Spiritual Solutions

Do you yearn to have a happy and fulfilling new year? Do you desire better things? In a sense, this is proof positive that you most certainly can have that better year. “Desire, or hope,” as Emerson puts it, “is the beginning of its own fulfillment.” That is why we are told, “Before they call I will answer” (Isa. 65:24).  Your very desire to find help, even before you formulate it into a full-blown request, is God’s answer pressing itself out into visibility. As Emilie Cady says, “Desire in the heart is always God tapping at the door of your consciousness with His infinite supply.” But she adds this caveat: “A supply that is forever useless unless there is a demand for it.”

We are forever looking at the circumference of life for that which can only be found in ourselves. You may have already set New Year resolutions and outer goals for 2011. But the great need is to find our oneness, to find a sense of self-realization of inner security, of the “peace that passes all understanding.” The happy new year that we all wish for, and that we wish for one another, and hope will manifest for the world, may well depend upon the degree to which we can follow the guidance of the apostle Paul, “Awake thou that sleepeth, that Christ may shine upon you.” The key is in prayer or meditation.

It was Emerson who said, “Prayer is a study of truth; a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite.” The problem is that we have been taught that we begin with emptiness, and we go forth into the world to find fulfillment. Hence, we are always attempting to find out there that which fulfills us in here. We remember that Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks it will be opened.” (Matt. 7:7) But there is obviously much more than is generally realized to the word “ask.”

Without verbalizing, we ask for many things, good and not-so-good. For example, we ask for affection of family and friends simply by giving love; in other words, asking as though we fully expected our love to be requited in kind. We ask for success through our industry and our practice of personal responsibility; we ask for trouble and rejection through our doubts and slovenliness. In our trust and willingness to give aid, we are asking for friends, whereas in our fault-finding and suspicion we are asking for loneliness.

In prayer, asking deals with creating the consciousness, the mental receptivity which makes the results inevitable. You ask God for what you want by getting into the spirit. It is not something God has to do for you; it is what you must do for yourself in order to enable this divine process to do through you and as you that which it is the “ceaseless longing of the Creator to do.”

That is why Jesus would say, “It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Lk. 12:32). We may offer conventional prayer for the good we desire, and at the same time be busily expecting through our doubts and fears something quite different. If only we would remind ourselves that our prayers are for the alteration of our consciousness, we would find ourselves pointed in the right direction.

Therefore when in need, we would ask God for guidance and help by placing ourselves in a position to receive; we would work toward that position in consciousness by affirming the truth, declaring that which we desire as already being real right now; give thanks that you have (rather than “will have”) the desires of your heart. As Jesus says, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mk. 11:24).

So, affirm the truth, speak the word, and thus get yourself into the spirit and create the condition, the channel, the conduit, through which God’s answer can flow into manifestation. So, whatever you want, ask for it, but ask in the consciousness that creates the conditions that make the results inevitable. Ask in your emotions, in your actions, in your spirit, in affirmation and in the spoken word of truth.

To achieve what you hope and pray for, the need is not to change anything but rather to change the way in which you have been seeing things. Examine the way in which you have been accepting yourself. Suddenly realize that you are what you want to be. You are a successful, harmonious, happy whole creature.

Move forward into the New Year with confidence, with faith, and seek to live the life you have imagined. Release the potential within you, and you will find an entirely new experience. You will have a different consciousness; you will make the very most of all experiences that come, in terms of releasing your own potentiality. And it’s very likely that you will have the best year of your life.

Remember, God is Blessing You, Right Now!

Rev. Alan A. Rowbotham
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Rev. Alan Rowbotham, a Unity minister for over thirty-eight years, invites you to enjoy more articles and/or subscribe to his free inspirational newsletter, “Spiritual Solutions,” at www.spiritualsolutionsblog.com

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The year 2010 can be the best year you have ever known if you will have it that way. To make it so, you do not need to draw up a long list of good resolutions, although these are fine if you can keep them. Whether you have already made some resolutions or not, I suggest you adopt a policy of great expectations instead of good resolutions.

