Third Series – Sermon Thirty-six
Original by George MacDonald
Paraphrase by Dale R. Howie
The Inheritance is the last sermon in the final series, a bookend with its matching pair, The Child in the Mist. This sermon is a true reflection and summary of what we have seen and learned. Our Abba, our Heavenly Father, is the beginning and end
and everything in between. If we have not found the first light of heaven in our relationship with our Father, Brother, and Teacher, heaven will be Hell for us! Because Heaven will be continuous fellowship with God! What we receive in the end is Them and what They always wanted from eternity past is Us!
“What I am trying to express is this: That if we understood that everything comes from God, then our inheritance, whatever form it would take, would be seen as Him, for everything is God’s, not just as being in His power, that of course, but as coming from Him.” “Independence is a stream cut off – a stream that has cut itself off from its source and thinks it runs on without it.” “For never, in the middle of the good things of this beautiful world, have I ever felt quite at home.” Home is where the heart is, and that heart resides within the One who is our Heavenly Father!
NOTE: For those of you who like the feel of paper, or just want to read this in a more traditional form CLICK HERE for PDF in new tab. BOLD TEXT are significant quotes for which I have placed the originals as Cliffnotes at the end.
“Giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”
The Inheritance
To have a share in any earthly inheritance is to dimmish by dividing the other inheritors’ shares. However, the saints’ inheritance, the claim that each has, increases the portions of the rest. Let’s look at the words Dante puts in the mouth of his guide as they pass through Purgatory:
Because you point and fix your longing eyes on things where sharing lessens every share, the human bellows heave with envious sighs.
But if the loftiest love that dwelleth there up to the heaven of heavens your longing turn, then from your heart will pass this fearing care:
The oftener there the word our they discern, the more of good doth everyone possess, the more of love doth in that cloister burn.
Dante questions how the division between more inheritors could make them all richer? Virgil answers:
Because thy mind doth stick to earthly things, and on them brood, from the true light thou dost but darkness pick.
That same ineffable and infinite Good, which dwells up there, to Love doth run as fleet as sunrays to bright things, for sisterhood.
It gives itself proportionate to the heat: so that, wherever Love doth spread its reign, the growing wealth of God makes that its seat.
And the more people that up thither strain, the more there are to love, the more they love, and like a mirror each doth give and gain.
In the inheritance of God, a person can desire and seek to obtain his share without fear of selfishness. Because to fail to receive yours is to deprive others of your portion of theirs. Let’s look closer and see what the inheritance of the saints contains.
In our passage in Colossians, “the inheritance of the saints in light,” Paul says that “Light” itself is the source and substance of our inheritance. And if we remember that “God is Light” and that Jesus’ greatest request in prayer was that we would be one with Him and His Father. So, Paul takes this oneness one step further in Ephesians, saying, “In him, we live and move and have our being.” We can see that the saints’ inheritance is fully contained within this “Light”! To make existence good, and the single thing worth having, there can be no film of separation between the Life and us, our origin. Not only should we know God as our Life, but be aware beyond our consciousness and imagination that our creator God is always and forever present, transforming us into the live beings that we are!
In other words, the inheritance of which we as twice-born children of our Father have a right to claim. The sole claim He desires for us to demand is the inheritance that is simply Light, God Himself, the Light! Of everything good and worth having, the sole thing that makes them this way is the Divine in them!
That the beauty of the world has its origin in the will of God would not satisfy me. But only that the beauty of it be the loveliness of God Himself. His own lovely thoughts and the subsequent revelation of who He is and what flows from Him.
Nor is this all; my interest would vanish, and the heart of it would be gone if you could persuade me that God no longer cared for the daisy and now cared for something else instead. The faces of some flowers lead me back to the heart of God. And as His child, I hope that I feel, in some small way, what He felt while creating them. He said, “They are good,” that is, “They are what I imagined.”
What I am trying to express is this: That if we understood that everything comes from God, then our inheritance, whatever form it would take, would be seen as Him, for everything is God’s, not just as being in His power, that of course, but as coming from Him. Even darkness itself exists because He is Light. There would be no darkness without contrast to Himself. The very idea of nothingness could not exist except and unless God had called something into being.
Nothingness owes its very name and nature to the being and nature of God. There is no word, no reality, that is not in God. Nothing exists without God in it, nor could there be. So, a share in the inheritance is in God Himself, the Light!
How can any share exist where all is shared?
