The Practical Power of Personal Faith 

Religious faith does not remove or destroy human troubles, but it does dissolve, absorb, illuminate, and transcend them. Faith – the positive leading of the indwelling divine presence – unfailingly enables the God-knowing person to bridge the gulf between intellectual logic and the heavenly Father of Jesus’ gospel, the personal God of love and human salvation. Genuine religion is the only way to achieve God-knowing. And faith-belief, or trust, is the cornerstone of such religion.

The profound experience of the reality of the divine indwelling forever transcends the crude materialistic technique of the physical sciences. Spiritual joy cannot be put under a microscope; love cannot be weighed in a balance; moral values cannot be measured; neither can the quality of spiritual worship be estimated.

Humans are educated by fact, ennobled by wisdom, and saved by religious faith. Faith leads to the recognition of the indwelling presence of God. There are three proofs of the presence of this spirit indwelling the human mind:

1. Humanitarian fellowship – love. The purely animal mind may be gregarious for self-protection, but only the spirit-indwelt intellect is unselfishly altruistic and unconditionally loving.
2. Interpretation of the universe – wisdom. Only the spirit-indwelt mind can comprehend that the universe is friendly to the individual.
3. Spiritual evaluation of life – worship. Only the spirit-indwelt person can realize the divine presence and seek to attain a fuller experience in and with this foretaste of divinity.

True religious worship is not a futile monologue of self-deception. Worship is a personal communion with that which is divinely real, with that which is the very source of reality. Humanity aspires by worship to be better and thereby eventually attains it.

The idealization and attempted service of truth, beauty, and goodness is not a substitute for genuine religious experience – spiritual reality. Psychology and idealism are not the equivalent of religious reality. The projections of the human intellect may originate false gods or gods in man’s image, but true God-consciousness does not have such an origin. God-consciousness is resident in the indwelling spirit.

God is not the mere invention of human idealism; he is the source of all such super-animal insights and values. God is not a hypothesis formulated to unify the human concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness; he is the personality of love from whom all of these universe manifestations are derived. The truth, beauty, and goodness of our world are unified by the increasing spirituality of the experience of mortals ascending toward divine realities. The unity of truth, beauty, and goodness can only be realized in the spiritual experience of the God-knowing personality.

Personal God-consciousness, or realizing God’s inner presence, is rooted in morality. But morality itself is not the cause of religious experience or the spiritual understanding that comes from it. The moral nature is more than animal and less than divine. Morality is the recognition of duty and realizing the existence of right and wrong. Morality is the foundation of faith.

The mind that evolves can learn about law, morals, and ethics, but the spirit that is given, the presence of God, shows the developing mind that makes the rules and is the source of everything that is true, beautiful, and good. And a religious faith that makes the mind so clear is emotionally ready to start the long and exciting search for God who lives inside and at the center of everything and everyone.

Morality is not necessarily spiritual; it may be wholly and purely human. But real religion enhances all moral values and makes them more meaningful. Morality without religion fails to reveal ultimate goodness, and it also fails to provide for the survival of even its own moral values. Religious faith provides for the enhancement, glorification, and assured survival of everything morality recognizes and approves.

Religion stands above science, art, philosophy, ethics, and morals, but not independent of them. They are all inextricably linked in human experience, personal and social. Religion is the supreme experience in the mortal nature, but the limitations of language make it forever impossible for theology ever adequately to depict real religious experience.

Religious insight possesses the power to turn defeat into higher desires and new determinations. Love is the highest motivation that we may utilize in our universe ascent. But love, divested of truth, beauty, and goodness, is only a sentiment, a philosophic distortion, a psychic illusion, a spiritual deception. Love must always be redefined on successive levels of spirit progression.Art results from man’s attempt to escape from the lack of beauty in his material environment; it is a gesture toward the heavenly level. Science is humanity’s effort to solve the apparent riddles of the material universe. Philosophy is an attempt at the unification of human experience. Religious faith is the supreme gesture, a magnificent reach for final reality, a determination to find God and to be like God.

In the realm of religious experience, spiritual possibility is potential reality; faith is not a psychic illusion. All of humanity’s universe romancing may not be fact, but much, very much, is truth.

Some humans believe they are too great and noble to descend to the low level of being merely successful. The true measure of a life's greatness is not found in conventional success but in transcending these standards to achieve a higher, more spiritual purpose The animal must adapt itself to the environment, but the religious person transcends his or her environment and escapes the limitations of the present material world through the insight of divine love. This concept of love generates in the soul an effort to find truth, beauty, and goodness; when a person finds them, he or she is glorified in their embrace, consumed with the desire to live them, to do righteousness.

God-consciousness is equivalent to integrating the self with the universe and on its highest levels of spiritual reality. Only the spirit content of any value is imperishable. That which is true, beautiful, and good will not perish in human experience. If faith is lost and a human chooses not to survive, then the indwelling fragment of God conserves those realities that were born of love and nurtured in service, and these things become a part of the Universal Father.

Do not be discouraged; the revelation of God to the world, in and through Jesus, shall not fail. The great challenge to modern people is to achieve better communication with the divine spirit that dwells within the human mind. Humanity’s greatest adventure in the flesh consists in the well-balanced and sane effort to advance the borders of self-consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of spirit-consciousness – contact with the divine presence. Jesus showed the way to experience the divine presence in every situation. He possessed the knowledge of actually being a child of God and achieved the goal we may all strive for – sustained and unbroken communion with God.