Chapter 14

^[*]God is the homeland of the soul. We are no good away from home, except to return. Our getting in union with him through our union with Jesus, who is God and the eternal Christ with us in perfect availability as perfect everything, is our one necessity and only responsibility. In this union all things are ours and we have His ability joined to our own to do all good things and to do them well. In union with Jesus at His present height of being and attainment and in union with all in union with Him, we are at the acme of privilege and possibility. It will always be better and better in this union, and worse and worse out of it.

Sin is everything that takes us out of this union and keeps us out of it, everything that takes us and keeps us away from home. Repentance is our part in the return. Separated from Him, we are like limbs severed from the tree and branches from the vine. Our only hope is in being grafted in or back. We are grafted back through repentance and faith, through receptivity and response. The new birth or the rebirth, or return, is a birth into union and into love. By yielding to his good Spirit, his love is shed abroad in our hearts and, as we choose to let this love outflow, we become loving and are born of God, for he “that loveth is born of God.”

Faith makes us responsive to God’s love and this response is the child of the union. The union brings love, and love brings more union. Everything after this comes through abiding and increasing in the union and in love. The more union the more love, and the more love the more union, and the more everything else that goes with the union. The birth and the gift of his love and the care of his love are free gifts of his grace. He first loves us and loves us into loving, just as a mother smiles her baby into smiling. Returning prodigals bring nothing to the feast but great need. They furnish the appetite, the father furnishes all else. Prodigals do not have to leave home, but when they do leave they are loaded down with all the good that they can carry with them; but they cannot take enough with them to last long, any more than the severed limb and branch can last long apart from regrafting.

We return home for what we must have. The Father draws us back, but He does not send out fresh supplies to the far country. If He did, we would be all the longer in returning. It is impossible for God to give us His best, except in union with him and in His love. The getting in union with Him, the abiding and the increasing, is from necessity the free and happy yielding and responding to Him and to His spirit and to His perfect love and truth and everything else that He is and gives and enables. To get away from His good spirit is to get away from Him. To repent and to get back in His spirit is to get back in union with him. To get out of love is to get out of Him; to repent and get back in love is to get back into Him. To get out of truth and truthfulness also requires the repentance that is our part of our return. To get out of anything that God is, is to get out of that much of God, while to yield and respond to anything that is God is to yield and respond to that much of God. The return and the conditions for the return and the abiding and the growing up are so perfect no enlightened person would change them if he could. The more we see of God and His perfect way, the more we approve and delight in Him.

We become like whatever we receive and pass on. So, to abide and increase in union with Him, we must receive freely and give freely, give His love and give only His love. For if we give out anything other than love, we go out in the thing we give out; this means that we must meet all evil with good as well as all good with good. To meet evil with evil is to become evil and to be overcome with evil and have evil on top of us. But every time we meet evil with good, we get on top of the evil and rise higher.

As we meet all hate with love and all evil with good, we find ourselves in the kingdom of Jesus and in union with him. Here we cease from all judgments of condemnation and go to judging in terms of his limitless possibilities to turn everything to good that is turned over to Him. Here we join Him in the judgments of love and mercy unto victory. If one has been the worst enemy and the chief of sinners, as was Saul of Tarsus, he is given the opportunity and the ability to become His best friend, witness and apostle and chief of saints. In the realm of Jesus we go about giving His love and ours to all. In giving His love and ours, we receive ever-increasing love and enter into ever-deepening union with Him.

Whoever or whatever leads us, brings us into the realm or kingdom of that leader. To be led by leaders as good as John Wesley, St. Francis, or George Fox, will lead a man to be a Christian of the Methodist, the Franciscan, or the Quaker type. To be led by Jesus and by his good spirit is to be led right into Him and into His Kingdom, where abides pure religion, free from human limitations and coloring. To be led by love is to become harmonized with Him who is love. Of course, we follow after those who are ahead of us in the way, but we follow them because they follow Him and because we have to follow them until we can get ahead of them.