A real share in the kingdom of heaven is not what you keep but what you can give away. What is mine is that which I have the power to give away. What I cannot share, share with everyone is not fundamentally mine. The cry of the thousand splendors which Dante saw in “Paradiso” gliding towards them in the planet Mercury, was:
“Lo, here comes one who will increase our loves!”
All Light is ours. All of God is ours. Even the depths of the Divine we cannot understand is ours. Everything is in God, and everything is one in Him. We will never know and comprehend all that is God, even given all of eternity, yet He is our Father and thinks of us with all of His Being.
The vastness of God helps us to see that we have but shares in His limitlessness. The infinite God can only begin and be revealed through His infinitely diverse creatures, all of them capable of wonder, admiring, and loving each other, all creation bound in Him as one, each one revealing to the other a facet of Him.
Every human being is like a facet cut in the great diamond, which is God. Every man, woman, and child in their incompleteness reveals Him as a progressive worker in His creation. I have my secret, my message, of my great Lord, and you have yours. The ways of God go down into the microscopic depths and the telescopic heights and are even more marvelous, for in them lie the beginnings of life. Creation and the immensities of the stars and worlds all exist for the sake of things far less than themselves. And so, the ways of God go into the depths of things not yet revealed.
I say, then, that every one of us has something that others do not. We know something, whether we realize it or not, which no one else knows. Therefore, our responsibility is to share it with all the rest as one of the Kingdom of Light. For we are one family with God as the Father, the head and heart of it, with Jesus Christ, our elder brother, and the Holy Spirit revealing the Father’s heart, that They alone know!
Then, we may say that whatever is the source of joy or love, whatever is pure and strong, that wakes aspiration and lifts us out of selfishness, and is beautiful or admirable is Light! This Life in us makes up our part, however small, in the inheritance of the saints. James says, “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” (1:17)
Children fear death and heaven because of the terrible ideas the unchildlike give them of it. Those without imagination, who receive unquestioned, what others, with no more vision than themselves, represent concerning it. I do not see the benefit of presenting an alluring picture of heaven. For I suppose if I could persuade a man that heaven was everything he would desire it to be, how would the person or the truth gain by it? If he knows the Father, he will not be concerned about heaven. If he does not know Him, he will not be drawn to Him by it.
I also would not care to persuade the feeble Christian that heaven was a place worth going. However, I would convince him that no home in space, no hour in eternity, is worth anything to the one who remains such as they are. I would hope that no one would teach the little ones about things they know nothing about! Telling them to desire things they cannot love! How well I remember the pain of the expectation – no, the problem of not being happy with the prospect – of being made a pillar in the house of God and going out no more! These words were not spoken to little ones. Yet are they, literally taken, a blessed promise compared to the idea of continuous church attendance!
Perhaps no one teaches this plainly, but somehow the children catch the subtle implications. There are ways of subtle communication more powerful than words. However, what boy, willing to be a disciple of Christ and a child of God, would prefer a sermon to his glorious kite. A kite is the most divine of toys, and with God, Himself as his playmate, watching it together in the blue wind, tossed hither and thither in the golden sky! He might be willing to part with his kite, the wind, and the golden sun and go down into the grave for his brothers, but surely not to be admitted to an eternal prayer-meeting!
For my part, I rejoice to think that there will be neither church nor chapel in the heavenlies. Yes, there will be nothing of religion but its Love and no law but the perfect Law of Liberty. There is no need for law or religious practice where every heartbeat expresses the Divine, where selfishness is too revolting to be considered, and every voice is eager with thanksgiving! Where the rushing of these joyful waters is bursting from beneath the throne of God, they being the joyful tears of the Universe! Religion! Where will there be room for it, where the essence of every thought is the Divine? What place for honesty, where love fulfills the law to overflowing! Here a person would rather dive into hell than wrong his neighbor in the smallest way!
Heaven will be continuous fellowship with God, in this relationship, in this very sense of being, is joy! For to experience real Life, there must be actual and conscious contact with its very source. Therefore, this life is simple goodness, as good as the very Life of God is good, filled with the joy of our very being! I think we will need the soothing of the great joy of communion with our blessed neighbors, the comfort of the arts in every form, expressed in all their creativity, and the relief received by limitless giving to those still unfulfilled and weighted. Those who are alone, who do not yet know their neighbor or their Father. The joy of pure being will, I say, need these to bring expression and relief to the intensity of this Life to be sustainable in mind and heart.
