About Faith: Does your faith protect you? Do you protect your faith?

Protection relates to faith in 2 ways: we are protected by our faith; at times our faith needs our protection. Our faith is what we rely on to feel, to enjoy that we are protected. At the same time, our focus/worry about what goes on in our day-to-day “reality” can cause dips in our faith, can cause our faith to need some protection of its own!

Click here to listen to this lesson.

How does faith protect us? First, faith in ourselves is our confidence that we can stand up and do what(ever) we have to do! Believing we have the strength, skill, energy, commitment to fulfill the task at hand is our self-faith. And it’s a good thing to have. Consider the power of believing

Faith in oneself  puts weight on one’s shoulders, however. It is a necessary thing to have, but it’s not easy. It requires continuous reminder of our “can do” ability. Even feeling greater faith in ourselves thanks to our faith in Spirit, that self-faith requires an effort!

Faith in spirit, on the other hand, let’s us rest. It’s almost like an escape clause in our living-this-daily-life contract. It allows us to rest spiritually (what else is there, really?) in the protection and love of Spirit. Consider the many phrases encouraging us.

That requires the faith to surrender, to surrender to the certainty of God’s protection. That can be a challenge. It even sounds like a contradiction that we want to hold on to our faith to give it up to God.

Unity offers the bridge between our human need to be able to do, to take action and our desire for spiritual faith. My definition of faith is the realization that the 5 Unity Principles are Truth.

The Five Principles are based on the Truth that God is the Supreme Power and Presence in our lives. We have the power, then, to act upon that faith by knowing we are co-creators of our reality, by communicating with Spirit through prayer, and by living the principles. In effect, the Principles are guidelines to growing and blending our spiritual faith and our faith in ourselves.

We build the faith, we live the faith. How, then, do we protect our faith? Do I hear you asking, “Do we really ever need to protect it?” I think so. Our attention to the human world we inhabit, the human tests and situations, pleasures and pains, successes and shortfalls definitely causes us to question our faith. That’s when I believe our faith needs protecting.

So, how?      (To listen to this lesson, click here.)

Eric Butterworth says we need to build our real awareness of God. Humans are the greatest concentration of Divine Energies: thinking allows us the power of knowing God, gives us the power and freedom to express the wisdom of Divine Mind. Such direct knowing is

to know that the whole of Spirit is present in Its entirety at every point in space and time
There is no distance between God and man. (Butterworth).

I love how Butterworth says Jesus is the Christopher Columbus of the soul. Jesus crossed the frontier of the mind and discovered a new world within Himself. He then demonstrated the wonder of the mind staying on God and realizing the mind is the bridge between what is humand and the Infinite.

We can cross the frontier of our minds by keeping in mind that it’s not so complex, not nearly as complex as we want to make it, not as complex as humans want this human world to be.  Here’s Butterworth’s view:

There are not really thousands of things to learn in life.

There is onlyone thing to learn:

to know the Knower within and to acknowledge Him in all our ways. (Butterworth)

He alludes to how we can know the Knower:

The highest form of prayer is not reaching for things but knowing allness. (Butterworth)

Prayer. Unity Principle #4. There is power in affirmative prayer, which we believe increases our awareness of God.

And when we know Allness, when we allow our consciousness ot realize the Allness is reality, we have no need for faith.

Posted on September 19, 2012 at 3:52 pm by Tim · Permalink
In: God, Oneness, Prayer, Spirituality, Unity Principles · Tagged with: , , , , ,