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].

758. The fact that everything the Lord said then to his disciples was about the time when the Christian church would come to an end is very clear from the Book of Revelation, which contains similar predictions about the close of the age and the Lord's Coming. Each verse of the Book of Revelation is explained in Revelation Unveiled (published in 1766). Since the points that the Lord made to his disciples about the close of the age and his Coming align with the points regarding the same events that he later revealed through John in the Book of Revelation, it is abundantly clear that the Lord was not referring to any other end than the end of the Christian church that exists today. There are also prophecies about the end of this church in Daniel; this is why the Lord says, "When you see that the abomination of desolation foretold by the prophet Daniel is standing in the holy place, let those who read note it well" (Matthew 24:15; Daniel 9:27). There are similar passages in the other prophets.

[2] The appendix will show further that the abomination of desolation exists today within the Christian church. It will demonstrate that there is not one single genuine truth left in the church, and that if a new church were not raised up to take the place of the church that exists today, "No flesh would be saved," as the Lord says in Matthew 24:22.

Strange to say, though, the fact that the Christian church of today is severely devastated and is at its end is not at all apparent to those on earth who have become adamantly devoted to the church's false teachings. The reason for this is that becoming adamantly devoted to a teaching that is false is the same as denying a teaching that is true. Such people place a heavy tarpaulin over the doorway to their intellect to prevent anything from sneaking into their mind and pulling down the tent poles and ropes that they have used to shape and reinforce their theological system.

If our rational faculty is earthly in nature, it is capable of supporting any notion it wishes to. It is equally capable of giving support to something false as it is to something true. Once a given idea has been reinforced in us, truth and falsity appear in the same light. We lose the ability to tell the difference between the dim, deceptive light we experience in a dream and the true light of day.

If our rational faculty is spiritual in nature, though, it is quite the opposite. How do we develop spiritual rationality? We turn to the Lord and he gives us a love for what is true.