Day 25: Living Daily in Reality: Eternity in Time
=================================================

Our creator is not some cosmic toy-maker who makes billions of
human-beings, gives them free will and then stands back to observe the
results. He is a loving father who foreknew in a millisecond all the
consequences of the free decisions of billions of us through the
centuries. He bore them all personally in his son, could then negate them
and their cosmic effects, and mercifully made us all again in him. He
then expressed that eternal event in time in his son’s death in Palestine
in the first century. So we are now free to see in this present world the
effects of our decisions and to choose our original creations instead.

This is the meaning of profound statements in the Bible like “we are
God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which he has
prepared beforehand that we should walk in them…he himself bore our
sins in his body on the tree….our old self was crucified with
him….with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years
as one day”. But how do we change? Many of us have tried to live
independent of the world’s things, people, and circumstances and depend
on our creator for our needs, but we’ve found it impossible.

The only way for us to live in reality is to believe our creator is who
he says he is and has done what he says he has done. Just as in our
day-to- day lives we live in things as they are, so it is in time and
eternity. Only our maker can actualize in time what he has done in
eternity – this is the meaning of that paradoxical Biblical statement “at
the east of the garden of Eden…a flaming sword which turned every way
to guard the way to the tree of life”. Our part is obvious – simply live
in eternity – in accordance with the change our creator has wrought in us
in his son’s death. If we live in that daily, then he actualizes the
eternal event in our present lives.

So there is no mystery about living in reality – it is not just an
ascetic self-discipline of our evil tendencies or a life-long ethical
slog or a self-directed dependence on how-to books or an esoteric
mysticism which tries to believe what isn’t true. Faith creates nothing –
it simply accepts reality and lives accordingly.

In other words, living in reality means letting our creator’s son, Jesus
Christ, live in us the life his father has planned, i.e. a life where his
spirit daily depends on his father for the security, significance, and
happiness that his love and friendship give us. This means daily dying
the death that he died for us to things, people and circumstances in our
ordinary lives – the result is the activity of his spirit in our lives so
that “he works all things according to the counsel of his will” and “all
things work together for good to those who love God”.

This means a life that works from the inside out instead of from the

outside in. All of us are aware of our bodies and most of us are aware of
our minds and feelings, but only a few of us are aware of our spirits.
Sometimes in the quietness of a summer afternoon in the country or the
darkness of a starlit night we – like the poet Wordsworth – “have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply inter-fused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things.”

This is the part of our personalities that our creator has brought to
life when he raised us up in his son. Reality is believing that and
living from the inside out each day – from the level of our spirit out
through our souls and bodies. Let’s talk about this kind of life during
these next days.