HELPING OTHERS
INSTEAD of thinking of the people whom you have believed to be evil and an undesirable influence, begin to think of the goodness of God in the life of all His children. Think of God as everywhere present light, and love, and peace, and power, and life. Think of all men, all women, all children as ever abiding in His presence and expressing His qualities. As you do this, you will touch the reality of individuals, and you will invite only the best from them. Spirit will respond as you expect it to, for the Spirit of God is in each and every person. Some persons have not yet wakened to this realization; but as you declare the Truth for them and expect to have it express through them toward you, you will receive only loving and considerate treatment from them. As you read these explanations of the way in which a soul may lay hold of its inheritance from God and exercise its God-given freedom in the endeavor to develop and use its powers, pray for more light to enable you to see just how precious these individuals are and how important it is that we all have freedom to correct our mistakes.
The best way to help your brother is to pray for him to be spiritually illumined. Then if he has come to a place in his soul development where he is ready to accept Truth, he will have the understanding and desire to seek the indwelling Christ.
It is never wise to try to force Truth upon anyone. Place your brother “lovingly in the hands of the Father,” and know that his own indwelling Lord will take care of him until he is open and receptive to ideas of Truth.
You are good, yes. But it is a negative goodness. You haven’t realized your powers and made positive and purposeful use of them. You have been made to feel that nonresistance, and righteousness, and Christianity, and loving service are all passive. You have allowed your personal ideas of love and good will to make you too sympathetic and inclined to give, without seeking and asking for wisdom and good judgment to direct you.
Now while it is a virtue to be always ready to help others, we must be sure that we are truly helping them, and not hindering them by allowing them to continue in the unwise habits that have brought them to lack.
The greatest help is to be able to show others how they may help themselves and become self-supporting and resourceful. Study and prayer, along the lines of the Unity literature, will give you the knowledge and power really to help others to understand and bring forth their prosperity.
You have a store. Have you taken God into partnership with you? Do you start every day with quiet, purposeful communion with God? Do you really ask God to show you just what to do in each and every transaction?
Do you bless your store—the room, the stock of goods, the accounts, the customers, the salespeople? Do you fill the atmosphere with thoughts and words of love and wisdom and prosperity?
Do you demand of others that which you demand of yourself, that they use good judgment, and self-denial when necessary? Do you make them understand that God prospers those who do their part; and that you expect them to do their part to pay their bills, so that you can pay yours and go on with the store, the service you feel led to offer?
Or do you think of the sickness, and the poverty, and the inharmony about you? Do you let folks have merchandise because you think them in need, or because they are God’s children, and you are in this way helping Him to prosper them and make them happy; and because your business is going to prosper all and result in greater blessings? Do you pray for their prosperity? Do you expect God in these people and God in you to prompt them in doing that which is right by you?
By studying this matter you will come into a better understanding of the law of prosperity and will be led into a happier and more successful handling of your problems.
Don’t feel that you must just open your hands and pass out everything that you have. Conservation is one of the rules of success. You must expect others to do their part. And every one, no matter how many failures he has had, can do his part.
You aren’t really giving Spirit much credit for ability to work in your brother’s consciousness and affairs, are you? You say in the same breath that he has been upheld by the Spirit these months and that you feel he cannot stand the strain much longer! Don’t you see what a mixed state of consciousness that is, and how foolish it is to pray and to expect Spirit to express its harmony and order and light in yourself or another, and then to feel that you or the other may at any time collapse because of the lack of spiritual power or light or life or substance?
Suppose “his mind,” this tense, mortal state of mind that has been causing him the worry and anxiety and weariness, does give way! What then? Why, that’s the very thing that must come! This old fixed state of mind must give way, or be given up, that the Christ ideas may flow freely through his consciousness and give him the new life and light and poise and power and substance that he needs! Encourage him to let go, to place himself in God’s care and keeping. It is personal assumption of responsibility that makes him feel he must cling so tenaciously to some of his opinions and ways of working. This is the only thing that keeps him out of the kingdom of heaven and its blessings! The treatment he has had, if he were co-operating, would have raised him into the Christ consciousness of peace and order and success long ago.
We are asking you to place him confidently in the care and keeping of his own indwelling Lord and to take your mental hands off! Don’t even treat him! So long as you are trying to force something into him, you keep his attention divided, and he doesn’t really get within and quiet enough to let his own soul commune with God. Leave him in the secret place, with the Father. Jesus has promised, you know, that those who go to the Father in secret, shall be rewarded openly!
The spiritual light coming to him from within will show him the utter foolishness of struggling and worrying and striving. It will reveal to him the right relation of things spiritual and things manifest. And he will see clearly how the right mental attitude and physical poise and health will result in instant and constant progress and prosperity and satisfaction. You can’t give him this. Nor can we. It is the free gift of the Father within him.
What are you believing about this Father, who Jesus Christ proved was willing always to hear and to answer every call in the name of His Son Jesus Christ?
You are looking for a call. Do you really know when you are called? You are to go straight to God to talk over these things. Go into your closet of prayer, into your “secret place of the Most High” (Psalms 91:1 A.V.) and shut the door; then really pray.
We are not promised the Father’s attention when we merely moan and cry out, “Oh, I long so to do something for this ailing one.” Did Jesus Christ perform any healing by wishing that He had the power? No. God gave Him the power; why shouldn’t He use it when all He was required to do to lay hold of it was to recognize that “I and the Father are one?” (John. 10:30)
So, dear friend, if you believe in the works of the Father, believe also in His Spirit in the midst of you, waiting to be recognized and put to practical use. Through “Christ in you” you are the “beloved Son” in whom the Father is well pleased.
All power is given unto you in all the affairs of mind and body. Exercise your God-given power, authority, and dominion and rise out of bondage to conditions of lack and discord.
There is a saying that “God helps those who help themselves.” You are God’s executive, and your indwelling Lord is depending upon you to make His glory manifest. Then be up and doing. Do the will of Him who sent you. In so doing you are not only helping yourself but you are helping others.
