recognize within ourselves one or two specific evils is to take the very first step towards heaven.

Then we can make a second step. We have to take responsibility for what we have done. We have to accept that those things we have done are sins against the Lord. We must indeed make ourselves guilty of those evils which we find, but this is to be a specific guilt, a guilt with a purpose. We acknowledge specific things that we have done wrong, with the intention of changing. There are spirits who like to burden our consciences. They love to see us squirm under the burden of guilt. If they had their way, they would inject into us so many scruples that we would begin to feel guilty about everything, even about things that are not sins at all. This is the burden which these troublesome spirits would place upon us. The burden of the Lord is completely different. He asks us to consider the Ten Commandments, and then to look at ourselves. He asks us to find some specific evil within ourselves, and to accept that this evil is a sin against Him. At first all we are asked is to do this with just one or two evils. Finding one or two evils! It doesn’t sound difficult at all. It sounds almost too easy. But to see an evil within ourselves, and then to acknowledge that we have sinned in this way, making ourselves responsible for it, is to take two small steps towards heaven. This is the way in which we begin to walk along the path towards heaven. It is by taking one step, then another, and then another, and so on, that we actually begin to walk. It is infinitely better to begin by taking just two small steps, than to sit burdened with guilt, moving nowhere.

The next step, the third step, is to approach the Lord. This is essential. The very reason that repentance is easy is that the Lord helps us. But He will not force His help upon us. We must ask Him for it. And so we must pray. We must talk to Him. This isn’t difficult, either. We already know of Him. What we need to do is talk to Him, talk with Him. After we have found an evil within ourselves, and then admitted that what we have thought or done is a sin against Him, we should get down on our knees and pray. We should ask for His mercy, and beseech His help in resisting this evil in the future. We should tell Him that we see that what we have done is wrong, and that we have sinned against Him. This is all we need to do. There is no need, the Writings say, to list our evils in our prayers. The Lord already knows them; it was He who led us to see them for ourselves. Nor do we have to beg forgiveness. He has already forgiven us. All we must do is acknowledge before Him that we have sinned against Him, and ask Him for His merciful help. To do this, to actually ask the Lord to help us, has tremendous power.

After this, the fourth and last step is to begin a new life. This, more than the other steps of repentance, might sound difficult. To begin a new life, though, does not mean what we may think it to mean. We are not expected to repent and then all of a sudden go forth to live a perfect life. This new life we must live is not a perfect life. It is a better life — a life that is better in some small way. Because we have seen some evil in ourselves, acknowledged that it is a sin, and asked for the Lord’s help, we are in a position to resist this evil in the future.

And this is not difficult. It becomes difficult only when a person has become accustomed to giving free reign to his evils, or else has previously rejected everything of heaven and the church. Then the fight can indeed become severe. Normally, though, resistance to evils is not a hard task. Indeed, it is said that if we only resist those evils to which we are inclined, once every week, or once every two weeks, we will notice a change. We will find that to resist them becomes progressively easier. Our strength of will, given to us by the Lord, grows gradually stronger, until that evil we have discovered within ourselves is put away completely. Eventually we come to detest even the thought of committing this evil. Reaching this point is a gradual process. It takes time. But if a person is sincere in his efforts, and does his best, then this path is a sure path and a progressively easier one. It is as easy as walking. Indeed this is, of course, precisely what it is. It is walking the path to heaven.

This path would be difficult, it is true, if we were expected to walk it alone, or if we were expected to complete the journey overnight. But we are expected to do neither. The Lord does not expect us to repent without His help. This is why we are commanded to ask Him for help. Neither does He expect us to become perfect overnight. He expects us to walk the path to heaven in steps, not to get there suddenly in one big jump. First we must take the four simple steps of repentance. Then, as we begin a new life, we can, step by step, resist the evil we have discovered, until it is, with the Lord’s help, fully conquered. Then the whole process can be repeated. At recurring seasons we can examine ourselves to find one or two additional evils, acknowledge that they are sins, pray to the Lord, and then begin a still better life. If we do this at least once or twice a year, we are indeed on the way to heaven.

Repentance is easy, and it becomes easier and easier the more we do it. Repentance is not a thing we do once. It is, above all, a habit, a habit to be acquired. Once it has become a habit, it comes easily to us. On the other hand, if we never do it, it becomes progressively more difficult and painful to take that first initial step. In this it is like any other task we may undertake. The more frequently we do it, the easier it becomes.

We must make a regular practice of repentance, so that it becomes a part, and indeed an easy part, of our lives. The Lord has made it easy for us to go to heaven. It is a foolish person who ignores this, and tries to make it difficult instead. We have a tendency to burden ourselves with all kinds of imagined difficulties and problems. But with the Lord it is different. His yoke is easy, and His burden is light. He makes it easy for us to go to heaven, and He makes it easy for the simple reason that He loves us, and He wants us to be happy. He wants us to go to heaven.

Amen.

By Rev. Grant R. Schnarr

“What ails you Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is” (Gen. 21:17).

The story of Hagar and her son’s banishment into the wilderness is about desolation. Hagar may have thought that she was secure forever in Abraham’s house, that her Son, Abraham’s son, Ishmael, would become Abraham’s heir. But instead Hagar found herself cast out into the wilderness with her son. And as she wandered the dry and parched lands, that one being, which held all her hopes, her dreams, her pride, her future, was dying in her arms, her only son Ishmael.

Hagar’s state of complete devastation represents on a higher more spiritual level, states of devastation that we can go through. The Writings say that this story illustrates how we can feel as if we are losing something special to us, those dreams which we’ve lived for, being a good person, for friendships, for conjugial love, how these dreams can appear to be dying before our eyes and what we can do (AC 2682).

Hagar represents our affection for external truth (AC 2675). It is that part within us that loves knowledge. It is that part within us that loves to figure out how to get along in this world. If we think about it from the Writings we understand why Hagar is from Egypt. Egypt represents scientifics, the intellectual (AC 5373). Of course our affection for external truth is born from our love of the natural sciences.

Hagar has a son, Ishmael. Ishmael here represents spiritual truth (AC 2677). Ishmael represents that truth which is genuine, pure. He represents our ideals, our dreams. Each of us has dreams that we carry with us. Those dreams of wanting to be an angelic being. Maybe we remember the first time we read Heaven and Hell or Conjugial Love and we saw the beautiful image of what it means to be a good person. And we really wanted to follow that. Maybe we were very little children when we first heard about angels and we wished or prayed to the Lord in innocence and sincerity that we could be an angel some day. That’s a dream we had, a goal. Many of us too, at one time or another, when we were very young, sat down in the pew to witness our older brothers’ and sisters’ weddings or maybe a relative, and we thought to ourselves, “Wouldn’t it be nice. I wish I could have that. I wish I could have conjugial love some day.”

But just like Hagar, what happens when we enter the wilderness of life. Things are not so easy. Hagar being ousted out of the home and into the wilderness represents us being ousted out of the innocence of childhood into the real world. Abraham, here, represents the Lord, the Lord sets us out into the wilderness of life with our dreams by our side. And when we get out into that wilderness it doesn’t take long to realize that we’re not just going to walk into a beautiful world where we effortlessly live those ideals. Life isn’t one continuous flower garden. It’s a wilderness out there, there’s no water around. And the little truth that we have begins to run out. The water bag runs dry very quickly. And we find ourselves alone in the wilderness, nowhere to go in our lives. And our ideals, our dreams that we held so close to us, those truths that the Lord has given us, are dying in our arms. We can feel them slipping away from us, resignation. We say to ourselves, “I’m not going to have conjugial love, not after the way I’ve been living my life. Forget it. I can’t do it.” Resignation: “I’m not going to be able to be that angel I dreamed about. Are you kidding? I look at my life and the disorders I’m in. I’m not going to make it. This dream is dying before me. My dreams, my visions, are dying.”

