Across the ages, as He did in the Garden of Eden, God still calls out to man, "Where are you, Adam?"  Man, with the help of the dogmas of Western Christianity, has lost his way, and sees himself totally separated from God because Western Christianity through the Roman Catholic Church stressed "fallen" man, with Jesus dying for our sins on the cross.  The churches have not explained our potential as "gods", with our God-given creative power, and how necessary it is for us to be under the guidance of the Holy Spirit of God when we use this power.  Quoting Psalms 82:6, Jesus asked, "Is it not written in your law, I said, you are gods?" St. Irenaeus, a famous early Christian leader stated that God became a human being in order that human beings might become God.  I would change what he said only to the degree that I would say that Jesus showed us the God that God, our Father created us to be.

Instead the churches lead us to believe that the church was given the authority to decide who was going to heaven, and that those who didn't join their particular denomination were going to hell. This is incongruous with the teachings of Jesus, the Christ, who told us the tale of the Prodigal Son not only to help us understand the love and forgiveness of God but to help us understand that the Prodigal Son is the cosmic tale of each and every human being.  We have all forgotten that we are sons and daughters of the most high God; that our spiritual side, the soul of man, needs to return to have total fellowship with the Father. To do this we have to come to ourselves and realize that in this human plane of existence, our human, selfish side has led us down the road of materialism and of living only for ourselves, which caused us to turn away from our Father and our divine destiny and forget who we are.  It caused our spiritual death.

Jesus went on the cross to show us that we must die to this human egotistical side in order to let the soul of man, which has carried the knowledge of who it is and from whence it came, come to life and into control.

This is our Ultimate Destiny, to reach out and begin to communicate with the Christ, so that He can lead us back to being alive (i.e. into that perfect union with our Father) and let Him pass His love and thinking through us to one another.  We must come to know the living resurrected Christ within us, and depend on passing His love to one another and to God, because our human love isn't enough.  When we recognize this truth, then, like the Prodigal Son Jesus told about, we will have "come to ourself"; that is, we will come alive, and will decide to go home, for we will know that even being a servant in our Father's household is better than being dead spiritually, the way we have been living.

Then, with the Christ, the Holy Spirit and our Father  -  all of us joined together  -  we shall be helping to create a universe and no long a diverse.

This is what I believe Jesus meant when He said, "And I shall draw all humanity to myself, when I am lifted up from the Earth."  Christ showed us that He had to go through the death of His physical self in order for the resurrection of His spiritual self to take place. I think that His death on the cross also symbolized that we must realize we are dead before we can be raised up by the resurrected Christ within us.  I find it hard to believe that in our present state of spiritual death we can conquer our self-centered lower physical nature without going through the death and surrender of our will as did Jesus on the cross.  I can say from the Risen Christ's having conducted me through four realms of life after death, that in the highest realm, He showed me beings who had followed His teachings and were now resurrected into spiritual beings who were like Him when it came to the love, light and life they put forth.

I believe Jesus did not incarnate just to die for our sins, but that He also lived and died to show all of humanity, regardless of race, creed, or color, how much God our Father loved us.  He expects us to do the same thing.  When we come to realize this, then He will truly be lifted up for we shall be keeping the great commandment:  "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.  Love your neighbor as yourself."

Our destiny is not only to come to know and rise above our human side, but, by following His example of dying to self, to come to know and activate, or bring to life, our spiritual side, which He showed was in every man, woman, and child.  He showed us how to die to self and how to rise from the dead and ascend into our higher self, life.

I'm not saying that we have to make a sacrificial death on a cross as Jesus did.  I am saying that we have to reach the place where we are willing to face the death of our self-centered nature so that our higher spiritual nature can gain control.  I believe that being willing to follow such a total surrender to God's Will will bring about a resurrection and ascension of the transformed self, which can change a world into a heaven on earth.  He started this transformation first in Himself to show what can happen to all who would follow Him. It changed Him and all who followed Him because He surrendered His will to God our Father, who, He showed, is pure LOVE.  Our destiny is to do the same thing in order to survive and change our world.  His commission wasn't just to teach and show us how to reach the highest realm, heaven, but rather how to create heaven on earth.

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