Life 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 relationship between life and the Father's will.
And now, sit back and listen to today's message.
The Relationship Between Life and the Father's Will
"In all their affliction, He was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: In his love and his pity, he redeemed them; and he bare them; and carried them all the days of old." Isaiah, Chapter 63, Verse 9.
Brothers and sisters, "many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all." If we are being afflicted, then we can rest with absolute assurance that we will never suffer the greatest affliction, for the greatest affliction of all is never to have been afflicted. The Psalmist declares: "Before I was afflicted, I went astray: but now have I kept thou word. Thou are good, and doest good; teach me thy statutes." Brothers and sisters, as hard as it may appear to our ease seeking souls, we only learn wisdom by experiencing tribulation. Here on earth, our lives are filled with certain developmental incompleteness embracing material, intellectual and spiritual realities. This state of imperfection manifests itself as evil, and the consequences of evil are pain, suffering and disappointment. Evil is potential as well as actual and can be chosen collectively and individually. Evil is the unintended violation of divine law, the law of the Father's love, and is a measure of the inability of our souls to perfectly follow the Father's will, owing to incompleteness of growth.
But aside from the problem of evil, there lies the problem of unfurling the potentials locked up within our souls, the spiritual potential for divine sonship and perfection. Our souls can be taught and can learn to do the Father's will. First, it is the Father's will our souls live among the uncertainties of life with all of its potentials for evil. The liberation of the potentials for spiritual perfection locked up within our souls requires a potent stimulus. Being self-conscious, this stimulus is the ability to experience good and evil and to chose between them. It becomes immediately clear that in order for our souls to actualize their potentials we must progress from the state that we are actually in. Our physical, social, moral, intellectual and spiritual environments provide the ideal stimulus. These stimuli awaken man through the painful realization of his present state to seek super human help. These stimuli drive him forward, and the mercy provisions of the process reveal to him the truths of life, divine values and meanings. Our unseen spiritual friends actually manipulate the environment to achieve the maximum effective stimuli.
But deep within our minds and souls, there is something else--the spirit of the Father Himself and the enshrouding presence of the Spirit of Truth--guiding our souls into all truth, the perfect relationship between our souls and the Father. This combination of spiritual influences on the outside and spiritual influences on the inside all conspire to unfold the spiritual potentials wrapped up within our souls.
The passport to eternity, the survival of the mortal life, and endowment with immortality and ultimately eternal life is wrapped up in the decision to do the Father's will, that is to follow, once they are recognized, the spiritual urges released into our minds and souls. These urges when acted upon with intelligence and wisdom leads to augmentation of status and ultimately to spiritual perfection. Doing the Father's will is done within the present environment. The handicaps of space and the delays of time notwithstanding, the Father's will can and must be done under all circumstances. All that is required to do the Father's will is a moral nature and the ability to recognize and choose good over evil. Since it becomes evident that the Father's will is spiritual, material handicaps can have no effect upon choosing the Father's will. Choosing the Father's will is only dependent upon our desire to be like the Father, to be perfect like Jesus.
Life allows for an almost infinite arena of finite spiritual choices. And the choices, progressively difficult, provide the resistance that results in the unfolding of the potentials locked up within our souls. It is indeed true that the progress made by our souls is made actual by dire necessity. Being pressed by the straits of the gate of suffering squeezes out the potentials of our souls into actualities. And herein is a truth: that despite the many forces that threaten our material existence, nothing can stop our souls from achieving spiritual perfection except our selves. Mortal death can only translate our souls to a different and higher arena.
"In my Father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you so that where I am you can be." There is a starting place for every soul no matter what the status of spiritual growth is. In the final analysis, life as defined in its broadest sense--the process of interacting with the inside as well as the outside--provides the fertile soil where the Father plants His valuable seeds of growth and development. The harvest of eternal life is the result of this seed sowing.
This concludes today's message on the relationship between life 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.
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Life and the Father's Will
