THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Eight

THE GOD I KNOW

Chapter Eight

Free Agency and Prayer

It is against the law of free agency for the God I know to make our choices. They will not do it. Whenever we pray asking that God make a choice for us, the prayer is answered by allowing us to struggle until we can answer it for ourself. While God sees us as divine, They know we don’t see ourselves that way. They know the only way we will be able to see our divine natures is by using our free agency to choose what is carnal in us and what is divine – what we want to keep and what we want to discard. We can’t tap into God’s power with prayers which would rob us of our free agency or others of their free agency.

God will not answer the following type of prayer: “My school teacher and my Sunday School teacher are telling me two different things – which one should I believe?” or “I love both Richard and Tim -- which one should I marry?” or “Please make John under-stand me.”

These prayers would place on God the responsibility of making choices which determine the course of our lives. The purpose of mortality is to teach us the differences between good and evil. We learn those differences as we experience the consequences of our personal choices. If we could have learned the difference by simply asking God, there would have been no need for mortality.

At birth we are ignorant of both good and evil. Our environment introduces us to some of both, but does not necessarily differentiate accurately between truth and error, right and wrong. God’s gift of free agency gives us the right and the RESPONSIBILITY to be selective about what we accept and reject. If God chose for us, we would be robbed of the responsibility inherent in freedom. And we would not grow.

The only thing God can do, when we pray a prayer relinquishing our free agency, is let us struggle within ourself until we make a decision that is in harmony with our current knowledge. If most of our knowledge has to do with temporal, carnal understanding, we will be most comfortable making a choice that lets us abide the carnal laws upon which we are basing our decision. If our search for truth has drawn us into knowledge of divine wisdom, we will be more comfortable making a choice which allows us to abide those divine laws which we understand.

At any point of decision, if we make a carnal choice, we will be further away from God and from the truth of our divine nature. If we compromise two contradictory points of view so we can avoid changing, our knowledge will remain static. If we take a stand with our divine nature, God can confirm our choice as being harmonious with divine truth, and can endow us with a more sure knowledge of who we really are.

Choice and Change

Making a new choice will result in change, and changing is not easy.
Carnal man will try to avoid change until it is forced upon him, and then will resist it up to the point where accepting it becomes easier. Satan wins a lot of battles using these facts of carnal man’s laziness.

Divine man’s need, however, is to become – to be freed from the shackles that chain him to carnality – to grow and progress – to CHANGE from a lesser being to a greater being. The price he is required to pay for these changes is never too high, because with each new truth he embraces, he is freed to comprehend more truth. His decisions to change and his reasons for desiring change are continually based upon greater knowledge.

One of the most overwhelmingly humbling mysteries of the love of God is that it is God’s will for our divine will to be accomplished. In the infinite wisdom of God’s caring about each individual intelligence, God knows how to direct each of us to the fulfilling of his/her greatest potential. God knows what we need. The sooner we use our free agency to ask for help in ways They CAN help, the sooner we will reach our potential.

While it is fruitless for us to pray that God will make choices for us, it is vital to our becoming that we dare the possibility of change by choosing to pray prayers that will allow God to help us.

It is important to realize that if we don’t want to change, we will be left on our own. Satan will leave us alone because mortals are fallen and already in his domain. God will leave us alone because They honor our free agency. If we do want to change, if something inside us is not content with the status quo, we will certainly be subject to both forces.

Satan has no scruples about how he will influence us. He does not pay any attention to free agency. His methods are force and deceit. I’ve often wondered if Satan has our connections to God wire-tapped, because it seems that, if in our ignorance we pray prayers that ask God to ignore our free agency, Satan answers them with whatever response he sees as being potentially most destructive to our divine nature and most appealing to our carnal nature. We need to learn wisdom in how we pray and in how we listen for answers, so we will be able to discern whom our answers come from. Otherwise we may be deceived into thinking that good is evil and evil is good. Satan lets us imagine his answers are God’s answers. God continues to honor our freedom of choice, sincerely hoping that we will eventually be true to our divine nature and reach out in prayers which They can answer.

God can inspire us with answers to such prayers as: “Please help me understand more clearly Your concept of truth.” “What is the order of God?: How do you love me?” God can reinforce our divine self-confidence if we pray, “Help me to make this choice in harmony with Thy will.” “Please give me eyes that see, ears that hear and a heart that understands Your ways.” “Bless me with wisdom.” “Show me the way.”
Even when we are saying prayers which God can answer while still honoring our free agency, we may wonder whether the answers we receive come from God, or whether we are telling ourselves the answers we want to hear, or whether we are being deceived by Satan. These are valid concerns. God doesn’t often turn on flashing lights which announce “THIS IS GOD SPEAKING!” We must be alert to subtler forms of communication – a warmth in the heart, a surge of joy as an idea forms in our mind, a sensation of light flowing through us. If we believe that the Holy Ghost is our own divine nature, and if we are in tune with that spirit, we can trust that the answers which come from ourself are the same answers God would give. If we are principally in tune with our carnal nature, it is quite likely that we will be deceived both by Satan and by ourselves. Even in our prayers we will rationalize and blame, rather than taking responsibility for our own behavior.

Some of the biggest contradictions we face are created because our lack of knowledge causes us to believe that we have to somehow reconcile what we have personally experienced of the truth of God with what we have been told is true by fallen men. We don’t have to do that. We do have the responsibility to separate the evil from the good, reject the evil and embrace the good. When we can see a principle of God’s truth clearly enough to freely choose it, God quickens us with a confirmation of rightness which allows us to stand in a sure place of truth where Satan (or misguided men) have no more power to deceive us in that principle.

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Eight

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Seven

The Purification of Passion

The God I know is a being of great passion. Their love for each other and for us is alive and warm and exciting. The passion which flames in Them draws to itself all good, all beauty, all light, all truth, all joy – from which perfect ingredients They create Love-Energy. Because They see US as good and beautiful, They hold OUR beauty to Them-selves. Our goodness is always the living, passionate reality for God. Our evil, or carnality, as far as God is concerned, is a theatrical mask. Our lives in mortality are a drama which They watch through the passion of Their own deeply-felt laughter and tears, as They live with us the playing out of our lives through the passion of our laughter and tears.

As mortals in this drama we experience passion two contradictory ways. On the one hand, we feel passion as the motivation for our loving, worshipful, creative or otherwise constructive actions; and on the other hand, we feel passion as the motivation for our hateful, jealous, angry, greedy or otherwise destructive actions. We learn passions, both good and bad, from our environment. Our divine nature (which is our only nature at birth) responds positively to our good experiences. Our carnal nature develops as we respond with pain to bad experiences. We learn to feel negative passions by being hurt, and we instinctively turn against the people who have hurt us, not being able to separate the people from the deeds. It takes the healing of God before we can feel deep inside the knowledge that we are against evil, not against people.

Until we receive that gift from God, we justify our carnal passions and reconcile ourselves to the oppositional turmoil of envy, anger, jealousy, competition, greed, pride, etc. All these negatively passionate feelings can be categorized as “lust” – lust for power, fame, selfish pleasures, riches, sexual stimulation, revenge, etc. Lust becomes the all-encompassing negative passion. It is the opposite of Love, which is the all-encompassing positive passion.

If we would have our passions purified, so that they are harmonious with God’s passions, we must begin by learning the difference between divine man and carnal man, the difference between unselfishness and selfishness, and the difference between love and lust – which technically are the same differences.

Our carnal natures are completely selfish. Self-preservation is the first law of carnal man. To surive at whatever cost is his dominant instinct. This drive puts everyone else in the world in competition with ME, “Number One.” At the same time nobody wants to survive alone. Carnal man lusts after erotic pleasure with the opposite sex. The drive for sexual gratification is close to the survival drive in its intensity. Since both drives in the carnal man are entirely selfish, he is always in competition for supremacy with those he pretends to “love.” Carnal man is not capable of pure love. His behavior towards others is always motivated by the greedy attitude, “What’s in it for me?” The big need in his awareness is to satisfy Number One with the greatest degree of thrill and excitement, at the expense of whoever is available.

The more we choose to be carnal, the more sure it is that selfishness will dominate our relationships with others, and the more sure it is that what we feel for them will be lust, not love. Our selfish carnal natures feel more secure when others are less secure. Carnality precipitates quarrels, violence, cruelty, abuse and ugliness in our relationships, because we use others to meet our own selfish ends. We do not comprehend love.

