Todays Eric Butterworth The Key To Personal Prosperity I am quite sure that most of us are interested in prosperity. If someone should ask you, “Are you ready for financial betterment? Are you ready for affluence in your life?” you would hasten to say that you are. Most of us think we’re ready for prosperity. But I wonder if we are…really. Now, it is hard to imagine not being ready and willing to welcome, with open arms, the good things we desire from life. But simply wanting material benefits doesn’t mean that we are really ready for them. If we were, they would come to us. Make no mistake about it, the amount of prosperity that you have at any given moment is the exact amount that you are prepared to accept.To make room for more, you have to go into a kind of training for it. You go into training for any other skill. To become a lawyer, dentist, doctor, engineer, nurse, private secretary, one must put in a period of study and preparation, even on-the-job training. Painters, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and mechanics serve an apprenticeship while they are learning their trade. The acquisitions and proper handling of money or material blessings certainly is no less a skill. Why should we think that prosperity is merely a matter of chance or luck, subject to no underlying laws of cause and effect? To attract a fortune, or even a small enough fraction of one to buy a new car, we have to apply the Prosperity Law, either consciously or unconsciously.There is no doubt that some people seem to be born with an innate understanding of the Law, and they use it intuitively, without realizing that they are doing so. One very affluent man, who was once asked for the secret of his success, said: “It has just never occurred to me that I could possibly be poor. I expect money to come to me, and it does.” And yet, vast fortunes accumulated by people like this are often quickly dissipated by sons and daughters who apparently are untrained for prosperity. Because the millionaire’s understanding of the Principle behind this acquisition of a fortune was unconscious, he couldnt pass that understanding on to his children, so they soon came to grief when it was their turn to act as custodians of the trust.Many persons who attract plenty are unable to keep it. With them it is “here today and gone tomorrow, as the cliché goes. Others in various degrees of lack or want seem incapable of attracting enough to meet their needs. In either case, what these persons require is not better luck but better training in the ground rules of prosperity, so that they can develop what we call a “Prosperity Consciousness,” enabling them to have and to hold the all-sufficiency that is God’s free and loving gift to all His children.Charles Fillmore [co-founder of Unity] says in his book, entitled Prosperity, and I quote: “You may think that you could live better and do more good if you had lots of money. Things wouldn’t be a bit better with you if you had a million dollars unless you also had the understanding to use it for the good of yourself and others. We must evolve with our possessions until we get the ability to handle them, and then the Law is fulfilled.” A word of advice from Charles Fillmore.Prosperity is subject to Universal Laws, just as the sun, the moon, the stars, and the tides are. Jesus said it is the Truth that sets us free. [John 8:32] And surely that means free from lack and want, free from the inability to pay bills, free from penury. Yes, Truth will free us from all these miseries. But note the exact quotation, because there is a condition implied in this promise: “Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free.” In other words, before Truth can free us, we must first know it. Until we do that, we are not ready for the kind of prosperity that lasts, any more than we can solve a mathematical problem until we know the multiplication tables. If and when we do know the Truth about ourselves, we shall have every good thing we need. We shall then attract prosperity easily, automatically.The truth about prosperity is really very simple. Here it is in just a few words:First of all: God is the source of all Prosperity, of all Substance, of all Affluence. We have the promise that “Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” [James 1:17] This is simply a symbolical and theological way of stating that the Source of all Substance is nonmaterial, it is in Spirit.Second: There is no separation between you and God. The Scriptures tell us, “I and the Father are one,” [John 10:30] and that is the truth about you!Third: God wants you to be prosperous, and has already given you all that you can accept as belonging to you. The promise is, “...it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” [Luke 12:32] And, the Kingdom is not “out there” somewhere; as Jesus said in Luke 17:21, it is within you.So, let us put all this into one simple statement. It is the Truth that you must know if you are to be set free, forever, from lack and fear of lack. It goes, simply, like this: “God is my Abundant Supply. All that He has is mine, and He wants to give it to me. I now claim my Abundance of good.” Take this affirmation and make it a part of you. Let me repeat it.