Living Daily in Reality

Day 60: Living Daily in Reality: The Exchanged Life
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To sum up then our conversations about living daily in reality, what is
reality?  Reality is that you are actually part of our Creator’s
only son – the man known as Jesus of Nazareth who lived on the earth
for more than thirty years in the first century of this present era. Â
One of his followers has written “you are the body of Christ and
individually limbs of itâ€(cid:157) and he himself said to his father, our
Creator, “I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly
oneâ€(cid:157).

Sin is not just some moral failure like stealing or adultery – sin is
“missing the markâ€(cid:157) – missing the whole point of life – living as
if there’s no God – as if you are not part of his only son! Â
Living in this unreality is trying to get the sense of significance and
security and happiness from people and things and circumstances instead
of your dear Father who knows you personally as part of his only Son. Â
When you do this, your whole personality becomes warped and corrupt so
that you can’t do what you want: you try to feel how important you are
to your Maker, but all the celebrity the world can give you isn’t
enough.  You try to feel safe and secure, but you can never get enough
money or possessions – and circumstances never give you the happiness
that only reality provides!

 So your life works outside in rather than inside out.  This inbred
sin or dependence on the world has made it impossible for your maker’s
son to live the unique life in you that he has planned, so you’re left
with the unsatisfactory existence you have – you don’t believe
there’s anyone inside you except your own thoughts, so you have no idea
what your Maker’s son wants to do through you, so you use your mind to
manipulate things and people and circumstances for your own security,
significance and happiness. This results in hundreds of short-circuits
that develop between your eyes (looking for peer approval) and your mind
and between your feelings (looking for peace and exhilaration) and your
circumstances.  When you try to fix these internal malfunctions
through self-help and the power of positive thinking you find you can’t
– your whole human-nature has become carnal nature that will not do
what it was made to do. It was made to express the part of God’s Son
that only you can express – so only God can put it right.

That’s what our creator expressed in Jesus Christ’s historical
crucifixion in 29 A.D. and it’s what he did in eternity before the
world was made – when he foresaw that we could have the free will to
love him only if we had the opportunity to do the opposite.  He knew
he would have to bear that, and he did – and has – every day of our
lives – and will – until we stop killing him inside ourselves! Â
He has replaced your old self – that outside-in nature in his only Son
– and replaced it with a new creation – an inside-out nature. Only

his Son’s spirit in you can realize this reorientation of your whole
personality – only his spirit can reveal to you the next psychological
or spiritual short-circuit that he has replaced in you within
Himself.  Only our maker knows exactly how each of us is missing the
life he has for us.

Only he can sort us out – and that’s the secret to your life here –
to let our maker’s Son within you remake your very nature so that your
life can be fulfilled in him. Your nature is broken – let Christ
replace it with his so that your life becomes an expression of His.Â
Let’s look at the sense this exchanged life can make of the problems
and difficulties we face each day.

HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING?
Â
My life flows on in endless song
Above earth’s lamentation;
I hear the real though distant hymn
That hails a new creation

No storm can shake my calm repose
While to this rock I’m clinging:
If Christ is Lord of heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?

What though my joys and comforts die!
I know my Savior liveth;
What though the darkness round me lie!
Songs in the night he giveth

I lift my eyes – the cloud grows thin,
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smoothes
Since first I learned to love it.

The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart
A fountain ever springing
All things are mine since I am His
How can I keep from singing?

Day 61: Living Daily in Reality: Good and Bad News
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The good news is that your Maker is your personal loving Father who made
you part of his only Son so that he could express himself through you in
his universe. The bad news is that you don’t accept that and your
nature has become dependent on that universe instead of his love. You can
see the result from the red arrows in this diagram that your needs for
security, significance and happiness begin to depend on things and people
and circumstances outside rather than on the Maker’s son inside – so
your very nature becomes corrupted as you try to get from things and
people and circumstances what only your Father’s love can give.

So as you can see by the green arrows in the diagram, instead of letting
our Maker’s Son inside us develop the world through us, we develop our
personalities to get from the world outside what we are made to get from
our Maker’s spirit inside us.

Our inner consciousness of God – our spirit – dies, and our psychological
part – our soul – is corrupted and perverted so that the mind is bent on
manipulating things and people and circumstances for our benefit instead
of understanding our maker’s plans for them and us, the will on asserting
our rights rather than submitting to our maker’s will for us, and the
emotions on enjoying self-gratification rather than rejoicing in the
abilities we exercise.

Let’s look now during these next ten talks at the ways this corrupted
human nature becomes a carnal nature that we cannot control but can only
be remade by its Maker. We find in our everyday practical lives that our
minds, emotions and wills seem to be controlled at times by a carnal
nature that frustrates all the efforts we make at self-improvement. We’ve
read so many self-help books and tried so many “wonder” techniques, but
still we cannot – as the Bible says – “do the good we want”, but instead
“do the evil we do not want”.

We try to use our minds, for instance, to give to the world and others
the things they need, but we find them dominated by a habit of getting
things for our own security. Our history books, substantiated by
thousands of Greek manuscripts and the lives and deaths of contemporaries
confirm that the Creator’s Son, the first-century Jesus of Nazareth,
said “consider the birds of the air – they do not sow or reap and yet
your heavenly Father feeds them – will he not also feed you?â€(cid:157)

However, we do not recognize that this Jesus is actually in us so we have
no belief like him that our Father knows us or cares about our food.
Therefore we have no assurance that he would give us what we need;
besides everyone around us assumes that money is essential to buy food,
so obviously we have to earn money to stay alive – this is the main
purpose of work.

This, of course, sets up one of the most basic short-circuits in our
personalities – security comes from money and money comes from work. As
the Bible says “by the sweat of your brow you eat breadâ€(cid:157), so worry
about losing your job and anxiety in a recession create a perverted chain
reaction between our work and our basic sense of security. Moreover that
has become so ingrained in human nature that we refer to it as “inbred
sinâ€(cid:157) – meaning the attitude of a fool that there is “no Godâ€(cid:157) has
become natural for us humans. All of us know the stomach upset that
occurs when we lose our jobs or hear that our company is in trouble.

Even though you know it’s wrong to worry, you somehow can’t control
the restlessness that makes you toss and turn in bed at night. The
problem is not acid in the stomach or lack of tranquillizers or even a
steadier job or more stable company – the problem is that you are
absolutely convinced that only money can guarantee your security and
enough food to keep you alive – because you have no sense that your
Maker’s son is in you to do something that he can do only through you
– and, therefore, your loving Father is going to ensure you have what
food you need. But the connection between your stomach and your mind’s
grasp of the economic situation is such a basic habit of all the cells in
your body that you cannot change it – however hard you try.

This old corrupt nature is so dependent on its environment that it cannot
respond to Christ’s spirit within you, so – as we discussed in number 47
of these talks, God foresaw this before he made us – and remade you in
eternity outside time. So deliverance from insecurity about your job and
livelihood requires your old nature to be replaced by the nature of
Christ. God will actualize that only if you are willing. Are you willing
to die to your own judgement of how much food you really need? Are you
willing to let your Maker’s son live the life he planned through you?
Will you trust Him to get what you need – and concentrate on letting him
do the particular work that he can do only through you and your unique
life?