It is the nature of our divine self to desire to be a contributing part of God’s creations. Our divine energy naturally radiates out to others; our divine heart cares about others; our divine yearning is to share with others and find happiness with them.

It is in our divine nature that we find the ability to keep Christ’s injunction to love God, ourselves and our neighbors. God is the Source of the Energy which is Love. In order for this energy to remain pure, it must flow in an unbroken circle – from God to Christ, through Christ to us, through us back to God. If we break the circle (God and Christ will NOT break it) the love is no longer pure.

As John said, (I John 4:19) “We love God because He (They) first loved us.” We learn to love purely by RECEIVING Their love, by opening the door of our divine nature and letting it in.

Receiving God’s love for us is the first step in loving ourselves purely. As God’s love pours through us, we are quickened with a light which enables us to see ourselves reflected in God’s eyes – to see ourselves as God sees us. We are able to love this image of ourselves with pure love. As we return the love to God with our gratitude, the circle remains whole, the love remains pure.

In order to love others purely, we will always remember to glorify God as the Source of Love and the purifier of our passions. When the person we love does this, the circle of love remains unbroken and the love relationship remains holy and in order. If he or she does not glorify God, the circle is broken for that person, but remains whole for us as long as we do acknowledge God’s power in our love.

In our divine natures we are all good, but we are not all the same. As we learn to know our own unique goodness by honestly separating what we desire to be from what we desire to reject, we can also see what is good in other people that we would like to be part of. Our own goodness increases as we come to know others and embrace their goodness. When we love people, we offer them our goodness. If they receive it, their own goodness is increased by our love, and our goodness is increased by their love.

All the righteous passions which we experience are felt through our divine natures. While carnal man can experience only counterfeits of love, divine man is aware of and responsive to real love, the pure love which comes from God. Much of the passion which we experience in mortality is a part of this love.

Because we have come to define passion in terms of the pain we have experienced as a result of the lusts of others and our own lusts, part of our carnal inheritance is to fear passion. Religious leaders have used this fear as another whip to force us into their prescribed molds, and have taught for centuries that we must suppress our emotions and bridle our passions. But passion, by God’s definition and in Their behavior, is the moving force of love; so one of the consequences of our fearing passion is that we also fear to love with honest feeling. When we are thus stripped of feeling, there is no power left in love. It becomes a valueless pretense, better defined as “pity for the less fortunate, and idol-worship for the more successful.” By God’s definition pity and idol-worship have nothing to do with pure love. Those feelings motivate us to do good deeds for our own satisfaction – to have our feet licked by the pitiable or our heads patted by the enviable. They are carnal satisfactions, but they are not love.

Another consequence of denying ourselves the power of our own feelings by suppressing our passions is that we become blind to the power of God’s feelings, and we see God and “worship” God as we are (hard-hearted), and not as God is (open-hearted). This mistake allows us to justify the lusts in our own passion, because we judge God to be jealous, vengeful and cruel, as we are. The God I know does not have any of those attributes. They stand passionately against jealousy, vengeance and cruelty.

We find ourselves in an unhappy dilemma with regard to our passions. Shall we bridle them or let them run free?

We ARE cursed with the selfish passions of lust as part of our inheritance in the fallen world. But at the same time we ARE BLESSED with an inheritance from God which is just the opposite, the unselfish passions of pure love. We have built into us the capacity and the need to truly love and to be loved unconditionally.

Now the truth of the God I know is that They passionately want for us all the good things of the earth. They want us to be able to feel all the joy of righteous passion and none of the destruction of unrighteous passion. This can happen through the process of purifica-tion – and God, dear God, provided a Savior through whom our passions can be purified.

Jesus Christ, too, loves us with great passion. It is this passion which moved Him to give His life for us. His experience in the Garden of Gethsemane was the passion of loving us so much that He deliberately chose to feel all the pain mankind suffers as consequence of sin. Therefore, Christ knows us inside and out. When we are feeling our own pain, when we are torn apart by our own imperfections, He is not ignorant of what we are going through. He knows our pain and our passion. He felt it in Gethsemane and He feels it with us as we are experiencing it. He has the power to use His passions perfectly and if we turn to Him, He can heal us. When we reach out to Christ in repentance (godly sorrow for our sins), He touches our hearts with perfect empathy and we are made whole.



