New Church Life September/October 2016 | Page 19

    within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.” (Ezekiel 36:26-27) So if we want to have any understanding of how God works in the world, we have to understand how He works in our hearts and spirits. When we listen to a radio or watch TV we don’t pay much attention to the radio or TV itself but to the music or message that is coming in. A message is widely broadcast and the radio waves that carry it are all around us, and even go right through us, but they are invisible and inaudible until they are picked up by a receiver. If you were to go on a search for those radio waves without an antenna you would find no evidence that they exist. Yet through the antenna, tuner and amplifier in the radio we can hear the message clearly. Since the message comes into the receiver invisibly it seems as if it is coming from the radio or TV itself. Someone who does not understand radio waves may have no comprehension that every sound and image is coming from somewhere far away. The Lord is constantly broadcasting messages to all people. Like radio waves, those spiritual influencers are invisible. We can’t see, hear or touch them. We may have no idea they are even there. Yet our minds are receivers and when we pick up those messages they show up in us as thoughts and feelings. These thoughts and feelings flow in from the Lord through heaven and hell, through angels and spirits, and sometimes the messages are distorted along the way. So we have good thoughts that flow in through heaven and bad thoughts that flow in through hell. The desires, feelings and thoughts that flow in make up our whole life, just as the messages that come by radio waves constitute all the life that appears in the radio or on TV. The Lord’s Word is like the tuner for the radio. The tuner allows the radio to focus on a particular frequency so that it can make sense of the incoming radio waves. When we search the Word with a sincere desire to understand and follow the Lord’s leading, the truths we live by tune our minds to a frequency that can receive the Lord’s messages. If we believe the Bible literally, but we are not open to the spirit within, we are like a radio that has a tuner but does not have an antenna, so it doesn’t pick up any signal. We are not paying attention to the spirit. On the other hand, if we reject the Bible completely we can’t tune our The power and magic of the commandments lie in the way they open up a channel for the Lord’s love to flow into our lives. 425