Day 62: Living Daily in Reality: Triumph of Life over Death
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Our creator made us as part of his only Son so that he himself would bear
the deathly consequences if we chose nothingness instead of his design to
develop the universe through his Son in us. As we ignore this inner
life and his love, our human nature becomes warped through trying to get
security, significance and happiness from the things, people and
circumstances of this little planet. Our maker foresaw all of this
outside time in a parallel universe (such as the quantum physicists have
posited) and re-fashioned all of us and our world in his son, so we may
live out that triumph over the encroaching death of our present world.Â

So our life here has two purposes – a personal one and a social one.Â
The personal one is to experience the change of our carnal outward-inward
nature to the inward-outward human nature of our Maker’s son.  The
social one is to express the development of our world that has been
wrought in Christ even before the world’s creation. Both of these
were mentioned by Christ’s apostle, Paul, when he wrote “the
cross…by which the world was crucified to me and I to the
worldâ€(cid:157)(Galatians 6:14) and “God was in Christ reconciling the world
to himselfâ€(cid:157)(2 Corinthians 5:19). The plain implication is that the
Creator foresaw the complex corruption of our nature we would cause by
our dependence on the world rather than Him – as well as the complex
corruption of the physical and social world – and he reconciled both of
them outside time.

These gracious reconciliations outside time are sometimes
manifested inside time when we discover a spare body-part in the leg that
can replace a blocked vein to the heart or see the destructive power of
greed exposed by financial crises.  Often human ingenuity and effort
are both equally impotent when a solution suddenly appears that was there
all along.  We are alive on this planet to work with the
reconciliations or repairs that our Creator has already in place – or (as
Paul wrote to the Ephesians in Ephesians 2:10) “we are God’s
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God has
prepared beforehand, that we should walk in themâ€(cid:157).

This then is reality – you are part of our Maker’s son for
him to reproduce in you facets of his character that only your unique
personality can express – and also for him to add and organize little
bits of this world that he can do only through you.  All of the
character and the achievements are already in place – you have simply
to do the actions.  Sometimes the result will seem to be improvement
like Jesus healing the blind man while at other times it will seem to be
failure like Jesus’ own death on the cross.  But always you can know
that it was a power beyond your own that did the work! Â

So, as you move in this way, you’ll sense that your Maker loves

you and will provide what you need.  This enables you to take a
different attitude to the world: instead of emptying and being defeated
by it, you fill it and subdue it – as you were meant to do through the
Creator’s Son in you.  The result is a life of joy and lightness of
heart.

Day 63: Living Daily in Reality: The Real Purpose of Work
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Your Maker made you and put you on this planet for two purposes – first,
to do something in his universe that only you can do – and secondly, to
become more like him. His only born son, who lived in Palestine as Jesus
of Nazareth about 30 A.D. (our most reliable history books detail his
life and words in detail) said that “every hair of your head is numbered”
so, undoubtedly your maker knows your name and made no other person just
like you.

In fact, one of Jesus’ closest friends said that we all are “God’s
workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which he has prepared
beforehand that we should walk in them”, so there are things today that
our Creator has prepared for you to do, but the choice is always yours
-Â as Jesus implied when he said to the citizens of Jerusalem “how often
would I have gathered you as a hen gathers her chickens, but you would
not!”. So even though our maker has everything laid out for you today,
he works with your moment-by-moment will -Â just as our high-frequency
trading computers can make thouands of decisions in a second to buy
stocks and shares in the light of what others have bought or sold a
millisecond earlier.

So today you will walk a known way – a way prepared lovingly for you by
the one who knows where every bird will fly and where every planet will
orbit. But you are the “crown” of his creation, so each experience gives
you an opportunity to let his only born Son live through you. There are
things to fix and to complete in the creation that only you can do. The
office you work in or the work-bench awaiting you or the ward where you
nurse or the floor you sweep or the house you clean all have things that
are to be done in a certain way that our Creator’s Son can do only
through you. Just as a great conductor misses the note of the smallest
instrument – so the Creator sees and hears what you permit him to do
through you.

Alan Turing, one of the early computer geniuses who worked on decrypting
the German code in the second world war, described his work like this:
“in attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently
usurping his power of creating souls, any more than we are in the
procreation of children; rather we are, in either case, instruments of
his will providing mansions for the souls that he creates.”

Whether we build houses or make chairs, it is really our maker working
through us to complete his creation. As you do it with care and
thought, you can begin to feel the pleasure of God.  He made your hand
to hold that brush in just that way – with that degree of care and
precision. As you do it, your body and mind become more like what He
has in mind for you a thousand years further on in another place he has
made.  You also, as you do it with satisfaction and concentration,

become more like him in his faithfulness and steadiness.  All of this
is at the base of the real purpose of your life – your fulfilment and
happiness as the “darling child” he called you in the Bible.

This is part of the real purpose of work, and our maker has
assured us that “if we seek first his rule (or his plan) all other things
will be added to us”.  We won’t have to scrounge around for ourselves
or make our work a slavery we suffer in order to get what we need in the
way of clothes and food and shelter.  We’ll be able to fulfill his
plan for us and enjoy our lives as we achieve what he made us for.

Day 64: Living Daily in Reality: Work of Getting or Giving
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So you are here for the Creator’s son to complete his Father’s creation
through you. In this process both you and the planet will yield to his
will for them – even though it may only be completed in the cataclysm
foreshadowed in Paul’s statement that the “world is crucified to me and I
to the world”. This enigma is becoming more understandable as our quantum
physicists point to the possibility of some kind of parallel universe
where time and space are relative.

The same truth was revealed in the Biblical letter to the Ephesians in 64
A.D. – “for we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good
works which God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them”.
Your work is not the slavish, unpleasant toil we have made it by our
atheism – “in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread”. It is the
glorious work that your Maker has given you to “be fruitful and multiply,
and fill the earth and subdue it”. The way you multiply and are fruitful
and fill the earth and subdue it will be different from everyone else
because you are unique: you are here for your Maker’s son to be and do
something that he is and does in no other human-being that has ever lived.

All of us have sensed at times an intuitive urge which we usually
attribute to something like conscience or heredity and most of us have
experienced a strength that seems to come from somewhere other than
ourselves, so the fact that our maker’s son is within us does not seem
impossible. Moreover all of us have found that we face two strong urges
if we see someone drowning – an urge to dive in and save – but also an
urge not to risk our own lives. This is the meaning and purpose of our
existence and the works we are given to do – either we let God’s Son live
in us or we crucify him and become his enemy.

Because of our self-centredness we easily misinterpret Christ’s spirit
within us as our socially formed conscience or we see our desire to avoid
danger as simply self-preservation, but our nature becomes increasingly
warped out of shape until it is utterly carnal and dominated by the world
around us. The enemy outside overcomes the friend inside so that we
cannot do the good we want, but instead do what we do not want. The more
we struggle to free ourselves, the more we sink in our own selfishness.
Only our Maker’s son within us can free us by his activity!

Broadly speaking, the works we face expose our dominant desire to get and
offer us the chance to let Christ give. So our choice of a career exposes
our desire to get and provides a chance to give. If we are practical
atheists we are committed to providing the food, clothes and shelter
which we’ll need in this life, so money is an important factor in our
career plans. If we are practical theists we’ll be preoccupied with what
we can give to the world. As we pursue our training and our career our
nature becomes increasingly warped out of shape or becomes increasingly

shaped by the spirit of our Creator within us – while our needs are met
incidentally along with many of our wants.

