Day 51: The Changing of our Personalities
Day 51: Living Daily in Reality: The Changing of our Personalities ==================================================================
Reality is that our maker is actually our loving Father –  who made us part of his only son so that he could live in you and me the life on earth that he has planned.  Now let us try to synthesize briefly that simple but complex reality – so that we can study its practical application to our daily lives.
All diagrams simply represent ideas of facts that are much more complex, so this one that we will use is “one of manyâ€(cid:157) that could be used.  It is by no means a perfect explanation of the human personality and there are many other diagrams that are equally useful, but this one helps us understand the relationship between us, our maker, and the world.  So let’s use it as an easy way to talk together about these things.
It looks like the Jewish temple that consisted of three areas – the Holy of holies where God Himself dwelt in darkness, the Holy Place, where the altar and ark of the covenant were, and the Outer Court where people gathered.   We liken it to the levels of our human personalities.   The outermost part is our body, which sees and hears and touches this physical world, our inner psychological part which thinks and feels and decides, and our innermost self that can communicate with our maker.  Sometimes these levels are termed body, soul, and spirit.
We’ve been saying our personalities were meant to work from the inside out – from God’s directing us to the world outside.  God made us to trust him and his love for all that we need – his love would give us security and a sense of significance and happiness  But instead, we live from the outside in – dependent on the world rather than its maker.  So, we were created to trust the love of God but instead we trust the love of the world.
 If God is really your own personal father and if he loves you as much as his own Son, then he will make sure you have enough food and clothing – and you won’t care what others think about you.  But if you don’t believe he’s your own loving father, then you have to ensure your security with the things in this world and your importance from people’s opinion of you, and your happiness from pleasant circumstances. That’s what we have done – so we live outside in instead of inside out.  And this has corrupted our nature, twisted the way one part affects another, so that it can no longer operate the way it was meant to.
Our creator’s Son has things to do through you, so in your innermost self (your spirit) he gives you intuitions as you communicate with him and your conscience constrains your will to use your mind to understand God’s directives so that your emotions provide exhilaration to energize your body to affect people, things, and circumstances accordingly. Â
But as we instead try to get from the world security and significance and happiness, we use our minds to manipulate things, our emotions to enjoy pleasant circumstances, and our wills sink into passivity.  Â
Through self-help and education we try to change the systemic corruption but our Maker knew the corruption was radical and had to be changed by Him who had permitted it.  So in the millisecond of the eternal present (which encompasses the time before the creation of the world AND the time after its renewal) he destroyed our corrupted natures in his only Son and remade them in his resurrection.
This is the cosmic action of our Maker that was expressed in time in his Son’s crucifixion in Jerusalem in the first century.  His son – Jesus of Nazareth – included the whole human race and God saw the whole development as it has taken place – and rectified our natures outside time in eternity.   Our “old self was crucified with Himâ€(cid:157) so that our independent nature might be destroyed and we might no longer be enslaved by it.