Personal God

“ We are to consider this week the Christian faith that God is personal. Before, however, we deal with the arguments which may confirm our confidence in such a faith, or even with the explanations that may clarify our conception of its meaning, let us, in the daily readings, consider some of the familiar attitudes in every normal human life, that require God's personality for their fulfilment. Men have believed in a personal God because their own nature demanded it. ”

“ He shows the moral supremacy, even in this imperfect empirical world, of the perfectly good will, and He impresses those who see Him—see Him, I mean, with eyes that can penetrate through the temporal to the eternal and find His real nature—as being the supreme personal unveiling of God, as worthy to be our Leader, our Ideal Life, our typical personal Character, and strong enough in His infinite Grace and divine self-giving to convince us of the eternal co-operation of God with our struggling humanity, and to settle our Faith in the essential Saviourhood of God. ”

“ God has provided everything that the life of man may desire. There are heavens for the senses and heavens for the soul; there are heavens that the eye can see and the person enjoy, and there are heavens that only the soul can discern while on the mountain tops of its own exalted divinity. And everywhere there is God giving His personal thought to every human desire or need.
God is not a personality, but He is personal to every personality in existence. ”

“ This can be accomplished by identifying oneself with the transcendental absolute that resides deep in one's self or displacing interest and affection towards the personal God that feels as an entity different to our own. ”

“ Living in the highest Goodness, the supreme Perfection, their sole object was to uplift mankind by manifesting that Goodness in thought, word, and deed. They stand between man the personal and God the impersonal, and serve as exemplary types for the salvation of self-enslaved mankind. ”

“ Personal affections, immediate obligations, ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and essential things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us ”

“ In Him there comes to focus in a Life that we can love and appreciate a personal character which impresses us as being absolutely good, and as being in its inexhaustible depth of Love and Grace worthy to be taken as the revelation of the true nature of the God whom all human hearts long for. ”

“ The sense of personal responsibility to God is one of the highest manifestations of Christian life, and implies a recognition of God as a personality, as a moral governor whose eye is everywhere, and whose commands are absolute. ”

“ But, on the other hand, for a man to face himself, to excite himself to a consciousness of his own individuality, and to a fulfilment of his own personal obligation to God, is the way to a peaceful and happy life. The Scripture uses a notable expression when describing the return of the prodigal: "He came to himself;" and in our ordinary language, when we wish to express the idea of a man's seriously reflecting on his destiny and duty, we say he enters into himself. ”

“ The fact of ethical interest from which we must proceed is that man, in virtue of his spiritual nature, is akin to God, and participates in the three great elements of the divine Personality—thought, love and will. [15] Personality has been called 'the culminating fact of the {62} universe.' And it is the task of man to realise his true personality—to fulfil the law of his highest self. In this work he has to harmonise and bring to the unity of his personal life, by means of one dominating force, the various elements of his nature—his sensuous, emotional, and rational powers. ”

“ Having no starting-point, Mind can never be in bonds, or be fully manifested through personality. God is individual, not personal; to be omnipresent, God must fill universal space. To conceive of such personality is impossible. ”

“ though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world. ”

“ Man's Personal Separateness from God.—The sense of the value of the person cannot admit for a moment such a one-sided emphasis upon a universal cosmic evolution, or upon the immanence of God, as should make impossible a true personality in man. ”

“ Here the moral and spiritual character has to be built up slowly, painfully, laboriously, throughout all the various stages and circumstances of life, with their endless combinations of pleasure and pain, trouble and temptation, inner and outer help and hindrance, success and failure. Here the simply Individual is transformed into the truly Personal only by the successive sacrifice of the lower, of the merely animal and impoverishingly selfish self, with the help of God’s constant prevenient, concomitant, and subsequent grace. ”

“ Every clew which leads us to God shows Him to us as a spiritual and social Being—in no sense solitary and self-sufficient. Our own self-consciousness, our own ideals, our passion for the unrealized, imply and involve more than an impersonal energy at the heart of things. There must be a spiritual matrix for this living, throbbing, growing [25] social organism in which personal life is formed. Our own experience carries in itself the implication of a genuinely spiritual Person at the heart of the universe of whom we all partake. ”

“ He, nearest of the near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body and my soul.—I am Thee and Thou art Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that already. Every good thought which you think or act upon is simply tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God behind, manifests itself—the eternal Subject of everything, the eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it were, a lower step, a degradation. ”

“ If He is our centre and our goal, then be sure our Ego will begin to live, because it is 'grounded' and rooted in His. Any trouble and anxiety that leads you out of self to the Infinite Ego, that makes you feel helpless and lonely and in need of a Human Helper and a Human Comforter, thank God for it. He is teaching you to cast yourself upon One who is perfectly human because perfectly divine. ”

“ Having sought for the divine personality in all the external objects of the world around him in the end he learns, what was the truth from the beginning,—that it is in his heart he has access to his God. ”

“ We therefore say to the moral individual: “This your act, in so far as you meant it, that is, in so far as it expressed your striving toward your goal, is an embodiment of your freedom, and, in so far, nobody in the whole universe of God besides yourself is responsible for it, is expressed in it, or is to be judged for it. In so far, your acts show what you are. Viewed with reference to your goal, they are part of you. In the long run, what they are, you are; and no will besides your own, no Divine choice beyond yourself, determines what, in the most individual aspect of your being, you are.” ”