So what does Hagar do? She lays her son down right there underneath a shrub and walks away. She can’t face it. She can’t face the loss of this beautiful thing that the Lord has given her, that she dreamed so hard about. Her son, her only son, is dying in her arms. So she lays him down and walks a bow’s distance away, sits down under a tree and weeps bitterly. In the same way, when we are faced with the reality of life, we can take our dreams that the Lord has given us, take our dreams of being a good person, the dream of conjugial love, whatever the dream may be, and we can become so distressed that we aren’t able to live by this right now, that we put the dream down and walk away. We walk away in resignation. We feel as if something is dying inside. We say, “This beautiful teaching – I can talk about it, but it’s not me. I can’t do it.” So we cast it down and go into various disorders, leave our dreams to live a mundane life without ideals, we work, we have hobbies, we watch television and we idly waste our spiritual life away.

But when we leave our ideals behind something deep inside of us weeps bitterly. Inside of us, something is crying out for the ideal. The hagar within us cries for her son.

Now what happened as Hagar sat there under that tree crying? The Lord came to her and the Lord asked, “What ails you, Hagar?” In the same way, the Lord says to us in those times of desolation and resignation, “What ails you?” And the Lord knows what is wrong with us. He asks the question so that we can face in our lives what is ailing us. What is our problem? Why have we laid our ideals down? He asked Hagar the question so she would look at her life. He asks, “Why have you put down your son? I gave you that son,” the Lord said, “I want to make him a great nation.” In the same way, the Lord says to us, “I gave you the Writings. I gave you those ideals. I didn’t give them to you so that you could put them down to die here in the wilderness. I gave them to you so that you could take care of them and hold them up. I’m going to make of them a great nation if you let Me.”

The Lord cares about us. When we were tiny children, dreaming about angels and how wonderful it would be to be an angel, who gave us that vision? The Lord did. When we were a little older, in church watching that wedding, thinking how beautiful it would be to be married and have a good marriage, who gave us that ideal? Who gave us that dream? The Lord did. When we were older and we had that vision from the Writings, about what it means to be a good, useful person to society, a person who cares about people, a person who is productive, who knows the Lord – who gave us that dream? The Lord did. And He’s not going to take that away from us. He’s not going to kill our child in the wilderness. He’s not going to kill our dreams. That would be cruel. Instead, He wants us to go back and pick up those ideals and never let them go.

The Lord said, “Go back. Pick up your child. Lift him up with your hand.” And we can see the correspondences here. Pick up the child. Raise him up. Raise up that ideal again. Go back ! It’s not too late. Don’t be resigned to life. You can pick that ideal up again. You can live by it. And we know what hands represent in the Word – power. Give those gentle dreams some support in your life. Lift them up. The Writings say, at this time, that this raising up represents support (AC 2695, 2698). We support the ideals, to support the genuine truth, and in turn that genuine truth will support us. It is a reciprocal supporting. The more we hold up our dreams, the more our dreams hold us up in our lives.

Many of us, at times, act as if we’ve given up on life. We act as if we’re dead inside. Why do we read the Word, why do we come to church, if we are really spiritually dead? Isn’t that a waste of time? It makes us feel bad. That’s all it does. But the Lord is saying, “You are not dead. You`re sleeping. That child isn’t going to die in the wilderness; he’s going to be a great nation if you go back and work for it.. Can’t you go back and look at that ideal one more time and see if you can’t pick it up again?”

At this time we can so easily say to ourselves, “What is going on in me? Why am I different? Why didn’t I reach my ideals?” The Lord is pointing out to us in this story that everyone feels that way at one time or another. Everybody occasionally feels as if they’ve lost it spiritually. We have to feel that way. Why? So we recognize that the Lord has all power, so that we can call out to Him and ask Him for help. Also, we’ve got to truly want the spiritual part of life, and struggle for it. We have to realize that we know about life, which we have seen from our own natural intelligence, will get us nowhere. We’ve got to see that everything we need the Lord has, and call on the Lord to help us (See AC 2682).

As soon as Hagar returned and picked up her son, a well appeared before them. This is the truth, the living truth from the Word. The Writings say that this represents the life in the Word, that once we pick up our ideals and care about them again, we will be led and nourished by the living truth of the Lord,s Word (AC 2702). It will feed us and especially our dreams, and they will grow strong.

How many of us have gone to the Word in times of trouble and seen that help? It’s a miracle – the Lord really does talk to us through the Word. All we have to do is open it up and read it, and the Lord is there. We must go to the Lord’s Word, and believe in what He says, fully believe in what He says. That’s how we can make that dream grow again, that’s how we make that dream become a reality in our lives.

After Hagar gave her son a drink from the well he recovered. And one of the last things we are told in this story is that this boy grew to become an archer, and that God was with him, and that he did indeed become the father of a great nation. That’s the promise that the Lord gives us, if we’ve given up and put down our dreams somewhere, it’s never too late to go back and pick up those dreams. We should never give up on life. The Lord never gives up on us. Why should we give up on ourselves? The Lord is there saying to each of us, “What ails you? I’m going to make that child a great nation. Go, raise him up.” And then we will find that our dreams, those dreams that we love with all our heart, will become a reality. They will grow strong and we will find that what the Lord promised us from the very beginning has indeed come true. “What ails you Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad and hold him with your hand, for I will make him a great nation” (Gen. 21:17-18).

Amen.

By Rev. Frank Rose

Fortunately, comparatively few of us have had that degrading and humiliating experience. People who have will be very sensitive to the message in Psalm 142 which ends with the prayer, “Bring my soul out of prison that I may praise your name; the righteous shall surround me for You shall deal bountifully with me.”

Of course, not all people are in prison because of crimes. Many experience being in prison in time of war or perhaps they’re political prisoners of some kind. There are comparatively few stories in the Old Testament about people in prison, partially because of all the regulations and laws given in the Books of Moses which stipulate different crimes and their punishments–none of the punishments ever involved going to prison. In the early days of the Hebrew people, it was not known what prison was; it was not part of their culture. Joseph was cast into a prison. First of all, he was a slave which is a kind of imprisonment, but then when he was in Egypt, be was falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife–found himself in prison and later emerged from that prison to become the second ruler in all of Egypt–but that was an Egyptian prison. Samson was put into a prison and that was a Philistine prison. The first time, you hear of anyone of the Children of Israel being put into prison by their own people is in the time of the Kings; especially the story of the Prophet Jeremiah, who was repeatedly cast into prison because his message was so unpopular.

So when the people heard the Old Testament prophecies that the Messiah was going to come, and among other things, was going to release them from prison, you can’t help but wonder as to what meaning that held for them, since so few of them had had the prison experience. There is a prophecy in Isaiah 61: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor: He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” And this prophecy is repeated in different words in other places; that’s one of the reasons why the Messiah was coming was to release people from prison.

The first time Jesus stood up to speak in the synagogue at Nazareth he quoted that part of the 61 chapter of Isaiah, and having read it, He then said: “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your ears.” Now, do you know of any story in the New Testament, of Jesus releasing someone from prison? John The Baptist, who prepared the way of the Lord and who baptized Him, was cast into prison by the wicked Herod and there is no indication in the Gospels that Jesus ever did anything to release him. Eventually, he was beheaded in prison, and yet Jesus said: “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your ears.” He was already releasing people from prison. Now what prison was that?