The results in our world are evident in times like the 2008 recession –
bankers who are meant to keep people’s money safe and lend it to others
at reasonable interest become preoccupied with getting more and more
money along with investment bankers who are meant to finance businesses
so that more jobs and incomes are created. So the development and
subduing of the world that Christ in us is here to do doesn’t occur;
instead, the world’s resources are diminished and stocked away unused by
the few who accumulate them. Thus the acquisitive nature dominates
families and nations so that greed and anxiety and frustration take hold
of men’s hearts and minds. The result is a society and world that becomes
increasingly comatose and moribund and lacks the lively activity of the
Maker’s son and his brothers and sisters.

It all starts or turns around with you and me.

Day 65: Living Daily in Reality: The Work of Filling the World
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When you look out on a hillside filled with daffodils in the spring or a
river with salmon leaping upstream or a sky full of flocks of birds,
you’re filled with a sense of plenty and generous provision. It’s easy to
think that someone or something has spilled gifts of life and beauty
everywhere – this is what we’ve been saying – that our maker has built
into the universe feelings of generosity and giving that is part of his
plan for your life. You are here so that the creator’s son can give
things through you that he has planned to give through no one else. You
yourself don’t have that life, but you have exactly the right personality
and abilities for your maker’s son to give them through you – that’s why
you’re here!

Like so many of us, you find that hard to believe; so you try to get
things rather than give things. As you try to accumulate a little money
and a few possessions to “keep the wolf from the door”, you struggle into
a kind of frustrated self-preservation until some financial or physical
disaster occurs and your whole house-of-cards collapses. Sometimes help
seems to come from nowhere unexpectedly – or – especially when you lose
someone in death – you tap a source of strength that you cannot explain.
Often our creator’s son shows his hand in times of deprivation when we
are at our wit’s end – and we begin to realize that there are powers and
ways that we’ve never known before.

In experiences like this when the world’s resources seem insufficient we
are driven beyond ourselves and our own resourcefulness; we reach out in
desperation and touch a life that comes direct from the divine person in
whom we were created. So our maker has carefully planned our lives so
that we stumble into situations that seem to have no answers or
insufficient provisions; only thus can we be driven to see that we are
inadequate in ourselves. Many of us are so dependent on ourselves or the
world of things that we have to be driven beyond our own abilities: only
then do we reach out in desperation for the life that Paul mentioned “I
live – yet not I – but Christ lives within me”.

It’s then – at times when everything seems hopeless – that our Creator’s
Son makes us aware of Himself and fills us with his own sense of adequacy
and life. This is the moment when we get up off the ground, dust
ourselves off and rise into the new life that surrounds us all every
moment – or we pretend it’s our own: then we have to go through it all
again. This is why we’ve seen so many businesses and nations rise from
apparent disaster and loss when there seemed no practical means of
deliverance. Out of this kind of human extremity arises God’s opportunity
to express the power of his Son within us. So you yourself see that the
maker’s son “existed before all things and in him all things hold
together”.

The simple fact that we ourselves are tiny specks on a huge
sphere spinning and orbiting through huge spaces all maintained by no
visible power induces us to relax in full confidence of our maker
supplying all our needs. So we begin to trust and depend on his giving us
what we need while we pass on to the world all that it needs.
Gradually we settle into the reality that the creator’s son within us
produces all the energy and strength and wisdom that we need for him to
do the works that he has done already and that he does indeed “work in us
both to do and to will of his good pleasure” so that “he works and we
work also”. This fills us with the confidence that enables us to
understand his ways and to do his works that continue to fill the world
and complete his creation in his way.

Day 66: Living Daily in Reality: Why Work?
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God made us free so that we could let his only Son develop the world
through us, but we chose to ignore him and develop the world for
ourselves. He knows there’s nothingness apart from him – and he knew
we’d initially corrupt the human organism through misuse – so he remade
you and me in a parallel universe. Â

You can experience that fact by recognizing it and living accordingly –
only the maker can remake the nature that we have perverted. So we all
live as broken organisms in a broken organism, but both we and it have
been remade by our maker in eternity outside time – as expressed in 29
A.D. by his Son’s crucifixion and resurrection. We can escape the
present unreality of our world and ourselves by rejecting the one and
accepting the other.  You can decide to put your faith in your
maker’s fulfillment of your abilities rather than your enjoyment of
leisure to do what you want. The first leads paradoxically to
enlargement while the second leads to shrinkage.

That’s the choice you have as you think of your work – do you assume
that there is no god that is personally interested in you or your
security?  Or do you assume that you have a loving Father who made you
so that his Son can live in you and develop the world through you by your
work?   There must be some reason why there’s no one else in the
whole world just like you – that’s what our latest DNA research is
finding. Scientists now say that of the twenty thousand genes that run
your whole being – .010% have never occurred in the same way as they do
in you – not in any other person who has ever lived or is living today! Â
You are actually unique – the maker has made no one else like you
– which is what his son, Jesus Christ, implied when he said that
“every hair of your head is numberedâ€(cid:157).  When our maker turned to
his son and said “let us make man in our imageâ€(cid:157), he knew that he
would have to make billions of people like his son to express his own
infinitely varied nature.  So you are alive and different from
everyone else so that our maker’s son can express through you some
likeness of his father that none of the rest of us possess. Â

Christ’s apostle, Paul put it like this – “we are God’s
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, for good works that God has
prepared beforehand that we should walk in themâ€(cid:157). All the
developments and rectifications of the world have been foreseen and
effected by our Maker, but you are the only one he has willed to work the
works that you alone can do – whether inventing the fastest computer or
cleaning the bathroom floor. Work is not just using your mind to get
what you need (our maker will take care of that). Work is using your
mind to understand what particular repairs and improvements to the world
God will carry out through you. In other words, God will “fill the
earth and subdue itâ€(cid:157) through work that his son will do through you that

he will not do through anyone else in just the same way! He gave you a
mind so that you could understand his works and ways and be a co-worker
with him to redeem the world and develop the universe.

Two mighty operations are going on in this planet – one is the clear
demonstration of what life is like without God – the world is
deteriorating and declining in all kinds of ways; but the other operation
is the uplifting and restraining work that our maker’s son has been
given to do – and this work he can do only through your physical
presence.  So you are here so that Christ can do through you a work
that he can do through no one else.

We, of course, have perverted our natures by using our minds to manage
and manipulate the world of things for our own personal benefit.  Thus
our minds become impaired and narrowed by self-interest and we are unable
to see the expansive plans and strategies that our Creator has for us.Â
From time to time He manifests this function of the mind in an Einstein
or Newton, but his desire is that each one of us would use our minds to
understand what particular work He has for us to do. When you wonder what
you should do with your life, find out what things the son of God can do
through you to fill the earth and bring it into the order and beauty God
has in mind.  The last thing you need to concern yourself with is your
food and shelter, because God’s son has said “your heavenly Father
knows you need those thingsâ€(cid:157) and he feeds the birds and clothes the
flowers!

