The Meaning of Life

I've had an inner search for many years. I felt I needed a more total understanding and a more total experience. Of God? Of myself? Of the ways of God? I was always struck by that word in Psalms where it says many of God's people know His acts…the 103rd Psalm. He made those acts known unto Israel, and His ways unto Moses. I know a person's acts outside me and I can benefit by them. I know a carpenter's acts and can benefit by his chair. To know the ways of the carpenter means I am `identified' with the carpenter. He and I are one inside and I learn from him how to operate from inside to produce chairs…… I don't know that.

So it is one thing for us to start by knowing the wonderful acts of God through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is another thing to become a "co"…co with God, fellowship with God, cooperation…union with God, so that we act as God. We know His ways and are going along with God in His ways. That is what I was after…something more total.

Paul always used the word "all"……all sufficiency, in all things, abounding in every good work, having all power, to all wisdom, and all longsuffering so I can do all things through Christ. He loved that word "all". Paul didn't say what he didn't know. He didn't talk theory. He knew “all”. There is that allness we can know! And I needed an allness-expansion of understanding, which can become an expansion of experience that can be an operating experience, which met my inner needs and meets my outer needs. That has, of course, been the subject you precious people have had every year as you've met in the conferences. I'm only echoing what you hear continually.

So that's been the kind of search with me for years - maybe 30 or 40 years. My basis always has been the written Word. That stood to me as the final revelation, as it is all of us here. So I hope all we say is based on and is expansion of the written Word. We can turn back to that at any time, but I've been to other sources. I drank a great deal from the mystics, because they knew union. I wanted union with God. They knew union…St. Theresa, John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena, John Ruysbroeck, John Tauler, Meister Eckhart…wonderful men! And to me the greatest of all, a man who had the understanding, was the great rather unknown German, Jacob Boehme, (whose books are difficult to get) and his English interpreter, William Law…made a tremendous revolution in my life when I began to feed on their wealth a few years ago. And other authors along the way, and people along the way, have been helps to consolidate in me some understanding which I hope has become experience, because we live by experience, of course…live by what you are. So that's the kind of thing that I'm seeking to share with you these days.