Day 26: Living Daily in Reality: A Corrupted World
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Your personal father is not your human Dad – your personal father is
your creator. He made you like himself and put the spirit of his only
Son into you – this is “the light that lightens every man that comes
into the worldâ€(cid:157); this is the good that you feel rising at times inside
yourself. Watch the first six segments of this series so that you
understand the intellectual basis in history for what we’re saying here.

You, of course, like the rest of us have used our freedom to keep this
spirit of God within us damped down so that we could live independent of
our Maker. But this has made us utterly dependent on the world around us
– its things for our security, its circumstances for our happiness, and
other people for our significance or celebrity status. The result is that
our personalities have been corrupted so that we cannot do the good that
we want, but repeatedly do what inside we really want to do.

Our maker knew this would happen but did not want robots who loved him
just because they had to; He wanted dear children who would love Him
because he loved them. This meant he had to experience himself the worst
that they chose to do and be; not only had they to see and experience
what he was not – but He himself had to bear that in them. This meant
His own death – it meant experiencing all that He Himself was not! And,
if we were to have the chance to actually live and love with Him, it
meant His making us then what he wanted us to be – after we had
experienced life without Him.

This is our situation in this world. It is life without its maker –
life mutilated and corrupted by humanity living off the creation rather
than the creator. Our maker “subjected the creation to futilityâ€(cid:157)
through our abuse of nature and each other so that we would see and
experience first-hand the death that existed outside Him. Just think of
it for a moment – how would you make other living beings who could love
you freely because they wanted to and not because they had to. How would
you give them the opportunity to really choose you freely if there was no
other existence outside you? Even more than that – how would you keep
them alive if there was no other life than yours?  And how could you
bear the pain of death that would be inflicted upon you if you stayed
with them as they lived in the midst of the death that exists outside
you? Then imagine what it would be like if their existence continued only
because they were part of your only son and it was him who bore their
destruction to shield them from extinction!

This present fallen world is what life is like without our dear Father
– except that it is ameliorated and made bearable by the life of his
son’s spirit which continues the moderating effect of his spirit.
Wherever this is accepted or exercised without coercing our human wills
our creator is able to restrain the devastation wrought by our autonomous

lives. Thus the present world is “subjected to futilityâ€(cid:157) so that we
can see what life would be like without God as against the life of his
son manifested from time to time. Far from being a perfect world – this
is planned by our creator to be a graphic picture of the kind of world
that our autonomy produces so that we personally can see the difference
between just a knowledge of good and evil and the life of his own nature
within us.  Â

By living in such a world we see how our own personality is warped and
corrupted by the environment we create. So, when we try to live
independent of his life and love by getting life and love from the world
itself, we discover that our nature becomes so corrupt that we cannot
depend on him even when we wish. How can you be freed from your
dependence on things for your security, circumstances for your happiness
and people for your significance? Let’s talk about that tomorrow.