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Teach Us To Pray
The God to Whom We Pray
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[Teach Us To Pray]
[Charles Fillmore's Works] [Unity on the Web Home Page]
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
--Elizabeth Browning
OMNIPRESENCE, omniscience, omnipotence are verities of
Being and are facts of existence.
The Mind of God, creative Mind, is perpetually moving upon
supermind ideas and through them bringing man and the
universe into existence.
Creative Mind is everywhere present; yet while it is within
the mind of man it lies beyond the consciousness of sense.
Omnipresence is that spiritual realm which can be
penetrated only through the most highly accelerated mind
action, as in prayer. Thus in unfolding this inner kingdom
we are dealing with a reality beyond the ordinary
comprehension of man.
To the superbly tuned mind and brain of Jesus Divine Mind
was a soil eager with vibrant life and light and substance,
which He used to produce the finest of materials for both
character and body building.
Spiritual character building is from within outward.
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Spiritual character lives in man; it is what God has
engraved on man's soul, ready for development through man's
spiritual efforts. It is a reserve force of organized
victory over carnality.
Man builds spiritual character by consciously functioning
in God-Mind, where, laying hold of spiritual ideas, through
Christ he realizes the Truth they contain; and as he thus
weaves them into his soul consciousness they become a part
of his very nature.
Our most effective prayers are those in which we rise above
all consciousness of time and space. In this state of mind
we automatically contact the Spirit of God. Indeed when we
elevate our consciousness to that of Jesus Christ, the God
presence becomes as meaningful to us as it was to Him. It
is in this state of at-one-ment that we truly become aware
of His sublimity and power.
"I go to prepare a place for you." By getting acquainted
with the one Mind as integral substance, we move with it
and it moves with us, and thus are established within us
new spiritual states of consciousness, a "place" where we
are aware of the God presence as reality.
Jesus said: "My Father is the husbandman." "I am the true
vine." "Ye are the branches." "As the branch cannot bear
fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither
can ye, except ye abide in me."
"Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh away:
and every branch that beareth fruit, he cleanseth it, that
it may bear more fruit."
In this scripture Jesus is revealing to us that
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through Him we are born anew, born of God, and that through
Him we may be consciously attached to God--as the branch is
attached to the tree--so that we may not wither and be cast
away.
Through Christ we are consciously attached to the parent
stem. It behooves us to retain this attachment so that we
may go forward in spiritual unfoldment and be crowned with
eternal life.
Many good people think that God is a person located in a
place in the skies called heaven. They pray to Him for what
they want and are satisfied. This is the prayer of the
primitive, personal man, and it meets his needs; but this
is not direct communion of the Father and the Son, the
communion with reference to which Jesus said, "I and the
Father are one." We must have this more intimate
acquaintanceship or communion with creative Mind if we are
in all ways to do His will.
God presence establishes us in ideas of honesty, strength,
intelligence, spiritual manhood, perfect womanhood, all
needed factors in the unfoldment of the redeemed man, all
builders of the indestructible body temple.
Thus we must understand the nature of the God to whom we
pray and awaken in ourselves that divine nature through
which we effect our union with God.
God is power: man is powerful. God is wisdom: man is wise.
God is substance: man is form and shape. God is love: man
is loving. God is life: man is the living. God is mind: man
is the thinker. God is truth: man is truthful.
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Many people pray to God in the same manner as they talk to
some distant friend over the telephone. We talk too much
about God, too much as though He were a third person in the
God-man relationship instead of the first. It is
unthinkable that the Creator should cause to exist a
creation so inferior to Himself as to remove it beyond the
pale of fellowship with Him. In his saner moments man knows
that this is not logical or true. It is man's exalted ideas
of God and his disparaging ideas of himself that have built
the mental wall that separates them.
In our prayers we must meet God face to face and realize
that we are getting that inner assurance which is the real
answer to our petitions.
A minister, after twenty years of faith preaching, once was
persuaded by a friend to try the Truth way of prayer, the
way of scientific silence. Afterwards he confessed that
when he touched God and found Him alive he was startled.
To Jesus the God presence was an abiding flame, a flame of
life, of life everlasting that He felt in every cell and
fiber of His being, making Him more and more alive,
cleansing and purifying until He became every whit perfect.
During our higher realizations of Truth we are often
conscious of this abiding flame working in us and through
us.
To Jesus God-Mind was a treasure field within Him in which
could be found the fulfillment of every need He could
possibly have. The Spirit of God in Him was constantly
working, yes, steadily
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and persistently working, to transmute every natural
impulse of mind and soul into a spiritual realization of
life. To Him the Spirit of God was working to satisfy His
inner craving with living substance and intelligence, thus
rounding out soul and body consciousness into the perfect
expression of Divine Mind itself. What a glorious
satisfaction God must feel in His perfect Son Jesus who
acknowledged His inner consciousness as one with, and as
consciously expressing, God's will and wisdom. God Spirit,
God-Mind, is not in any way confined or limited; it is
everywhere present. The "ether" of science corresponds to
"the kingdom of the heavens" taught by Jesus. Light and
other forms of radiant energy, the objective expression of
the invisible spiritual forces, compose an omnipresent
world more marvelous than the old-time heaven. All the
forces of modern scientific discovery are but parts of "the
kingdom of the heavens" described in the many parables of
Jesus. Science recognizes the physical phases of the
kingdom, ignores the mental, and utterly fails to
comprehend the spiritual.
The announcement of Jesus to the obtuse Nicodemus, "Ye must
be born anew," gives us a clue to the shortsightedness of
physicists. They have not developed the faculties of mind
necessary to the discernment of the spiritual intelligence
that moves the physical universe, consequently they see its
material aspects only. A new school of science must be
developed in which the mind of the Spirit will be given
first place.
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[Teach Us To Pray]
[Charles Fillmore's Works] [Unity on the Web Home Page]
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