Sermons of Charles Fillmore

The final goal of man is at-one-ment with God. Personally interpreted, Jesus Christ made that at-one-ment for all who believed in him. He was the one great blood sacrifice; giving up his life on the cross, we are told, atoned for us if we accept him as our sacrifice. He was the only begotten son of God, given to the world to save it from its sins. But there are many interpretations of this fundamental subject of Christianity.

I do not think that Paul would interpret the literal crimson tide idea which is so strongly emphasized by some of the followers of Christianity, I do not believe Paul would accept that literal blood atonement. He requires a spiritual interpretation by grace and by the power of God; and by spiritual understanding we come into a new concept of what life is, that it is more than blood, that the blood is but the outer representation of an inward tide, that it was the union which Jesus and Christ his inner spiritual man made that made it possible for us to come into the same at-one-ment or unity with the infinite life. We find that in all of our lessons this great truth is taught and this brings us back and back until we have to understand what man is, what the soul is, and what sin is and what God is.

So to understand the atonement or at-one-ment of man with his source and with the Spirit of God we must know consciously, because everything we know comes through the consciousness. We must know consciously of the character of our souls, in other words the character of God and we must know ourselves as the offspring of this God. And in the lesson today when we know these fundamentals and know the, aright, and see that we are all developing and working toward that great goal, the at-one-ment with the omnipresent source of our being.

Now we are told by Jesus that God is spirit and they that worship him, or those who ·would come into this union with God, with the Spirit, must worship him in spirit, we must become in other words, spiritually alive, detach ourselves from the material and come into spiritual understanding. That means that we must know that God being Spirit is without body or parts or form. God is the pure essence of being, the pure essence of life, pure essence of love, the pure essence of intelligence, the pure essence of substance even. God is substance.

We have thought that substance was in some way material. Thinking that, we came into a material concept of a spiritual reality. To get back into the real of substance, we must think about it and become conscious in our minds of its spiritual reality. Now we find that these different attitudes of the mind are all set forth in the various symbols of the Bible. The Bible is a great esoteric work. It is a work on, well, spirit, soul and body. In the Old Testament the Spirit is Jehovah, a manifestation of God as I Am. And the soul has many names, but in the lesson today it is Assyria. Assyria is the soul, the psyche, and the body Egypt, the great material realm which has great possibilities. It lays a foundation for man. Now these, we are told, are in a state of evolution.

There are three steps. You will notice in the scripture everything has in its activities three steps. Jesus said on the third day he would rise, and he said that he would rebuild his temple in three days. That trinity seems to run through everything, and we find as we analyze ourselves there is the mind, the idea in the mind, and the manifestation. In other words, we have that consciousness which we term our thinking capacity, and we make up our minds what we want to do and that is the idea and then we do it. There are your three days, and if you apply this scripture to yourself you will find this trinity is part of everything you do,- three steps, three ideas, three movements of the mind, and when we see this activity in ourselves we begin to analyze its different attributes, how it works.

Now in the lesson today we are told that Moses had reached the limit of his activity. And we know that Moses is, well in the Bible a character who represents the law, the law giver. We live under a law, and that law is good, but we reach a point when we see the possibility of something higher than the law we have lived under.

Moses represents the law of cause and effect, positive and negative forces, heat and cold and good and bad. Now we are told in the very beginning of our existence that we shall not eat of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or good and bad, but we shall realize the source of our being is only perfection, not even good as we understand good, because when we speak of Good we always imply there is an opposite but in the perfect mind this omnipresent spirit, there is no such thing as good or evil. We should not think of either good or evil, but absolute perfection, and when this comes to consciousness we say we have taken a new step, we are no longer under this law of cause and effect then you realize that you have stepped out, have come out of the Mosaic law into spiritual understanding, you will not be compelled to reap the karma or the effect of your wrong thinking.

Jesus Christ had the power to do away with the sins of man. He said that same man-consciousness that made evil and sin could do away with it. Man hath power in the earth to forgive sins. Now, when you realize that you are no longer under the law of cause and effect, you will come into what? I Am power, and that is Joshua. The law no longer moves, and you can move right over into this new world, this new consciousness, this promised land, this divine estate if you will use your I Am and use it courageously.

You will remember if you have read that first chapter of Judges, the Jehovah mind said, be very courageous, be fearless, I am with you. Many of us are timid and afraid when we think about the great possibilities of coming into spiritual understanding, spiritual power, and we don't walk over into that promised land. That promised land is the spiritual realm within. It is here, everywhere; we live in it, but we don't consciously incorporate it in our minds. We don't think about it, but here is the lesson and this lesson tells us that we have the power to come out of the law and come into spiritual understanding.

