Meditate | In and Out of Control

Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments or even your own article. Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor

Now when He concluded all His sayings in the hearing of the people, He entered Capernaum. And a certain centurion’s servant, who was dear to him, was sick and ready to die. So when he heard about Jesus, he sent elders of the Jews to Him, pleading with Him to come and heal his servant. And when they came to Jesus, they begged Him earnestly, saying that the one for whom He should do this was deserving, “for he loves our nation, and has built us a synagogue.”

Then Jesus went with them. And when He was already not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to Him, saying to Him, “Lord, do not trouble Yourself, for I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof.  Therefore I did not even think myself worthy to come to You. But say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man placed under authority, having soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

When Jesus heard these things, He marveled at him, and turned around and said to the crowd that followed Him, “I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel!” And those who were sent, returning to the house, found the servant well who had been sick. (Luke 7:1-10)

I have been working on trusting the Lord in my life and contemplating the place of control. What strikes me in the story of the centurion’s servant is how the centurion trusts in the Lord’s power because he has experience being in power himself. And it is this faith that the Lord praises for its greatness.

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Meditate | Who's Watching? Finding Access to the Lord

Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments or even your own article. Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor

The term ‘intermediate self’ is used because the heavenly and spiritual traits in us, which belong to the Lord alone, supply us with an internal self, as shown earlier. Our rational processes, on the other hand, supply us with an intermediate self, or one midway between internal and external. And our responses to goodness, and the facts in our memory, create an external self for us…

The reason that reproducing and multiplying have to do with the intermediate self—the rational self—is that we do not feel the operation of the internal self except in a very general way, at that intermediate level. A single general impression or even a comprehensive general impression is created in our intermediate self by a boundless number of individual components. Just how far beyond counting they are, what they are like, and how they create a dim, general impression can be seen from the demonstration offered earlier at §545. (Secrets of Heaven 1015)

Going with the language of the passages quoted, if I’m having good thoughts, true ideas or good feelings, that’s not me experiencing the internal self—that’s me receiving influx from it into my intermediate self. This is a revelation to me, that if I’m feeling these things, then the goodness and truth that live in the internal self actually have already made the trip to my intermediate self! The connection is there and open or I wouldn’t be feeling those things. That’s a comforting thought.

Let me draw you a scene: We’re at our little, wooden dinner table. There are toys strewn about on the wooden floor. It’s dinner time. The sun has set in the cold winter sky and the shades are drawn in our warm dining room. We’re all hungry and just sitting down to the meal at hand. Kids are yelling, melting down, and I’m grumpy, bursting with short-tempered directives, all the while having negative thoughts about myself and the situation because of it. Hit pause. Take a step back, a step deeper within my mind—who’s noticing all this going on?

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Meditate | Belly to Belly

Over the course of these meditations, which are the meat of this column, the presence of the Lord in my heart has been a recurring idea. My awareness of the complexity of this idea has deepened over the course of my regular meditation practice reading Secrets of Heaven and writing these posts. This week’s passage and the meditation and insights that followed my reading of it have been a pivotal part in this process and are what you read below.  

“When the earliest people (whose nature was heavenly) spoke of a snake, they meant watchfulness. They also meant the sensory level of the mind, which enabled them to watch out for any evil that might otherwise hurt them… Something similar was meant by the bronze snake lifted up in the wilderness [Numbers 21:9]. It symbolized the sensory level in the Lord—the only heavenly person and the only being who watches over and provides for everything. That is why people who looked on the bronze snake were saved” (Secrets of Heaven 197).

 The Lord in my heart—as my heart, my will—is an entire person; a person with all the levels a person has—a complete human, the complete human. So I can let go of my “levels” and adopt His on all parts of myself—the sensory level included! I can look to the Lord for protection from evil and provision of all things!

The idea of the Lord as a human being has never felt so essential, so present, so purposeful and intimate as it does now.

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