NOTE: To see blog post on this section THE KITE STORY
To those who care only for things and see not the source, truth, or reality of them, the prospect of inheriting Life holds no attraction, offers no comfort, for they cling to a false life! They can be assured there will be no danger of a requirement of them to accept their inheritance. Perhaps they will go on sucking their things dry, continually missing the loveliness in them. Sucking on them until, at last, they hate their lovely husks, and their false imaginations turn ugly. Loving but the shell, the body, of Truth, even here they come to call it a lie and break out in tearful moaning over their illusions of life. The source of Truth they have lost because they never loved Her. What may they need to pass through, what purifying fires, before they can even behold Her!
And what notions so-called Christians have concerning the resurrection state into which their loved ones have entered, what they call a place of blessedness. Yet are ever using it to justify the bitterness of their grief and sorrows over their loss. And the heathenish doubt whether they will see and know their loved ones again. Based on this idea, it would be a wonder if they did! After a year or two of such a fate, their loved ones might well be unrecognizable. I am almost ashamed of writing about such nonsense. The idea of nirvana is grander in contrast to this heaven.
The early Christians might now and then ask Paul foolish questions about heaven, the questions to which there are still no answers. But they were never the ones who doubted they would see their loved ones again. These notions are but forms of ever-changing unbelief. They believe, they say, that God is love, but they cannot quite believe that He is the source of the love in which we are most like Him, making His love either a mockery or torture.
Little would any promise of heaven be if I could not hope to say, “I am sorry; forgive me; release me for what I did in anger, uncaring or indifference, in Jesus’ name! Many such confessions and self-humiliation will pass between our brothers and sisters. Can the man or woman who is not ready to confess, not ready to pour out their regrets – can they be an inheritor in the Light? It is the joy of a true heart, of an heir of Light, of a child of God, who loves an open soul. Sheer joy awaits the one who hates the wrongs he has done and can say, “I was wrong; I am sorry!”
Oh, the sweet winds of repentance, reconciliation, and atonement that will blow from garden to garden in the tender twilights of His kingdom. Whatever heaven will be like, one thing is sure that there will be eternal atonement, at-oneness, and ever-growing love. Certainly, too, whatever the divinely healed human heart desires, it will not hope in vain. The Light, which is God, and that of our inheritance as children of God, ensures this hope. For our hearts are made to desire this Light.
God is! And let the earth be glad, and this heaven, be the heaven of heavens! Whatever a father can do to bless his children, that God will do for His children and more. Let us, then, live in continual expectation, looking for the good things that God will give to men as their Father and everlasting savior. If the good things I now have come from Him, and they are plainly but the beginning, will I not take them as a down payment of better things to come?
So, how else can I regard them? For never, in the middle of the good things of this beautiful world, have I ever felt quite at home. Never has it revealed things grand or lovely enough to satisfy my soul. It is not all I can imagine of life. It may be that my dissatisfaction comes from not having keen and open eyes to see and understand what He has given. But in the end, it matters little whether the cause is in the world or me, both being incomplete. For God is all, and all is well.
All that is needed to set the world right for me – and no celestial heaven could be without it – is that I care for God as He cares for me!
That I, with my will and desires, are in harmony and are keeping time with His music. That I, with my thoughts and feelings, are springing from Him and not from myself. And finally that my individuality is experiencing the freedom born and belonging to His. That I am no slave to my body, my ancestry, my prejudices, or any unknown impulses, but in obedience, I am free in the law of my being. That I am living in the life-making will by which life is Life and having Life in myself!
What springs from my selfish-self is not from God and is evil; it is a perversion of something of God’s. Whatever is not of faith, that is of not trusting and living from the Life of God, is sin! Independence is a stream cut off – a stream that has cut itself off from its source and thinks it runs on without it. But Light is the inheritance through Him whose Life is the Light of men, to awaken in us the Life of our Father in heaven. All love be to Him, Who in Himself generates the Life, which is the Light of men!
For MacDonald, our inheritance is relational, not material. And our share in it is expressed in giving. This thought reflects the nature of creation as the expression of the Trinity’s relationship, shared love, and subsequent giving of Life. This process is consistent with the continuation of our transformation from takers to givers!
How else could it be? How everything begins is how it ends. They wanted to share Themselves, Their Life, with us. So, when Life has gone full circle, what we will receive is Them!
Again, what else would make any sense? The Father, Son, and Spirit sacrifice Themselves, withholding nothing of Their Life from us. They have given away all that They are and all that They have for Their creation! Would this giving not define everything for us as well?
This section is the theme of the sermon and reflects Abba, Father! and The Child in the Mist on relationship as the Divine’s Irreducible Truth! Heaven is not an escape from life, but the family, the Home, we were destined for from the beginning.
