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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE? Program 165 Our Spirit Communicates With God by Ernest O’Neill
What is the meaning of life? This is the question we are discussing on this program each day. What is the point of life? What’s the purpose in your being alive at this moment? How come you’re here? Why do you exist?
None of us are really satisfied with the idea that it really all came about by sheer chance and there is no point or purpose in any of it. We perceive within the system that we have here — either the political system, the social system, the educational system, the physical system or the astronomical system — that there is order and there is purpose. It just doesn’t make sense to us that within something which has order and design, that thing itself has no purpose or order in it. We simply cannot accept the illogicality of that.
Most of us sense there has to be some point in us being here. There must be. We don’t know what it is, but there must be some purpose in it. That’s what we are discussing. What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose in our existence? Why are we alive? Why are you alive? How come you exist now and didn’t before? Why did that happen?
We’ve been discussing this for probably about eight months now, so you can guess that we have gone through much of the intellectual underpinnings and undergirdings that such a discussion requires and we have discussed the reasons for believing there is an intelligent, personal being somewhere behind the universe. We have begun to examine the evidence that such a being expressed himself in the first century of our era through a remarkable human being who differed from all the other great religious leaders in that He was able to destroy death.
He was able to come back to life again after He had been killed. He, obviously, had ability to go into the world beyond space and come back into space whenever He chose. That’s the man who we know as Jesus of Nazareth. If you want to examine the arguments for believing that He lived and he was an historical figure and then believe He actually did and said the things He is reported to have done and said — and then examine why it is evident that He is more than an ordinary human being, then, please, do write to the address at the end of the program and catch up by listening to some of those early cassettes of the broadcasts.
We have reached the point where we have concluded He is the Son of the Maker of the universe, and His explanation of the meaning of life is the only one, therefore, which is authoritative or valid. That is the one we have been studying these past few weeks. One of the things He makes very clear is that His father made us because He wanted others like Himself to love.
So, His father made you because He wants a friend. He wants someone whom He can love. This is why He created you. He didn’t create you just to do the job that you do here on earth. He didn’t create you to go out like a light just as soon as the breath disappears from your body. He made you to actually love Him and have a friendship with Him. That’s why He made you like Him. That is, He gave you the same capacities as He has.
He gave you capacities on three different levels: on a physical level, your body by which you are able to perceive through your five senses the world of people and things and circumstances; your soul, which is really the psychological part of you – your mind, emotions and will by which you are able to reflect upon yourself, the self-conscious part of you; then, the spirit part of you, the innermost part, the very essence of you. It is there that you perceive Him, Himself.
That’s the part that we’ve been talking about this past week particularly. How is your spirit meant to work? You probably have had some experience of it, even though you haven’t known. At times, I know that you’ve sensed what I’ve sensed. You have been sitting in a room by yourself and you’ve somehow sensed that there is a certain thing that you should do. There is something that you should do.
You’ve sensed there is a certain job you would be good at. There’s a certain career that is right for you. You’ve sensed something deep down within you telling you that that’s the thing to do. Or, at times, often we talk about women’s intuition. At times, you ladies have it apparently more strongly in a natural way than we men. But, at times, you’ll just know you ought to do a certain thing. You’ll just know a certain person is thinking something. You’ll know it deep down inside.
Now, what that is is the remnants of your spirit. Most of us have spirits which are long ago dead, which can’t sense anything from their Creator at all. We’ve been driven so much by our external needs of security, and significance and happiness that our little bodies have driven us to do everything we’ve done.
So, we are driven by the need for food. We are driven by the need for clothing. We are driven by the need for shelter. That drives us to try to get jobs that give us good money. Then, we want other people to think well of us, so we are driven by ambition. Most of us are driven by external, animal needs and drives and impulses. Our spirits long ago have died so that we can no longer hear them speak.
But, the fact is we were originally meant and are meant today to live our lives by the intuition of our spirits. In other words, there is a part of you inside that has certain capacities that give you the only direction in your life that is valid for you. You are different from all the rest of us. You are a unique creation of the Maker of the universe and He puts into you, in this inner part of you called your spirit, He puts into you the sense of what He wants you to do at different times.
That part of you is called your spirit. That’s how this man Jesus explained it. He said that your spirit is the place where my Father communicates with you. We’ve talked over the indications of what the spirit does. We haven’t wanted to bother a lot with detailed quotations from the Bible, but if you want those I’ll certainly be glad to send them to you. But if you follow them through, you’ll find that your spirit has not only the capacity of intuition, but also of conscience.
In other words, what we call conscience, that part of us that makes us want to live up to the best that we know, judges us according to what comes through our intuition. Then, our intuition catches what our Maker wants us to do through our communion with Him. That’s another capacity or function of our spirits: the ability to commune with God. That’s where we actually have relationships with God. Not through outward things, not even through the beautiful churches that some of us may look at or go to, not through rituals or choirs or even through speakers, but primarily through God speaking to us within our spirits.
That’s where you alone are able to communicate with your God. If you want just one reference, there is a piece in one of the books of the New Testament in the Bible, in Mark, Chapter 2 and verse 8, where you read, “And immediately Jesus, perceiving in His spirit that they thus questioned within themselves said to them, ‘Why do you question thus in your hearts?’”
That was the occasion, you may remember, when some people let their friend down through a roof who was paralyzed, so He could heal him. He said to the friend, “Your sins are forgiven you.” Of course, all the religious leaders were sitting around kind of thinking and whispering in their hearts that this guy was just
bluffing and that’s where it says, “And immediately Jesus, perceiving in His spirit that they thus questioned within themselves.”
In your spirit you are able to perceive things that normally you couldn’t through the psychological apparatus that you have. So, that’s what we’re saying. Our spirits are something more than the deductions that we make from an unconscious, inductive operation of our intellects. It’s something deeper than that. Our spirit is actually receiving signals from our Maker that give us direction in our lives.
Let’s talk a little more tomorrow, just once more, about how those spirits of ours are meant to operate in connection with the rest of our personalities.
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