Chapter 26 – Atonement – Dynamics For Living

Chapter 26
ATONEMENT

Charles Fillmore
Dynamics For Living

WE HAVE been taught that Jesus died for us–as an atonement for our sins. By human sense this belief has been materialized into a flesh-and-blood process, in which the death of the body on the Cross played the important part. Herein has the sense consciousness led us astray. That spiritual things must be spiritually discerned seems to have escaped notice in forming the scheme of atonement. At the root of the teaching is Truth.

Jesus of Nazareth played an important part in opening the way for every one of us into the Father’s kingdom. However, that way was not through His death on the Cross, but through His overcoming death.

To comprehend the atonement requires a deeper insight into creative processes than the average man and the average woman have attained; not because they lack the ability to understand, but because they have submerged their thinking power in a grosser thought stratum. So only those who study Being from the standpoint of pure mind can ever understand the atonement and the part that Jesus played in opening the way for humanity into the glory which was theirs before the world was formed.

Overcoming

Jesus must have been the product of a former cycle of time, and He had previously made the perfect union in the invisible with the Father.

In proportion as people understand and have faith in Jesus their actual Savior from sin, and in proportion as they are set free from appetite, passion, jealousy, prejudice, and all selfishness, they experience wholeness of mind and body as the result.

The ultimate result of this knowledge and of daily practice in overcoming will be a new race that will demonstrate eternal life–the lifting up of the whole man, spirit, soul, and body–into the Christ consciousness of oneness with the Father. This is indeed true glorification. By means of the reconciliation, glorification, and at-one-ment that Jesus reestablished between God and man we can regain our original estate as sons of God here upon earth.

Sanctification

When we have found our being in God, we are no longer identified with the world; our interest is in spiritual things. Through our intense realization of the eternal good and our unity with it we become so saturated with the thought of good that we are impregnable to evil. Thus we find that the doctrine of sanctification is based on Truth. It is possible for us to become so good in purpose that everything we do will turn to good.

We must certainly sanctify ourself in Christ and persistently send forth the word of purity and unselfishness to every faculty in order to demonstrate it.

The realization of divine unity is the highest that we can attain. This is true glory, the blending and merging of the whole being into Divine Mind.

When a soul makes complete union with God-Mind there is always an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon it. This is true glorification, the acknowledgment by the Father that the Son is indeed lifted up.

Realization means at-one-ment, completion, perfection, wholeness, repose, resting in God. A realization of health brings to the consciousness an inner knowing that the divine law has been fulfilled in thought and act. Then as man lays hold of the indwelling Christ he is raised out of the Adam or dark consciousness into the Christ consciousness. This at-one-ment with God brings a lasting joy that cannot be taken away.

Christ Consciousness

Jesus was more than a man of Nazareth, more than any other man who ever lived on the earth. He was more than man, as we understand the appellation in its everyday use, because there came into His manhood a factor to which most men are strangers. This factor was the Christ consciousness.

The unfoldment of this consciousness by Jesus made Him God incarnate, because Christ is the Mind of God individualized. Whoever so loses his personality as to be swallowed up in God become Christ Jesus or God-man.

We cannot separate Jesus Christ from God, or tell where man leaves off and God begins in Him. To say that Jesus Christ was a man as we are men is not correct, because He had dropped that personal consciousness by which we separate ourselves into men and women. He was consciously one with the absolute principle of Being. He had no consciousness separate from that Being, hence He was that Being to all intents and purposes. He attained no more than is expected of each of us.

It is all accomplished through the externalization of the Christ consciousness, which is omnipresent and ever ready to manifest itself through us as it did through Jesus.

Accomplishment

This principle has been perceived by the spiritually wise of every age. They have not known how to externalize it and to make it an abiding state of consciousness. Jesus accomplished this and His method is worthy of our adoption because, as far as we know, it is the only method that has been successful. It is set forth in the New Testament. Whoever adopts the life of purity and love and power exemplified in the experiences of Jesus of Nazareth will in due course attain the place that He attained.

The way to do this is the way Jesus did it. He acknowledged Himself to be the Son of God. The attainment of the Christ consciousness calls for nothing less on our part than a definite recognition of ourselves as sons of God right here and now, regardless of appearances to the contrary. We know that we are sons of God–then why not acknowledge it and proceed to take possession of our God right? That is what Jesus did in the face of most adverse conditions. Conditions today are not so stolidly material as they were in Jesus’ time. People now know more about themselves and their relation to God. They are familiar with thought processes and how an idea held in mind will make itself manifest in the body and in affairs; hence they take up this problem of spiritual realization under most favorable conditions.

It must work out just as surely as a mathematical problem, because it is under immutable law. The factors are all in our possession and the rule that was demonstrated in one striking instance is before us. By following that rule and doing, day by day, the work that comes to us, we shall surely put on Christ as fully and completely as did Jesus of Nazareth.

Impersonal

Be thankful that God is no respecter of persons, that Truth cannot be revealed by one mortal to another. God is a special, personal Father to every one of His children, and from no other source can they get Truth.

Jesus Christ clearly revealed the Father in His consciousness. He points the way. Believe and keep His sayings, and follow Him. By adopting His methods you will find the same place in the Father that He found.

Chapter 27

* * * * *

Dynamics For Living by Charles Fillmore
Table of Contents

Copyright © 2007 - 2024 The Piscean-Aquarian Ministry for New Thought, and Respective Authors. Powered by WordPress & Romangie Theme.