Chapter 4
CHRIST IN
YOU
Charles Fillmore
Keep a
True Lent
VOLTAIRE IS CREDITED
with saying that if there were no God,
men would invent one. The human
characteristics of the gods of all
religions betray their man-made origin.
Not discerning the real character of
God, man has thought of Him as acting
as man would if he were God. The result
is a God who is angry every day,
regrets that He made man, drowns the
whole human family, and condemns the
wicked to the eternal fire of hell if
they fail to ask His forgiveness. This
God of many of the religions of the day
is of such frightful mien that we find
it difficult to accept Him as the
loving Father that Jesus taught Him to
be.
Robert Ingersoll
paraphrased "An honest man is the
noblest work of God" to "An honest God
is the noblest work of man." He was not
so far wrong. All inventions are first
pictured in the mind of the inventor.
So we form a mental picture of
everything we conceive, and our
conception of God is no exception. We
do not see persons and things as we
think we see them. What we see is our
own conception of them.
We are forced by
intuition, logic, and manifest evidence
to the conclusion that the Creator of
the universe in which we live was and
is wise and good. This being true, we
cannot accept descriptions of Him or
His acts that contradict that primal
conclusion. When we read that "God is
angry with the wicked every day" we
question the understanding of the
writer, although the evidence would
tend to prove the
assumption.
Those who transgress
divine law suffer in various ways, and
it might well seem that an angry Being
is the executioner. However, we know
that even those who frame our civil
laws are not angry with the persons who
break them. Those who conceive of God
as a person will invest Him with
personal traits, some of which are
ridiculous.
We can all understand
that a creation which involves complex
relations must be governed by laws and
orderly acts. Those who get the right
conception of the creative source and
adjust their minds to its wisdom,
purity, power, love, and completeness
as the ideal source of perfect man are
rewarded by a serene peace and
confidence in the final supremacy of
justice and righteousness. God is good,
and He is the only real power in the
universe; consequently, perfection must
eventually establish itself in the
minds of the law-abiding people and
through them in the whole
world.
God-Mind presents its
perfect ideals to all minds, especially
to those that are open to the light of
the Christ, by whom the bonds of error
thought are broken. Those who have been
trained to think of God as a person, as
the parent of a family of billions can
continue to think of Him as such by
adding the attributes of unlimited
principle. But they should not make
their God a man with the limitations of
the human. The natural man thinks that
the world in which he lives is the real
world and that the thoughts he thinks
are the real thoughts. Those who expect
the second coming of Jesus look forward
to His appearance in a body of flesh
similar to the body that was crucified,
if not the same.
But Jesus at the
Ascension broke His physical organism
into its primal electrons or ions of
substance and life, which He sowed as a
body seed for all those who follow Him
in the regeneration. Thousands have
appropriated these seeds of the new
Christ body in the past nineteen
hundred years and are now in the
process of unfolding a redeemed
organism. No one has fully developed
the Christ body as it will appear when
mortal life has been replaced by
immortality. Many are experiencing
strange sensations that they or their
medical advisers do not understand.
These are the transforming elements of
the new life that they have
incorporated into their consciousness
in this or some other
incarnation.
The redemptive work that
Jesus began will require a long period
of time to be fulfilled. He told His
apostles that many things would happen
before the consummation of what He
called the "end of the age." This
phrase appears in the American Standard
Version of the New Testament as the
"end of the world," but is corrected in
the margin. This erroneous translation,
"the end of the world," has caused wave
after wave of fear to sweep over the
earth for hundreds of years, and many
ministers are still using it as a club
to scare people into
conversion.
Jesus never taught that
God would destroy the earth, but He did
teach that race evolution was being
carried forward in great periods or
ages, one of which was ending in His
time. Jesus said that no one knew the
duration of this age except the Father.
Paul doubtless had this in mind when he
wrote to the Colossians concerning "the
mystery which hath been hid for ages
and generations . . . which is Christ
in you, the hope of glory." Through
Christ we are unified with God and
become joint heirs with Jesus to all
the treasures of the kingdom of
heaven.
Every follower of Jesus
should strive for a better and fuller
understanding of the unity He made with
the Father, whereby He opened the way
for us to make the same unity and help
others to do likewise. People are no
longer herded into heaven by persons
preaching the fear of hell, but many
persons are sinking deeper and deeper
into the delusions of sense. The old
serpent is deceiving them with the
promise that they get pleasure out of
sensations of the flesh. We must preach
and teach and demonstrate that there is
health and happiness in the spiritual
life of Christ. The blood of Jesus does
save. We have a striking illustration
of the efficacy of human blood in the
restoration of life to our wounded
soldiers. The blood of the human family
has become corrupt, and the race body
is no longer vitalized sufficiently. It
has reached a point where an infusion
of purified blood is
imperative.
Jesus raised the blood
of His body to spiritual potency. This
purified blood was sown as seed in our
race thought and can be appropriated by
anyone who raises his thoughts to those
of Jesus. This is accomplished through
faith in Jesus to save one from sin, to
inspire one with His Spirit, or through
asking Jesus to come to the aid of the
sin-sick mind or suffering body. A
single atom of the purified blood of
Jesus can begin a vitalizing and
purifying work in mind and body that
will continue until the Christ man
appears. How long it will take to
transform the mortal into the immortal
no man can tell. We do know, however,
that once the mind receives the Christ
quickening it will continue to grow in
grace, incarnation after incarnation,
until the rejuvenating life has
overcome death and reincarnation is no
longer necessary.
The multitudes who still
labor under the logic of the
personal-God consciousness continue to
ask why God does not plainly reveal
Himself and destroy the Adversary, who
is leading so many astray.
Those who have for even
a short time given their thoughts to
the Christ Spirit can testify that it
has developed in them a new outlook on
life. Where before they were doubtful
and uncertain, they now have the
assurance of the presence of a power
that is helping them to better living
in every way. Christ has become a real
Comforter, working with them, rather
than a historical God-man in heaven.
Health and prosperity have replaced the
former fear of sickness and financial
worry.
How great is the need
for a metaphysical understanding of God
and His relation to man! Jesus taught
plainly that "God is Spirit." God is
not a sleight-of-hand performer who
makes full-grown animals instantly. God
gives Himself to man, and man has the
power to make himself what he will.
Freedom of will is man's inheritance,
and he can use that freedom to build or
destroy as he determines. Jesus claimed
that all authority was given to Him "in
heaven and on earth." What Jesus had,
we all have potentially. He developed
His powers and was the great example
for all of us. We can attain the same
unity with the Father-Mind that He
attained; and He promised us that He
will help us to reach this unity with
the Father. If suffering humanity could
appreciate the importance of this
stupendous invitation and accept it,
the world and its people would soon be
transformed.