“ And the greater we are in ourselves, the more godlike, the intenser our rightful self-love, so much the farther shall we stretch out beyond ourselves with an all-enfolding charity. For God's love has well been described as a sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is at infinity or nowhere. ”

“ But God has no need to kill a man in order to draw him to Himself, for God Himself is the Life. He is at once the centre and circumference of being. The good we think and do, the virtue we call manhood, — these qualities are real, and reflect God. ”

“ This was some time before his sufferings in the garden. But while we admire his outward beauty as man, what vast beauty possessed his mind—wisdom, prudence, chastity, holiness, zeal, understanding, faith, hope, love, and joy; in the principle—mercy, commiseration, pity, affection, patience, gratitude, and fidelity. Look at his actions, and they all correspond with the holy principles of his mind, and this holy nature was the image of God, the exemplar pattern and likeness of the new man of grace in the souls of God’s children ”

“ Here we behold Him in the most intimate and vital relation to mankind; clothed in our frail, finite and perverted humanity; Himself a man among men; yet, as to his internal, the supreme and only God. Here we behold Him in a form that we can approach and understand, and that our affections can lay hold on. ”

“ Nothing, one would think, should be more powerful with us to convince us that there is a God, and to engage us to seek his honour and glory in our services, and to seek our happiness in his favour and love, than the consideration of our own nature, especially the noble powers and faculties of our own souls. ”

“ And shall we not fall upon our faces before God, and make confession, and get down on our knees under the burden of the terrible load, and say, "I know I am a believer, but I am not living as I should to the glory of my God. I am under the power of the flesh and all the self-confidence, and self-will, and self-pleasing that marks my life." ”

“ It is in man, able to choose what is morally good, able to resist temptation, to make sacrifices for worthy ends, to determine his own character; it is in man, whose own will is his law, and who is not the mere mechanical agent of [159] another's will, that God finds a worthy temple for Himself. Through you God can express and reveal what is best in Himself. Your love is sustained by His, and reveals His. Your approval of what is pure and hatred of impurity has its source in His holiness, and by transforming you into His own image He discloses Himself as truly dwelling and living within you. ”

“ Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned.—1 Tim. 1:5. There is no better way of convincing a man than by appealing to his own conscience. There, as in a glass, we may read our duty much more plainly than ten thousand teachers can instruct us. We have already shown that it is a point of natural equity to love God above all things, and that he who does otherwise, sets himself up as his own idol. ”

“ Soul becomes pregnant by the Soul of souls And brings forth Christ; Not that Christ Who walked on land and sea, But that Christ Who is above space.
162 The work of man in this world is to polish his soul from the rust of concupiscence and self-love, till, like a clear mirror, it reflects God. To this end he must bear patiently the discipline appointed:—
If thou takest offence at every rub, How wilt thou become a polished mirror? ”

“ In worshipping God we worship ourselves, and in worshipping ourselves we worship God. The real self is within us, the essence of the Ego is divine. We clothe it in the rags of flesh and of fleshly desires, until the divine self is hid ”

“ First, it is essential that God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he must be conceived under the form of a mental personality. The personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being all good and righteous things. ”

“ Cannot you take this trial also into your own heart, and be ignorant, not because you are obliged, but because that being God's will, it is yours also? Do you not see that a person who truly loves is one with the Infinite Being—cannot be uncomfortable or unhappy? It is that which is that he wills and desires and holds best of all to be. To know God is utterly to sacrifice self. ”

“ As long as you follow His gentle leadings, and the pure impulses of your own heart, all will be well. But as soon as you begin to take counsel of the world and its self-seeking spirit, you will find yourself in trouble. If we wish to prosper and be happy in God's world, we must do His will. ”

“ Enter in His grave into the rest from self and its work -- the rest of God. With Christ, who committed His spirit into the Father's hands, humble thyself and descend each day into that perfect, helpless dependence upon God. God will raise thee up and exalt thee. ”

“ By as much as this theory of despair is suited to atrophy all nerve for the ethical task, and sink personality from its true intended elevation of divine fellowship and excellence into the inanity of unconscious being, by so much does the Christian truth of the assured success and victory of right and goodness in the advancing kingdom of God's grace and eternal love, exalting the worth and force of personality to the highest, inspire and sustain the moral endeavor. ”

“ These names are often borne by men who are destitute of the qualifications and feelings proper to the relationships which they express, but when any one of them is applied to God it is applied to one who combines within Himself all those attributes of character in perfection which ought to be possessed in some degree by men who are called by these names. The righteous man’s refuge, then, is a Living Personality—a Self-existent and Eternal King and Father, infinite in power, in wisdom, and in tenderness. ”

“ People sometimes seek to deny such attributes as are connoted by the word 'Personality' in the Godhead—they [ 384] say it is a human conception. Certainly it is a human conception; it is through humanity that it has been revealed. Why seek to deny it? God transcends personality, objectors say. By all means: transcends all our conceptions infinitely, transcends every revelation which has ever been vouchsafed ”

“ And this is the second sin I promised in the beginning of my sermon to speak on: but the time, and your other occasions will not permit. There is a natural self-love, and a divine self-love, and a sinful self-love. This sinful self-love is, when we make ourselves the last end of all our actions, when we so love ourselves, as to love no man but ourselves, according to the proverb, "Every man for himself." When we pretend God and His glory, and the common good, but intend ourselves, and our own private gain and interest; when we serve God upon politic designs. ”