Your own contribution to your own resurrection
Underlying topic(s):
- By John Eagles, August 8, 2006.
This page is part of an ERW course, Divine Principle.
How can you or how can i contribute to your or my own resurrection?
Resurrection is resurrection of the spirit. That we speak about 're'-surrection is to stress the fact that the spirit is not in the state it should be in. When there would not be obstructive forces in the universe, everyone's spirit would just grow normally like a tree that is treated well and has access to all necessary nutrients.
Some people believe they can grow by just consuming a lot of spiritual food. They do acquire much knowledge in that way, but will that make them grow in a healthy manner? Compare it to eating good food. What when you eat food all the time but you don't move your body, don't work out etc.? You get fat and ugly and will have a short life span.
It's like that with spiritual food. If you only try to get more knowledge, your spirit will not get resurrected. You might even get addicted to what is the spiritual equivalent of junk food. You consume knowledge but in reality that knowledge doesn't steer you to live a healthy spiritual life and will kill you in the end.
The key word for having a healthy spiritual life is 'faith.' The faith meant here is not faith in a particular religion or spiritual teaching. Original faith is faith in your own good relation to the Creator, it is faith in love and goodness, it is faith in yourself as a good being.
To have this kind of good faith is our own responsibility. When you loose this faith, you are lost. When you forgot to be a good person and when you forgot that you have a relation to your Source the Creator, your spirit will go down and come in need for resurrection. We all are in need of resurrection because we were not born in a good world. We were born as the outcome of a history of troubles and it is our task to elevate ourselves above that.
Faith is something that must be built up. You can destroy your faith or you can build it up. To destroy good faith can be done with one or a few wrong actions. After you made a big mistake, your faith goes down in a falling movement. To build it up, you need to invest yourself over longer time doing the right things. Faith cannot be built up in an instant, but you could lose it very quickly.
The question then is how to build up good faith. There are a few elements to build up a foundation of faith. The first element is you. There is a central person who must build up faith. This means that your faith is dependent on what you do. You can inherit some kind of faith by uniting in love with other people who have already built a foundation of faith, but eventually, to make your faith grow, you have to do it yourself.
What do you have to do to build up faith? This is what you have to find out. There are no general rules for this. Faith is your living relation to the Creator, to your own and deepest good core. You can't build up faith as if it were a kind of diploma for that you have to pass pre-described tests. You build up faith in your own personal course. Your course is different from that of everyone else's. So, your first task is then to find out what you must do, what you must accomplish as next step in your life. This you can only find out by yourself, as an individual, in deep meditation or prayer.
Once you know what you should do, you have to do it, whatever it is that you must do. What you must do is called 'the offering.' You offer yourself by giving yourself, sacrificing from yourself to God and for others. So you get a task and when you accomplish this task, it is called an offering.
This offering must be fulfilled over a certain time period. There are also numbers connected to your offering. For example, an offering could be that you should fast for three days, to prepare yourself for a task that comes after your fasting. Another offering could be that you should offer some of your money for people starving from hunger. Your offering could be that you should study a certain holy book, over a certain number of days. What you have to do should not be determined by yourself, but you yourself are responsible to find out what you should do.
If you make up your own mind about all this, you will be unable to do it from your original heart and your offering will not be connected to God. There will not take place resurrection. It may appear to you that you advance, but you are not really progressing because you made your offerings while disconnected from the Creator.
The central elements for building up faith are:
You yourself as the central person who must do it in relation to the Creator The offering that must be fulfilled A certain amount of time Specified numbers that must be fulfilled.
When you build up your foundation of faith, your spirit will gradually be resurrected. This process of resurrection is actually a process of recreation. Because recreation is essentially a creative process, time and numbers are involved, just like the original creation of everything takes time and numbers. For example, an unborn baby spends 40 weeks in the womb of the mother. A week means seven days. A day is defined by the circulation of the Earth around its axis.