Day 67: Living Daily in Reality: Why do we want to be a Celebrity?
==================================================================

We’re talking about the human personality and the reason we ourselves
have such difficulty doing what we think we should do. We’ve said that
we were made by our maker as part of his only son so that we could enjoy
his love and let his son develop this planet through us. But we have used
our free will to ignore our Creator and depend on the things, people, and
circumstances of the world to provide the security, significance, and
happiness that only our Father-Creator’s love can give us.

Many of us use Facebook and Twitter because we are interested in other
people and want to keep in touch with our friends – and make new
friends. But many of us carefully list the things we’re doing or the
places we’re visiting because we want others to know that we exist and
have interesting lives. Sometimes that’s all that our interest in
social media means. But sometimes we feel it expresses that we’re
important and that our existence matters. Indeed, at times we need the
reassurance we get from our blogs because we realize there are about
seven billion other people like us in the world – so it’s easy to
feel you’re just a tiny blob of humanity that nobody really cares
about. That’s why some of us will do anything to be on television where
people can see us – and recognize that we exist. It’s very easy in
this mass society to feel you’re a little zero that means nothing to
anyone. We wish we could be a celebrity and think it would be wonderful
to be in that position of admiration and popularity in so many people’s
eyes.

Indeed we feel we are different from others – in all kinds of ways that
they don’t seem to notice, and this seems more and more likely as our
genetic scientists come up with the details of our DNA which suggest that
each of us is absolutely unique – there’s no one like you in the
whole world – and there never has been. Even though we find this hard
to believe yet we do feel we’re different – we do have a sense that
no one else has felt just the same feelings as we have.

And, of course, this is all true. Our maker’s son – Jesus of Nazareth
– likened his Father to a good shepherd that knows each of his sheep by
name and has counted all the hairs of our heads. So it is no wonder that
we feel we’re different or important or significant – especially when
it’s evident that our Maker regarded each of us as dear as his only
Son. This readiness to put us before his only Son by allowing our
predecessors to actually kill him heightens our sense of his estimate of
our value in his eyes – and there is no other opinion of us that matters.
So we are born with a real sense of our own value in the eyes of some
significant other, and we never lose that sense of personal value.

It is impossible to find a substitute for the love of our Creator –
there is just no other being who can give us that sense of significance

or importance, especially when you know He made you different from
everyone else so that he could express through you part of himself that
no one else expressed. This results in that strong sense of significance
that each one of us has that can never be fully satisfied by the
recognition or approval of mere human beings. Although it would find
itself perfectly at peace in submitting to the one that made it, it
cannot bear to submit willingly to any other power, but always searches
for a way to assert itself and gain the attention that it thinks it
deserves.

So we find ourselves with a will that insists on asserting
itself and its rights at every opportunity. The will is the pivot-point
of the whole personality and is free only while it is constrained by a
conscience in active relationship with its maker: otherwise it loses its
executive power and becomes a slave to the outside world. Its fulfillment
is found in directing our personality in accordance with our conscience
which reads God’s purposes for each of us.

Day 68: Living Daily in Reality: The Purpose of Your Life
=========================================================

Our maker made us part of his only Son to develop the world and our
natures by his son’s uncreated life, but he foreknew we would choose
first to do it for ourselves by our own created life – and that he in his
son would have to bear the results. Only thus could he justly remake us
and our world in a parallel universe outside time so that we are really
free to choose inside time between his creation and ours. Â

In the year 58, Paul, a follower of our Creator’s Son wrote that this
man “is the express image of the invisible God, the first-born of all
creation; for in him all things were created. He is before all things
and in him all things hold together. For in him all the fullness of God
was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things,
making peace by the blood of his crossâ€(cid:157) which he continues to bear each
time we kill or are angry, or deceive or hate.

The purpose then of our lives is to let our maker’s son fill and subdue
the world through us – with the loving care of a son for something his
father has made. You can see in this diagram that the vital connection
between his son’s Spirit within us and our psychological life is the
will. If we believe that our maker’s son is within us, then we will
endeavor to know what he wishes to do through us, and this conscience
will constrain our wills to fulfill that intuition. So the will is the
pivot-point that is only really free when it acquiesces in our
creator’s planned purpose for our lives. Â He has made it clear –
through his readiness to suffer the worst we can do to him in his son –
that he wants to preserve our free will, yet loves us too much to let us
throw our lives away.  So in a real sense he alone has shown that he
can be trusted with our wills. As a result our will is at ease when it
submits to the one significant other in the universe. Otherwise, our
wills lose their balance and freedom and become either assertive or
passive.

As we begin to believe that the son of our Creator is in us and that we
are part of him, our hands and minds are intended to do what this loving
son plans, so they need to be guided by a will that submits
enthusiastically to the one in whom it was made. Conscience then is our
gyro-compass as it always urges us to the highest that we know – and,
if we are willing, can lift us higher than our impaired minds may
understand. But as we exercise our minds to understand the intuitions
that our maker’s son expresses, so our consciences urge us to exercise
our wills in harmony with our maker’s wishes. So cleaning up the
excretions of a drunkard on a beautiful carpet receives the same “well
done, good and faithful servantâ€(cid:157) as Handel when he completes the
“Hallelujahâ€(cid:157) chorus. Our maker sees the same loving care for his
creation – and recognizes the touch of his Son.
Â

We’re here on this planet to let our maker’s son develop the world
through us so that we can experience what he is really like. This
diagram shows how our wills would submit to our consciences and be able
to direct our minds (as shown by the green arrows) to understand the
intuitions that we receive from our communion with our maker. But
instead, we’ve rejected the reality of a creator who is our loving
Father – and have developed wills that passively submit to our need for
security or compulsively assert the significance that only the one
significant other in the universe can give us. Thus the will becomes
enslaved to either people or things and we become dominated by one or the
other. This kind of living is a parody of the dignified, restrained and
tranquil life we have been made for, so let us begin to understand the
life that is lived in reality.

Day 69: Living Daily in Reality: Between Two Worlds
===================================================

Our Maker designed each of us to express a unique part of himself through
his only Son to whom he has entrusted the completion of his creation.Â
Our willingness to let his son express himself through us will determine
what our world is like and whom we are like. He has foreseen both of
these outcomes, and Christ has borne the corruption of the world and our
nature along with their redemption outside time in eternity. In this
present time we are therefore between two worlds – in us and around us
is the nature and the world which we have corrupted, while ahead of us in
a parallel universe is our new nature and world graciously re-created by
our Maker in his son’s death and resurrection.
Â
In this life, you are living either in the reality of our corrupted
nature and world or you are living in the reality of our new nature and
world that our Maker has already remade outside time. Who determines
which nature and world you are living in? You do – you throw the
switch – then the cosmic death and resurrection expressed at Calvary
actualize here in your life! Just as even our crude high-frequency
trading computers can analyze in a milli-second hundreds of buys and
sells and send hundreds of alternative offers to the stock exchange, so
our Maker can in a millisecond arrange thousands of events which protect
the exercise of your free will yet move everything a step nearer his own
plan. But you alone determine how long you spend crucifying or exalting
your Maker.
Â
While you are in this world as part of the Creator’s son you are
therefore either letting the spirit of his life shape your nature and the
world or you’re succumbing to your nature to exploit the world. The
uncreated spirit of his son applies the eternal work of real change
wrought by the Maker himself in his son’s death, whereas our nature
applies a temporary band-aid; the first deals with the actual corruption
whereas the second deals with the symptoms. The first forms Christ
within more fully, the second tries to imitate his nature.