Clearly, it was not some external prison. What was the prison in which people found themselves, in which the Messiah had come to deliver them from? You know how you can be imprisoned by your body, Think of a person who is suffering from Alzhiemers Disease–how their body becomes like a prison to them–and even their minds can’t operate properly, simply because of a physical condition. Any kind of physical limitation is the nature of an imprisonment and if we listen too much to the bodily senses and base our whole life on our sense experience, our mind becomes very limited by people who say” “Well, I don’t believe in a life after death; I’ve never seen the Spiritual World. I’ve never met anyone who has come back from the Spiritual World.” So they are unable to accept the concept of Life After Death because they are imprisoned by their bodies, Their thoughts are overly dominated by sensual things. Remember in the early days of space travel; one of the space ships went out and an atheist jubilantly reported that God must not exist, because here Mankind bad traveled to the moon and no one had seen God on the journey! Notice the sensual thinking that God, if He is real, must be visible to the physical eyes! So we all tend to be limited because we have a body in the Natural World and sometimes it’s very difficult to rise above the appearances of that body–to see beyond the surface–to see the, reality. If you saw a person physically in prison you might not realize that their spirit was free and perhaps the jailer was more imprisoned that the prisoner, because of a mental attitude. Being in prison is much more a state of mind. Think of people who suffer with addictions, and in that sense they are prisoners of their own bodies. They cannot stop themselves from eating or drinking or taking in certain substances. They have lost control; as much as their mind might say: “I won’t do this anymore,” yet the body keeps on doing it. They are prisoners in a very tragic sense. But having a body itself is a kind of imprisonment; because the spirit is beyond the body, it has its own level of reality and there are many times in which we have to arise above the appearance that we exist only within the limits of our physical frame–to realize that we are Spiritual Beings and the body is only a very small part of our life. When the body grows old, our spirit does not grow old and when the body dies, we do not die–but to think like that, we have to be released from the domination of physical appearances. When Jesus taught, He confronted the people with their thinking–their thought patterns, You may remember the phrase: “You have heard it was said to them of old times, that I say unto you.” One of them we read was a recitation “You heard that it was said to them of old times–you shall not murder!” People who had that concept of the Fifth Commandment, that it was concerned with the murder of the physical body, had no awareness that their inner hatred and bitterness was a form of murder and therefore their thinking was very limited and it made them such that they wouldn’t even take responsibility for the inner attitudes or thoughts, They thought so long as they obeyed the letter of the Law, they were: “Right with God.” Now that thinking was a kind of prison bar which limits the way in which they approached life. Every time the Lord spoke He confronted their “traditional” thinking. He told them to cleanse the inside of the cup and platter, saying that ritual wasn’t going to get them to Heaven, but an inner spirit of Love and Charity would. He told them they should love their enemies–that they should forgive–they should let go of the pattern of wrong doing and revenge because that pattern, which we still see in the world today, is a kind of spiritual prison. People get caught in that and they’re locked into a way of thinking that makes it almost impossible for them to see anything else, That’s why it says in the Psalm: “Bring my soul out of prison.” Having the body in prison is one thing–having the soul in prison is even worse and your soul is in prison when your thoughts are false or when your emotions are totally negative.

During the Second World War, there was a Christian Thinker, Clergyman, Philosopher named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He spent many years in prison and eventually died in prison. He wrote a book entitled “Letters From Prison.” The early letters were written after he had been in jail for only a short while and one of the first things he observed was that while the body is in prison, the mind does not have to be. And then he says this: “The important thing is to make the best use of one’s possessions and capabilities -there are still plenty left and to accept the limits of the situation, by which I mean, not giving way to feelings of resentment and discontent,” You see, he realized that thing that would truly imprison him was not the bars–was not the walls, but that spirit of resentment and discontent. “I’ve never realized so clearly what the Bible and Luther meant by Spiritual Trial. Quite suddenly, for no apparent reason, whether physical or psychological, the peace and placidity which have been a mainstay hitherto began to waver; and the fear, in Jeremiah’s Expressive Phase, becomes that defiant and despondent thing one cannot fathom. It is like an invasion from the outside, as though evil powers were trying to deprive one of life’s dearest treasures.” And then he adds: “But it is a wholesome and necessary experience which helps one to better understand human life.”

What then is prison? For much of his time in prison, Bonhoeffer was able to maintain an attitude of freedom and peace and he could see that there were times when his heart was invaded by these destructive forces which were all on a mental level; negative feelings of bitterness–despondency, despair, resentment–that was the prison he had to fear. And don’t we know the same kind of prison? Think of what prejudice does to imprison the mind. Imagine if you have a view that a certain race of people, a certain culture of people, are all bad, how that limits your life. How you put yourself in prison due to your own prejudices. Suppose you were negative to all black people, then you would never be able to meet a black person and see them as a real human being and benefit from that relationship. You’re imprisoned because of your own way of thinking, We all need to be liberated from this kind of spiritual limitation and spiritual blindness. That’s why it’s interesting in one of the prophesies of the Lords Coming, “The opening of the blind eyes” is put right alongside “Delivering people from prison,” This is Isaiah 42: “I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people, as a light unto the Gentiles, to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the prison, those who sit in darkness from the prison house,” Jesus never physically delivered anyone from prison but every time He spoke, He was opening their eyes and delivering them from their prison of darkness–from negative thinking–from prejudice–from an attitude of mind that judges all things on the basis of appearances and is not willing to be lifted up to a higher level. Whenever we are in a destructive frame of mind, self-pitying, resentful of others, we find ourselves in prison. And maybe you have known that kind of state in which you felt the limitations and you desperately wanted to get out. How do you break down those walls; how do you liberate yourself from that confined way of thinking and being? The Lord invites us to escape from prison by lifting our minds to a higher level. Just take for example, the prison of the body and the prison of our own personality. Ever stop to think that ones personality is a kind of prison–that you think of yourself in a certain way–others think of you in that way and your true spirit may be very different than your personality. So how do you break out of that prison of yours; those physical limitations or what people think of you or what you think of yourself? One way is to simply observe yourself and raise your mind to a higher level and realize that your body and your personality are a very small part of your total essence; that you are truly a Spiritual Being, created to live forever and that many of the things that are important to you in your life right now are just temporary; things that are active for awhile, but they’re not part of your true essence or your true personality. That’s why in the Psalms the person prays to escape from the prison by flying: “Oh that I had wings of a dove, for then I would fly away and be at rest.” You can imagine a person sitting in a physical prison and using the wings of thought to raise their minds above the limitations in which they find themselves, and suddenly they’re free, Whether we’re in physical prison or not, we can liberate ourselves by meditation and by elevating the mind. If you think of the problems that you face in your life, the things you find so discouraging and difficult to deal with just lift your mind to a higher level and let them come into a better perspective and you will be freed. And the most wonderful thing is as you release yourself from prison, you also release other people, for we tend to put other people in a box: by our attitudes toward them, by our judgments about them. Maybe you’ve had the experience of other people having thoughts about you that you say to yourself, “I’m not like that–I’m not the kind of person that other people think I am!” So if we become more liberated in our own thinking, able to think on a higher spiritual level, we will liberate other people and we will never say as we approach a person: “I know you!” For how much do we really know of one another–where I’m willing to judge you or I’m willing to interpret your life? But rather, I might say: ” I am more than my body, I am more than my personality, I am more than my roles in life and therefore the person I am talking to is much greater than what I see–and the limited thoughts I have about him.” In this process we need, most of all, to be liberated from the tyranny of having to be right all the time.

Let us accept with joy, in the fact that, in a certain sense, we are nothing–we’re just created out of the dust of the Earth and our loving Creator sees in us an infinite potential on the Spiritual level. So we let go of our pride, we let go of our self image and we lift our thought upwards and then we find that we are liberated, we are set free, we are given a kind of internal peace, surrounded by that spirit of love and acceptance.

Have you ever been in prison? Of course you have! We all have! There are many times in life when, mentally, we are in prison. The Lord has promised that He will come and deliver us from prison; to rescue us from that prison, if we but turn to Him, lift our thoughts to a higher level, want to rise above the limitations of time–of space–of personality, and see things more as He sees them, from an eternal and loving point of view.

Amen.

By Rev. Grant R. Schnarr

If we look in the Word we find so many places where someone is longing for home or has been displaced from home. In this song particularly the Children of Israel had been taken captive to Babylon, and they were away from their home, strangers in a strange land, and how the Psalmist cries out for his God. He remembers what it was like back in his homeland, how he used to go to the temple for feasts with all his people and praise God in the simple life. He remembers the beautiful flowing Jordan river, the waterfalls and the sounds they made, and we can imagine the feelings of home that must have been coming back to that psalmist at that time, and how people around him–the Babylonians–came to him, “Where is your God now? Where is He?” And how his soul was melted like wax within him as he longed for a homeland.

