Full dedication to the highest ideal
- This page is part of an ERW course: Building a better world.
- By John Eagles, September 14, 2009.
Many people are committed to the highest ideal as envisioned by the Creator and yet how difficult it is to engage our entire lives for it. What is holding us back? How can we not only inspire others but first of all ourselves?
I believe that eventually this comes down to having a good understanding of God's love for us. When we could only unite with God's love and vision for a beautiful future, we would be filled with ongoing inspiration. The Creator has been so patient in the work to make our lives good and beautiful. I am saying this not only as my personal conviction, but when we look around in nature, we can also see the beauty that God created. How good and great God is to have made such a magnificent world! This is a certainty that grows in us whenever we let ourselves be embraced by the grace of God's creation of nature.
Yet what we feel to be so true when we are having our moments of unity with God and nature seems to frequently disappear when we are distracted by and involved in human relations and affairs. It is in human society, small on a family level or also globally when we feel ourselves part of the human family, that we so often get frustrated and tend to lose our good hopes. We get easily overwhelmed by the many forms of human suffering that are around us, in wars, famines, corrupted segments of human society and other signs of despair and misery.
So how can we dedicate ourselves to the highest ideal that God has for us?
I can only speak here of my personal experiences and added to this my understanding of God's principles. Although it is essential that we understand God's suffering heart, that by itself will not pull us through the countless difficulties we have to overcome in order to build a more ideal world. Because this is how it is: as soon as we become involved in activities in human society, we cannot so easily feel anymore the deepest of God's heart. The reason for this, I believe, is that there is so much evil around us. It is the nature of evil to make our hearts cold and insensitive, it is the nature of evil to make us forget about God's love, it is the nature of evil even to give us feelings against God.
To establish God's ideal... that is a battle, a war that needs to be fought and won. It is a battle first of all in ourselves, in our own hearts, in order for us to keep our faith also under the most difficult of circumstances and under the most adverse conditions.
How do we grow strong faith in ourselves, not only in our best moments of inspiration, but also when we feel dry and depleted from motivation? At such times, we ought to go back to the most fundamental principle, that is how to build up faith in God. Faith is not just something that we get through the encouraging words of others or in our deepest prayers, it is something that we simply must build up. This is why we speak about 'foundation' of faith. A foundation is something that can be built up over time.
How is the foundation of faith built up? It is done by obeying God's will for our lives, over a certain time period. For this we absolutely need a personal relationship to the Creator. We need to be so open for God that we can hear God's voice so that we know what it is that we should do today, tomorrow and at all times. When we persevere in doing this, we can be certain that our faith will grow over time. Our strength and determination will increase as our faith grows. Then, even in hardest times of anguish, heartbreak and depression, we still will be able to hold on to the vision of God's ideal for a great and happy world.