A spiritual law as exact as the laws of gravity, electromagnetics, and atomic fission, stands in back of this phenomenon of great expectations. Jesus stated it in the gospel of Matthew in this way: “Go; be it done for you as you have believed.” (Matt. 8:13) and “According to your faith be it done to you.” (Matt. 9:29) In the J. B. Phillips’ translation we read: “Everything will happen as you have believed it will.” Could you not characterize these statements as saying that convinced expectation is a forerunner of a certain outcome?

What are you expecting in 2010? Your expectations will have much to do with what the year will bring you.

God made you in His image and after His likeness; therefore, it follows that you are creative, even as God is creative. You create your own circumstances through your thinking, feeling, believing, and expecting faculties of mind. Many of the great men of the world have known this. Thomas Carlyle put it this way: “Man makes the circumstances and, spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.” Disraeli said, “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.”

Behind every outward circumstance stands an unseen, invisible thought, feeling, or word – an expectation of good or ill. The Bible tells us: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” (Prov. 4:23, KJV) The “heart” here means our deepest inward convictions and beliefs about what we think we are worthy of having, in the outer, as a part of our life experience.

The word to be stressed as yo make your own blueprint of your expectations for the upcoming year is “great.” Great expectations! Make those expectations large, if you would experience the largeness of God’s abundant giving. All the good and great desire for more health, wealth, and happiness, is really His own spiritual desire to fulfill Himself in and through you – in a joyous, rich, and expansive way of life.

Remember, only a happy new you produces a happy new year!

I would like to share with you a prayer, coming to you straight from my own heart. I pray that this year may be a truly happy year for you, a year filled with rich and wonderful belessings. I pray that it may be a year in which you walk in close companionship with God, a year in which you know and feel God’s loving Presence enfolding you and your loved ones. I pray that this may be a year in which the good is magnified in your heart and in the heart of every person, a year in which all of us may come to see more clearly our oneness with one another. I pray that, in the words of Psalms 65:11, “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness.”

Rev. Alan A. Rowbotham

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We are standing on the threshold of a new year, a year filled with possibilities, new potential for you to explore, new songs to sing, new dreams to bring into visibility. But do you have the power to see it through? That’s the question I’d like to put to you today.

Sometimes it’s hard to get started in a new direction. We need that push forward through the inertia to get moving in a certain direction. When we think about our dreams and our goals and our visions and our purposes and begin to pray about them, they come alive to us. We begin to see what we want to achieve.

But we must go further than that. Let me illustrate by referring you to the scripture in Exodus 14:15, where we find Moses and the people of Israel on the edge of the Red Sea having escaped from Egypt and bondage. Here they are, faced with the Red Sea before them and no way to get across, the Pharaoh and his army in back of them approaching rapidly. What were they to do? They were panicking and Moses told them to stand still, that was the first thing, to “Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord.” In other words, to pray, to get still. I’m sure he was praying pretty hard right then. What was going to happen? It was a scary moment. You’ve been in those moments, between a rock and a hard place.

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If you haven’t done so already, soon you will be taking down the Christmas tree and putting away the lights and Christmas decorations for another year. The nativity scene has been put away. But will you also be putting away the Christ for another year?

So now what? At Christmas we affirmed the birth of the Christ within us. So what happens now? Where do we go from here?

We often go back to the same old routine, the same patterns and beliefs, the same mistakes we have made before. We forget that we have affirmed a truth of our being, of the presence of God born into our awareness in a whole new way.

I was reminded of this recently when talking to a man who was telling me about his dog. He said, “We have a wonderful little dog in our family, but he does some stupid things. He likes chocolate, and chocolate is poison to dogs. A few weeks ago somebody brought a chocolate cake over. They had put it on the

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