Chapter 26
ATONEMENT
Charles Fillmore
Dynamics For Living
WE HAVE been taught that Jesus died for us--as an atonement for our sins. By
human sense this belief has been materialized into a flesh-and-blood process, in
which the death of the body on the Cross played the important part. Herein has
the sense consciousness led us astray. That spiritual things must be spiritually
discerned seems to have escaped notice in forming the scheme of atonement. At
the root of the teaching is Truth.
Jesus of Nazareth played an important part in opening the way for every one
of us into the Father's kingdom. However, that way was not through His death on
the Cross, but through His overcoming death.
To comprehend the atonement requires a deeper insight into creative processes
than the average man and the average woman have attained; not because they lack
the ability to understand, but because they have submerged their thinking power
in a grosser thought stratum. So only those who study Being from the standpoint
of pure mind can ever understand the atonement and the part that Jesus played in
opening the way for humanity into the glory which was theirs before the world
was formed.
Overcoming
Jesus must have been the product of a former cycle of time, and He had
previously made the perfect union in the invisible with the Father.
In proportion as people understand and have faith in Jesus their actual
Savior from sin, and in proportion as they are set free from appetite, passion,
jealousy, prejudice, and all selfishness, they experience wholeness of mind and
body as the result.
The ultimate result of this knowledge and of daily practice in overcoming
will be a new race that will demonstrate eternal life--the lifting up of the
whole man, spirit, soul, and body--into the Christ consciousness of oneness with
the Father. This is indeed true glorification. By means of the reconciliation,
glorification, and at-one-ment that Jesus reestablished between God and man we
can regain our original estate as sons of God here upon earth.
Sanctification
When we have found our being in God, we are no longer identified with the
world; our interest is in spiritual things. Through our intense realization of
the eternal good and our unity with it we become so saturated with the thought
of good that we are impregnable to evil. Thus we find that the doctrine of
sanctification is based on Truth. It is possible for us to become so good in
purpose that everything we do will turn to good.
We must certainly sanctify ourself in Christ and persistently send forth the
word of purity and unselfishness to every faculty in order to demonstrate it.
The realization of divine unity is the highest that we can attain. This is
true glory, the blending and merging of the whole being into Divine Mind.
When a soul makes complete union with God-Mind there is always an outpouring
of the Holy Spirit upon it. This is true glorification, the acknowledgment by
the Father that the Son is indeed lifted up.
Realization means at-one-ment, completion, perfection, wholeness, repose,
resting in God. A realization of health brings to the consciousness an inner
knowing that the divine law has been fulfilled in thought and act. Then as man
lays hold of the indwelling Christ he is raised out of the Adam or dark
consciousness into the Christ consciousness. This at-one-ment with God brings a
lasting joy that cannot be taken away.
Christ Consciousness
Jesus was more than a man of Nazareth, more than any other man who ever lived
on the earth. He was more than man, as we understand the appellation in its
everyday use, because there came into His manhood a factor to which most men are
strangers. This factor was the Christ consciousness.
The unfoldment of this consciousness by Jesus made Him God incarnate, because
Christ is the Mind of God individualized. Whoever so loses his personality as to
be swallowed up in God become Christ Jesus or God-man.
We cannot separate Jesus Christ from God, or tell where man leaves off and
God begins in Him. To say that Jesus Christ was a man as we are men is not
correct, because He had dropped that personal consciousness by which we separate
ourselves into men and women. He was consciously one with the absolute principle
of Being. He had no consciousness separate from that Being, hence He was that
Being to all intents and purposes. He attained no more than is expected of each
of us.
It is all accomplished through the externalization of the Christ
consciousness, which is omnipresent and ever ready to manifest itself through us
as it did through Jesus.
Accomplishment
This principle has been perceived by the spiritually wise of every age. They
have not known how to externalize it and to make it an abiding state of
consciousness. Jesus accomplished this and His method is worthy of our adoption
because, as far as we know, it is the only method that has been successful. It
is set forth in the New Testament. Whoever adopts the life of purity and love
and power exemplified in the experiences of Jesus of Nazareth will in due course
attain the place that He attained.
The way to do this is the way Jesus did it. He acknowledged Himself to be the
Son of God. The attainment of the Christ consciousness calls for nothing less on
our part than a definite recognition of ourselves as sons of God right here and
now, regardless of appearances to the contrary. We know that we are sons of
God--then why not acknowledge it and proceed to take possession of our God
right? That is what Jesus did in the face of most adverse conditions. Conditions
today are not so stolidly material as they were in Jesus' time. People now know
more about themselves and their relation to God. They are familiar with thought
processes and how an idea held in mind will make itself manifest in the body and
in affairs; hence they take up this problem of spiritual realization under most
favorable conditions.
It must work out just as surely as a mathematical problem, because it is
under immutable law. The factors are all in our possession and the rule that was
demonstrated in one striking instance is before us. By following that rule and
doing, day by day, the work that comes to us, we shall surely put on Christ as
fully and completely as did Jesus of Nazareth.
Impersonal
Be thankful that God is no respecter of persons, that Truth cannot be
revealed by one mortal to another. God is a special, personal Father to every
one of His children, and from no other source can they get Truth.
Jesus Christ clearly revealed the Father in His consciousness. He points the
way. Believe and keep His sayings, and follow Him. By adopting His methods you
will find the same place in the Father that He found.
