This is Part 4 of 5 of a sermon on Mark 12:28-34 by the Messenger Elizabeth Clare Prophet delivered on Palm Sunday, April 15, 1984, at Camelot. It is published in Pearls of Wisdom Vol. 27 No. 23 – May 28, 1984.

Love God with All Thy Strength

There is another requirement: to love God with all thy strength. Four types of love—the love of the heart, the love of the soul, the love of the mind, and the love of thy strength. And in this octave thy strength is in the physical body, the strength is in the chakras, the strength is in the fire of the etheric body—the ability of the mind to focus and of the desire body to be a chalice for the desire of God. If we are going to love with strength, we must seek strength in these four lower bodies. We must exercise them. We must treat them well and be certain that we have better than a stallion at our command.

If you owned a prize stallion worth a million dollars, you would treat it well. Your four lower bodies are worth much more than a million dollars to the Godhead. This is the vessel of the living God. This is the place where God can descend into the physical octave. And if you are not strong in all ways, you will not be able to contain him, and the chalice will crack and shatter and the light will spill upon the ground.

Will God do this? He will not do it. If he perceives a weak chalice, he will withhold the light, and you will never know what the experience is of living and walking and moving with God.

Therefore, you must have the strength to love him; your strength is being tested. Recognize the test, recognize the need to constantly check one’s thoughts, one’s feelings, the condition of the heart, how the heart loves—whether with joy or with holding back, whether with purity or the desire to possess. Check the soul and whether it is daily maintaining the discipline of where it must go.

So, you see, you can measure yourself—not against the mediocrity of the world—but against the standard of the saints, the wise men and women, the great teachers, the examples we know whose tremendous sacrifices were born out of a long self-discipline of the faculties.

Do you think George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or the great heroes of every nation suddenly stepped forth capable of doing what they had to do to preserve the spirit of freedom? No, they were called because they were ready, having made themselves ready. Having made themselves ready, the fire of freedom was poured into the vessel, and it did not destroy them. They were exalted and they in turn exalted a nation and a people, and all of civilization moved forward.

And the saddest story I could ever tell you is this: that if you are not ready and have not prepared the vessel, the angel of the Lord and his Holy Spirit will bypass you. And in the density of nonpreparedness, you will never know that you have been bypassed, that you have lost an opportunity to be the vessel of divine love.

One comes to the perception of the longing to be that vessel of one’s Higher Self. In the path and process of self-purification, there is the longing that develops for oneness with Christ, and no other event in one’s life can take the place of that oneness. The hunger and the yearning for God becomes so intense that it spurs one on to conquer the self day by day. And one literally waits upon the Lord—on the return of that love. One waits to hear the word This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. One waits to hear the word “Well done.”

We can perform a thousand tasks without even so much as a hint of praise, knowing that when our praise of God is perfect, the Divine One will respond. And one word in a century from God is enough because by that we know we are going in the right direction. And when we see people healed and raised up because of our ministry, we need no other praise because we know our Father so well that we know he is well pleased.

Continued in Part 5 Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself…