August 26th.

Each one should retain the place in life that the Lord assigned to him and to which God has called him. This is the rule I lay down in all the churches. Was a man already circumcised when he was called? He should not become uncircumcised. Was a man uncircumcised when he was called? He should not be circumcised.

This letter is addressed to a certain group which was being troubled by particular problems in their overall quest to serve with pure and honest hearts, the Lord and Father who called them with power to the position they were chosen to have. Establishing this, it wasn't intended to become a rule book by which the humans form their institutions. The fallacy of this thing that they do can be seen very simply in how they overlook certain passages as those which must not apply (like this chapter because it's inconvenient to live by these words—they want to marry and be given in marriage because that animal drive overwhelms them) while promoting other passages as those they claim to and hold others to live by, as the justification for instance as to whether someone should be kicked out of their precious group for being unwilling to follow the rules they have established.

An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord's affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided.

What this letter is about isn't necessarily marriage, or spirit gifts or any other thing that gets addressed within them in particular. None of the letters about isolated things, converted into rules to be followed. Why the Father had these and the other letters preserved is for the purpose of them being a witness, from those who were genuinely under the new covenant before it went away, about being singularly devoted to the Father and His purpose. Being married or not married isn't the concern because in the end it's meaningless—neither of the situations one is in (married to another or not) matters, just like whether one was physically a Jew or not has no bearing on anything that mattered for those who were under the new covenant. For those who weren't, then everything the humans do and don't do mattered a great deal, because it was the only life they knew.

Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God's commands is what counts. Each one should remain in the situation which he was in when God called him. Were you a slave when you were called? Don't let it trouble you--although if you can gain your freedom, do so.

The life of one who was under the new covenant in the real and powerful way that it existed in the first century (before it went away) wasn't about the things the humans worry themselves over. Nor was it in obeying the commands that were created by men based on what they picked and chose from what read in a book. The commands are simple—do the Father's will instead of your own, which means to become engrossed in His purpose so that your own purpose became negligible and unnecessary. The reason this was okay is because there was no reason for the true sons to fuss and fight to get what *they* wanted, to survive and live for themselves, because their existence isn't based on the things they could get and have for themselves. Their life became about the Father's desire to have His family of true sons who have been specially chosen by Him. And if they knew they were a part of that family, then their heart could truly be wrapped up in that endeavor instead of their own plight and dilemma all the time, which is the curse of the animal on the humans.

A curse on him who is lax in doing the LORD's work! A curse on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed!

The new identity of one who knew that he was chosen to become a son of God was one of losing the old identity and then taking on this new one, so that his will and the Father's will became aligned. That is one of the premiere messages of the life of the Son of God who came to show the other sons how to live, how to be, how to become transformed from the animal they once were to what they must become in order to be pleasing to the Father—just the same as he was in shape, form, desire and will. Did the Son of God go looking for a wife to secure for himself? No, because he wasn't an animal so he knew that the things the animals love and run after are worthless and ultimately good for nothing in and of themselves. Human marriage is just one of many ways that the son's interests become divided, so that he cannot be as Jesus and Paul were. There are many things that the humans participate in, run after and love, that pull his devotion away from the Father and back to himself, to the earth—that define him as an integral part of the present dying creation, a dead animal which cannot be brought near to God.

For he who was a slave when he was called by the Lord is the Lord's freedman; similarly, he who was a free man when he was called is Christ's slave. You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men. Brothers, each man, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation God called him to.

The most convenient and available way to become a slave to men is to put ourselves in situations where we force ourselves to have to count on the humans to give us what we need. For instance, if we have to make a certain amount of money every month to pay for all the things we think we need or deserve to have because the others have them (wives, animal replicants, houses, cars, etc.) then we have forced ourselves to become slaves to the system that the humans create and live in while they pass their time as animals in their little animal existences. If we become embroiled in that kind of mess, then all we can do is give in to the fact that we have carved out our life and that's where we're going to be for the balance—working our asses off, giving the humans the best hours of our days, weeks, months and years, all because we feel like we have the right to live like all the others. Then the only thing we'll be able to comfort ourselves with is the lie that all the others hold on to—that they'll all just be fine, and they're all a goin' to heaven with a banjo on their knee.

What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.

Nothing matters except searching for and finding the hidden Father. Just because He has purposely hidden Himself doesn't mean He doesn't want to be found. It means He does want to be found, because there are so many clues about Him in the world, yet He remains hidden and secret. Those who claim to have found their gods have to be satisfied with the lies they also create about them, because their nothingness isn't real since they're all just made up. The reason the humans have to make up their gods is because they aren't willing to search, because the authentic search requires giving up, selling, abandoning, casting aside everything one has, or could have, in order to continue to search for the hidden God.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.

