Being Human

Becoming a "good" person is a process. You invite the Lord into your life and trying to live according to His will instead of your own selfish will.

To say that each of us has an internal “self” and an external “self” is not particularly revolutionary. We all have a natural sense that our thoughts and feelings are “inside” us and our bodies and actions are on the “outside” of us.

As human beings, we get stuck all the time in conflicts between what we want and what we know. We want to eat that extra piece of pie, but we know over-eating is bad for us.....

Freedom -- what is it really? As far as we can tell, our level of freedom is pretty new, at least in this neck of the cosmos.

Rationality is the ability of the intellect to understand what is true and good (and the opposite, what is false and evil).

Through our ancestry we receive tendencies towards evil, as well as good traits. Those evils don't become "our own" unless we make them into habits, and justify them. If we fight them, and shun them, they get pushed to the peripheries of our minds.

In New Christian thought, femininity and masculinity in human beings represent the eternal marriage between Divine Love and Divine Wisdom in God. It can be an amazing, wonderful union.

Swedenborg describes temptation as an assault or an attack on what we spiritually have come to love.

Repentance doesn’t just mean confessing our sins, being forgiven, and then forgetting about it and going right back to what we were doing before. In order to truly repent, we need to change our ways.

Imagine a society where everyone is always "looking out for #1".

This was the guiding philosophy of the great man, and great Chicago Bears running back, Gale Sayers.

Sometimes, when someone doesn't live up to their professed standards, we think "there's another hypocrite." Is that fair? The answer is: It depends.

The "as-of-self" is a key doctrinal concept in New Christian theology.

Swedenborg uses the term, "to appropriate", in a distinctive way.

We need to marry a desire for good to a true understanding of how to be good. The search for this union is the basis of spiritual rebirth.

God is often described as angry or jealous in the Old Testament. How does this fit into our idea of God being loving and forgiving? The answer is in understanding the difference between anger and zeal.

People in this world who think and speak well of others "are like the angels" (Arcana Coelestia 1088)

The purpose of baptism is not well understood in the world today. Some people view it in almost magical terms--as something which will automatically bring grace to the one who is baptized. What does New Christian teaching say about it?

When a person becomes a church, he has found a dwelling place, a home inside his heart and mind where the Lord can dwell.

In the Holy Supper, or communion, the bread stands for the Lord's good, and the wine stands for His truth. When we eat and drink, there's a correspondence between these natural acts and the spiritual acts of reception.