If you missed last Sunday, August 29th’s Zoom Church Service with Guest Minister, Rev. Dr. Jonathan Mitchell, you can watch it below on YouTube.
#LastSundaysSermon: “Thinking Together and the Search for Truth”
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Tag Archives: Truth
#WeekendPlans: 8/29 “Thinking Together & the Search for Truth”
Friends, please join us for our zoom service this Sunday, August 29,2021, featuring Guest Minister, Rev. Dr. Jonathan Mitchell. Rev. Mitchell is the acting co-pastor at the Garden Church in San Pedro, CA.
Sunday School is at 9:45 am, Fellowship time at 10:30, and Worship at 11:00 am.
“Our thoughts and feelings are never ours alone — at least if we believe what Emanuel Swedenborg teaches. Even when we are apparently by ourselves, thinking our own thoughts, we are thinking together with a spiritual community, whose thoughts and feelings we share. The social ability to observe the same things and agree on how they are to be described makes possible the scientific endeavor. Unfortunately, the social practice of agreeing on how to describe things also underlies pseudoscience, prejudice and mass delusion. In a world where the social, cultural and political rifts are getting ever deeper and more embittered, how can we think together in a common search for the truth?”
Rev. Jonathan Mitchell
Our Readings will be:
Psalm 19
Matthew24:3-13
Emanuel Swedenborg: Nunc licet intrare intellectualiter in arcana fidei. Now it is permitted to enter with understanding into the mysteries of faith.
#PsalmOfTheDay: Psalm 126
Please leave your reflections in the comment section.
Psalm 126, New Living Translation
Psalm 126, Science of Correspondences
5, 6. This is said of those who have been in spiritual captivity and are liberated. To hear the measure of seed stands for instruction in truths, to come again with singing, for the gladness of affection for truth, and to bring the sheaves, for the doctrinals of that truth. A. 4686.
~Emanuel Swedenborg
#PsalmOfTheDay: Psalms 100 + 101
Psalm 100, New Living Translation
Spiritual Translation of Psalm 100 in Science of Correspondences.
Knowledges of truth and good are signified by gates. They also signify introductory truths, which are knowledges from the Word. R. 899.
Psalm 101, New Living Translation
Spiritual Translation of Psalm 101 in Science of Correspondences.
6-8. By sincerity are meant also integrity, justice, faithfulness, and uprightness. A man cannot be in these from himself so as to love them from themselves and for their own sake. But he is in them who shuns the various forms of fraud, cunning, and deceit as sins, and he is thus in them not from himself but from the Lord. This the Lord teaches in many passages. Life 84.
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“…The Time is Ripe…” #MLK
“…the time is always ripe to do right” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
What is it to be spiritual?
“No one can be regenerated unless he knows the things that compose the new life, that is, spiritual life; for it is that life to which regeneration leads a person. The things that compose the new or spiritual life are the truths he ought to believe and the good deeds he ought to perform. Those truths are matters of faith, the good deeds are aspects of charity.”–Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia, n. 8635 (Elliott, trans.)
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40)
“From this one may now see what spiritual life is, namely being in possession of truths rooted in good which come from the Lord.” Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia, n. 6685 (Elliott, trans.)
The natural and the spiritual #SaturdaySerenity
In the natural world, the variety of climates is relative to the distance of the sun from the equator; in the spiritual world this variety is produced by the distance, greater or less, between the affectations of the will, and the love of the true. –Emanuel Swedenborg 
Faith and Caring
As we near the end of this second week of Advent, we ponder the meaning of Faith, the symbolism of the second candle in the Advent wreath.
“Real faith is simply recognizing that something is so because it is true. This means that people who are devoted to real faith both think and say, “This is true, and that’s why I believe it.” That is, faith is dependent on truth, and what is true is the object of faith. ~~ Emanuel Swedenborg, Life-Faith, §2, George Dole, trans., Swedenborg Foundation
“ … [p]eople who have an inner recognition of what is true are those who have a spiritual love for truth.” ~~ Emanuel Swedenborg, Life-Faith, §4
“ .. [f]aith and truth are one and the same; and this is why the ancients, who thought more about truths than we do because they had a longing for them, talked about “truth” rather than “faith.” This is also why in Hebrew the same word—for example, emuna, and also amen—can mean both “truth” and “faith.” ~~ Emanuel Swedenborg, Life-Faith, §6
Swedenborg goes on to explain how caring has its origin in true faith:
“Caring originates in a desire to do something good. Since what is good loves what is true, this desire leads to a desire for truth and therefore to the recognition of what is true, which is faith. By these steps, in proper sequence, a desire to do something good takes form and turns into caring. … We can see from this how love, which is a desire to do something good, brings forth faith, which is the same as recognizing what is true, and by this means brings forth caring, which is the same as love acting through faith.” ~~ Emanuel Swedenborg, Life-Faith, §13
Therefore, “the ‘Inner Recognition of Truth’ that is Faith is found only in people who are devoted to caring.” ~~ Emanuel Swedenborg, Life-Faith, p. 62
A Person is a Church #MondayMiracles, #FindYourFaith
“A person is a church when in possession of goodness and truth, and a group of such people make up a church on a larger scale.” (Swedeborg, Secrets of Heaven §6113)
Read more about faith traditions and Swedenborg here.
New Church of Montgomery, in Glendale 