The Father wants to find those who are willing to do that, who see that the living God who created all this beauty must be more than what all the others are telling them He is. He isn't interested in those who settle for the humans' made up gods which obviously aren't real, but they cannot handle facing that fact because it's too unbearable, too unable to be manipulated and controlled. He simply wants those who want Him, which is probably the most succinct way of stating the reality of the Father toward what makes the humans good. This could even be the criteria for whom He chooses to become sons of God, the members of His family which is the purpose that this beautiful creation—what the worthless humans are totally fucking up and making ugly out of their greed and need to own and control everything they can—is existing, that out of it He could draw His sons who will populate His world which the humans cannot see or know about. The only thing they think they know is what they read from a book that they have no business reading in the first place, let alone thinking they can possess the inheritance about which it speaks—what they think they can just buy and own for their own purpose and pleasure like they do with the land they own and are destroying, all in the name of private ownership, which is greed the most perfect motivator for animals who can only survive and never be able to see beyond that motivation because there's nothing else that drives them.

The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."
They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good.

The fool says, "I can make up my own gods who will serve me, those which I don't have to search for because I can have and contain them right here in this box I keep them in. I don't want to give up everything just to search for the hidden God, and now I don't have to because these gods are promising me everything. I know this is true because there are all these people over here that all "believe" the same thing, so it must be true."

The LORD looks down from heaven on the sons of men
to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God.

All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt;
there is no one who does good, not even one.

Paul knew these words to be a statement about the condition of the humans, not just the Israelites. He knew that within him there was no good thing, good being defined even by the same words as that which would allow him to understand, understanding being defined as one who knew that God was hidden and wants to be found. Not half-heartedly by buying a lie, and then holding on to that lie like it was something that could save him. Being *willing* to abandon everything and everyone that he may have considered valuable if he were to listen to the lies of the humans in order to find the Father IS the message of the Son of God's life. It is what the real words say, that which gets plowed under because they're so unpleasant and go so against what's in the humans to be able to accept. Genuinely searching for the hidden Father means never being able to say "I found Him, so now I can keep Him because I have done the requisite things so now I can just live my life. For the son of God that search becomes his life, and everything he could have become or gotten for himself becomes dispensable, even the members of his own flesh and blood family, what the humans would hardly be ever able to abandon because that would bring too much shame and condemnation from them—it would be utterly impossible to do. Yet listen to the Son's words, which cannot be turned into something they're not:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, `This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.'

Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.

Sure they ate the food he gave them, and of course they wanted to follow him just as long as that endeavor fit into what they were willing to accept; but it wasn't about anything true within the motivation of their heart about wanting to seek and find, so they could properly serve, the living God. He even had to tell them why they were following him:

I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.

Then they wanted to be able to just figure out what he was saying, to find that agreement within themselves which is the thing they sought after—not finding out the truth about God. But he purposely didn't just flat out tell them; no, he continued to speak in a very obscure way that they couldn't understand:

Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world."

then when he did say something they could comprehend, he told them what he knew they would find impossible to accept, for the purpose of weeding them away from him, because the truth of the Father wasn't just something that could be understood. Like Him, it has to be sought after and fought for. It has to be the thing that is so valuable, the one who does find it must abandon everything else he considers valuable in order to find it. That is how the Father is, which makes sense not only with what we can observe of the natural creation but also what's inside us and what we've observed so far in our search for Him. It is the secret journey that leads to the Father that starts when He decides to reveal Himself to the one He has chosen, which becomes that necessary motivation or else it will just seem not worth doing.

"Sir," they said, "from now on give us this bread."

Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day."

At this the Jews began to grumble about him because he said, "I am the bread that came down from heaven." They said, "Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, `I came down from heaven'?"

"Stop grumbling among yourselves," Jesus answered. "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: `They will all be taught by God.' Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."

In the words of the Son of God, the humans cannot "believe" in him, cannot come to him which means embrace him and his words enough to be able to genuinely follow him (not theoretically, or with their well intentioned mouth babble) unless the invisible Father actually, purposefully does something in them to enable them to be able to see clearly enough to do that. Why? Is that not fair? Because the Father doesn't want every last one of them crowding their way into where He lives. His house is orderly and not chaotic. He decides who is drawn to the Son, which means given the choice to either follow or not follow, which becomes who is worthy to be called a son of God.

