What’s Your Story? Have you made any New Year's resolutions? I like to play around with words and I got to thinking about the word "resolutions." If we take the first syllable away, we have the word "solutions." Isn't that what resolutions really are? They are solutions we use to deal with a problem we've identified about our self. Resolutions can be revolutions. Revolution can be radical change, but it is also repetition; things that keep coming around. They revolve. What do you keep doing you wish you could quit doing? Revolution also means to revolt. Making a resolution to revolt against something can lead to revelation. Trying to quit something can lead to new understanding.
That's a revelation. It's also how temptation works in us. We are presented with choices and are tempted by those choices. If we simply give in to temptation, we learn nothing and we don't change. We keep on becoming the kind of person we have been.
But choices can change us. We make choices all the time. Our New Year's resolutions are intended to help us have the determination to make better choices. Each choice we make is like a sentence in the book of our life. The sentences fill up the pages and the pages make the chapters and one day we will leave these bodies and this earth and we will have written our life story. This is our book. Every one of us is writing his or her life story.
We are writing the books that the Bible refers to in Revelation. Our lives are called a book. Depending on how well our book matches up with God's Book of Life spoken of in Revelation, we either enter into eternal life with God or cast ourselves out of heaven into eternal darkness and death, called the lake of fire. Note that no one throws us out of heaven. We jump into the lake of fire. (So be careful about telling someone to go jump in the lake.)
We have already chosen our place in eternity by the time we reach this socalled judgment. We make the choice while we are living here on the earth, writing our book. You've probably heard the phrase, "write your own ticket." We all do that. The book we write is our ticket. Our destination is written there by the way we live.
William Bruce, one of my favorite commentators on the Bible, writes in his commentary on Revelation, "The human mind itself is a book in which every thought, word, and action is written.......As an active power, the mind is just what it has become by the use or abuse of its faculties. Affections and thoughts are not things laid up in the mind, but states and forms of the mind itself.
These are capable of being modified or changed during the life of the body. After death they become fixed, as if crystallized. This is the book of life that is opened at the judgment, and from the records of which we are said to be judged." *
Our minds are becoming crystallized. It is difficult for someone whose mind is set in this way to change him or herself. The more we practice the actions of such a mind, the more rigid they become. This is why it is so important to examine ourselves and find the false ideas we use to justify evil actions. Evil actions grow out of loving ourselves more than others. This is basic Swedenborg.
The disciple Peter was changed by his contact with the Lord. When the Lord renamed Simon, Peter, he was calling him a rock. Eventually Peter became a rock star in the Christian world, but initially, he was just a rock, a pretty dense rock.
Peter was so convinced of his true faith and devotion to the Lord that he swore he would never deny him. We all know what happened. Faced with the possibility of suffering along with him at the time of Jesus' arrest, Peter denied him not once, but three times. So much for being a rock. He crumbled. The rooster crowed and Peter saw in the light of the dawning day what a chicken he really was. He was devastated by his lack of courage and saw that he really had little faith. What did he do? He changed. He didn't change himself. He let the Lord lead him and change him. He became the rock the Lord intended him to be, and in the scriptures he is the disciple who represents the good and truth of faith, what a rock stands for.
We can't change ourselves, but it needs to seem to us that we are changing ourselves while actually the Lord is changing us. We think we are writing our own book, and in one sense we are. We decide what goes into the book. But the choices we make depend on our relationship with God. If we are turned to God, he writes on our souls and our books are love stories. But if we turn from God, he cannot write in our books because we have turned them away from God and hidden them from him…or tried to.
The things we write on our own are stories filled with deceit, revenge and spiritual death. No angel wants to read them and they are shunned in heaven. If we have written such a story when we enter into the world of spirits and encounter the angels who come to greet us, we find ourselves in a world in which we cannot be happy, a world so foreign to us that we can't even breathe the air. We turn and run and dive headlong into the lake of fire.
When I was a kid, my family spent the summers at our little cottage on Porter's Lake in central Wisconsin. We had a short dock jutting into the lake where we parked our rowboat. It was a small lake. There were no motorboats allowed. It was primitive. I loved it. I used to go out on that dock at night and look up at the stars. There were millions of them, thick through the center of the Milky Way. We can't see that scene living in the city.
In scripture stars represent ideas, thoughts. Those stars in the Milky Way were like the millions of individual thoughts that run through a human mind in a lifetime. Those thoughts are what form our minds. When you are out on your dock, gazing into your nighttime sky, which stars are the brightest for you?
Remember the bumper sticker that said, "Don't believe everything you think!" There are evil spirits with us all the time, trying to get us to write nasty things in our books. God's angels are there, too. They want us to write love stories, because that's all they will read. What’s Your Story?
In the book of Revelation, the seer John is commanded by the Lord to write what he sees. Why does the Lord want it written? William Bruce says that, " writing is confirmation. What is written is settled and fixed."
When we leave this world we lay down our pens. The writing has been done. What we have chosen to relate to in this world is what we continue to relate to in the spiritual world. We do this by writing a love story with our lives. Nothing else will suffice. We must write about loving God by showing that love to our neighbor. Our actions write the story.
Go forth and write your story so that when it is finished and your book is closed on this earth and opened in the world of spirits, it will be angels, not devils, who clamor to read your story and welcome you into their community with open arms, surrounding you with God's love.
*(Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, by Rev. Wm. Bruce, 2nd Ed., London, James Speirs, 1906, p. 361)
READINGS
Old Testament Reading: Jeremiah 17:1, 10
The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with the point of a diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart, and on the horns of their altars.... I, the Lord, search the heart and test the mind, to give to all persons according to their ways, according to the fruit of their deeds.
New Testament Reading: Revelation 20:12
And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done.
Reading from Swedenborg's writings: Apocalypse Revealed #867
By books are not meant books, but the interiors of the minds of those who are judged by the books, the interiors of the minds of those who are evil and are judged to death, and by the book of life such as are good, and are judged to life. They are called books because in the interiors of the mind of everyone are inscribed all the things that they thought, intended, spoke, and did in the world from the will or the love, and sense from the understanding or faith; all these things are inscribed on the life of everyone, with so much exactness that not one of them is wanting. The quality of all these things appears to the life, when spiritual light, which is wisdom from the Lord, and spiritual heat, which is love from the Lord, Slow in through heaven. Spiritual light discloses the thoughts which are of the understanding and faith, and spiritual heat discloses the affections which are of the will and love; and spiritual light together with spiritual heat discloses the interiors and endeavors.