The kind of union that we have been considering, which comes through our returning, rebirth, or birth from above, that continues and increases through our receiving and giving His love and only His love, by meeting all evil with good, by giving up all judgment but the judgment of love and mercy, and love unto victory, and by being led by Him and His good spirit, prepares us for being baptized by Him with the Holy Spirit and entering into union even with His glorified body. This baptism and gift of the Holy Spirit is the beginning of the glorious union with Him, on the plane of his resurrection and glorification.

The baptism of the Holy Spirit meant for me an amazing revelation of Jesus and the free possession and control of my whole being, including my body. Before this I had something of His Spirit. With the baptism the Holy Spirit had me. I was lifted up upon the cross of life and bliss and glory. Jesus manifested Himself without, so that I could even feel the outlines of His glorious body, and then He breathed or infused himself within, so that I realized the fulfillment of His promise that in that day when He gives us the other Comforter or the Holy Spirit we shall know that He is in the Father and the Father in Him and He is in us and we in him. “At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.”—John 14:20. All I did was to ask, to tarry with desire and expectancy, and to invite Him to come within and to be in me the life and principle of His own good life and teaching, and to dedicate my­self to go His way of love and to give this love at the bottom of human need. I even told Him if He could baptize me without the tongues I would prefer it, but if it required the tongues I would take the tongues. The control and speaking for months was in English, before the Spirit spoke through me in other tongues than my own. This was His way of dealing with me.

The one great neglect of the Church as a whole has been that it has not continued to ask for and obey the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit, that Jesus went away to receive in a new and glorious way and give to all believers. The failure of most of the few who have asked for and been obedient to the gift and baptism of the Holy Spirit has been that they have not lived in the Spirit and gone on to the perfection of union with the glorified Jesus and the bearing of the fruit of the union. Even in the early Church, Christians soon began to fall away from their first love and glorious union. As much as they received, it was not the fullness that is to be and must be, in order to bring the perfect union, the perfect marriage, and the perfect Kingdom.

The best is not behind us, it is yet to be. While we have to be born or adopted to become members of the family, after our baptism our calling and enabling is to become like our Heavenly Father and our perfect Elder Brother. We have to grow up in Him and in ever-increasing union with Him. This requires the perfect food and the perfect exercise and the perfect atmosphere, which He is and gives. Our bread is Jesus Himself, our meat is the doing of His will, our drink is His spirit. We must have the full and balanced diet with plenty of exercise to grow. As precious and necessary as is the baptism by Him, no one experience can take the place of continuous and increasing abiding, fruit bearing, and going on to perfection—the perfection of union, and the perfection of fruit bear­ing, and the perfection of likeness.

When we first receive Him, we are given the new birth and power and predestination to become sons of God. When we are baptized by Him and receive Him and His glorified body in our spirits and bodies which are His, we are made ready in a new way to witness for Him with certainty and power and to co-work with Him efficiently. We are thus prepared to grow up, and are given the ability to become full overcomers and full attainers.

He comes into us as the glorified one when He is wanted and invited and comes to remain forever if we choose above all else for Him to remain. There is nothing else I know that is so rewarding and healing as to invite and want Jesus, who is longing and knocking to come in, to come in to the all of us, spirit, mind, soul, body, and our daily affairs, and to be all and in all and to come in a double portion into all of us who are sick and weak and in special need. I have seen the insane become sane when Jesus was invited to come into their minds and their nerves. I have seen a paralytic rise up and walk when Jesus was invited to come into the whole of her, and in a double portion, in all of the paralyzed parts. But our entering into Him, never to go out at any time, is through leaving on the outside everything that keeps us on the outside, and entering into Him at his feet, the place of humility, and letting Him place us where we belong. It is through putting and keeping Him first and centralizing upon His way of life as love that we abide in Him and grow up in Him and become both extensions and contagions of Him and of His Kingdom.