Both require human action but one is based on the final renewal of the
world wrought by God in Christ’s resurrection while the second is based
on man’s own attempts to save the world. The first is initiated by
Christ within, the second by man’s best thoughts – your will is the
pivotal-point for both.  Moses tried to free the Israelites by killing
the slave-driver; then he freed them by the effect of the plagues wrought
in Christ’s resurrection in eternity. Later he had to stretch his
staff over the Jordan, but it was Christ’s supra-time power over the
world of nature that divided the waters.

So in our twenty-first century we will continue to see the deterioration
of our human nature and our world repeatedly exposed as abnormal and
unintended by the creator.  But alongside the encroaching chaos there

will persist the counteracting effects of the uncreated spirit of the
maker’s son in things like the bacteria-killing penicillin discovered
in fungus, the power of non-violent resistance in Mandela and Gandhi, and
the built-in capacity of an angry man to be calmed by a soft answer.
As we begin to apply reality to the diverse ways in which our world seems
to be going wrong, let us see how this real power of our Maker’s
uncreated life in his son can work through us.  As we do that we may
find there are two ways to “leave the world a better placeâ€(cid:157)…  Â
But more importantly, you may find why your Creator has made you so
different from the rest of us – and you may grow up into the fullness
of Christ.

Day 70: Living Daily in Reality: The Exchanged Life
===================================================

So the world is exactly like it was not meant to be, and our Maker has
permitted this so that we would have a clear choice. This meant the
capacity to love because we had the freedom not to love.Â

The reason his only son appeared as the human Jesus in the first century
was so that we would see clearly that the world we have created is
something that brings great pain to him. It is evident that either it
has to change or we have to change.

This is why our maker designed you different from all the rest of us –
so that his son could complete the world through you as you lived
inside-out, but we all have lived outside-in – that is – as practical
atheists who have no maker and need to get security and significance and
happiness from the world. We can never get enough of this from people
and things and experiences to satisfy our need for the love of our maker,
so our very nature has become perverted and needs to be remade. This is
the meaning of that old Biblical clause “the wages of sin is deathâ€(cid:157)
– sin is living as if there’s no God – and practical atheism so
perverts human nature that it requires radical destruction and
re-creation by God’s power so that it can operate the way it was
originally intended.

Our maker has done all this in what our physicists call a parallel
universe – or eternity – above time and space as we know them, so we
now can experience our creator’s son living in us and through us —
beginning to fill the world instead of emptying it for ourselves,
subduing it instead of being subdued by it and using it rather than
abusing it.

This is called the “exchanged lifeâ€(cid:157) – described by Paul in the
Bible when he said, “this life I live – yet not I – but Christ
lives within meâ€(cid:157). It is “Christ in you – the hope of gloryâ€(cid:157) –
you as a permanent resident of the eternal life for which we were made,
no longer living in fear that you won’t get what you need, but
preoccupied with what your creator’s son wants to do or say through
you. You know that you were made part of him and that you share the
benefits of his ability to use the sub-atomic particles to modify even
matter to develop the world in ways that accord with the Creator’s
will. From time to time these seemingly supernatural powers will be
manifested in the interim years before eventually the whole world will
have to experience the renewal that already exists in a parallel universe.

But such powers of Christ’s uncreated life can only be manifested where
we have exchanged our life for His. This requires the projection of
ourselves outside ourselves – a total acceptance that we were destroyed
with him in His death – and that his will alone counts in our everyday

life. It means “not I, but Christâ€(cid:157) – only then can his Spirit
live through us the life for which we were made.

This means that we no longer live from the outside-in, as in this little
diagram, but we live from the inside-out – from the heart and thoughts
of our creator’s son within us – expressing his thoughts and his
heart and what he wants.  It means stopping our looking to the things
and circumstances and people around us for our security and happiness and
sense of significance – but instead trusting our Father’s
faithfulness, enjoying the gifts he has provided all around us and
pleasing him and wanting his favor above man’s.

This changes the way our minds work: they concentrate on understanding
how our maker’s plans will work out and affect the world, our emotions
will enjoy his company and using the powers he has given us, while our
wills direct firmly our life’s actions and feelings. All of this is
motivated by a real oneness we sense with our God – and a preoccupation
with what He is thinking and wants. We enjoy walking through the world
with the owner beside us as he explains what his ideas and plans are.Â
Let’s do just that during these next thirty segments – let’s look at some
of the ways our Maker might guide us in the challenges and problems that
our world faces.

Day 71: Living Daily in Reality: Renewing the Earth
===================================================

Our world consists of billions of spinning particles so small that only
our physicists can detect or hypothesize them. They are controlled by our
Maker’s Spirit in his only Son, Jesus Christ; they express the results
of our acquiescence or rejection of our Creator’s will. He has
permitted us to desecrate their harmony so that we can see in the
resulting world the nothingness that exists apart from him. Meanwhile he
has recreated the world and us outside time in another part of his
universe – so that through this cosmic miracle we can eventually come to
accept his will for his only Son in us.

We appear to be quite far on in this process as our world tips towards
chaos. However our Maker so “longs for the creature he has madeâ€(cid:157) (Job
14:15) that, despite the pain he feels with each egocentric move you and
I make, he restrains this world’s disintegration as much as is
consistent with our willing conformity to him. However long we hold out
and he suffers, his steadfast love for us in this regard never ceases and
his mercies do not come to an end.

So although we all observe and take part in developing the earth’s
resources and civilizing its peoples outwardly, another deeper renewing
of our hearts is beginning by the work of our Creator’s Son’s
uncreated life in us. This is the renewing of the earth that will
complete the work begun when His Son was given us and our world before
time began. Although in this present era this inner work seems secondary,
it is in fact the primary work – because the reason we were given the
task of developing this planet was precisely so that our heart for it
would be the same as God’s!

So as we begin now to look at the way an inside-out personality affects
our present world we are really looking at the way our hearts become like
our Maker’s. The reason we glimpse such apparent delight in the
seagulls as they soar or our little dog as he feels the wind in his
coat-hairs is the sheer joy of God’s heart. Throughout the universe
darkness is constantly dispelled by the joy of the Creator as he pours
forth his own life and heart. This is the fresh life that will totally
renew the earth so that it is able to rise with its sons and daughters
into the harmony of God’s joyful universe.

Let us start now to see the ways this miracle of uncreated life
transforms our present world, makes the earth a better place to live in,
and prepares it and us for the final work that only God himself can
complete when the earth – as we know it – ends. Although the outward
calamities like the bizarre shootings and tortures and rapes are
themselves horrendous and savage in their effects, the hardness and
cruelty they infuse into all our hearts is even more destructive. So
everywhere in our present world there is developing a heart that is less

and less like our Maker’s and yet is increasingly oblivious to its
dehumanizing effect. This is the more serious deterioration to be stopped
and turned around – if the present world is to avoid a premature end.

It is our great privilege that we are no longer enslaved to sin by
corrupt personalities driven by the world’s inadequate substitutes but
are willing bond-servants of a dear Father who has made everything in
this broken world right. We live now in the joy of this rightness and
through that perception and faith we express the confident power and joy
of his only Son, so that our Father manifests here in time the world that
he has renewed in eternity. That wonderful rearrangement of the billions
of particles that make up the present state of the matter in the world is
part of the ways and works of God by which he continually adjusts our
present world and us in their progress towards the righteousness he has
created. As we have increasingly the mind that is in Christ, the
creator’s son, so our heart becomes one with God’s and his ability to
rearrange the particles of matter in the loaves and fishes — and
expresses itself in us as we begin to mould the world by his power.