Because of God's mercy, the humans will always have their own reality which is not aligned with the son's. They fully develop their bond with the dying creation when they pass over from child to adult, and perfect for themselves their own complex ways of becoming self-sufficient survivors. They become fully dead when they become fully human, when they firmly establish their own mature, independent identity in the world. The humans detest naivete in other humans; God detests maturity in them.

I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Mature humans are proud and independent creatures who have perfected within themselves the nature of the serpent, the ruler of all the animals who is unclean and separated from God. They don't know this; they all think they're good, which is a major component of the animal nature that rules them (what makes them unclean, evil, unable to come near God). It doesn't matter who they are, they will all believe that there's something good enough about them to be redeemed by whatever lies about whatever gods they've decided to latch on to, which is actually a safeguard built into that nature by God, for His purpose—to keep His inheritance fully for His own sons, so it isn't diluted by the mass of human animals who are all under the assumption that they will have what is reserved for those who are chosen to be given the choice—their way or the Father's.

When the humans are first born, that is when they are the closest they will ever be to God, because they don't know about, nor have they taken any of the nature they are inheriting into themselves yet. As they progress along their time line, they move further and further from God as they learn more and more how to be fully human, as they develop their human identity. As they get older, they transform from as close to God as one of them could get, to farther and farther away from being pleasing to Him. They get less and less naive, less able to believe things which cannot be seen, and more and more independent as they trust only in what can be seen and validated in the world, of which they are becoming full citizens.

It's what all of the sons have to become so that the miracle of being transformed from something dead into something alive to God can take place in them (because they are all born under the curse with which God infected the humans). This condition was forced upon us, and we become transformed into dead creature just like all of the humans. The difference is that the humans will just remain as they are, even becoming more so as they go along, while the sons have to make another transformation back to the place they once were: naive, foolishly unaware, helpless, wrong, and dependent on another besides themselves—everything the humans despise and loathe, and would never choose to become.

When we're first born, the animal nature is all we know, because it is what we perfected within ourselves as we became mature animals. So we have this condition as citizen of the earth always pulling us so forcefully like gravity back down toward the earth. Every time we're exposed to other animals, when we interact with another person or are subject to the way they are, the force is acting on us to reinforce that animal nature in us, to keep us from hearing the word that transforms us to what the Father's will is for those He has chosen. Only through the day after day of our experience with the living word are we able to begin to see another way—the way of the spirit instead of the way of the flesh. But then our interaction with the world, even passively, will lead us away from the Father and back to the serpent.

The force of gravity fits into a category with the perfect name—it is a "natural law" of science, which aims to explain the world and how it works in an intelligent manner. The force of the natural is powerful and ubiquitous on the earth, and it never changes unless you change the conditions and make a situation unlike that which exists on the earth. In the same way we cannot know anything but the natural if we are natural, of the earth. We will merely be continually pulled toward an earthly understanding of everything. That's the direction all of the humans must take, because they don't have a choice in the matter unless the choice is made by the Father to reverse it in them, to transform them back to what they once were, and away from what they now are.

When we are born of the spirit, our spirit eyes will slowly open, and our progression will be similar to an earthly child being born and then growing up—the natural is a copy of the spiritual. As we get older we are enlightened about spiritual things and we learn them in the same way we learned the earthly things when we grew up as an animal. But again, our exposure to and interaction with the natural world—more specifically the humans—will stunt our growth in the new way. The best thing we can ever do is pull ourselves away from the humans and our interactions with them in all forms. Their power to reinforce what God hates in us is like a disease—we cannot be strong enough to defend ourselves against it, because the virus goes right past our ability to defend, and we will without doubt be infected by what they have, no matter how harmless and good they seem.

...and you shall root out the evil from your midst...

There is no mixing of the two for the sons. At first we won't be able to help it, because the animal nature is all we know, but as we grow up in the knowledge of the things of God, we grow out of the earthly things. As our spiritual eyes become opened, our earthly eyes must fade, or we'll just be stuck, like the believers whom Paul said weren't moving toward God, but were stagnant.

Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly.

In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

As we become familiar with the things and way of God, who is the spirit, we want those things more than the things of the humans. We can then start to become ignorant and innocent about the earthly, fleshly, worldly ways of men. At one time they were all we knew; now we are gaining a new understanding.

You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.

Our aim is to be as Paul was. The humans cannot understand the letters of Paul for their intended purpose. For them, all they can do is use them to establish rules and regulations for the members of their religious institutions to adhere to, for the purpose of being able to control them. The purpose intended by God for His sons is so that we who are born of God can understand the mind of a spiritually mature man, childlike according to God, despised to the humans, and hope someday to attain to the same retrograde nature (as the humans observe it) into which Paul was transformed.

...I want you to be wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil.