Fellowship With God

It is impossible for us to live in fellowship with God without holiness in all the duties of life. These things act and react on each other.

Without a diligent and faithful obedience to the calls and claims of others upon us, our religious profession is simply dead. To disobey conscience when it points to relative duties irritates the whole temper, and quenches the first beginnings of devotion.

We cannot go from strife, breaches, and angry words, to God.

Selfishness, an imperious will, want of sympathy with the sufferings and sorrows of other men, neglect of charitable offices, suspicions, hard censures of those with whom our lot is cast, will miserably darken our own hearts, and hide the face of God from us.

H. E. MANNING

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Roland's Comment

It's amazing how some of the writers of long ago were able to say in a few words what would take others volumes. This author has it just right.

Conscience is what we wordlessly know in our heart. Most of us dismiss it, ignore it or doubt it. We are moved by emotion, and the emotions is excited by outside people or circumstances. We move like stimulus response animals, and afterwards we feel anxious. This anxiety is really guilt (a sense that we are not living rightly or that something is out of order). And guilt is our intuition, now coming back as twenty twenty hindsight.

If only we could realize that intuition is from God. He gives animals instincts. He gives humans intuition. Find, follow and trust your intuition, and it will lead you to safety and happiness.

Pavlov and all the behavioral scientist and those who study the arts of manipulating and controlling people treat us like stimulus response animals and use conditioning on us, because we are animals (as long as we ignore intuition and conscience).

But no sooner do we listen to what our conscience is trying to tell and then come back to God by a brief but heartfelt sorrow as we mourn our wrongs, then we are restored to fellowship with God.

Until this wonderful reconciliation, we ignore what God would like us to wordlessly sense in the first place; so we feel anxiety in the second place. Instead of realizing that it is because we didn't meet some moment rightly, and God is ever so gently making us aware of that fact--what do we do? We foolishly resent conscience, and we reach for a cigarette, a drink a pill, or some distraction to take away awareness.

The meditation we offer here at the Center For Common Sense Counseling helps people refind their intuition. But it is not for everyone. Only for those who hunger and thirst for truth, and who are willing to admit their wrongs.