It works this way: when we feel a carnal passion such as hatred (or any other negative passion) some of its force is directed toward the person we hate, so that he may – or may not, if he is insensitive – feel the discomfort of our hostility; most of its force, however, remains inside us as a poison which insidiously distorts our perceptions and works against US. We hurt others with unkind and unreasonable behavior. The more people we hurt, the more we hate. All the energy of our passion is used up in destruction.

When we turn to Christ, His love in us opens our eyes and our hearts to a clearer understanding of our divine nature, and enables us to recognize that we truly do not hate any person. We hate something evil which we are feeling through their behavior, or perhaps through our own behavior -- bigotry maybe, or arrogance, or cruelty, or selfishness, or blindness, or jealousy. The truth is that we want to reject the negative things which are brought to our attention by the ugly behavior of others (or ourself), and we want to take into ourself the positive things which are brought to our awareness by the beautiful behavior we witness.


The miracle occurs when we see clearly that we truly want to stand against evil -- in ourself and others; and we truly want to embrace good – in ourself and others. By the power of Christ’s passionate love for us, we are quickened to greater awareness of our divine nature, so that we are able to feel the energy of our passion as a constructive power. Instead of hating ourself or others, our passion will be directed against hatred itself, which is an unembodied evil. When by the grace of God we can feel to separate ourself from the hatred, it becomes impossible for us to hurt anyone with it. We reject it with the same impersonal rejection we would feel if a drug to which we were allergic were offered to us. We would simply know that it was something we could not tolerate, and it would become extinct in our consideration. It would be dead to us.

As soon as hatred becomes dead, all the passion we would have expended in keeping it alive, is freed and can be used constructively. We do not destroy hatred or lust or jealousy, etc. as God does not destroy evil. But it becomes non-existent as a feeling inside of us. The passion we do feel is love. We will stand with love and with God against hatred (or any other evil) because our feelings inside are alive with good and constructive passions.

Christ purifies our passions by the act of experiencing our feelings with us, taking them into Himself and returning them to us free from perversion. Our passions which would destroy are cleansed by His passionate love, and transformed into passions which build, uplift, create and heal. This is the miracle of purification.

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Six

The Ten Wisdom-Laden Counsels (Commandments?) of the God I Know

All of the laws of the God I know are laws of magnificent beauty and harmony. The God I know doesn’t command us to do anything. They give us wise counsel, which we have the freedom to use or reject. Since Moses came down off the mountain, however, his people started using the word commandment – and churches still use it as a means of judgment and control. The “Ten Commandments,” understood as God’s heart intended them, are words of grace and comfort.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

God’s meaning in this instruction is, “Nobody loves you as much as I do. Nobody in your mortal experience will be able to love you purely, because love has been perverted in the Fall. If you worship (depend on, trust, give your allegiance to) anyone except me, you will be hurt and disappointed. Nobody in the world will believe in your goodness as I do, nor see the beautiful person I see in you. I am the only one who can reveal your true self to you and bring you to peace and joy. Let me be your God, so I can do that for you.”

This law in our scriptures is preceded by a reminder of how God delivered the children of Israel from the Egyptians. Its implications, via man’s (Satan’s) perversions, indoctrinate us with the concept that: “God has used cruel and destructive powers to rescue us from the Egyptians – or the Romans or the slave-holders, or the Nazis, etc. If we don’t worship Him, He will turn on us with those same powers and destroy us. We must fear this jealous God.”

It is true that God is capable of performing what we call “miracles” (meaning we don’t know how they are accomplished). God has used unfathomable powers many times in the world’s history to keep a reasonable balance between good and evil, in order that we might have a fair chance. It is not true that God’s reason for coming to our rescue is so that They can be tyrants ruling over us or so that we will feel obligated to Them. Their reason is that They love us and want us to be free. Even as They perform miracles in our behalf, They give us the freedom to choose whether we will thank Them and acknow-ledge Their hand in our blessings, or ignore Them and take the glory to ourselves.