Day 72: Living Daily in Reality: You are a Unique Variation of our Creator
==========================================================================

Our Maker made us in his image so that He could express all his glorious
richness, and we could enjoy it firsthand. So you express part of Him
that no one else can. That’s why you’re here – to mould his world
in ways that no one else can by his power. You’re not here to die
like a dog – and never be seen again. You’re here to live forever,
but only your Maker can make that a delight and joy for you – and all
of us. You yourself would make it hell! So God has put you in this
world – which we have distorted by trying to get from it what we can get
only from Him – so that we’ll choose to reject that self-centered
life and allow his unself-centered life to fill us. Only then will we
begin to use the world and stop abusing it – only then will we really
be able to subdue it to his will instead of being subdued by its will.

So we are here to be like God – through living in his Son in whom we
have been made. This transforms the state of marriage and home-life –
which both exist to reveal in us God in whose image we have been made.Â
Today we think they exist for our benefit so that we will be satisfied
but they exist so that we will lose our life (like God) and find it!Â
Just as He Himself produces others like Him through his forbearance and
readiness to be crucified, so we produce others like Him when we do the
same. When marriage is unselfish it succeeds – when it’s selfish, it
fails. How often do you give in? Until the other person starts giving
in, too. How often do you let the other person have their way? Until
they start wanting you to have your way. How long has God let you do
what you want? As long as you want! Such a marriage will never work,
we say! But it’s the only way it will work! Such forbearance and
love will never survive, we say!Â

But Christ has done quite well – and God is still in his heaven!Â
Such a ridiculous pacifism would destroy communities and nations!Â
But we’re talking about individuals and their attitudes to each other not
the restraining of forces created by many wills acting together –
only the laws of God can defend us against that. But only the grace of
love can express our Creator in you.

This then is the goal and purpose of our existence – to eventually
agree to our Maker’s Son expressing himself in us personally. How
long will God keep giving us such an opportunity? As long as it
takes! His only Son, Jesus once stated clearly how often one should
forgive – “seventy times sevenâ€(cid:157) – or as long as his Father’s
“steadfast love that never ceases and his grace that never comes to an
endâ€(cid:157).Â

Could that take life even beyond physical death? Of course!Â
Certainly God stated through his son that “there will be no murderers
or adulterers in heavenâ€(cid:157), so the implication is that the ideal world

will be possible only when it is filled with people in the image of God
Himself – but Jesus said that “in God’s house are many mansionsâ€(cid:157)
so that even if other parallel worlds are required, the Creator will
forbear until each of us finally enters into the reality he has created
for us in his risen Son.

Day 73: Living Daily in Reality: Christ in You – The Hope of Glory
===========================================

The completion of our Maker’s Son is the purpose of your life. Each
of us has a whole way of thinking that we inherit from our parents – a
suit of clothing that we put on as humans. We get our security from the
things we have, our significance from people’s opinion of us, and our
happiness from our circumstances; so this limited world of things, people
and circumstances is the world we think about most often. Even the
cyber-world of computers is usually just a mirror of this world so we are
short-sighted in our view of life – it’s tied mostly to this present life
on earth. However, as we hear more these days about our space probes and
light-years we are beginning to think of the possibilities of life beyond
this present existence. This is taking on a more serious aspect now that
our theoretical physicists suggest that there may be parallel universes –
and that we may grow older faster or slower as we travel elsewhere in
space!

You may remember that statement of Jesus when he said, “Before Abraham
was, I am….your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it
and was glad…â€(cid:157) (John 5:56-58). This is the world that opens up for us
as we begin to take seriously the implications of our real relationship
to the mysterious human being, Jesus who is described so naturally as the
only son who lived with his Father, our creator outside time. Paul
defined Him like this in his letter to the people in Colossae –
Col.1:15….â€(cid:157)He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of
all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth,
visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or
authorities – all things were created through him and for him.

He is before all things and in Him all things hold togetherâ€(cid:157). Here almost two
thousand years before Einstein showed mathematically – and
astro-physicists demonstrated scientifically – that time was relative to
where you were in space, an ordinary well-known historical figure spoke
from a viewpoint above both past and present. Acknowledged by the Roman
emperor as the only son of our creator and respected since as the only
Son of God, this man astounds us all by saying also that you and I were
made in Him and He is now in us!

But far more than that – he implied what studies in the human genome
prove today – that each of us is different from everyone else that has
ever been or now is on this planet when he said that each hair on our
heads is numbered. When Peter asked him what would happen in John’s
life, Jesus implied that he had a different plan for the life he would
live in him by saying “what is that to you, you just follow me!â€(cid:157) Why
is your DNA different from every other one? Because our creator is so
complex and diverse that he needs each one of us to express himself fully
in all the richness of his heart and life. In other words, you are a
unique expression of our Creator – he shows part of himself in you that

he shows in no one else in just the same way! This is God’s truth.

This reality appeals to our own common-sense: why would the creator make
every one of us different from each other? Just because he enjoyed
diversity? Or because he made us in his image – so rich and infinite
that he can only begin to be revealed in the lives of billions of human
beings like ourselves. His only Son has planned to show in you a side of
his Father that will not be seen in the same way in any other person.
This is why Paul wrote that “all things work together for good
…..that we might be conformed to the image of his Son.â€(cid:157) Your
experience is unique and no one else has been exactly where you have been
or seen exactly what you have seen. If you are not what you were created
to be, the Creator will not be seen in all his richness and beauty. Just
as the great British conductor, Sir Malcolm Sargent, noticed when the
little triangle player missed his note at the crescendo of a Beethoven
symphony, so the Creator cares that you will play your full part in this
life!

Day 74: Living Daily in Reality: The Fullness of Stature – The Hope of Glory
===================================================

The infinite creator conceived and created everything in a millisecond:
he conceived of children like his only son who wanted to return his
love. But he knew that love is only possible for beings who are free
not to love. This meant creating and bearing in his own son in eternity
all that he himself is not and then remaking it – this is the meaning of
the crucifixion. All humanity exists inside Christ who has borne the
effects of every choice of ungodliness possible – with the result that we
all see clearly our choice – God or not God? Our present world displays
temporarily some of that life without God – Christ displays life with
God, our father!

You were created in Christ (Colossians 1:16) and you are alive now to
grow up into the fullness of his stature as he is fully formed in you
(Galatians 4:19).

So part of our present life is Christ living in you and me as honestly
and truthfully as he lived in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Although
he did not act directly to change the social and political injustices of
his age, he did express the pain that his own spirit experienced in the
light of their lack of love and wisdom. He mirrored the beatitudes that
he described in his sermon on the mount because they expressed absolute
faith that our Father had changed and rectified the wrongs in eternity so
that we could trust his manifesting the rectification appropriately in
time. So slavery and military domination and persecution had all been
rectified by God before the world was created but their actualization in
this temporary society would take place in God’s perfect time and
way.Â

Meanwhile, however, Christ felt and expressed the pain of his
Father’s spirit in his own attitude: so with each of us as we
experience and express the heart of God in our present age. This
integrity in our response and restraint in our human action is part of
the fullness of his stature into which we constantly grow in this present
life on earth. So we feel the sympathy expressed by Christ for Mary
Magdalene and his pain at the hypocrisy of those willing to cast the
first stone when we see the same lack of sympathy for the pregnant
teenager or harshness in those who condemn her.

