WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?
Program 132
Holy Spirit in our Lives
by Ernest O’Neill

We’re talking about the meaning of life. What is the meaning of life and why are you here? What is the purpose
of our existence? We have been talking especially about the kind of problem you face if you have become
addicted to alcohol. If you have become addicted to alcohol and decide to stop drinking, you find an
impossible series or network of responses that have been created in your personality that seem to be almost
permanent.

You determine that you will not have another drink, yet your whole emotional and physical make-up have become
so used to alcohol and the relaxation and the pacification and the apparent freedom that it gives you from
worry and anxiety, that you see that your own personality is your own worst enemy. It seems as if your
personality has become suited and fitted to operate on alcohol. Just as an automobile will only operate on
certain kinds of gasoline or petrol, so it seems to you that your personality has become so used to alcohol
that it cannot operate any other way.

So, you often think to yourself, “If I could only change this personality. If I could change the very chemical
makeup of my blood, if I could have a whole new body, and a whole new mind, and a whole new set of emotions,
then perhaps I could have done with this alcohol.”

Of course, it’s the same with any addiction. Even if it’s an addiction to heroin, or if it’s an addiction to
crack, of if it’s an addiction to opium, or if it’s an addiction, strangely enough, to bad temper or to anger
or to resentment, it seems that when you determine to stop doing the thing that you decide is not right for
you, you discover that your whole personality seems to be bent so in the direction of that particular vice,
that you feel the only way you can possibly do what is right is if you can check in this personality and check
out a new one completely.

That is the problem that we have been discussing. What we have been saying, of course, is that the Creator who
made you has a plan. (And there is a Creator who made you. Your personality didn’t come about by chance. You
know that things that are much less ordered and complex in your personality require an intelligent mind to
produce them. So how much more does your personality require to produce it?)

The Creator, when He conceived of your existence, determined that he wanted you to be able to share the
greatest thing that He knows. The greatest thing He knows, of course, according to His own revelation of
Himself to us through His Son, is love. He determined to make you capable of love. But the only people capable
of love are people with free wills. He knew that He had to make you with a free will and He did that. The
moment, of course, He knew that He had to make you with a free will, He knew that you could use that free will
to choose to live as if He didn’t exist.

Once you did that, you would begin to create all kinds of complicated networks in your personality such as we
just discussed. It would create in you certain attitudes of mind, and emotions that would be filled with
frustration as you tried to get from other people what you were originally meant to get from Him. It would
fill you with all kinds of complexes and all kinds of twists and crooked ways in your personality as you tried
to get from the world the kind of security that you could only get from Him alone.

He knew that He had made you for the love of an infinite person who is infinitely wonderful, and as you tried
to make do with the love of an ordinary human being in place of that, He knew that it would create all kinds

of attitudes and responses in your personality that would be filled with frustration and filled with
dissatisfaction, and would require all kinds of perversions, both sexual and emotional, in order to try to
fill the gap.

Immediately when He conceived of that, He conceived of the need to remake you completely.(cid:9)And this is what He
did. This is what an old book called the Bible says that He did. It says that there was a Lamb that was slain
from before the foundation of the world and that Lamb, of course, was His Son Jesus. Another verse in that
Bible says that, “Christ died for all; therefore all died.”

In fact, what God, the Creator, did was He conceived that you would choose to live without Him, that you would
choose to go your own way, that you would as a result pervert your personality and twist it to the point where
the only way you could be free to do what you felt you should do and what you thought was right to do, is if
He actually destroyed that personality and recreated it anew and that’s what he did in His Son in a cosmic
miracle in the midst of infinity.

In timelessness, He recreated you and made you new, so that He sent you into this world with two
personalities, in a sense. Really one, but He sent you with the ghost of the old one still alive. That is the
one that you have when you try to stop drinking. That’s the one that you have when you try to stop smoking.
That’s the one that you have when you stop the sexual perversion that you’re involved in. That’s the one that
you have when you try to stop being bad-tempered. He allowed that one to continue to exist so that you would
see the consequences of that choice.

But, He also created a new one in His Son, in timeless eternity. Your old self was crucified with Him. That
timeless, beautiful, and pure and perfect personality is available to you and that’s the real one that
actually does exist. What we’ve been talking about is how that personality is made existent in this present
life. Of course, the amazing thing is that you either need a time machine, such as H.G. Wells’, that can
actually bring eternity into the midst of time, or that can bring the miracle that occurred in the first
century on the cross at Calvary, or that occurred millions of years before that in timeless eternity.

You need a time machine that will bring it into this present time, or you need some power that will do it
supernaturally. Now, that is what the Creator has provided. There is a power in this life that is given the
name of Spirit and it is called often the Holy Spirit, because it brings a holiness into your life. This Holy
Spirit is God Himself. It is the Creator Himself. It is the infinite Being Himself.

This Holy Spirit is able to take the miracle that God created before He even made the world, the miracle
whereby He renewed you completely in His Son and remade you and destroyed that old self-nature. This Holy
Spirit is able to take that miracle and bring it into time, right here in this present generation in this
present century, in this present day. It is this Holy Spirit that does that miraculously.

So, you are right if you say, “Well, whatever He did in the first century, I can’t have it in my own life
today, because I’m in time here in the twentieth century and He did this back twenty hundred years ago. If
you’re right, He actually did it millions of years before that. How do I bring that into my life?” You don’t!

But He has provided a power, a dynamic. It’s actually a Person. The Holy Spirit is actually a person. It’s the
third person of the Godhead. He is able to take that miracle, that God wrought in His Son Jesus in you, and He
is able to bring this into your life today as you sit in this car at this moment. As you sit in your room at
this very moment. As you sit in your office chair and look out the window, the Holy Spirit is able to make
real in you this tremendous deliverance that the Creator worked for you in His Son.

In fact, He made you twice. He made you, first of all, with a free will, and then He foresaw what you would
use that free will to do to pervert your own personality. He took that perverted personality and He remade
it in His Son. Then He made available the Holy Spirit who is able to actualize that cosmic miracle in your
personal life at this very moment.

What does He need you to do, in order that He should do that? You need to want it. You need to be willing for
it. You need to begin to respect the Holy Spirit and to ask Him to make this effective in you. If you do that,
He will change you this very moment. Let’s talk a little more tomorrow about it.