The Carpenter

We can never attain a maximum love of God with only a minimum knowledge of God.

The intellect is for knowing, understanding and seeing. For our love of God to grow we need a full functioning intellect, in addition to the will to love God (thus being saved).

To have a healthy intellect we need to see what God sees, and seeing what He sees is seeing what is REALLY there. Seeing what is REALLY there is sanity (just as seeing what is not there is INsanity).

When we look at the universe we see what everyone else sees, with a few exceptions based on what we've learned. So we don't have so much Godly minds as we have worldly minds with Godly patches.

The truth is that all things are held in existence from moment to moment by nothing but the continuing will of God that they should not cease to be.

When we see anything at all, do we in the same act see it as being held in existence by God? If we don't, we are not mentally living in the same world as God. What is more is that we are not really seeing how things are, we are not seeing sanely.

Remember that God has made you and me and all things out of nothing. I have not ever really taken in this fact. And actually realizing this truth is kind of world shattering. Realizing this is almost self-annihilation, at least self-sufficiency is annihilated.

God used no material in our making, we are made of nothing.

For although we are made of nothing, we are made INTO something, and since what we are made OF does not account for us, we are forced to a more intense concentration upon the God we are made BY.

If a carpenter makes a chair, he can leave it and the chair will not cease to be. For the material he used in its making has a quality called rigidity, by virtue of which it will retain its nature as a chair. The maker of the chair has left it, but the chair can still rely for continuance in existence upon the material he used, the wood. Similarly if the Maker of the Universe left it, the Universe too would have to rely for continuance in existence upon the material He used - nothing. In short, the truth that God used no material in our making carries with it the not-suffucently-realized truth that God continues to holds us in being, and that unless He did so we should simply cease to be.

Whatever might be the ultimate constituents of matter, God made them of nothing, so that the beings built upon them exist only because He keeps them in existence.

We are created by God, even our souls, and could not survive an instant without His conserving power. We are held above the surface of our native nothingness solely by God's continuing will to hold us so.

"In Him we live and move and have our being." Acts 17:28

If we see anything at all without at the same time seeing God holding it there we are seeing it all wrong.

Insanity would be seeing a coat hanging on a wall and without realizing it was being held up by a coat hook. We would not be living in the real world at all, but in some fantastic world of our own in which coats defied the law of gravity and hung on walls by their own power.

Similarly if we see things in existence and do not in the same act see that they are held in existence by God, then equally we are living in a fantastic world, not the real world.

Seeing God everywhere and all things upheld by Him is not a matter of sanctity, but of plain sanity, because God IS everywhere and all things ARE upheld by Him.