So we sense the same fear of impending doom when we see the inevitable
decline of our present economy because of the self-destructive influence
of the rich on our tax policies. As passive income is favored over
earned income and the gap between rich and poor increases between the top
.1% and the other 99.9%, so our economy puts four times more of its
income into passive capital. We feel the same concern for our poor and
under-privileged citizens when we see the power of special-interest
groups to manipulate our elected representatives rather than encourage

the exercise of their free judgments. We express Christ’s attitude
that respected those in authority over us because they are not a terror
to good conduct but to bad.

Just as Paul exercised his political responsibility to appeal to Caesar
so we exercise our responsibility to elect our representatives and
encourage them to exercise their free judgments regarding all our
welfare. At the same time we refrain from any activity that would
influence them to benefit us at the expense of our neighbors because our
trust is in the free elections that God has permitted and will use for
the common good. So we are blessed by God as the meek or gentle who
will inherit the earth by his action as we pray for those in authority so
that we are quietly governed — but our faith is in God’s maintenance
of the structure rather than in our taking it out of the hands he is
using. So we live Christ’s ascended life at God’s right hand
together with this present life where we continue to learn his obedience
through suffering the chastening and conforming effects of our godless
environment.

Thus Christ in each of us begins to be fully formed as he develops the
world through his faith in the rectification of the world that has been
accomplished by his death and resurrection. At the same time we
experience the conformity to his image which is accomplished through the
exercise of his faith as we face the chastening effects of the fallen
world’s godless deterioration and hostility. So in this life we share
in the development of the earth planned by our Father and we also benefit
from facing its unlikeness to its creator.

Day 75: A Family of Loving Individuals
======================================
by Ernest O’Neill

Our Maker loves his only Son – whom we know as the human-being called Jesus of Nazareth in Palestine in the first century. They live in perfect harmony outside time and want us to live with them and love them and be like them. But we can love only if we are free not to love, so our Maker has made us in his son so that we are free to let him develop the earth for his father through us or we are free to develop it for ourselves.

But he knew that this could be real only if we were free to see what life was like without him, so he made it possible for us to ignore his son within us and develop the world by powers and methods that are opposite to his. But since there is no existence outside God, even our temporal disasters can only occur inside his Son’s participation in us while their eternal transformation has to occur outside time in his Son’s oneness with His father. Thus each one of us can exert our own free will and degrade the world or we can exert Christ’s will and develop the universe. In either case we are enabled by our creator’s ‘steadfast love which never ceases and his mercies that never come to an end but are new every morning’. Our maker is committed to letting us have our way until we finally allow him to have his way. His continual love and providence express an eternal life that has power to change and transform.

Often we do things that should cause us intense pain or disaster but we escape both by some magical intervention while at other times our success seems far beyond what our effort justifies. In both cases there seems to be some providential over-drive that supplements the action of our wills.

That’s, of course, exactly what is happening. Our maker knows precisely what he has made – he knows you and me intimately along with the details of all the events and actions we will engage in. He also knows what actions we will take and what will strengthen our freedom and what will restrict it – what will dictate our decisions and what will liberate them! He works continuously to apply the benefits of the eternal, renewed world to our temporal, fallen world as our wills freely express his son’s will. Throughout all this complex syncretism (as he “works and we work also”), his own will for hearts like his Son’s carefully preserves our real freedom as we retain the power to “work out our own salvation” even though we are his “workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them”.

The creator’s commitment to the freedom of our wills is expressed forever in letting the human race crucify his only son. One who exercises his will in that instance cannot be doubted in his respect for each of our wills. So despite all God’s undoubted ability to foresee and modify circumstances, we can be certain that he wants above all else to have sons and daughters who can love him freely as his own son does: “it is not his will that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance”.

Day 76 The Tears of the Creator
===============================
by Ernest O’Neill

So the creator made us temporal creatures in his only-begotten eternal son so that we could let his uncreated spirit develop us and the universe into the infinite expression of his being that he had already re-created in eternity outside time. At present we see the temporary broken planet that our independent spirits produce when we choose the nothingness that exists outside him. But his love is so real that he lets us destroy his only son’s temporal life so that his own tears will express his respect for our freedom to reject his “steadfast love that never ceases and his mercies that do not come to an end”. This is why he wills our ability with, as it were, his left-hand to do even things that oppose what he is faithfully doing with his right-hand. The one shows us repeatedly what he is not while the other expresses through us what he is.

Life without the creator is so impossible that his son always portrays it as unbearably and repulsively destructive of the expansive, infinitely fulfilling experience of his huge universe which we’ll develop by his power and life. However long it takes to bring us into his glorious life, his words through Peter in the Bible are very clear – “do not ignore this one fact that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works upon it will be burned up. But we wait for new heavens and a new earth.”

Our Creator wants children like his own Son, Jesus Christ, so he made you and me as part of his Son with each of us expressing part of him that the rest of us could not. Then he put us on this planet so that we could choose to develop it as if He did not exist so that we would see plainly the results of human beings using the creation for themselves. Thus we are able to see how we are not like Him and are drawn to live in His image. This is the purpose of our lives in the future eons and the infinite universe in which we’ll exist. Indeed the Creator’s love is his desire for us to experience all that He himself is so that we may live in harmony with Him and his son forever.

His embrace of our old selves in his Son’s death and his re-creation of our new selves in his resurrection express clearly his desire for us to know him as he is and to be like Him. In infinite humility He made us in his Son in their image and then bore in us the nothingness that we chose in his place so that we could eventually fulfill our destiny! Such love and respect for you and me is expressed in Job 14:14-17: “If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my service I would wait, till my release should come. Thou wouldest call, and I would answer thee; thou wouldest long for the work of thy hands, for then thou wouldest number my steps, thou wouldest not keep watch over my sin; my transgression would be sealed up in a bag, and thou wouldest cover over my iniquity.” Our Maker’s desire is for us to understand his innermost mind and heart, to see clearly what it is and what it is not, so that we will know the nothingness that exists apart from Him and embrace Him freely as our own beloved Father.

Day 77 Reality or Nothingness
by Ernest O’Neill

The Creator made us unique parts of his only Son so that we could know him, become like him, and develop the earth.  Through this work we know what he is like, and through the broken world we know what he is not like.

Our astro-physicists tell us that space is expanding into infinite time.  Our Maker wants live beings like his only Son – not robots – to live there with Him forever.  So he has given us freedom to have an existence in the universe – after this short life on earth (which we have desecrated and which starkly contrasts with the earth he has renewed outside time in his son’s cosmic resurrection).

Only by knowing what God is and what he is not can we eventually grow up into the fullness of Christ in whom we were made.  God is infinite and perfect so he has an innate concept of absolute truth: we can only approximate to that knowledge by comparing (delimiting) one thing with another: here we need to see what he is – compared with what he is not – as we experience what we have made of this world and how he has renewed it in Christ. Our Maker wants us to understand him and his ways, so he makes the ‘nothingness’ of this chaotic world possible but simultaneously makes it new outside time in his Son’s resurrection.  Thus we can begin our infinite, eternal life in the universe in the real freedom of beings that know by experience what God is like and what God is not like and thus affirm reality rather than nothingness.