In this commandment the Lord is also saying, “Satan will tempt you as he did me, to worship the gods of his world – riches, fame and dictatorial power. He will promise them to you and he will deliver them to you, if you are willing to deny your divine nature and to embrace evil, lust, selfishness and carnality. Because I understand you, I know this choice will bring you pain and loneliness and grief. Let the power of my love protect you from the power of evil. Choose me to be your God.”



Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

God meant: “You are in the world experiencing opposition, separated from my physical presence. Sometimes in your loneliness and fear and lack of faith you will think to find comfort by making an image which you can see to worship. You will actually be searching for something to give you enough strength to continue your struggle. Anything you, a fallen mortal, can make for that purpose will be lifeless, empty and unable to give you what you need. The pure love of Christ is the only power which can help you. I, who am alive and caring and feeling, am the source of the love-energy which can quicken your inner being to be vibrantly alive and function with meaningful purpose. Do not waste your time with dead graven images. Come to me for life.”

Mortals have been made to feel: “God is very jealous. If you don’t worship Him and Him alone, He will punish you and your children and their children.” We know from experience that the sins of the parents are visited on the children. That is part of the fact of heredity and environment. It doesn’t happen because God is jealous or cruel. It happens because man is fallen and cannot prevent the passing on to his children of his own “idols.”

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

God meant: “My ability to help you is determined by your sincere desire for my help.
If you do not freely choose me with your heart, the words of your mouth, when you call upon my name, are to no avail. If you use my name synonymously with or to describe anything which is opposite to what I truly AM, you are negating the power of love in your own life and defeating yourself. Call upon me in love, so that in my response I will be able to let you feel the power of my love for you.”

Man has added to this simple law his own idea that: “God will find you guilty of sin and will punish you for swearing. He is vindictive and will make you pay a price for defiling His name.” God does not intend to punish us for taking His name in vain. He does not need to defend it. Our use of it cannot change what He-She IS. But how we use it determines whether or not They can be a power in our lives. It is a plain fact of which God is aware, that when we do take God’s name in vain, we are freely choosing to reject Them, for which we will suffer the consequence of Them being unable to be part of us.
It is as true for those who “pray” thoughtlessly using God’s name, as for those who blaspheme the name of God, that they cannot be recipients of the strength of God which is part of those who use God’s name with love and joy and reverence.

Keep the Sabbath day holy.

God meant: “It is hard for me to be separated from all of you whom I love, and to watch you working and struggling against opposition. I realize that the curse of Adam is hard to bear. One day in seven I would like to lift that curse for you and let you rest in my peace. Let’s spend that day together communing in the spirit, singing praises and rejoicing in our love for one another. I need to know you remember me, and you need the strength with which I can sustain you. Our closeness on the Sabbath will abide through the week, enhancing the beauty of our daily communications and making every day more holy.”

Fallen man has perverted this loving invitation into a burden by misinterpreting it too. We are told: “You are bad if you don’t go to church on Sunday, and you are bad if on Sunday you . . . “ and there is a long list of things for us to be afraid of doing, and an equally long list of penalties if we break these man-made rules. People become so guilt-ridden because they can’t keep all these rules, that they ignore the Sabbath day entirely, or else become so busily self-righteous in keeping the letter of the man-made laws that they cannot keep the spirit of love which God offers. One vicious-circle result of man’s perversion of this law is that even in church meetings, which are supposedly held to worship God and commune with Them, a great deal of time is spent condemning us for our sins and exhorting us to keep men’s laws or be punished. This pulls us even further away from the love of God and from the peaceful feeling which should hallow the Sabbath.

Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother

God gave this law with a double meaning. It means: “Remember the Father and Mother of your spirits, who love you with perfect unconditional love . . . and . . . remember the father and mother of your physical bodies who, because they are fallen, love you imper-fectly, but who gave you opportunity for mortal existence. They were each necessary to your becoming YOU, and so are part of you. If you acknowledge them with gratitude, your days will be happier and more filled with love.”

Here in mortality none of us has perfect parents. Parent-child relationships run the gamut from very good to very bad. In good relationships honoring our parents comes naturally. However, often our parents are responsible for much of the opposition in our lives, and it is hard for us to honor them in the sense of approving of and sustaining their imperfect-tions. That isn’t what God is suggesting we do. God understands that love begets love, and that it takes a special endowment from the Lord for us to be able to feel honest love
for our parents unless we feel honest love from them. God is asking us to respect our earthly father and mother as important people in our lives and to honor their right to be themselves. God knows that if we feel good about our parents, it is easier to feel good about ourselves. If we try to see their divine natures we will be able to accept them as valuable people and to appreciate the many positive contributions they make in our lives.

Thou Shalt Not Kill

God is saying, “Life is a sacred gift. Each person has the right to the full measure of his life. No person has the right to cut off life.” The God I know is also saying that we do not have the right to intentionally hurt each other in any way, but that we should tenderly protect all that is good and beautiful. So often in the world we thoughtlessly crush the enthusiasm of a child, or break someone’s heart by our selfish carelessness.
God is saying it is wrong to kill another’s hope or his faith or his sensitive spirit. It is wrong to do anything which would cause another person to become defensive and build up protective walls which hide his divine beauty.

Thou Shalt Not Steal.
Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness.
Thou Shalt Not Covet.

Put into the wording of the Law of Love, God is saying, “I give you all that I have because I love you, and it brings me joy. Do not take from each other, but give with love and you will be richer.
“I tell you only the truth, because I care about you and want you to trust me. Show each other that you care by telling the truth. This will engender trust, and trust will engender love and appreciation.
“I can see each one of you as a treasured and beautiful part of my experience. As I rejoice in your unique beauty, my life is enriched. Instead of coveting what is your neighbor’s, rejoice with him in it. This will bring you precious fulfillment.”

Since we became victims of the perversions which cause us to feel a need to compete with each other, many mortals have become ruthless in their “dog-eat-dog” tactics. Men have worded these laws defensively to protect us from each other’s carnal natures. If we were purified, we would automatically by nature be so concerned about one another’s comfort that these laws would be unnecessary. However, it is necessary under the Fall to have some deterrent to total selfishness. Because these laws are just, they have become part of the basis for those civil laws of men which are designed to protect our personal rights in the world.

Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.

God is really saying, “The ultimate love experience between a man and a woman is the holy of holies. It is the well-spring of life. It was, in your first experience with love, the power by which your Heavenly Father and Mother created your spiritual body. It is the power by which your earthly parents created your physical body. It is the power by which you may create bodies for other spirits of God. And it is the power by which it could be possible for you to create and people worlds of your own. Since in man-woman oneness is the key to continuance of life, inherent in this consummation is also the greatest responsibility in spiritual and physical relationships between men and women. Wherever you love, keeping this counsel will protect your love and will provide strength and power against evil. Outside of marriage, chastity will allow you to love freely with passionate response to the beauty of others and to their righteous needs. It will allow you to be of one heart and one mind with all whom you love. Within marriage, sexual fidelity will allow you to become bone of bone and flesh of flesh with one other person. That is the order of God. Love between a man and a woman is the most fragile of all powers, the most exquisitely beautiful, and the most easily twisted into opposition. Keep this sacred power pure by keeping its ultimate consummation in My order between husband and wife.”
God is telling us that Their own passionate love for us is, in us, a powerful force for good. Perverted by Satan to lust, it is a powerful force for evil. God is telling us that if we could refrain from adulterating the purity of love in any way, we would be free from lust and its evil consequences.

We have come to think of this “commandment” only in terms of committing sexual sin our of the order of marriage, and so we know it only as a restraining law. But to God, it has a much wider implication, a gloriously freeing concept. It encompasses Their desire that all love everywhere be allowed to be free from perversion, free from adulteration, free from having anything put into it that would make it less than perfect. It is a word of warning against hurting one another – but in a higher sense it is a word of hope in the possible reality of loving one another as God loves us – with peace and joy and perfect fulfillment, as we love in the order of God.

In God’s eyes, when a man and a woman take the vows of marriage, they are making a covenant to build together, by the complete joining of their energies, the perfect atmosphere (home) for the off-spring of their love. To God marriage is the ultimate relationship of creativity and responsibility, because it includes the life-renewing cycle. Therefore, until a man and woman are willing to make a commitment to one another which accepts all the responsibilities inherent in creating life, they do not have the right to unite sexually.

In the fallen world our best hope for giving our children an inheritance of security, love and happiness is in the context of marriage, with God as the acknowledged source of power.