This is not only true in many of the Psalms, but also think about the children of Israel, how after they had Egypt, wandering through that wilderness, looking for a home. They had no home but their own tents and where they stopped that night. For forty years they wandered in that wilderness searching for a home. And even after that, when they came in to the promised land they had to fight to make something their home.

Think about David who wrote many of the Psalms. He was kicked out of his own land. If you remember, Saul was after him to kill him. David had to hide in caves and in mountains. David had to run from Saul all the time, and how often David longed to go home, to be able to return back to where he was born. But even in that time he had to go and hide among his enemies, pretend he was insane so that they would not kill him, take him prisoner, because he couldn’t go home. He had been displaced.

And even the Lord Himself when He was in this world, walking to all the different villages to speak to people, many of the time the crowd pressed on Him so much He had to go into the wilderness to be able to breathe, and how He said to His disciples, “Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man does not have a place to lay His head.” And even on the final temptation on the Cross how homeless He must have felt at that time when He looked up and said “My God, my God, why have you for forgotten me? quoting the twenty-second Psalm of David. And then coming back to that realization of who He was and where He was going, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

If we can all relate to many of these feelings of being displaced, being homeless and searching for a home, how many of us have moved away from home. When I was in California we were talking about many people in California are moving all the time. And we were talking about home and what is home. Someone said, “I’ve been to so many different places the only thing I think of home any more is my immediate family. That’s home wherever I go, my husband and my children.”

Another person said, “So many people are moving around us, we make friends and then they move and new people come in, it’s hard to feel that there’s anything that I can call home with my friends.”

I was talking to someone this week who was saying they moved so many times in their life that she used to think of her grandmother’s house as home because her grandmother was always there. In the same house there was a place where she could fix her mind and think, this is home, here at my grandmother’s.

Home, we all long for a home in our lives. How often have we looked at a photograph- perhaps an old photograph of something–home, maybe when we were little children, and it brought back so many memories to us, a longing that we had within us comes out. How often have we heard maybe some kind of noise, or maybe smelled something that brought back memories when we were children and the beautiful peace we had then, a place called home. Perhaps you’ve heard a song that brings back these memories and we long for home.

The reason that we feel this way, and in the Word so many times homelessness is brought out is because in one way spiritually we all are homeless. We’ve all left a home behind and we’re searching and longing for a new home in the Lord. You think about it, the Lord said in the beginning of Genesis, “A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife.” Leaving our father and mother, this does not just apply to males, but to females as well, if you look at the spiritual sense of that. To leave our father and mother means to leave those hereditary inclinations that we have within to do wrong, to leave those behind and to seek after a new will, a new life, a marriage with a new kind of life, a new way of life in our own hearts and in our own lives.

That’s why the Lord said in the New Testament, “He who does not hate his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters, his wife and children, is not worthy of me.” I can’t imagine a Fundamentalist saying that is literally true; you should hate your mother, your father, your wife and your children. Of course not. There the Lord is pointing out to us that there are things within us we’ve been comfortable with that we’ve grown up with, that have been hurting us in our lives, pet habits that we have, loves of self that we have within, loves of the world that we have within, that have hurt us very much, and that we’ve got to leave those things behind.

I think we can all see that there’s this longing for home. The idea that we should leave our mother and father, our brothers and sisters behind, in the sense of the spiritual brother, sister, mother and father. Many of us have these feelings within us that we’ve grown up with, these pet evils, these pet selfishnesses that we’ve had that have given us a certain delight in our life and how much we do look t them as being sort of blood relatives. They mean a lot to us, the things that we’re following in our lives, but how the Lord calls us out of our selfishness, our of our old ways and tells us to seek out after Him, to look for a new home with the Lord.

But when we do that, what happens? I think we’ve all felt that in our lives. When we leave that comfortable life behind, that old shack of a house that we used to have and begin to follow the Lord, sometimes we can feel so empty inside. We can feel so alone. We feel like the Lord is not with us any more. We are strangers in a strange land and we don’t know where we’re going any more. We really cry out for the Lord, and we long for Him. Where is our home in life?

The Psalmist said, “I pant for the Lord just like a dear pants for waters.” Spiritually we know that water represents truth. Panting for new truth in our life, new ideas. We’ve had so many old ideas that we used to use that just don’t work any more in our lives: that we’ll find love in sexual immorality. We took that route; many of us did. And how that just didn’t work. That we’ll find some kind of peace in our lives by fantasy, that we’ll find peace in our lives by escapism. That doesn’t just mean drugs and alcohol, but we all have our ways of escaping. Escape into work. Escape into have more people like us in life. Escape into little pet fantasies that we have of who we are and what we are about. But we realize that they don’t work in our lives. They just don’t work.

How many of us have taken that route of feeling maybe we’ll find self-worth in our lives if we go and immerse ourselves into our work. In the 80’s it’s the Worth ethic, you know, work, work, and how we can lose our own souls trying to gain the whole world.

These things don’t work any more and we realize it, but now we long for new truth in our lives. Where do we go now? We’ve left those things behind in our lives, and we pant for the Lord, we pant for new truth in our life.

Not only that, but at the same time, when we are thinking about this, we can look around at times when we become frustrated, and see people who are leading lives the way we used to lead, and how we can see them in certain disorders in their lives that we’ve left behind, and we wonder to ourselves, why can they do this? How can they continue on but we can’t. And even if we’ve taken that path before, even if we’ve been there before and now we’re out of it, something tells us that perhaps we can go back to that, that perhaps it wasn’t so bad. We forget about the idea that we recognize that we can’t life that kind of life any more, and we want to go back to that way of life.

When that happens to us we can imagine at the same time things coming up within us, the doubts that come up within us at that time. The Psalmist said that “The people stood around and they said to me. ‘Where is your God? Where is your God now?'” Have you ever had that happen to your life? You have those doubts and those voices come up within saying to you, “Where is your God now?” You’ve taken that route. You’ve followed that way and you really start to wonder again, where is my God? He’s left me.

We look back at those states that we used to be like. We want to go back to those things, and something inside says that that’s the right thing to do, to go back to the way you used to be in life. We feel alone.

The Writings of the New Church tell us that these voices that say, “Where is your God?”, that persecution that goes on is from hell. And they personify it. They say it’s the evil spirits that are around us. “Speak to us. Try to get us to give up. Try to get us to go back to the way we used to be, to the way we used to be miserable.” Persecute us within. If you want to think of it in those terms, evil spirits, just think about it as the different voices that come up within you.

How many times when we’re alone and when we’re doubting our path to follow, we have those voices of fear come up within us. Where am I going in my life? How can I live without my old habits that I used to have? We become so afraid we don’t know where we’re going. We feel alone.

How often those voices, the cynic. comes up within us. “Oh, it’s hopeless. You shouldn’t try that. It’s all hopeless.” We have an argument in our marriage and it comes up, “We’ve always had a bad marriage. It’s just a terrible thing.” You’ve been working on this trying to get rid of this habit and it comes up and gets you, and the cynic comes up and says, “You’re never going to get out of that. Why are you even trying?” We all have that cynic within us too.

And then, the more we listen to these voices within us that come up and tell us that it’s hopeless, that there is no home for us, that maybe we should go back, then resentment comes in, resentment about the Lord, why has He led us out here? Perhaps even a denial of the Lord and the resentment of our neighbors. It’s everybody else’s fault for how we feel. How those voices grow, and how the more we listen to those voices within, the more we listen to them, the more we sink into ourselves and really do feel hopeless, as if there is no home for us in our lives.

Then we have a call that comes within us that says to go back. Go back to the way we used to be. I’m sure you’ve felt that. Go back to the way you used to live in sexual immorality. You’re going to find some peace there. Go back to drugs and alcohol. Go back to the fantasies you used to have about yourself. Go back to the workahalism. Remember you felt pretty good. At least you didn’t have to face yourself any more, did you? Go back to those things.

But can we really go back? And it’s really interesting, would the Lord allow us to go back? The Writings say He does everything possible to make it so we don’t go back because if go back we’ll be torn apart. Imagine that. Imagine the children of Israel going back to Egypt, to Pharaoh and his people. They wouldn’t have welcomed them back. “Oh, here are your old homes.” They would have killed them.

