Midweek Faith Lift
Love As a Spiritual Power
Su Podraza-Nagle LUT
February 7, 2022
Good morning to those of you here in the Sanctuary and those of you viewing through technology. Welcome.
This Sunday is part 2 of a 3 part series on Love. Last week, we invited love in, and experienced it as we began to fill ourselves with love through affirmations and mirror gazing. As we filled ourselves during this past week, did we smile more, giggle a little, and treat ourselves with more kindness? Did we see the Christ Consciousness within us as us? Did we awaken more of our Christ Centered love?
This week we are going to explore Love as one of our 12 faculties. The Spiritual Power given to us by God.
As Unity Truth congregants and budding meta-physicians, I’d like to share in part, what Charles Fillmore teaches us about the great spiritual power:
“The subconscious realm in man has twelve great centers of action, with twelve presiding egos or identities.
When Jesus Christ had attained a certain soul development, He called His twelve disciples to Him. This means that when man is developing
out of mere personal consciousness into spiritual consciousness, he begins to train deeper and larger powers; he sends his thought down
into the inner centers of his organism, and through his word quickens them to life. Where before his powers have worked in the personal, now they begin to expand and work in the universal.” The 12 Powers of Man- Charles Fillmore
According to the Revealing Word, “Love is the pure essence of being that binds together the whole human family. Of all of the attributes of God, love is undoubtedly the most beautiful. Divine love is impersonal; It loves for the sake of loving. It is not concerned with what or who it loves, nor with a return of love.
When have we at one time or another chosen to act in the spirit of divine love. Helped a neighbor, Volunteered, Took a hot meal to someone in need? Not out of duty or because we felt it was an obligation, but out of that pure essence of love.
It is time to realize our Love capacity. The energy behind the word, LOVE has the power to heal, to unify, to bring joy, and create harmony.
Last week for homework, I requested you take time to look at yourself in the mirror, hug yourself and say affirmations of love. Did you feel joy, and healing? Yes? Fantastic. Not yet? Go back to the mirror and do more.
As Charles Fillmore, Co-Founder of the Unity Movement explained: "Love is an inner quality that sees good everywhere and in everybody. It insists that all is good, and by refusing to see anything but good it causes that quality finally to appear uppermost in itself, and in all things."
That means that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see the good in all of who we are. From the outer to the inner. All of our parts.
What about our world view? "Love is an inner quality that sees good everywhere and in everybody. It insists that all is good, and by refusing to see anything but good it causes that quality finally to appear uppermost in itself, and in all things."
Let’s take a moment to think about this. What this says to us.
What was your gut instinct when your heard this as a world view. Take a moment. Was there complete agreement within your consciousness, or did you hear or feel dissension?
Winifred Wilkinson Hausmann, Unity Author said it best when she wrote, “The love center in the body is in the heart. As the heart circulates life-giving blood throughout the body, so a right concept of love circulates life-giving sustenance through our thinking-feeling nature, as well as through our body and affairs. Development of the God-consciousness of oneness enriches all phases of the life it enters. The faculties of love, centered in the heart, and wisdom, from its seat at the pit of the stomach, meet in the solar plexus, at the back of the heart and stomach.”
Wisdom is another of our Spiritual powers, and Unity Truth Students know that Love is partnered with Wisdom and for good reason.
Let’s consider, and I enjoy using this example; Chocolate. During this month of February, it becomes a major food group. We all (well, most of us) love chocolate. If we eat too much, choose not to listen to our power of Wisdom, which, by the way is in our gut center, what happens?
We begin to realize we had too much of a good thing.
A couple more- Your first car. Oh how you loved that car. You washed it, showed it off to friends. But some of us forgot the power of wisdom in loving that car. How soon did we get our first speeding ticket?
As high school and/or college students, how often did we find ourselves behind on school work because we were busy having the time of our lives with friends and loving every minute of it?
The power of love is appreciating the magnificence of an Elephant. Wisdom is knowing you can’t invite them into your home for lunch.
Love without wisdom has the possibility to be blind, and easily misled. There are statistics in many forms to prove this.
We chose to love and expand in our consciousness while in meditation and prayer, our love center. Our heart center.
We use the power of our love center when we understand Unity’s 3rd Principle: We are co-creators with God, creating reality through thoughts held in Mind. We certainly wouldn’t choose to do otherwise, would we?
If it appears to be a challenge using love as a spiritual power, know that this has been a learning experience through the ages.
The apostle Paul in 1st Corinthians felt the need to write to the people of Corinth. Evidently they needed to be reminded.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.
Choosing to love, starts with each one of us. Being able to love yourself. Understanding the God given gift of our love faculty, expressing it every day and we move throughout our day and coupling it with wisdom is how we raise our Christ consciousness.
To honor, love with all your heart, soul and mind and to give freedom to that Power, that light, and then share it with others. This, is what we were told to do by our Master Teacher, Jesus in the Greatest Commandment.
And so it is.
Meditation:
As I say these words of affirmation, take them into your heart, mind and soul and repeat to yourself:
God is Love. This love surrounds me, In this love I safely dwell.
The One Power and One Presence is love. This love surrounds me, In this love I safely dwell.
The I AM is love. This love surrounds me, In this love I safely dwell.
Divine Source is love. This love surrounds me, In this love I safely dwell.
Principle is love. This love surrounds me, In this love I safely dwell.
Wonderful Spirit is love. This love surrounds me, In this love I safely dwell.
In the silence now, take one of these affirmations deeper into your spirit. Continue to fill your spirit with love, in the