TheGod I know understands that as we choose to keep sexual relations exclusive to marriage, all our relationships will have better possibility for fulfillment. The ultimate love experience between two people who are not married is the sharing of their unique intelligences and personalities. Their gift to one another is added light. If they err by lusting after one another’s bodies, they are caught in an insatiable trap where fulfillment is impossible and growth is damned. They miss knowing each other altogether and so are robbed of the light, love and joy with which their relationship could be radiantly alive.

If we could live the law “Thou shalt not commit adultery” as God understands it, we would have the freedom of loving each individual person in our lives with passionate closeness, as God loves us. We would be alive in love instead of afraid in lust. And we would also be eligible for the ultimate joy of complete fulfillment with one other person in holy marriage.

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Five

THE CONFLICT: DIVINE versus CARNAL

Even though Adam and Eve forgot their divine natures when they fell into mortality, God did not forget their divine natures. In fact, the God I know always and only sees us as divine. They see us as the beautiful, perfect individuals They created. Of course They recognize that we are living in a fallen state and that the reality of our existence is one of total opposition, but They see our carnal natures (the people we have become through heredity and environment) as part of the fallen world, not as part of us. They are aware of each of us as two separate people, the carnal and the divine; but in Their dealings with us, no matter how badly we behave, They continue to believe in the divine. Even though
our relationship with God is primarily carnal until we become aware of our own divinity, God’s relationship with us is always divine.

If we in our carnal weakness commit a sin, we may feel guilty and unworthy to ask God for anything, because we fear that God must surely be angry with us for sinning. The opposite is true. Rather than anger, God feels concern and empathy. They know that the reason for our sin is the curse of our carnality. They know we will sooner or later suffer painful consequences as a result of sinning, and They want to provide help, not punishment. They want to reinforce our divine self-image, so we will choose to let that be the reality which governs our behavior.

God understood all this in the planning stage of the world’s creation. They foresaw that we would need a way to transcend the evil inherent in mortality. They provided a Savior to fill that need. As has already been pointed out, Jesus Christ’s innate nature is to love, and His chosen purpose is to save us from evil. He is One with our Heavenly parents in that purpose – so much One that Christ can be included in the royal pronoun “They.”

In the beginning God the Father-Mother gave God the Son power over Satan in order to save God the Holy Ghost, and include us in Their Oneness.

Christ loves us so much that He voluntarily lived in mortality Himself, so that He could relate to our carnal feelings. He, by the power of His godliness, overcame the world. His suffering in Gethsemane was the passion of loving us so much that He felt the pain we feel when we sin. He died on the cross to cover those sins for us, so that we could be free from the pain of our own carnality if we accept His sacrifice. When we sin, God and Christ, instead of seeing our carnal nature which committed the crime, see our divine nature which is innocent of any crime. If we will let Him, if we will repent and turn to Him with knowledge that what we have done is against our divine desire, Christ can heal us from our guilt by letting us see ourselves at that moment as God sees us – free from sin, cleansed by His blood. He loves us that much. We worry about God forgiving us, when in truth God has not ever seen us as evil. God knows that what we need is to forgive ourselves. They know that nothing except the awareness of Their love can create in us that perfect peace which allows our divine nature to forgive our carnal nature. God wants us to feel that love. They are constantly pouring it out to us, hoping we will receive it.

While our reality in God’s eyes is our divine nature, we have to face the fact that our carnal natures are our own reality and Satan’s reality. Satan cannot see our divine natures. Everything he has to do with us relates only to our fallen natures, and so while most of the things he says are “true” in the sense of being the facts of the world we live in, they are opposite to God’s truth. Our carnal natures would do evil things. Our divine natures would not. Satan tries to reconcile us with our wickedness. God wants to assist us in believing in our own goodness. We are in the middle making the choices. We do have the free agency to decide whether we will be carnal or divine.

Unconditional Love and Free Agency

The God I know always loves us with unconditional love. That means that Their love is not dependent upon our behavior, but is an invariable constant. God is perfect. Their love is perfect. It is Their nature to love us and They are unchangeable in that nature. Nothing we can do, either good or bad, has any power to change God or to change the fact that the love They feel for each of us is a reality for Them. It is not always a reality for us because we do not always feel it. If it is our true desire to feel the love of God, we will be drawn by Them into the knowledge of the laws They live by, and into a renewing of our divine natures, so that it is possible for us to abide those laws.