Imagine David who was hiding from Saul finally saying, “I want to go back to the war. I want to go back to my own bed. I want to go back to my own people. So he just goes back. Saul would have killed him.

In the same way we can look back at those old friends we had, those pet loves that we had within and go back and think that we can go an embrace them again, but it is in all reality, an embrace of death. We can’t go back to those things. And even if we could go back (and how many of use try to a degree to go back to them) we find out that maybe life would be the same on the exterior, but we’ve changed. We’ve changed inside. We’re not the same people. We know better now, and once you go back knowing better, it just doesn’t work any more.

A very external example of this is Alcoholics Anonymous ruins your drinking because you know, you know better, so when you go back to it, it just doesn’t bring you the delight any more. And how true of that is that in all things though, once you know that there’s a different way and you’ve even felt a little bit of that peace, when you go back the same delights are not there. It’s not home any more. It’s not home. We can’t go back.

So here we are in the wilderness and we cry out for our God. We feel like the Lord in some ways has abandoned us and what do we do now?

The Psalmist has a few things to tell us in this regard. The Psalmist says to his own soul, “Hope in the Lord.” He says, “I will remember you by the Jordan.” Hope in the Lord.

In those times in our lives, the hardest thing isn’t that we’re all hooked into our evils and we’re being such prisoners by our own desires that we can’t escape, that’s not it. Evil has no power in it. The power of evil comes in falsity, in fantasy. It comes in us not trusting the Lord, to let go, to hope in Him, to say, “Yes, I do believe there’s a home for me out there somewhere, and I’m going to find that home in my life,” and put our hope in the Lord, to let go and to let Him lead us.

The idea of remembering the Lord by the Jordan. The Writings tell us that the Jordan river representing those waters again, the first truths, representing our initiation into the church. Remember the children of Israel had to cross the Jordan to come upon this land. That represents in our lives that we have to come to the Lord and recognize those simple basic truths in our lives, and it’s at those times in our lives to remember those things, that the Lord calls up those remains within us, those good affections that we have from childhood, that if we remember the good times, the good things, that we will find some peace and comfort in our lives.

Amen.

By Rev. Thomas L. Kline

“Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being tempted for forty days by the devil” (Luke 4:1,2).

Why do bad things happen? Why do bad things happen in our lives? One person recently made the comment that when he looked at the lives of all his friends, it seemed as if every person was dealing with some big problem or issue in his or her life, now or in the recent past. The problem could have been disease, a death in the family, marital difficulties, or emotional distress. But it seemed to him as if everyone had some big issue to deal with.

Another person made a rather cynical comment. That person worried, not about the people who had big problems in their lives, but about those who hadn’t yet faced a major crisis. The concern was that those who still believed that life was peaceful and free of problems would soon have that innocence taken away.

Not all of us face a crisis. And for some of us, the issues that we deal with in life are open and public; for others, the issues we deal with are more private and personal.

But back to the question: Why do bad things happen? One recent best seller was titled, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? And another best seller began with the sentence, “Life is difficult.”

Sometimes when a bad thing happens, we can explain it by reasoning that bad things are a necessary part of our spiritual journey. When bad things happen, it is part of that “refiner’s fire” that makes us into a stronger person. When a bad thing happens, there is a lesson to be learned, a victory to be won. And this is why the life that leads to heaven not only involves joy and comfort, but also involves pain and the anxiety of spiritual temptation. Spiritual temptation is part of our spiritual growth.

But sometimes things happen in people’s lives that are so bad that this explanation doesn’t seem to work. One person said over the tragic death of a loved one, “If there is some lesson that I am supposed to learn by something as tragic as this, I’d rather not learn it.” There are events of true tragic proportion: the untimely death of a loved one, terrible and painful disease, emotional disturbance and depression, the dissolving of a marriage, abuse, hunger and famine. If we come to believe that somehow the Lord allows or even causes these to happen so that we can learn some important lesson about life, we end up with a pretty terrible idea about God. One person made the comment about such an idea: “God is a bad teacher if He uses tragedy as His lesson plan.”

And so there is one other very important truth given to us in the doctrines of the New Church that helps us to understand tragedy: Bad things, terrible tragedies, are permitted by the Lord, not just so we can learn something new about life; they often happen simply because we are in the midst of a great war between heaven and hell. We happen to live on the battleground of a great war, and that war is taking place right now. It is a spiritual war between heaven and hell. It is the very war the Lord came on earth to fight. And sometimes we, or our friends and loved ones, are innocent victims of that terrible battle.

Imagine a physical war where a bombshell goes off near us, and we suffer pain and anguish, not because of anything we did, but because there is a battle going on and a bombshell went off. The same happens on a spiritual level. The hells do inflict pain and disorder upon us, and we suffer.

Think of a little child who has a painful disease. The disease itself, the pain and suffering, come from hell. That suffering is a physical manifestation of the hatred, anger, and vengeance of hell. And that little child has a painful and disabling disease not because the child was sinful, not because his parents sinned, not because there is some lesson to be learned (although there might be a lesson that is learned), but that child has a terrible disease because the hells are indeed powerful and they wish nothing more than to cause pain and disease and suffering. All bad things physical, mental and spiritual are a result of this great battle between heaven and hell.

We said that we are often innocent victims residing on this great spiritual battleground. This thought can make us feel kind of helpless. And this is why, rather than saying that we are “innocent victims” living on a great spiritual battleground, it is more accurate to say that we are actually “soldiers” who are called by the Lord to be part of the battle. We are soldiers who live on a large battleground, and we are called to fight in the name of the Lord. And this is one of the most important concepts we need to know about our lives, because it gives us a vision of hope and purpose.

We are in the middle of a great war. (Just look around you and within you.) We are soldiers who are part of this great battle between heaven and hell. Even that little child is a soldier, called into the army of the Lord.

When a bad thing happens terrible disease, a terrible death are we just to remain passive? Are we helpless? How can we fight if the terrible thing has already happened? If a little child dies, how can we be victorious over the hells that caused that death?

And here is another key : We fight the spiritual battle as an individual, but the consequences of our victory, no matter how slight, are global. When we, as individuals, fight a spiritual battle against the hells, we help countless millions throughout this world and the spiritual world who are affected by those same hells. When we are spiritually victorious over a particular hell, we lessen the power of that hell, not just for ourselves but for everyone. When tragedy happens take for example, the untimely death of a loved one we can still fight against those very hells that caused the death. And we do this by continuing on our personal spiritual journey of shunning evils as sins against God, by living the Word of God, by not giving up hope. In this battle we fight for all. And when we fight, we fight for all in the Lord’s kingdom now and in future generations.

Why can’t our life be free from pain, suffering, and the anguish of temptation? Why can’t life just be easy and enjoyable?

It is interesting to ask these questions about the Lord’s life. Why couldn’t the Lord’s life, when He was on the earth, just be peaceful? Why did He have to suffer continual temptations, as the Writings say, temptations from the beginning of His life to the very end? Why did He have to begin His ministry by being tempted by the devil for forty days in the wilderness? Why did He have to suffer the awful pain and anguish of the passion on the cross? Why couldn’t His life have been one of simple peace and joy?

When we ask these questions about the Lord’s life, the answer is obvious: He didn’t come here to have a life of peace and joy; He came here with a mission to be accomplished. He came here to fight against the hells. He came to fight for generations of men, women and children, generations yet unborn. He came to fight for all of us. There was a purpose to His life, a purpose greater than Himself.

And the same is true for us. We are here for our own regeneration, and we are here for a cause (a battle, if you will) greater than ourselves. And sometimes this battle will involve pain, hardship and temptation.

What one of us would not willingly go forth in the face of danger if it meant that we could spiritually benefit the global sphere of the whole earth? (It is interesting that some passages in the Writings suggest that just one person is all that is needed to effect the conjunction between this earth and all the heavens.)

