493. Every Spiritual Gift the Church Has to Offer That Comes to Us in Freedom and That We Freely Accept Stays with Us; What Comes to Us in Other Ways Does Not

What we accept in freedom stays with us, because freedom relates to our will; and since freedom relates to our will it also relates to our love. The will is a vessel for love, as I have shown elsewhere [39, 263, ].

Freedom is a characteristic of everything that belongs to love and everything that belongs to our will. Anyone can see this from the statement "I want to do this because I love it," and the other way around, "because I love this I also want to do it. " Nevertheless, the will we have is dual. We have an inner will and an outer will; our inner self has a will and so does our outer self. This is what makes it possible for con artists to act and speak one way before the world and another way with their close friends. Before the world they act and speak from the will of their outer self, but with friends, from the will within, and here I mean the will of the inner self where their dominant love resides.

Just from these few points we can see that our inner will is our true self. It is the location of the underlying reality and essence of our life. Our intellect is the form of that inner self. Through our intellect our will makes its love visible. Our freedom is a matter of everything we love and everything love leads us to want. Whatever comes forth from the love in our inner will is the delight of our life. And because the love in our inner will is the underlying reality of our life, it also truly belongs to us.

This is why something that the freedom of this will leads us to accept stays with us; it adds itself to what is our own. The opposite occurs if something is brought in apart from our freedom; that something is not accepted in the same way. But this is to be taken up in the ensuing discussion [496, 500].

199. The Lord spoke in correspondences when he was in the world. While he was talking in an earthly way, he was also talking in a spiritual way. This is clear from his parables. Every word of them has a spiritual meaning inside.

Take, for example, the parable of the ten young women. He said,

The kingdom of the heavens is like ten young women who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were prudent and five were foolish. When the foolish women took their lamps, they did not take any oil. The prudent women took oil in their lamps. When the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and fell asleep. In the middle of the night there was a shout: "Behold, the bridegroom is coming! Go out to meet him. " At that, all the women woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish women said to the prudent ones, "Give us some of your oil, because our lamps are going out. " The prudent women replied, "There might not be enough for us all. Go instead to the sellers and buy yourselves some. " But as they were going away to buy some, the bridegroom arrived and the women who were prepared walked in with him to the wedding and the door was closed. Later the other women came along and said, "Lord, Lord, open up for us. " But he answered and said, "I tell you truly, I do not know you. " (Matthew 25:1-12)

The only people who see that in each of these details there is a spiritual meaning and therefore something holy and divine are those who have a general awareness of the existence and nature of spiritual meaning.

In the spiritual meaning, the kingdom of the heavens means heaven and the church. The bridegroom means the Lord. The wedding means the Lord's marriage to heaven and the church through the good that love does and the truth that faith perceives. The young women mean people who are in the church. Ten means all. Five means a part. Lamps mean beliefs. Oil means loving what is good. Sleeping and awakening mean our life in the world, which is an earthly life, and our life after death, which is a spiritual life. Buying means acquiring for ourselves. Going to the sellers and buying oil means trying after we have died to acquire from others a love for what is good. Since we can no longer acquire a love for what is good after we die, therefore although they brought their lamps and the oil they had purchased to the door where the wedding was taking place, the bridegroom told them, "I do not know you. " The reason is that after our life in the world, the way we have lived in the world remains.

This makes it clear that the Lord spoke entirely in correspondences because he spoke from the divine nature that was in him and was his.

Young women mean people who are in the church. This is why the prophetic Word says the virgin or daughter of Zion, of Jerusalem, of Judah, of Israel so many times. Oil means love for what is good. This is why all the church's sacred objects were anointed with oil.

This correspondent nature applies to all the other parables and all the other words that the Lord spoke. This is why the Lord says that his words are spirit and are life (John 6:63).