Now we are taught on every hand that this law, this Mosaic law is, well, a part of our very existence, and so it is so long as we believe in it, but when we come to that place where we know that Spirit, God, made man perfect and put into his potential mind --potential mind I say, not his manifest conscious mind, but we every one have this potential mind, this mind on the mountain of our understanding, this high place which when we quicken, all of the nations will flow to. All of our thoughts will begin to take on this higher mind, this mind of Jehovah.

But we must grow, we must develop our souls. We have to develop our bodies even. We have to come out of the limitation of the flesh so we deal with what we call the material side of life, but we deal with it spiritually. We say that man is not flesh and blood as he conceives himself to be. That isn't the real. The real is that the body is spiritual. That is Egypt.

We are now as a race developing what is called Psyche, the soul consciousness. We have psycho-analysis on every side, lessons in psychology. People are having experiences that they have never had before. I have heard people in this auditorium say that until they came into this atmosphere they never saw anything psychic, never had a vision, never had anything that would indicate that their souls were beginning to function, and when they came into this atmosphere all at once there seemed to be a quickening, and they saw things. That is the result of the great spiritual quickening coming into the world through what is called the soul. But is that the real? No, that is the Assyrian. The Assyrians were the enemies of the Israelites. They fought against the Israelites again and again. You remember Byron’s great poem where the Assyrian hosts came down like a wolf on the fold, but there was a saving hand there and the banners of the Assyrians were dashed to the ground and the little band of the Israelites reigned instead. This is what is symbolically represented in the lesson today that there shall be a great highway out of Egypt we are told, and it shall unify the Assyrians and the Egyptians, but Israel through Jehovah God will be blessed and rule over all. That means that this material part of man and his soul shall be unified and opened up to the true spiritual understanding through I Am, illumined I Am ruling over all.

Are we developing our souls and quickening our bodies under the divine law or are we looking for something miraculous to happen, that God in some way through Jesus Christ who lived 1923 years ago shall through shedding his blood on the cross save us from our sins. lt is not in the Bible at all. That is some interpretation of Milton or Dante and those poets. It was not said by Jesus Christ or in the Bible. The Bible teaches that you are to be saved through your development, through the recognition of yourself as soul and a perfect body.

You must recognize these inner spiritual truths. Spiritual things are spiritually interpreted. Now the psychic people represented by the Assyrians are not a wise people. They had to bring some Israelite down into Babylon and Ninevah to instruct them in these great secrets of the soul. You remember that the king could not interpret his dreams. He had to call on Daniel to tell him what his dream of the brazen image meant, and when the handwriting appeared on the wall at the time of Belshazzar he couldn't interpret it. He sent for the Chaldeans and all his wise magicians, and they couldn't interpret it and he had to send for an Israelite, and the Israelite interpreted the handwriting on the wall. Now that handwriting on the wall came under the head of the psychic.

We are many of us who have spiritual understanding somewhat aware of the psychic. We say, don't have anything to do with it. It is a dangerous realm and yet we find ourselves being quickened in this Assyrian part of consciousness. What are we going to do with it? Shall we ignore it or analyze it? I should say we should understand it. People are having dreams today, people are having this handwriting on the wall. they are seeing visions. They are having experiences and we have our clairvoyants and our mediums and people who deal in the psychic realm as interpreters of the so-called spirit world. What shall we do with this great horde of teachers and ministers for the human family? Where shall they be placed? Shall they be discarded? We say they should be understood. Now the necessity today of the children of Israel to interpret the dreams and visions of the Psychic world is just as great as it was in the past in the time of Belshazzar and those old psychic representatives, just exactly, and if you are having these experiences, don't try to interpret them from a psychic standpoint, because you are living in a realm of ideas that don't understand themselves.

Ideas, thoughts, are real things, but it must have a spiritual interpretation. You must know what certain pictures that you see, what certain experiences that you have you must know what they mean spiritually. In other words, you must i know the idea back of this and then you are making a union with your Israel, your real thoughts, and the only interpretation is spirit. What do those things mean to me spiritually, and when I know them spiritually then my soul is quickened and it falls in line with my spiritual ·understanding and then I see that my body bears relation to the soul. and I then begin to see the science of true healing.

Man originates in spiritual essence in the realm of ideas, and those ideas come into his consciousness, his thoughts, and then those thoughts crystalize and we have what is called the body. Any limitation or error in your body can be traced back to some spiritual ideas. You doubtless are not exercising every function in your idea because you haven't unified it with this great high place in consciousness. You haven' t, in other words, worshiped God. You thought that God was separate from you, but the fact is that we are in union with God now in all the realities of our existence, and a larger expansion of consciousness would put us in tune. We would see the unity between the Spirit, soul and body, and seeing that and insisting upon it as our real being would adjust not only the I Am in us but every part of the organs, every part of the emotions and feelings with the great spiritual I Am. And this is the full atonement.

Up to the time of John the Baptist Jesus said the kingdom of the heavens was taken by force, men through violence entered into it. We find that certain adepts or men and women who have exercised their I Am qualities do have the power of taking forceful possession, through sheer will force of this kingdom of the mind, and they do marvelous things. Like old Elijah he had the power to call fire down from heaven and he found it was destructive. He burned up the four hundred prophets of Baal because he said they were enemies of Jehovah. He didn't have the sanction of Jehovah for doing that, and he, through the force of his will and his understanding of what we call the occult law went up in a chariot of fire to heaven.

Jesus Christ didn't say that Elijah had gone to heaven. He said John the Baptist was the reincarnation of Elijah, so we can see that Jesus was talking about some of the great truths of the soul's experiences and how up to a certain point of understanding these occult forces are violently exercised. Now that must all be adjusted under the divine law of harmony and love and peace. God doesn't destroy; God is love. God doesn't destroy his enemies, and we must find that law before we can come into union with the Spirit.

Now there are people who think that they can in some way cover up their delinquencies, their shortcomings, and get into the kingdom of the heavens. Jesus said that those people were thieves and robbers. They were trying to get in some other way. Now the only way is through soul purification and that is Christ. The whole man must be melted up and adjusted in his thoughts, his emotions, in his body activity to one great harmonious mind. You might compare this process of getting into the kingdom through some outer galvanizing process to the renewing of your old silver spoons. You know they have a way of renewing spoons by putting them into a solution of silver chloride of silver and turning on the current of electricity, and it will coat them all over, but the intrinsic value of the spoon isn't increased. Neither is it pure silver. The soul can be galvanized and electro plated in exactly the same way, and that is what men have tried to do under the law of will. They have taken on this kingdom of heaven but their souls have not been purified. They haven't made the at-one-ment. That is what Jesus Christ taught, that you must be purified. Follow me in the regeneration. He came out of these errors and these limitations, and he entered into spirituality through purification.

Now in this purifying process we go through many changes. We find our minds must be adjusted now and we must give up many of our old thoughts, our old thoughts about God, about ourselves, about men in general. We find that man fundamentally is a spiritual being and that we are spiritual beings. Thinking about that will throw us into a new consciousness, and then we change the world. Then we find that we have in our souls a great horde of thought people who are in a measure oppressing us, but if we understand the higher law we can overcome. You know that every time those Israelites depended upon Jehovah, appealed to Jehovah they overcame, they were masters of the situation, but they didn't always appeal, they didn't always seek the highest. They. thought that there was some way through a worldly effort that they could accomplish these ends, but I assure you ,you must begin in your mind.

Now the great question of peace in the world today must begin through peaceful thinking. We are doing more to reform the world and bring about peace by thinking peaceful thoughts than all the propaganda, than all the legislative measures that can be taken. So long as people think about war, they will invent warlike movements, but the moment they begin to think about peace, all these images of war are transformed into images of peace. So we are told by Isaiah that the swords shall be beaten into plow shares. That means all those destructive thoughts we have held about our enemies - and peace begins right at home, peace begins with you. If you are thinking destruction of life or oppression of any kind, punishment for other people, yon are getting that punishment yourself, because you are living under the Mosaic law. The moment you let go of that old law and assert your I Am purity, I Am peace, I Am love to everybody and everything, you will know your swords are being beaten into plow shares and your spears, those sharp penetrating thoughts that you have been sending out, they are transformed. Thus, they are transformed and they become instruments of agriculture, a building up of the world, your world especially. We see how this lesson is like a two-edged sword, and it cuts both ways. We must be careful what we think. Whatever you think comes to pass.

Then in the final closing up of the thought for today, this unity, this at-one-ment with God, let us remember that we have a soul to develop. We haven't all come into the full consciousness of our souls, and when you find your soul you will probably find that in all inharmony your soul is not adjusted. So long as you are giving up to your emotions or your passions or your anger or your fear, those things are working in the soul and they cause inharmony in Egypt, it the body. You don't go into that promised land which we are told we should possess, every piece of ground that you lay your feet upon in this promised land, this ideal heaven in you is yours. In other words if you understand that there is an omnipresent substance you are putting the soul of your feet, the soul of your understanding right upon that substance and it is making its impress upon your soul. You want this old material world of sin, sickness and death to disappear. We want the real heaven and new world to come to consciousness and we bring them into that consciousness as we come into the perfect harmony of the one infinite mind.

Let us this morning realize that the kingdom of God is within man. The kingdom of God is within me. This kingdom which 1 am to possess is here now waiting for me to recognize it and to put the stamp of my spirituality upon its substance and its life and enter into the salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ.