Faith, Trust and the Father's Will
Greetings and good morning, brothers and sisters. This is Dr. James Perry continuing with our series where we seek to explore the deeper meanings of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Over the years, the heavenly Father has revealed many revelations of spiritual truth to me, and I want to share them with you. This morning we seek to understand the meaning of the relationship between faith, trust, and the Father’s will.
And now, sit back and listen to today's message.
Faith, Trust, and the Father’s Will
"There is a way which seemeth right to man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." Proverbs, Chapter 14, Verse 12
Brothers and sisters, invariably we reach a point in our moral and spiritual lives, where we are confronted with a fork in the road, a junction where we must choose our way or the Father’s way. The will of God is the way of God as expressed in his Son, Jesus. Thus to do the will of God is to become like his Son, Jesus, through his Spirit of Truth. This Spirit of Truth will lead us into all truth, even the truth of divine perfection.
Still, what is the Father’s will? We know that it is different from our will. How, then, do we discern it and choose? What is the assurance that we have chosen it rather than our own? Struggling with these kinds of questions causes quite a few sleepless nights and much uneasiness in our minds, especially if we are really desirous of choosing his will rather than our own.
How do we link a decision that has to be made with the progressive experience of becoming Godlike? We know the Father is eternal; to choose his will is to make an eternal decision. How do we, as temporal beings, make an eternal decision? Again Jesus said, " it is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day." If we comprehend Jesus and believe in him, then we will follow him, we will choose the Father’s will. Jesus is the personal revelation of the Father; when we choose him, we choose the Father’s will. We choose to be perfect even as the Father is perfect, as revealed in his Son. If we really want to know and choose the Father’s will, all we have to do is choose Jesus and choose as he does. If you choose to love one another as Jesus loves us, then we are choosing the Father’s will.
The Father knows no past or future. The past and the future are one within him in the everlasting present. The Father ignores time and therefore experiences no sense of duration. There can be no separation of past, present, and future within him: they are all one. When we choose the Father’s will, we are choosing a decision that somehow must be compressed so that it contains the past, present, and future. How do we do this? How do we align our decision with the Father’s will in such a way that the two wills are in synchrony?
The Father’s spirit lives in our minds and the Spirit of Jesus lives in our minds. The Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of Truth, interprets the Father’s will for us. Thus, we follow Jesus when discerning and executing the Father’s will. We know that when we choose the Father’s will, we must choose the decision of the highest value. Anything short of that cannot be the Father’s will because if we choose the decision of the lower value, it will become apparent that further adjustments in the basic decision will have to be made since it was not the Father’s will. The decision will be found to be void of truth, beauty, goodness, and love. Let us consider an example of how we may make the temporal alignment with the eternal.
Our task is to find a way to make a decision that not only contains the present, but the past and the future as well. Well that seems like an impossible task since we are locked in the present. The past is a past event, and the future has not appeared yet. So if we can make a decision in the present that has past-future significance, then we will have accomplished our task: aligning the temporal with the eternal, at least with that particular decision.
Your rent is due on the first of each month. You have the money to make the next payment. But another desire has entered into your mind. There is something else that you would like to do with this money, something that you desire more at this time than your desire to pay the rent. We now have two choices. We can pay the rent with the money allotted for it or we can use the money for the new desire that has entered into our mind. How do we determine the decision with the highest value?
It is apparent to most of us what the decision of the highest value is. But let’s do the analysis and see why this is so. If we make the decision in favor of the new desire that has entered into our mind based only on the present, as some people do, than there is no hope of discerning the decision with the highest value. In this scenario, the decision with the highest value becomes the decision with the greatest desire. But we all have conflicting desires at times over what we should do and what we want to do. We resolve these conflicts in this manner, though we may not be aware of the process, especially with those kinds of decisions that have become routine.
