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Work for God (continued)
Salvation is the free gift of God, but those who are born of the spirit will immediately begin to show forth the fruits of the spirit in loving service to their fellow creatures. And the fruits of the divine spirit that are yielded in the lives of spirit-born and God-knowing mortals are: loving service, unselfish devotion, courageous loyalty, sincere fairness, enlightened honesty, undying hope, confiding trust, merciful ministry, unfailing goodness, forgiving tolerance, and enduring peace.
You may enter the kingdom as a child, but the Father requires that you grow up to the full stature of spiritual adulthood.
The Spirit of Truth
The first mission of the Spirit of Truth is to foster and personalize truth, for it is the comprehension of truth that constitutes the highest form of human liberty. Next, it is the purpose of this Spirit to destroy the believer's feeling of orphanhood.
The Spirit of Truth never creates a consciousness of himself, only a consciousness of Jesus, the Son.
The Spirit of Truth also came to help you to recall and understand the words of the Master as well as to illuminate and re-interpret his life on Earth.
Next the Spirit of Truth came to help the believer to witness to the realities of Jesus' teachings and his life as he lived it in the flesh and as he again lives it anew in the individual believer of each passing generation.
The Spirit of Truth equips the teachers of Jesus' new religion with spiritual weapons. They are to go out to conquer the world with unfailing forgiveness, matchless goodwill, and abounding love. They are equipped to overcome evil with good, to vanquish hate by love, to destroy fear with courageous and living faith in truth.
Post-Pentecost
Pentecost endowed mortal man with the capacity to forgive personal injuries, to keep sweet in the face of the gravest injustice, to remain unmoved in the face of appalling danger, and to challenge the evils of hate and anger by the fearless acts of love and forbearance.
Up to Pentecost, religion had revealed only mankind seeking for God. Since Pentecost, there shines out over the world the spectacle of God also seeking for mankind--and sending his Spirit to dwell within those whom he has found.
Before Pentecost, women had little or no spiritual standing in the tenets of the older religions. After Pentecost, women stood before God in equality with men. No longer can men presume to monopolize the ministry of religious service.
Before Pentecost, the apostles had given up much for Jesus. After Pentecost, they gave themselves to God, and the Father and Son responded, giving themselves to man by sending their Spirits to live within them.
The material spirit of selfishness has been swallowed up in this new spiritual bestowal of selflessness.
Jesus and revelation
Jesus lived a life which is a revelation of man submitted to the Father's will.
The religion of Jesus does not seek to escape this life--rather it provides the joy and peace of another and spiritual existence to ennoble the current life in the flesh.
Mankind has passed through the ravages of great and destructive wars from which there emerged but one victor--Jesus of Nazareth with his gospel of overcoming evil with good. The secret of a better civilization is bound up in the Master's teachings of the brotherhood of man, and the good will of love and mutual trust.
In Rome, Christianity came with refreshing comfort and liberating power to a spiritually hungry people whose language had no word for unselfishness.
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