Nothingness is everything that God is not – God is kind and patient and compassionate – but these words and attitudes begin to affect our inner attitude to life and others only as we see them contradicted and expressed in their opposites of unkindness, impatience, and insensitivity.  Similarly, we perceive deviousness when we are able to recognize candid transparency.  We begin to know what humility is when we see through modesty.  We begin to love towards a right concept of love only as we see the fickleness of affection.  We understand a little more about consistency when we confront the willfulness of stubbornness.  Faith in the active love of God is different from submission to blind impersonal fate.  Trust in God’s mercy is different from hope that he will overlook your short-comings.  Lively contentment with God’s providence is not the same as wearied acceptance of events.

Day 78: Jesus is Historical
===========================

About 4 B.C. Jesus of Nazareth was born by virgin birth to Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem; the event was witnessed by officials of the Judean king Herod and recorded by witnesses whose accounts were corroborated by thousands of contemporaries who observed this unique life over the next thirty-three years.

When he was thirty, Jesus became famous in Galilee for his faultless life, profound explanations of reality, miraculous actions and his startling statement that he was the divine son of God; he declared, “Before Abraham was, I am”.

The Roman authorities feared the Jews would use him to lead rebellion against them, so they crucified him despite their own view that he had done nothing wrong but live like the Son of God.

Jesus proved his transcendence of Abraham and death by rising from the dead and coming back to life thirteen times over the next thirty days.

The first accounts of his life, death and resurrection were circulating, being reproduced and corroborated by eye-witnesses during the next forty years.

By 100 A.D. the twenty-seven books of the New Testament history of his life had been written and copied, read and corroborated by hundreds alive during his life-time. These then were translated and copied scrupulously so that today in universities, museums and libraries around the world are more than 400,000 copies of this vital ancient history.

In 325 A.D. at the council of Chalcedon the emperor of Rome recognized Jesus Christ as the only Son of the Creator of the world – and the Western world divides its history before Christ as B.C. and after Christ as A.D.
This ensures that we are therefore dealing with some of the most reliable ancient history in our western civilization.

Day 79: The Meaning of Life
==========================
by Ernest O’Neill

Our creator, whose own Son lived as Jesus of Nazareth from 4 B.C. to 29 A.D but existed above time with his Father, made you in his Son, so that we might let him express himself uniquely through each of us. Your life here on earth and later in the universe gives you the opportunity to fulfill his plan or prolong the separation borne by Christ in us on Calvary.

So the creator made you a unique part of his eternal Son when you were born. He gave you free will so that you could share their love forever and help develop the infinite universe they had created.

At present we can see the light that started towards us from a star over 13 billion light-years ago; so obviously the creator can see all time and the whole universe in a second!

He knew you had to have freedom to see what life was like without him if you were to really come to love him; so he made you in his son so that he himself would face the consequences if you chose the nothingness that exists outside his existence. In your death with his Son above time he bore the nothingness of everything in the world that he was not – so that you could choose it if you wished. This agony of the godhead is expressed in history’s record of the cry of dereliction “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

But in the resurrection he graciously recreated you and the desecrated world. You will be able to manifest this new world in the coming ages – by faith in the forbearance and wisdom of Christ – rather than the anti-christ hubris of the nations which God destroyed at the tower of Babel. In Christ we will share the intuitive knowledge and understanding of the one in whom all things were made. We will work then as an active part of the great universe and not as separate external creatures.

So, after our brief life on this small planet, you and I will begin a far larger life developing the infinite universe around us by powers and lives that exceed our expectations more than even the size of this universe is doing.

Day 80: You Are a Unique Part of Your Creator’s Son
===================================================
by Ernest O’Neill

Our creator, whose own Son lived as Jesus of Nazareth from 4 b.c. to 29 a.d. but existed above time with his Father, made you in his Son, so that we might let him express himself uniquely through each of us. Your life here on earth and later in the universe gives you the opportunity to fulfill his plan or prolong the separation borne by Christ in us on Calvary.

So the creator made you a unique part of his eternal Son when you were born. He gave you free will so that you could share their love forever and help develop the infinite universe they had created.

At present we can see the light that started towards us from a star over 13 billion light-years ago; so obviously the creator can see all time and the whole universe in a second!

He knew you had to have freedom to see what life was like without him if you were to really come to love him; so in your death with his Son above time he bore the nothingness of everything in the world that he was not – so that you could choose it if you wished.

But in the resurrection he graciously recreated you and the desecrated world. You will be able to manifest this new world in the coming ages – by faith in the forbearance and wisdom of Christ – rather than the anti-christ hubris of the nations which God destroyed at the tower of Babel.

So, after our brief life on this small planet, you and I will begin a far larger life developing the infinite universe around us by powers and lives that exceed our expectations more than even the size of this universe is doing.

Day 75: Living Daily in Reality: A Family of Loving Individuals
======================================

Our Maker loves his only Son – whom we know as the human-being called
Jesus of Nazareth in Palestine in the first century. They live in
perfect harmony outside time and want us to live with them and love them
and be like them. But we can love only if we are free not to love, so
our Maker has made us in his son so that we are free to let him develop
the earth for his father through us or we are free to develop it for
ourselves.

But he knew that this could be real only if we were free to see what life
was like without him, so he made it possible for us to ignore his son
within us and develop the world by powers and methods that are opposite
to his. But since there is no existence outside God, even our temporal
disasters can only occur inside his Son’s participation in us while their
eternal transformation has to occur outside time in his Son’s oneness
with His father. Thus each one of us can exert our own free will and
degrade the world or we can exert Christ’s will and develop the
universe. In either case we are enabled by our creator’s steadfast
love which never ceases and his mercies that never come to an end but are
new every morning? Our maker is committed to letting us have our way
until we finally allow him to have his way. His continual love and
providence express an eternal life that has power to change and transform.

Often we do things that should cause us intense pain or disaster but we
escape both by some magical intervention while at other times our success
seems far beyond what our effort justifies. In both cases there seems to
be some providential over-drive that supplements the action of our wills.

That’s of course, exactly what is happening. Our maker knows precisely
what he has made – he knows you and me intimately along with the
details of all the events and actions we will engage in. He also knows
what actions we will take and what will strengthen our freedom and what
will restrict it – what will dictate our decisions and what will
liberate them! He works continuously to apply the benefits of the
eternal, renewed world to our temporal, fallen world as our wills freely
express his son? will. Throughout all this complex syncretism (as he
works and we work also) his own will for hearts like his Son’s
carefully preserves our real freedom as we retain the power to work out
our own salvation even though we are his workmanship created in Christ
Jesus for good works that he has prepared beforehand that we should walk
in them?

The creator’s commitment to the freedom of our wills is expressed forever
in letting the human race crucify his only son. One who exercises his
will in that instance cannot be doubted in his respect for each of our
wills. So despite all God’s undoubted ability to foresee and modify
circumstances, we can be certain that he wants above all else to have

sons and daughters who can love him freely as his own son does: it is
not his will that any should perish, but that all should come to
repentance.