Only your maximal effort builds a Foundation of Faith
Underlying topic(s):
- By John Eagles, April 20, 2001.
This page is part of an ERW course, Divine Principle.
To make a Foundation of Faith, to make the most important vertical relation to God, you must give 100 % of your efforts. How are you trying to reach God’s Ideal? How are you trying to fulfill the Foundations of Faith, Substance and to receive the Messiah? Are you doing this with a minimum of your effort or with maximal endeavor?
Only the maximal effort will build your Foundation of Faith. The minimal investment will not only fail to build your Foundation of Faith, it will actually destroy your faith.
This is understandable when we look at the motivations, both behind the minimal and the maximal effort.
God gave maximal effort in creating all
God created the whole world because God wanted to express to the fullest degree. God wanted to create God's children to give all God's love to. This was only possible when God created objects capable to fully receive His love. Those objects entirely able to receive God’s love are God’s children.
Human beings are God’s children and it is their destiny, the purpose for which they were created, to become like God.
The fall destroyed God’s children and since that tragic event God was motivated even more to recreate man than Godhad been to create Adam and Eve. God’s efforts, which already were 100 % in creating God's children, did not at all diminish after the fall. God is crying each day and giving everything of Himself to see more of His children come back to Him.
If we want to unite ourselves with God, which we do by making a Foundation of Faith or by putting ourselves right on the vertical axis on which we are directly connected to God, then we actually want to reach unity with God. By making a Foundation of Faith we attempt to have a direct relation of love with God. What we want to achieve is the highest degree of unity with God. And this is only possible when we do understand God’s heart. God’s heart is aching since the fall of His children. There is nothing that God wants more than that His children understand how much God is loving them. Once someone understands this deepest desire of God, he or she cannot else than to be like God, to give every second of time, to give all love, to devote each thought and feeling to help God to restore His ideal of love. When you do this, you are just like God, and you give yourself to a maximum degree. In that way, you become like God.
Only by giving the maximum of yourself, you can build a true Foundation of Faith.
Don't be calculating when you bring your offering of faith
Everything less than the maximum does not build a Foundation of Faith. There really is nothing in-between giving yourself maximally or giving yourself minimally. Some people try to find out what it is that God wants from them. They spend rather much effort to find out what God expects. And then they try to do exactly that what they think God is asking from them. They calculate the time that they invest and the money and all other kind of sacrifices they think they are making for God. When they have done so much that they think God expected from them, they bring their offering to God. Then such people can become very disappointed, if not frustrated and resentful and hating God, because God cannot accept their offering.
Are such people not just giving the minimal effort to God? The minimal investment is that you give to God just as much as you think God is expecting from you. Such people may spend a lot of time to find out what it is exactly that God wants from them. Such people will always fail their mission, again and again.
Why is that? Because they are trying to reach the maximum gain with a minimum of effort. And when you are like that, you will never be able to build a real Foundation of Faith. You will never become really like God. Because God tries to give the maximum and you are trying to get away with giving the minimum less than the maximum.
That shows that your motivation is not good. People who try to give the minimum are calculating how much they have to do so that God will be pleased with them. When you just are desiring that God is pleased with you, and you are not going beyond this, thinking of what God needs to get from you, then you are just plain self-centered. You try to do the minimum in order to get a maximum of blessing. To be like that, that is to be like Satan. Satan wasn’t thinking of what God needed, he wasn’t thinking from God’s point of view, but he was thinking what he, the archangel Lucifer wished for himself.
If you only want to give a minimum of effort to reach a maximum of result then you are centered on yourself. You are not considering God’s situation, but you only are thinking of your own situation.
Your heart closer to God
There is nothing in-between giving your maximum or giving only the minimal. The Foundation of Faith, which is the base for all further restoration and for realizing the Triune Ideal, will only be made if you give a real maximal effort. You have to give 100 % of what you can give.
Suppose that you really tried all you could, but you made no result at all. In that case, you will still build a Foundation of Faith as long as you are really sorry for God. I don’t mean that you just say sorry to God, but that you feel it deep in your heart. You are really sorry that you did not make result for God because you want so much that God is happy again. Then your relation to God will deepen and you have built on your Foundation of Faith.
Suppose that you did not really try everything you could, but for some reason you could make good results, which you offer to God. In that case, God will not be so pleased with you, and God cannot accept your offering just like that. You did not build on your Foundation of Faith in a meaningful way, because your heart did not come closer to God.
Give everything of yourself to God
It is the purpose of making a Foundation of Faith by bringing offerings to God that you come closer to God’s heart. You have to go through a period in which you really tried to be like God. You are like God only if you invested yourself fully. Your investment is most of all measured from the desire of your heart. Your investment is not first of all measured from the hours that you worked or did not sleep. It is not measured from the amount of money you sent. It is not measured from your external results first of all, but it is calculated based on how much desire and love for God there was in your heart during the entire period that you prepared your offering.
To try to fulfill your life of faith with a minimum of effort is not the right way. Only to give always everything of yourself to God is the way to make yourself come closer to God.