The Kite Story paints a beautiful image of our journey, one movement from Alone, Together, and to Others! This path is the journey of consciousness. Our ever-expanding Universe until all is One and all is Love! Therefore, this Life is simple goodness, as good as the very Life of God is good, filled with the joy of our very being!
If we do not care about relationships, then we are left with Things! If heaven for us is about Things, then God’s Heaven will be Hell! Without the fellowship and communion of the Father, Son, and Spirit, there could be no Heaven!
Relationships are dynamic, not static. They are ever-changing. Heaven is not instant attainment of perfect Love. If we have learned the joy of repentance in this life? We will continue to experience that ever-increasing joy in the next. Heaven is the joy of a true heart, of an heir of Light, of a child of God, who desires and loves an open soul!
It was Home that ended CHILD at the beginning and it is Home that ends the book here. For all of creation in all of its glory and beauty is but a taste of Heaven. For here is not our Home. Home is where the heart is, and that Heart resides within the One who is our Heavenly Father!
Inheritance – Introductory Blog
INHERITANCE OF THE SAINTS
In this inheritance then a man may desire and endeavour to obtain his share without selfish prejudice to others; nay, to fail of our share in it, would be to deprive others of a portion of theirs. Let us look a little nearer, and see in what the inheritance of the saints consists.
For the one only thing to make existence a good, the one thing to make it worth having, is just that there should be no film of separation between our life and the life of which ours is an outcome; that we should not only know that God is our life, but be aware, in some grand consciousness beyond anything imagination can present to us, of the presence of the making God, in the very process of continuing us the live things he has made us.
GOD IS OUR INHERITANCE
We have a claim—which claim his sole desire for us is that we should, so to say, enforce—that this inheritance is simply the light, God himself, the Light.
The thing I am reasoning toward is this: that, if everything were thus seen in its derivation from God, then the inheritance of the saints, whatever the form of their possession, would be seen to be light. All things are God’s, not as being in his power—that of course—but as coming from him.
THE MEANING OF SHARE
The true share, in the heavenly kingdom throughout, is not what you have to keep, but what you have to give away. The thing that is mine is the thing I have with the power to give it. The thing I have no power to give a share in, is nowise mine; the thing I cannot share with everyone, cannot be essentially my own.
We may say, then, that whatever is the source of joy or love, whatever is pure and strong, whatever wakes aspiration, whatever lifts us out of selfishness, whatever is beautiful or admirable—in a word, whatever is of the light.
HEAVEN IS GOD HIMSELF
What boy, however fain to be a disciple of Christ and a child of God, would prefer a sermon to his glorious kite, that divinest of toys, with God himself for his playmate, in the blue wind that tossed it hither and thither in the golden void! He might be ready to part with kite and wind and sun, and go down to the grave for his brothers—but surely not that they might be admitted to an everlasting prayer-meeting! For my own part, I rejoice to think that there will be neither church nor chapel in the high countries; yea, that there will be nothing there called religion, and no law but the perfect law of liberty.
Heaven will be continuous touch with God. The very sense of being will in itself be bliss. For the sense of true life, there must be actual, conscious contact with the source of the life; therefore mere life—in itself, in its very essence good—good as the life of God which is our life.
THE HELL OF THINGS
To those who care only for things, and not for the souls of them, for the truth, the reality of them, the prospect of inheriting light can have nothing attractive, and for their comfort—how false a comfort!—they may rest assured there is no danger of their being required to take up their inheritance at present.
They believe, they say, that God is love; but they cannot quite believe that he does not make the love in which we are most like him, either a mockery or a torture.
THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE
The man or woman who is not ready to confess, who is not ready to pour out a heartful of regrets—can such a one be an inheritor of the light? It is the joy of a true heart of an heir of light, of a child of that God who loves an open soul—the joy of any man who hates the wrong the more because he has done it, to say, ‘I was wrong; I am sorry.’
HOME
Never has it shown me things lovely or grand enough to satisfy me. It is not all I should like for a place to live in.
All that is needed to set the world right enough for me—and no empyrean heaven could be right for me without it—is, that I care for God as he cares for me;
What springs from myself and not from God, is evil; it is a perversion of something of God’s. Whatever is not of faith is sin; it is a stream cut off—a stream that cuts itself off from its source, and thinks to run on without it. But light is my inheritance through him whose life is the light of men, to wake in them the life of their father in heaven. Loved be the Lord who in himself generated that life which is the light of men!