Now this doesn’t mean that our lives are going to be plagued with tragedy every moment. No, there is a lot of joy, happiness, and peace in life. Jesus says that our yoke is easy and our burden is light. But we do need to keep in mind why we are here. We need to have more of a “war-time” mentality than a “peace-time” mentality on the spiritual level. And if we see why we are here, we can know why there is often a lot of pain and suffering in our lives and with those around us. A spiritual battleground is not a very peaceful place. If anything, the Lord gives us an oasis from the battle from time to time, time off from the battle, but the battle is our main purpose in life. In this context, it is useful to think of some of the teachings in the Writings about spiritual temptation.

First of all, we are told that a spiritual temptation is said to be an attack by the hells on some good love that we have. If you have some new, good love in your life, expect it to be attacked by the hells. And if you say to yourself, “Why, every time I have some new love in my heart, it is challenged,” you are not seeing the purpose of why you are here. There is a battle going; expect spiritual temptations.

Another teaching of the Writings: Are our temptations going to get easier or more difficult as we get older? The answer: they are probably going to get more severe. And if your reasoning is, “You mean I am going to have to fight greater battles as I get older? How can this be fair? Why fight now?” If that is your response, then you have missed the point of why you are here. There is a battle going on. You are called to be a spiritual soldier. As you grow stronger, more experienced, the Lord will give you greater challenges, greater battles to fight, because strong experienced soldiers are needed in some of the battles. The Lord is preparing you for great things.

Still another teaching: Spiritual temptations cause utmost despair and anguish. There is no such thing as an easy spiritual temptation. Sometimes you feel that you are going to “lose it” during a spiritual temptation. And again, if the response of your mind is, “Why do I have to have really bad temptations? Why can’t they be easy?” then you have missed the point of why you are here.

When Jesus began His ministry, He was baptized of John in the Jordan River. And then He went into the wilderness and was tempted by the devil for forty days. He hungered. He hungered so much that He was tempted by the devil to make bread out of the stones. And His hunger was deep within Him. He hungered for the salvation of the whole human race.

The devil took Him up to the pinnacle of the temple, and asked Him to throw Himself down. He was tempted to doubt His own power to save the human race.

And finally, the devil took Him up to a great and high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world. All this would be given to Him if He would just bow down and worship the devil.

And after all these temptations, it says that the devil left Him “for a time.” The temptations were to continue. They were to continue even to the passion of the cross. And by His victory over temptation, our redemption was effected.

Let us use His victory as strength in our lives so that we may face the challenges that lie before us with courage and strength.

Amen.

By Rev. Terry Schnarr

“Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and loose its seven seals” (Revelation 5:5).

The comfort and consolation of this passage summarizes the meaning of the whole of the fifth chapter of the book of Revelation. Don’t worry. Be happy. Don’t grieve, mourn, and feel sorry for yourself. The Lord God Jesus Christ rules over all things of our lives.

He rules over the angels and evil spirits who are our constant companions, making sure that we are in freedom to make good rational choices even after we have made many bad choices over and over again. Every day, every hour, is new, and we have the freedom to begin a new life.

When John saw the scroll sealed with seven seals and heard that there was no one worthy to open the book, he cried a lot; he wept much. Why? What was he grieving about? John was crying because he knew that if the book was not opened, the whole human race would perish. The whole human race would come under the power and control of satans and devils from hell. Each one of us would be compelled to love ourselves and the world, to be selfish and materialistic, and would spend eternity in hell. John cried out of grief and sadness for the whole human race.

We sometimes find ourselves in this state of grief. It is a depressed state of mind in which we feel, and think, that we just can’t be saved. We feel and think that we can never change, that we will always continue to say and do the nasty and mean things we have habitually done. We feel and think that there is no one who can help, that there is no one with any power to change or do anything for us. We feel despair. We feel hopeless. This is what John felt and expressed, though his concern was for all people, not just himself.

The scroll sealed with seven seals is the Word of God, the Old and New Testaments. Before the Lord made His second coming and revealed the hidden meaning in the stories of the Bible, people did not know how or why the Bible was holy. It appeared to be a poor history book about the Children of Israel and the Jewish race, and a man named Jesus who claimed to be the Son of God, performed miracles and taught a new way of relating to one another.

On the one hand the Word was written to guide us into a closer relationship with God and with each other. On the other hand, it is written in parables and incomprehensible visions, hiding God’s love and wisdom from people who would abuse them for the sake of their own selfish desires. The Word, revealing all of God’s infinite love and wisdom, is hidden from people to protect them from themselves. The Lord opens the hidden meanings in the Word to people slowly and gradually according as they grow in love and wisdom, by doing what it clearly teaches.

After we die, the Lord will begin to open the seven seals of the Word, allowing us to see and understand what is contained in it. How we respond and react to the opening of the Word will depend on how much we have loved the Word and tried to live by it in this world. If we have studied the Word, prayed for enlightenment, asked the Lord to help us shun our evils, and tried to do what the Word teaches out of love for the Lord, then as the internal meanings are revealed to us in the spiritual world we will gladly and readily drink it in. We will go into heaven where there are other people like ourselves who love the Lord and love to try to understand and live according to His Word.

On the other hand, if we have ignored the Word, or only pretended to be interested in living according to its teachings, when the seals are opened to us in the world of spirits after death we will continue to have no interest. In fact, as the Word is opened and we hear and learn of the love and wisdom of God, we will feel revolted. We will turn away and want to hear no more. As the seals continue to open, revealing how far away from loving God and loving our neighbors we really are because we have not done what the Word teaches, have not loved it, have not studied it we will want to get away from the Word. We will flee from heaven and the angels and find a place in hell with people like ourselves who have no interest in the Lord, the Word, or being kind to other people. In both instances we will judge ourselves by how we respond and react to the opening of the Word.

This is what takes place after death for each of us, preparing us for an eternal marriage relationship with the Lord or an eternal life alone against all the other satans and devils of hell. We will judge ourselves by measuring our habitual loves and thoughts and life next to the Word.

Obviously, the devils and satans in hell would not have minded if there really had been no one to open the scroll. Their selfishness, materialism, and love of dominating over others would never have been exposed. They would have been able to trick the new people coming into the spiritual world and turned them into slaves for their own evil purposes. They would gradually have turned the world of spirits, between heaven and hell, into a realm or kingdom in which they ruled and had all power. Then they would have been able to control all the people in the world so that none of us would have a chance to be good or go to heaven because all the angelic influences from the Lord would have been cut off from us. We would feel only evil desires and think only false rationalizations. We all would have been condemned to an eternal life in hell.

This is why John wept much and grieved. He could see the resulting destruction which would come to the human race if the Word of God was not opened. While we can identify with the personal feeling of despair of ever being changed and saved a feeling induced by the evil spirits with us most of us have difficulty recognizing how the whole human race was threatened by the hells.

Most of us have difficulty believing in our hearts, feeling it, that Jesus Christ saved us from destruction. He did this by being in the world, facing the evil spirits, satans, and devils from hell, and bringing them under His control by resisting their influences. The Lord saved the entire human race, all people of all religions, from eternal damnation.

In the middle of the 1700s the hells had again risen up out of hell and were invading the world of spirits, threatening the human race. They had been able to rise up because people were no longer understanding the Word, which was bound with seven seals. People thought the Word was saying that all one needed to do was to believe God sent His Son into the world to save us and then we would be saved, and that although God was one, there were three people in God. Such ideas brought so much confusion in the world and the world of spirits that the hells were able to rise up again.

The time had come for the Lamb to take the scroll out of the right hand of Him who sat on the throne and open the seals, to restore order in the spiritual world, and ensure once and for all the freedom of the human race.

In His second advent the Lord opened the seals of the Word and revealed the hidden interior meaning of the parables and stories of the Bible. Through the revelation given by Him through the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg the Lord brought rational light and understanding to the meaning of the Word, both in the world of spirits and on the earth. In His second coming the Lord opened the seals of the book sealed with seven seals. Doing this brought about a massive last judgment in the spiritual world, as all the angels, devils, and spirits responded in their own way to the new heat and light or love and wisdom now available in the spiritual world. Some were attracted and some were repelled. Because the new revelation is not in parables but is given in rational explanations, the ordering of the spiritual world will become permanent.

The elder comforted John by telling Him the Lamb, the Lord in His Divine Human, could and would open the seven seals. This is also why the angels sang a new song, why ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands of angels praised the Lord with loud voices, and why the 24 elders fell down and worshiped Him. They were all rejoicing and praising the Lord because He had made His second advent and was about to perform a Last Judgment which would free every individual in the whole human race to choose his own eternal life. They were rejoicing because they knew that from then on, the whole human race would be free to enter into a rational marriage relationship with the Lord that a new golden age of peace, love, and happiness could come.

This is what is meant by the words of the new song the angels sang:

You are worthy to take the book, and to open its seals,

For You were slain,

And have redeemed us to God in Your blood,

Out of every tribe and tongue

And people and nation,

And have made us unto our God kings and priests,

And we shall reign on the earth (Revelation 5:9,10).

“Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and loose its seven seals” (Revelation 5:5).

Amen.

By Rev. Dr. Reuben P. Bell

Our readings from Scripture today are not much alike. You may have noticed, and wondered where the connection might be. Isaiah tells us that the desert will blossom, and that water will gush forth in the wilderness and “streams in the desert.” Remember this: we will work our way back to this beautiful image. Matthew tells us of what must have been a terrible ordeal for Jesus – and the setting of this story is also the desert.

The Word is a marvelous narrative which teaches its lessons primarily with stories – a network of stories within stories, and the Lord Himself taught his disciples with stories, or parables. And so often, the images within these stories is of the desert; the wilderness. If our lives are journeys (and they surely are), there must be some parallels we can draw, from these stories to our own changing spiritual states.

Upon the birth of Isaac, we are told that Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, were sent into the desert of Beersheba to fend for themselves. Everyone knows of the wandering of the Children of Israel in the desert for forty long years. Elijah, before coming face-to-face with God, spent forty days in the desert, as some sort of preparation. The image of the desert appears and reappears in Isaiah’s book of despair and hope for the nation of Israel. We read some of it today. And finally, the desert beyond the Jordan River… the testing ground for Jesus, about to begin his great temptation.

So why the desert? The Writings for the New Church tell us that the significance of the desert (or wilderness) is found in its correspondence to a state of temptation. In the Arcana Coelestia, n. 6828, we read this:

For a “wilderness” signifies what is but little inhabited and cultivated, and also what is not inhabited and cultivated at all, thus in the spiritual sense a man vastated as to good and desolated as to truth, consequently a man who is in temptation; for he who is in temptation is in vastation and in desolation, because the falsity and evil in him come out and darken and almost take away the influx of truth and good from the Lord; and the truth which flows in does not appear to him to have sufficient life to disperse the falsities and evils. Moreover evil spirits are then present, who inject grief, and despair of salvation. That a “wilderness” signifies such a state, is evident from the very many passages in the Word…

You see, this marvelous narrative of the Word, which in its entirety is the story of the human race’s creation, fall, long struggle, and final triumph in the New Jerusalem, is mostly the story of the struggle. It begins in the third chapter of Genesis, and does not end until the twenty first chapter of Revelation. That’s a lot of Bible; devoted to the struggle of mankind to get back to the Garden. And this struggle is often described for what it is – a time in the desert, the wilderness – “when falsity and evil come out and darken and almost take away the influx of truth and good from the Lord,” when evil spirits are present… to test the strength of our convictions.

And what of the frequent mention of the number forty? It must have some use to us, as often and consistently as it is used in the Word. It rained on Noah for forty days and nights. Moses, Elijah, and Jesus all fasted for forty days in preparation for some significant spiritual event in their work. The spies of Israel spent forty days in the promised land, and Christ remained with the disciples forty days after His resurrection. The nation of Israel was led forty years in the desert until it was ready to enter the Promised Land. Again, from Swedenborg, we learn that the number forty lends important insight to our understanding of the Word:

That by “forty days and nights” is signified the duration of temptation, is plainly evident from the Word of the Lord. That “forty” signifies the duration of temptation, comes from the fact that the Lord suffered himself to be tempted for forty days. And as the things of instituted in the Jewish and other representative churches before the coming of the Lord were each and all types of Him, so also were the forty days and nights – in that they represented and signified in general all temptation, and specifically the duration of the temptation, whatever that might be. (Arcana Coelestia, n. 730)

So our theme this morning is the desert… the testing ground… for Israel forty years of it, and for Jesus, who was about to stand the world on its head forevermore. We shall see that this desert is a familiar place for us humans, but we shall also see that this desert, for all its desolation, despair, and danger, is the doorway into our salvation.

For without anxiety and despair, there can be no regeneration, and without regeneration there can be no New Jerusalem.

Let’s get on to the story. It is another of those deceptive little ten verse sleepers buried all over the Gospels. What a fascinating habit of those writers, telling the biggest news in the smallest space! It appears in Matthew, which we read today, is virtually the same in Luke, but in Mark, the whole episode is summarized in an amazing two verses! You get the sense that he assumed we knew the story already, and he was on to other things. It says: “At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.” Wild animals. He is the only one to mention this. We will return to it, when we talk about correspondences.

The story is simple. First, it is linked with the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. In fact, we will find that the two events must be considered together if we are to grasp the spiritual message here. Second, Jesus didn’t just happen to wander out into the desert – he was sent, by the “Spirit of God” which had only recently descended on him at his baptism – he was sent by the Spirit to be tempted. Third, there were three great temptations he had to face: (1) “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered from the Word, “It is written: ‘Man does not live by bread alone.'” (2) “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.” Jesus, again quoting the Word, “It says: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'” (3) “All this will I give you, if you will bow down and worship me.” Jesus, answering from the Word again, said “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'”

Lastly in this story, it says that “the devil left him, until an opportune time. Who was this devil? We shall see…

And that’s the story. But putting it into perspective, we are told that he abided there forty days. There’s that number forty. It tells us of the importance of this narrative. It puts it in the spiritual big leagues, so to speak. And it reminds us to look at it (despite its brevity) very carefully.

This story, in its simplicity, speaks for itself. My plan is to allow it to do just that – speak – to me and to you, in such a way that we can carry it home and put it to use.

I have said that the temptation of Christ in the Desert must be considered linked with his baptism. The reason is not complicated: The teachings of our church have a lot to say about temptation. Far from the simplistic idea of enticement or seduction by evil alone, we are told that temptation is a grand spiritual process, or exercise, by which our regeneration proceeds. Now we know that regeneration is the process by which we are born again, step-by-step into a new person, free from the evil and falsity we are born into. And it is by temptation that we take these steps. In the Arcana, n. 1787, we find that

Every temptation is attended with some kind of despair, and consolation follows. He who is tempted is brought into anxieties, which induce a state of despair as to what the end is to be. The very combat of temptation is nothing else. He who is sure of victory is not in anxiety, and therefore is not in temptation.

So temptation is defined as the continuous, ongoing struggle of our eternal lifetimes against evil, toward conjunction with the Divine. And it must begin with the illumination of our minds that there is good and that there is evil, and that we truly wish to be regenerated. This is reformation – the ordering of our thoughts toward good and the preparation to fight the battles (temptations) of regeneration.

This is our baptism – a sign and a memorial that our spiritual work has begun. And so did Jesus, coming out of nowhere, so to speak, step up to John and ask to be baptized. His destiny upon him, he felt an urgency to focus his energies for the great work ahead. As he was baptized, “heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting on him – and a voice from heaven said: ‘This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.'” There can be no regeneration without great temptation, and there can be no temptation without a first spiritual step – for Jesus, the baptism to “fulfill all righteousness;” for you and me, the decision to follow the Lord.

Having made this momentous leap into his prophetic destiny, it remained for Jesus to find out what he was made of; who he really was. Something very strange had just happened to him: the power of the universe had just been placed in his hands for the battles ahead. God-on-Earth he was, but let’s not forget that this Jesus was a man, nonetheless, and up to this time very likely a man much like you and me.

It is not hard to imagine the great anguish which must have followed his baptism as this new power over men and nature began to manifest itself within him. For along with this great power must have come awareness of the days ahead – and the cross at the end.

So the Spirit led him (where else?) to the desert – to sort it all out. And who he met out there, we really do not know. The Bible calls him the Tempter. What form he took is left up to our imaginations. Christian tradition would tell us he met a person; a being; a “dark god,” of sorts, who would match wits with this new and powerful force on earth. But our church does not worship such a “dark god.” Evil for us is more authentic and closer-to-home than that. It is within us. Mark, in his brief narrative, gives us the clue we need to visualize this experience. He said “He was with the wild animals,” in that desert, remember? Beasts, we are told, correspond to things of Man’s will or loves, to evil affections, cupidities and pleasures; to things which spring from the love of self and the pleasures of the world – the things we humans by nature hold so dear and have such trouble giving up. He met the Tempter all right. The same Tempter you and I meet every day. He met his Satan in the desert, just the same way. And the fight was on.

And what a fight it was. The tempter knew just where to hit him; just how to probe his soul for the weak spots – the human in this man who was trying so very hard to put his human away and assume the mantle of the Divine. There were three temptations in all: they were well chosen and covered all the bases. We shall see that they are the three elements central to all temptations, his, yours, and mine. In fact, if we recognize this, there are tools in this story to use in our own worst hours – for the beauty of Jesus is the example he left for us – he has done the work – shown us not only that it can be done, but how. I want to examine these three assaults on the Jesus, out there in that desert – analyze them a little, and I want to show you that in them is a lesson we can use when we find ourselves out there – alone, with the wild animals and the hunger and the danger of standing up close to the Tempter, who would destroy our souls.

“The Tempter came to him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.'” Jesus’ answer was simple and direct: “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'” Note that this (and all his answers) come from Scripture – the Word, in this case the law of Moses. He did not need to form some new argument to counter the challenge. This man used the Word in his defense because, as John tells us, he was the Word, who “became flesh and dwelt among us.” And what was the meaning of this challenge – to turn the stones to bread? Swedenborg tells us that in the Word, a stone represents natural truths, or truths known to us through our senses and our intellect. Bread, however, corresponds to things celestial, which are spiritual and heavenly truths revealed. What the Tempter really said was this: If you are the Son of God, take these truths which you are to teach to these thick-headed humans and rather than waiting for them to find their own way to salvation with them, open their eyes and make them see the spiritual truths contained in them. Get it over with. You can do it – you have the power of heaven and earth in your hands.

What a great temptation. He knew what was ahead – hardship, scorn, torture, the unspeakable horror of the cross. Why not? Why not make the people see, and then they would surely all be saved. And the man in him must have cried out to be spared the cross. But it was not to be. We must have stones, and our salvation comes only as we, in complete freedom, turn these stones to bread by our own temptations.

Next the Devil took Jesus to the top of the great temple in Jerusalem – built on a cliff, with a drop of several hundred feet. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'” Now there was an ancient belief of the Jews that in fulfillment of that prophecy, the Messiah would announce himself by doing just what the Tempter was suggesting – he would leap off the highest point of the Temple and land unharmed. Easy work for the Son of God. And the easy way out for Jesus – to force the minds of men to believe what can only be believed by free and rational choice. And once again, the reward: no hardship, no betrayal, no cross. What a great temptation it must have been for this young man who was new at this Messiah business, and who must have been very unsettled and frightened about the whole thing. What a great temptation. Always, the easy way out. Jesus’ answer, again from Moses, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'” Plain and simple: no free lunch – no blind faith for the human race any more. Those days were over, and there was, in him, a new covenant breaking in, which required it no more.

And last, the greatest temptation of all. The Tempter hit him with everything he had. What thing would any of us find the hardest to give away? What promise would likely appeal the most to the human in this fledgling Redeemer? “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this will I give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” What a great temptation. I am glad no one has ever made me that offer. All the kingdoms of the world and all their splendor. Imagine yourself in that situation. You have the power. It has been given to you “like a dove, descending from heaven”, and lighting on you. You know you have the power. You know what you are supposed to do… and it is going to hurt. The human in you says “Yes… please… yes.” But the dove says no.

Gathering up all his courage and strength and newly acquired righteousness, Jesus screamed at this Tempter, “Away from me Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'” Then the Devil left him, and angels came and attended him. Why angels? I am sure that only angels could have revived him after that last great struggle.

It is easy to read this story and miss its great significance. As Christ, the Divine Human, “the Word who was made flesh, to dwell among us,” God on earth, our tendency is to see him as some sort of superman, with super powers, simply going through the motions of suffering and temptation, for the sake of fulfilling the Scriptures and making it all come out right. We must get beyond this. Jesus was a man. He was born just like you and me. He lived in this world just like you do. At some point the Divine began stirring within this man, and his process toward Glorification began. Only at the cross was this process completed. At all other times in the Gospels, we are observing a man in transition. We must never forget this. It is this fact which brings life to the life of Christ.

In this story of Christ’s temptation – forty days in the desert – we must recognize the anguish, the desolation, and the loneliness he must have felt, because he was just beginning. He was you… and me… and he overcame the hells (as we like to say) to show us that we can do likewise.

So we have learned that there are three elements to great temptation. If we generalize those in this story to all our times of torment, anxiety, and pain, they can serve as rules to get us through. We have Jesus to thank for these rules. He suffered his forty days to help get us through ours. When we are on our journey through the desert, we have only to look to Christ for the peace which comes from knowing he was there before us. And then we look to our Church for the peace which comes from understanding what this process of temptation is all about. In times of great anxiety we must first remember: “Every temptation is attended with some kind of despair… and consolation follows. After the obscurity and anxiety of temptations, brightness and gladness appear.”

The pain is our signal that we are being tested. If it is a great temptation, we should next look for its three faces – the three elements we find in our story of the Lord’s temptation. By knowing that these will be present in some form, we can look for them, find them, and defeat them.

First, in any confrontation between good and evil, our first and strongest impulse will be to take the easy way out – to turn the stones to bread. This is the most basic of our human traits. Knowing this, and knowing that our regeneration depends on our doing what is right, not what is easy, we are encouraged to overcome.

Second, knowing that all of Providence works to the good, and knowing of the promises in the Word of our salvation by a loving God, do you just take yourself up to the top of the temple and throw yourself over? For it is written: “He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands.” Many people do. They accept their fate, and let the Lord do the rest. Blind faith. Faith without works. No good. Temptation is a battle. Join it. Do your work. Keep plugging away, working with the Lord, but working nonetheless. Who ever said our regeneration was going to be easy?

Third, remember that the love of self, and love of the things this world can give us is a strong love indeed. It is strong enough to destroy us. In all temptation we are fighting to displace these with love of the Lord and the neighbor, and the love of what is good and true. It is war we must wage to overcome these things as our ruling loves, and there is great pain in it. But remember: consolation and great peace will follow. These loves, out of their proper order, are at the root of most great temptations. If we look for them we will find them. And we can defeat them, just as Jesus did.

This simple story of the forty days in the desert – simple in its style and brevity, but enormous in its spiritual significance, is ours to use. There are tools in it. There is hope in it, and there is a great victory in its message. The victory can be ours, because Jesus, through no small effort, overcame the same temptations which confront us all – the basic human conflict between choosing the evil of self-direction, or the eternal life of following the Lord. We have learned that to follow the Lord is not the easy way. It does not involve mindless blind faith. It requires great work and can produce great pain at times. But it can be done, and there is eternal happiness in it if we do.

In closing, I want us to turn our minds to this image of the desert – barren, bleak, and desolate.

This is the landscape of our great temptations. Never, we are told, will the lord seem farther away than when we are journeying through this desert, paralyzed by the anxiety of the spiritual battles we must undergo. But knowing that the Lord is in fact never closer, and that he leads us every step of the way, this desert need not appear so forbidding. Let’s return to the image from Isaiah:

“The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom… it will burst into bloom… Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert… Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

Amen.