“God is my Abundant Supply. All that He has is mine, and He wants to give it to me. I now claim my Abundance of good.”Now, to claim your prosperity as already yours, and not off in the future somewhere, it is absolutely essential to establish the identity of your Oneness with the Flow [of God Substance]. Without that realization, you will be like the man who put a twenty dollar bill in his watch pocket and forgot it was there. Sometime later, he went to an auction with his wife and discovered he had left his wallet home. Several items came up for sale that they wanted to buy, but he didn’t bid because, as he told his wife, “I haven’t a cent with me.” After they returned home, he suddenly discovered the bill in the pocket. In other words, he had some money, all the time, to by a few little items that he was really “drooling” for, but he hadn’t realized that he had it, and it had done him no good.In the same way, we are all heirs to all God’s Infinite Riches, but unless we realize our wealth, we fail to benefit from it. We cannot possibly use what we do not know we have. Admittedly, it isn’t always easy, at first, to see plenty where lack seems to be. But remember that lack is only an appearance, and appearances are not real...they change. Put God and His Good in the place of the false appearance. Pay no attention to the thing you don’t want...deny it. Say to it: “You are not real. I don’t believe in you. Go away! Don’t come back!” And then, stop thinking about limitation and be thankful for its opposite—the blessing that you want in its place.Seeming miracles happen when you attain this high state of consciousness about God’s Abundance and His desire to share it with you. God always gives good measure when we have faith in the Divine Flow. But we have to see the good as already ours before it can come to us. If we see only lack, then that is what we are going to continue to experience.A woman had only a bottle of milk and a package of dry cereal in the house. Her husband had been out of work for some time, and they were down to their last penny. She took her baby to the park. And there, while he played in the sand pile, she thanked God for the fine dinner that they were going to have that night. In telling of her experience, she said, “It was so real to me that I could smell it and taste it.” When she got home she found a large carton on the floor outside her apartment house door. There was a note on top of it from her neighbor, across the hall, whom she had only known slightly. It said, “Have been called away, unexpectedly. Seems too bad to let this food spoil, so I am hoping you can make use of it.” The box contained enough food to last for a week, and by that time her husband got a job.God always give good measure, when we have faith in the Divine Flow. But, we have tosee the good as already ours before it can come to us. If we see only lack, then that is way we are going to continue to experience. This is because, like God, each of us is creative. With every thought we are constantly creating its likeness in the material world and causing it to manifest outwardly in our affairs. You cannot think poverty andexperience prosperity, any more than you could put apples in the oven to bake and take out baked potatoes. You cannot constantly think and say, “I cant afford...,” and at the same time expect freedom from scrimping. If you really want prosperity, it will pay you to be decisive and definite in your thinking.Prosperity, of course, means many things to many people. What does it mean to you? What is it that you really want? There is so much fuzzy thinking on this subject. Maybe you don’t make your inner desires sharp and clear enough for them to be out-pictured in your affairs. You will find that every successful person has known precisely what he or she was after, and didn’t “shilly-shally” in thinking, but had a definite goal indelibly stamped on his or her mind.It will prove well-worth your time to sit down quietly by yourself and make a specific list of the things that spell “prosperity” to you. Don’t be content to say simply, “I want more money,” because that is indefinite. Substance must have something to fill, and it is up to you to hold out the receptacle. God, Himself, will not pour a gallon of Substances into a half-pint measure.Now, we don’t need to outline how our prosperity is going to come to us, because God has many channels through which to work. We can leave the ways and means to the Divine Process. But even God will not help us if we don’t know what we want. Without decisive thinking about our goals, we are certain to get indecisive results.Jesus gave us the directions for finding true prosperity when he said: “Seek ye first theKingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”[Matt. 6:33] You have not “trained” for prosperity until you have learned first to seek theKingdom of God. It is not far off somewhere in time and space; it exists right here and now, because it is the state of consciousness that you enter when you realize that theReal you is One with the Father, One with the Creative Flow. Ask yourself whether you are seeking this knowledge first—ahead of cars and clothing and food and furniture, ahead of stocks and bonds, ahead of fame and fortune. Jesus didnt say we must find the Kingdom before our prosperity is assured. It is much easier than that. He said we need only seekthe Kingdom, and want it with all our hearts. In other words, we have to be explorers before we become discoverers, for what we seek we shall surely find. And you can go forward to experience Prosperity for you…without limitation!© Eric Butterworth
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 04:53:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015