Part I — Where It All Began
For Lessons 3 & 4
36 min read
Personal Application
This supplement is a heart-to-heart companion to the preceding two lessons — addressing your immediate personal needs and practical application of the truths studied.
Understanding how to interpret the Bible correctly and grasping the truth about God's nature changes something immediate and practical: how you pray. If God is a specific Person — with a personal spirit-body, a personal soul, a personal spirit — then prayer is not sending a request into a cosmic void. It's communicating with Someone who is specifically present and specifically attentive.
The idea that the Godhead consists of three separate and distinct persons—each with a personal spirit-body, a personal soul, and a personal spirit—will mean so much to you as you learn to know and love God and follow the divine plan for your life. At the very least, this conception of God will make the whole Godhead comprehensible to you. It will no longer be a mystery beyond all possible understanding, as you may have been taught.
Because God the Father is a person, He expects you to respect Him as you would any other great personage—and as you should the Sovereign Moral Governor of all free moral agents. God has a personal plan for your life that fits perfectly into His larger plan for humanity. In other words, He has invited and made it possible for each of you to have a personal part in fulfilling His plan for man.
You should enter wholeheartedly into cooperation with God's plan for your life. God's plan is a mutual one for the best and highest good of all creation. He wants to take you into partnership for eternity. As Paul expressed it, "workers together with him" 2 Corinthians 6:1.
Think of it like this: God is inviting you to become a junior partner in the most important enterprise in the universe. This should be the thrill of your life. You should count it the greatest honor ever bestowed upon you to have a part with Him in bringing about the highest good of the universe. You should hunger daily to know Him better as a person and to know His plan, so that you may become an integral part of God and His program.
The plan of God for man includes both the means and the ends—prayer and its answer, the labor and its fruit. There is a single plan that embraces all things for the good of all creation. It is part of the perfection of God that He would have a plan for man—the best plan possible. This plan is already predestinated according to the eternal purpose of Him that works all things after the pleasure of His own will Isaiah 46:10-11Daniel 4:35Ephesians 1:3-11Ephesians 2:10Ephesians 3:10-11.
This personal concept of God will enable you to work with God as a person, pray to Him as you would talk to any person in whom you put trust and confidence, and obey Him in all things—realizing that everything is done in the presence of God. As you continue these lessons, the plan of God will be unfolded to you, and you will get to know God in a real, personal way.
As you conform to the plan, you will get to know the power of God and learn how to use it to get the many blessings of this life for yourself and for others. God's plan will become a personal part of your life as you seek to know and follow it. God will become your best friend and a personal Father and Partner in your everyday affairs. You will come to know the glory and the blessing of a secret relationship with God such as few people know.