The one law which God abides, and which we also abide because it is a fact of our existence, is the law of free agency. We do have to assume the responsibility of being free agents. That means that to be able to blame anyone except ourselves for the choices we make is a temporary comfort. Sooner or later the law of free agency demands that we acknowledge our own responsibility in the choosing of what we do, what we think, what we desire, who we become. Free agency requires that we decide which laws we will be obedient to, the carnal or the divine.

In mortality we were born into and do live in the presence of opposition under a carnal law, and it is our fallen nature to be obedient to laws which are contrary to God’s nature. These laws are sometimes called “survival instincts.” We are motivated to obey them by selfishness rather than by love. For this reason “natural (or fallen) man is an enemy to God.” Natural men are enemies to each other too. If we want to be friends with God and with each other, we have to be willing to live by the laws which are in harmony with God’s nature and with our own divine natures.

Because God knows we are facing opposition in the world, They especially want us to feel Their sustaining love and protection, and They try to give us the kind of help we need in every situation. As soon as mankind fell to the place where we were not in God’s presence and so could not always feel Their love, God came to our aid by offering us some concrete information about how we could feel Their love if we choose to. They gave us Heaven’s laws.

God does not require that we be obedient to these laws, but the law of free agency requires that we be obedient to our own eternal intelligence, our own “will.” If we go through the motions of being obedient to God against our own will, we are breaking the law of free agency and turning ourselves over to the manipulation of forces outside ourselves. The law God abides does not allow Them to manipulate us. It allows Them to open, when we knock of our own free will; to answer, when we ask of our own free will; and to help us find the good things which we of our own free will are seeking. The rules by which Satan functions are opposite to this. He is very anxious to manipulate us away from our true desires of heart and to force us to conform to his desires. It is his desire and function to corrupt God’s laws of love. When men believe Satan’s perversions, they
become the instruments of fighting against God.

How We Lost the True God

It is men, under the influential opposition of Satan, who have imposed on God negative attributes which make us fear “Him.” It is fallen man who has turned God’s offerings of truth and love into rigid laws with strict penalties. Ever since the fall of Adam, God’s communications to mankind have been added upon, taken away from, perverted and changed by the lies of Satan and the “wisdom of men,” until they are almost unrecognizable as far as what God really would say, and almost unusable because of the glaring contradictions. The people who are responsible for confusing us about the Word of God are often the so-called “believers” – the zealous church leaders, who demand to be able to measure our righteousness in order to be able to make a compensatory judgment of our wickedness. They take the beautiful, freeing, comforting gift of love offered by God – the spirit of the law – and break it up into separate little rigid cubicles of fear – the letter of the law. So in addition to facing the built-in opposition imposed by the carnal law, mankind is faced with the necessity of separating the truth of God’s divine laws from the world’s less-than-truth interpretations of them. Until we do this, we will either remain blind to the contradictions in what is called God’s law, and will worship a being who is less than God; or we will see the contradictions and be unable to worship at all a God of such confusion.

All the information God has offered us is perfect truth. When seen from God’s infinite perspective there are no contradictions in that truth. All of it fits harmoniously into God’s whole vast picture. Fallen man, with his very limited vision, had taken the eternal truths of the God I know and altered them to fit into the tiny little picture of his own fallen world.

To start with, man has changed the definitions of God’s words. For example, God’s definition of the word commandment would be “loving counsel which is in harmony with ultimate truth.: Man’s definition of commandment – “an authoritative order” – implies force, and immediately gives a false image of God. It makes God appear to be demanding and vindictive, which qualities are completely our of character for Them. It makes us feel forced into obedience or else condemned by guilt – both miserable options. God would not do that to us.

God wants us to be free. They have offered us Their Truth, ultimate truth, with no motivation except pure love, with no desire except to help us, with no strings attached. We are free to accept it or reject it. But we are not free to change it. Whenever we change it, dilute it, pervert it, corrupt it, misinterpret it, or otherwise misunderstand it, we limit our freedom and our power, by believing God to be less than They are.

Everything we believe which limits our free agency and which prevents us from seeing God clearly, also limits our ability to see our own divine natures and to be better, happier people.