How Did God Plan For Us to Operate?

Rev. Ernest O'Neill

God has outlined the personality this way to us -- we exist on three levels:  the Spirit and the Soul and the Body -- not three separate entities, but three levels.

The spirit has the ability to commune with God.  It’s the part of us that relates us to God.  The soul relates us to ourselves.  It’s the self-conscious part of us.  We can look into ourselves with our minds and see what we are thinking.  We can feel with our emotions and feel what we are feeling.  It’s the part that’s conscious of ourselves.  The body is the part of us that relates to the world and to other people.

The spirit is capable of communing with God and of knowing by an intuitive knowledge of him what we ought to do.  The conscience judges us on the basis of that information and constrains our wills to direct our minds so that our minds understand that, and we are able to express that through our bodies to the world -- while our emotions express the joy of our friendship with God.  That’s the way God planned for us to operate -- just like that [pointing to the diagram].

We of course rejected that whole plan, and we live as if there is no God. Therefore we have developed a personality or a strain of humanity that is perverted -- perverted, because it has no sense of identity, no sense of meaning -- because it has no belief in a God, and it wonders why it’s here.

In all its desperation, it tries to get what it would have got from God’s own love and God’s own friendship.  Of course those are three main things -- it would have got from God a sense of security as he provided all that he needed; a sense of significance as he made clear the importance of his job or his function here in the world; and a sense of happiness in his relationship with the great infinite, only significant other in the whole universe.