THERE is a Power greater than you are, and you can use it. You are surrounded by a creative Intelligence, or Mind, that receives the impress of your thought and acts on it. It really is done unto you as you believe, and Faith is the greatest thing you possess.
I have never met anyone who seriously doubts the power of faith, but what everyone asks is: How shall we use this Power in order that we may get the most out of life, and give the most back to it?
There is a Life Force, energy and intelligence seeking an outlet through everything. Everywhere we look, we see that life is always in an active state; it is forever doing something. The ethers of the invisible world seem to be teeming with an energy backed up by an intense desire to create. We are some part of all this, and there is an irresistible desire back of, and within us, to do things. It doesn’t matter whether it is an artist painting a canvas, a minister preaching a sermon, or an actor strutting across the stage to do his stuff. Children make mud pies, and birds build their nests. A seed planted in the ground is impatient to produce a plant that will bring about a harvest.
There is an urge back of everything to create—to express life. There is an emotional craving for self-expression back of everything. And since this desire exists, no one is happy unless he is expressed. The hen wants to lay an egg, and she wants to set on it; the egg wants to produce a chicken, and the chicken wants to lay another egg and produce more chickens. The seed wants to multiply itself; it wants to become a tree in which birds shall nest. The birds want to build their nests in the tree and hatch out their young. The lion and the wolf and the dog, and you and I, and everything else in nature, have an irresistible desire to create.
We have to do things or we aren’t happy. We have to feel the accomplishment of doing things or our lives are not fulfilled. It doesn’t seem to make any great difference just what it is we are doing, so long as it is constructive. The child fulfills his desire to create when he makes a mud pie or builds a little castle, and when the same child grows up maybe he wants to build a dam, or a railroad.
I used to know Joseph Strauss, a builder of great dams — a man who built the biggest things in the world. He was a close friend of mine, and a wonderful man. Joseph was of small
physical stature. When he was a boy in school he couldn’t play football; he couldn’t complete in athletics; but he had the desire to express himself that all normal people have, and so he made up his mind that some day he would build the biggest things that had ever been built by man. The Golden Gate Bridge is a testimony, not only to his engineering skill, but to the emotional craving he had to create.
I happen to know one of the leading radio entertainers of our day—a girl who was brought up in the country, in a midwestern state. She just couldn’t help writing songs and singing them. She never had any technical training, but she did have an urge to express herself, and she just kept right on doing the thing she knew how to do. Then finally she met up with This Thing Called Life and came to realize that the thing that was working through her was something bigger than she was; it was intimate and close to her; it was real to her thought and feeling and imagination. Today she sings to the world, and they love it. They love it because she is herself.
Now, where did she get this? Where do any of us get the ideas that come to us? The Bible says that there is a River of Life which flows through everything, and that if we will search out its source, which is God, we shall find our own lives filled with energy and hope and realization. Both Henry Ford and Thomas Edison believed that we are surrounded by ideas, as though the ethers were filled with them, and they believed that these ideas are pressing against us, seeking self-expression. And so they followed some impulsion within them and produced the impossible, or what seemed impossible.
Jesus, the greatest of the great, also believed that we are surrounded by a creative Spirit which flows through us as well as around us, and he said that God is Spirit and that the “Spirit seeketh such,” by which he meant that anyone who will listen to This Thing Called Life and who will meditate on its meaning, and who will affirm its presence, and who will identify himself with its energy, will be carried on to success.
Charles Schwab, the great steel master, believed as you and I do. At one time he purchased fifty thousand copies of a book which dealt with the subject we are talking about today, and gave them to his employees. He wanted to stimulate a feeling in them that they were backed up by a Power greater than they were, and that they could use it.
Mahatma Gandhi said that there is a soul force in the universe, and that if we would let it, it would flow through us and produce miraculous results. People used to wonder what he was talking about and many called him a sort of dreamer, or a crazy person — an impossible idealist. But history will put him down as perhaps second to Jesus in the use of spiritual power.
Well, there is no use in spending our time thinking about great men and wonderful people, for you and I also are individuals, and someone else cannot live our lives for us. “Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time; footprints that perhaps another, walking o’er life’s solemn main, a forlorn and, friendless brother, seeing, may take heart again.” These words by Longfellow are filled with meaning. For lives of great men should remind us that we, too, are great. For what can be more wonderful than the thing that God has created? As the Psalmist said, “Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.”
Too often we have thought that God crowned only a few people with glory and honor. So Jesus came and talked to the multitudes. He didn’t feel that his words of deep wisdom would be lost on the average man — the common people who heard him so gladly. Quite the reverse, for it was Jesus who said, “Father, I thank thee that thou hast hid these things from the wise and the prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” Jesus knew what you and I must find out — that if God hadn’t had need of us He wouldn’t have put us here. He knew that every person exists as an individual in the One Universal Creative Mind, and that every person may draw on Its intelligence, Its power and Its energy, and that every person is a king in his own right.
It astonished the intellectuals of his day for a man who had no training, a man who came up from a carpenter’s bench, to have the audacity to proclaim that he was one with God. They were used to thinking of God as some distant and austere presence, some domineering power, because they hadn’t laid aside all the opinions and come in a simple, childlike way to the great Giver of Life and received His gifts.
What you and I need, more than anything else and above everything else, is a quiet confidence that there is a Power greater than we are, and that we can use It. And having come to this simple conclusion, we should not spend all our time proclaiming that there is a Power. Rather, we should spend our time proving that this Power exists. We should spend our time finding out just how it works in and through us, what it means to us as individuals, and what it could mean to the whole world if everyone became acquainted with it and learned how to use it, and actually put it into practice.
The Power that is greater than you and I, as humans, already exists at the center of our being. It isn’t something we go in search after; it isn’t hid in a deep mine; it isn’t lost in the desert; it isn’t obscured by the clouds that cover the lofty Alps, only occasionally showing their grandeur to our admiring gaze. It is there, too; but more than anywhere else, that Power is within us, and more than anything else, and more than all other things, we need to recognize it. For we, too, are a seed of the Divine Life deposited on earth, that we shall live and love and create and be whole and happy, and that we shall unite with others in bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to earth.
Suppose we accept this challenge, individually and together, and make up our minds to prove that God has not left us alone to buffet our way through life — a pawn on the checkerboard of chance. The way to begin is, as it would have to be, simple and direct. First of all, we must believe in the Power. Next, we must believe that it is right where we are. And, of course, we have to understand that it is a Power for good. Then we must realize that this
Power flows through us, operates in us, and that the instrument of this Power is in our mind. We haven’t quite realized that it was so intimate, so close, so immediate; but it is. And next, we must begin right where we are, because there is no other place we could begin.
We may have to start in little, simple ways, just by saying: “Today I accept the presence of this Power. Today I believe that it is operating in all my affairs. Today I accept that there is a Divine Guidance telling me what to do. Today I affirm that there is a Power that goes before me and prepares the way. I affirm that this Power is Love and Life. I affirm that the Divine Presence is a presence of joy and happiness. And I affirm that there is something within me that knows what to do under every circumstance and in every situation. And so I turn from everything that seems confusing, and no longer listen to that which denies the reality of God in my experience. And I let — I believe, and I permit — I believe, and I let — I accept, and I know.”
At first, when we begin this silent practice of affirming the Divine Presence and the Divine Power, all kinds of inward emotions and arguments arise to disturb the mind, as though we were a house divided against itself. Something else inside us seems to say: “Perhaps. Are you sure? Think of all the evil things that have happened to you. Think of all your lack and want and limitation, your physical pains, your limited circumstance.”
Probably the most hopeful sign on earth today is the fact that there are now millions of people, particularly in our own country, who are making an effort to prove in their lives, and in the lives of others, that there is a spiritual Power that can be used for definite purposes. There is plenty of evidence that this Power is being used, and that it is producing results. You can hardly pick up a magazine or newspaper today without finding some reference to this Power, and some instance of a person who has used it.
But how seldom do any of these articles analyze the meaning of faith and tell us just what it is, and show us exactly how to use it? It is as though we have found a new energy but don’t know how it works, and haven’t developed techniques for its use; so we are always talking about it and never quite coming to the point where it becomes the guiding star of all our lives — a light that shines in the darkness, a rock in a weary land, an oasis in a desert. And how you and I need the shadow of that rock; how deeply we all need to drink from this oasis, that our desert, too, shall blossom as the rose and bring comfort and sustenance to us!
These arguments come up out of our previous experience; but don’t be too concerned over them. They are just thoughts trying to disturb the mind. Just say to them: “Peace. Be still.” Just be still, and know, and believe, and let. If you follow this simple procedure, you will soon find that these arguments gradually lessen until they finally disappear, and your thoughts become a straight, consistent and persistent affirmation of the Presence and the Power and the Glory of the eternal God.