The Holy Spirit, being the highest consciousness of all, is the revealer of the highest truth and reality of all. He is, therefore, the only consciousness capable of making the full revelation and disclosure concerning Jesus, who is both God and man united in the perfect synthesis and the perfect achievement. The human consciousness, under whatever name it comes, philosophy or theology, is always whittling Jesus down to fit its own moulds.

Union with Him, through birth, through love, through baptism, and through overcoming, is a union of interchange, interaction, and integration. In the union as interchange, He takes our sins and gives us His righteousness; He takes our diseases and gives us His health and healing; He takes our griefs and gives us His joy; He takes our ugliness and gives us His beauty. In this union of interchange, He is the great giver and we are the great receivers. We are admitted to the feast of love and grace, because He is so rich and loving and we are so poor and hungry. All that is required of us is to confess and to put off our worse than lack, and put Him on. This is the way we treat babies. But to grow, they must learn to give as well as to receive love. They will always be great receivers, but to become adults they must become some­thing better than this. They have to become great givers. No one can come to maturity except through learning to love others as he is loved by Jesus. Since He furnishes the love in superabundance, we do not have to create the love—we only pass it on and add ours to it. The passing it on is even better than the receiving it. Running with the Father to meet the next returning prodigal is even better and happier than being met by the Father.

We grow as He is permitted and welcomed to love through us, and we choose to love and overcome through Him. He achieves through us and we achieve through Him. We are partners. The Son becomes so much like the Father that the Father is seen in the Son and the Father is received whenever the Son is received.

This partnership of love, of the Father and of Jesus, and of Jesus and us, makes us extensions and contagions of Jesus and his Kingdom. Here we love to do and delight in doing what we should do. Here we find that God never did want to keep us from what He knew we would really love and be satisfied with, but was only seeking to keep us from what we thought we wanted and really did not want.

Peter and Paul became so integrated with Jesus that the garments that Paul wore—as well as the robe that Jesus wore—had in them something of his healing virtue. Even the shadow of Peter had a healing virtue. To touch even the least of those in full integration with Jesus is to touch Him and to be made whole.

The union with Him, which is the union of inter­change, interaction and integration, is progressively revealed as identification, ineffable union and marriage. Whoever receives a prophet in the name of a prophet, receives the prophet’s reward. We become like our leading identification which is our leading love, and the highest identification of all is with the glorified Jesus, Who is perfect. He is perfect Saviour and perfect salvation, perfect spirit and perfect body, perfect divinity and perfect humanity, perfect lover and perfect love, perfect healer and perfect health, and perfect rejuvenator and perfect rejuvenation. His perfection is infinite and extends to our smallest needs and possibilities.

The ineffable union of His glorified body with our bodies—first experienced when He baptizes us and comes within us—must increase and increase, until we become like Him, even bodily, either through resurrection or rapture. Our marriage with Him is revealed to be our becoming wholly His and He wholly ours. It comes with our happy choosing to give up everything but Him and love, and to hold fast unto them.

The marriage with Him will bring divinity victoriously unto humanity and humanity victoriously unto divinity. It will bring soul and body and everything else into perfection of unity and attainment. In this marriage, even our homeliness will be put off and His beauty will be put on, old age will be put off and His perfect youth-maturity put on. The divine and human, soul and body, heaven and earth, have become one in Jesus, in a great synthesis, fulfillment, enrichment, and harmonization. In the perfect marriage with Him, what has been achieved in Him will be ours, both by gift and attainment. Nothing good enough to contribute is left out. Heaven needs earth and earth needs heaven, so they are brought together, in the enrichment of heaven and in the redemption of the earth. Soul needs body and body must have soul, so the soul gets its full opportunity through the body and the body gets its transformation through the soul. Jesus longs for us and needs us; we must have Him. He will never be satisfied without us and we can never do without Him. Without Him, we are nothing; with Him, we are on the way to becoming all that He is, which is perfect everything.

1. * [Note, footnote is on the Subtitle word Union*.] Reprinted from Together, copyright 1946 by Stone and Pierce. Published by Abingdon-Cokesbury Press at $1.25. (↩)