Description
First of all, the man with spiritual self-reliance must believe in God. History shows that it makes no great difference what people with spiritual self-reliance may have believed, so far as their different types of religious faith was concerned, for fundamental to all faith is the belief in God. Everything else is non-essential. It is the belief in God that gives the background. All people with spiritual self-reliance have had a deep and an abiding conviction that they were one with the Divine Spirit.
And this is right where you and I will have to begin if we wish to develop spiritual self-reliance something that will make us positive without aggressiveness, something that will make us completely sure of ourselves without egotism, and something that will make us positive in action without becoming intolerant. This something is a complete and an abiding faith in the two principle factors that make for spiritual self-reliance and creative living.
First of all, and fundamental to everything else, is the faith in God. And next, and equally necessary, is faith in ourselves. The kind of faith in ourselves we are talking about is, of course, not in an isolated self, as though we were struggling alone, but rather, faith in a spiritual self, because this type of self-reliance comes only to those tho have a deep conviction, not only about God, but about themselves. Therefore, this kind of self-reliance must have as one of the mainsprings for its being the conviction that man, as a living spirit, moves and has his being in God.
The kind of spiritual self-reliance we are talking about is a reliance on ourselves because we first know that the real self is, as the Bible so beautifully states, “hid with Christ in God,” which means this, that every person’s nature is Divine. He is rooted in the Infinite. He lives because God lives in him. He thinks because the Mind of God thinks through him. And he is able to act creatively because the Mind that created everything is creating something new in him.