When we decide whether to pay our rent or not, we look to our past experiences with this kind of problem. We know from past experience that in order to stay in the apartment, we must pay the rent, for we have the ability to project into the future to see what will happen if we don’t. We will be evicted and will have no place to stay. This is unacceptable to most of us. Thus, the present desire to use the rent money for some other purpose is not the decision of the highest value. To act on a desire that only has present significance will be disastrous in the future.
Now this is a straight forward example but the principle is the same. Complex decisions are made in the same way. We eventually distill down their essence and compare which one has the highest value.
Now we come to the decision that we wish to make subject to the Father’s will. In making such a decision, we must go through the same process as with the rent scenario, but we must take into consideration faith and trust. The Father’s will exists in our minds but is subject to our wills. And since it is subject to our wills, it is not actual. The Father’s will only becomes actual in the decisions that we make when we choose it.
In the spirit world, potential spirit realities only become actual by the exercise of faith. We must wholeheartedly believe that we are choosing the Father’s will. The choosing of the Father’s will in addition to being an intellectual choice, must be chosen wholeheartedly, with faith. When we use faith in choosing the Father’s will, the choice must be our supreme desire. There can be no wavering back and forth as to whether we desire to choose the Father’s will. There must be no competing desires. How do we know that choosing the Father’s will is our supreme desire? Our sincerity. At any given time in our inner life, we know what is most important to us. We know what we value more than anything else. Sincerity ensures that when we say we desire to do the Father’s will supremely, we in fact desire to do just that.
When we consider making a decision in the present, we reach back as far as we can into our past, seeking those experiences that may have a bearing on the decision that we wish to make, while at the same time we forecast the consequences of the decision as far into the future as we are able to. When we make such a decision, we have escaped from the purely present, and our decision made in the present is of past-future significance. Such a decision has now compressed the past, the present, and the future into one moment. It has now become identical, one with eternity. Having become one, the Father’s will expresses itself.
The decision reached during this process must be the Father’s will, it cannot be any other way since we have aligned our will with his by the process of identification. By identification, we mean that as far as it is possible for our decision to become one with the Father’s decision based upon the degree to which we have become like him, have become like his Son, Jesus. We must always remember that we are experiencing beings, and we can only integrate our temporal experience into eternity to the degree that we have had these experiences. We cannot integrate nothing into something else. We can only integrate what we have into something else. So as we strive to do the Father’s will, we also strive to become like him, to become like Jesus. The degree that we are like him is the status that we possess when we do the past-present-future analysis. But we must remember that our decisions cannot rise any higher than our value system, the degree to which we have become like him.
Now all that is needed is the value of trust. We must trust that when we seek to know the Father’s will, he will reveal that will to us. And that is the function of the Spirit of Truth--to reveal the personal revelation of the Father to us. The fact that we are not intellectually conscious of this will is not important. The important thing is that we choose it. Trust is important because it is the mechanism whereby we know his will. Always will we know him because we trust him. We can only know his will since it is eternal when we choose it. And we always choose it in the present moment. Without trust, we will not choose the Father’s will and therefore we will fail to know it. We must trust the Father’s goodness and the power of our supreme desire in conjunction with the Father’s will to choose that will. What the Father wills and we supremely desire is. And is the Father’s will that we know and choose.
Finally when we have gone through the process of compressing the past, present, and future into the moment, and when we have exercised our faith in choosing the Father’s will, and when we trust that our choice is the Father’s will, then the decision that we make must be the Father’s will. It can be nothing else. We must act, must choose, and the choice that we make even though it may appear to our conscious minds that they both have equal value, the choice that we make will be the Father’s will.
This concludes today's message on understanding the meaning of the relationship between faith, trust, and the Father’s will. We hope you find something in this message to ponder and pray about as you go about your day.
Until next time, this is Dr. James Perry.
Your Kingdom Come; Your Will Be Done!
Inspirational Messages of Light
By Dr. James Perry
Faith, Trust and the Father's Will
