Jesus: I Speak to You Again

Chapter 59

The Dead Prayer Service

The time has come for you to awaken and understand that God is not the kind of being who punishes, hurts, or torments you. If you leave a church service without a deeper feeling of love for people and all of creation, if you do not feel a greater devotion to the Father because you have experienced His love within yourself, then the prayer you engaged in was nothing more than an empty ritual. It did not nourish your soul with the living water of the Father. This kind of prayer merely soothes your mind, tricking you into believing that you’ve communicated with God simply because you attended a service meant for that purpose.

Pay attention to yourselves after each prayer service—are you becoming better, more merciful, more loving toward others? Not just toward your earthly family, but toward all the members of the vast spiritual family, the Father’s family, whom He loves equally, just as He loves each of you. If you do not feel this transformation in your heart, it means that you are merely performing a dead ritual that does not bring you the real, living experience of a relationship with the Father, which your soul craves. It also means that you are denying yourself the growth and joy that the Father intends for you. You are robbing yourself of the true gift the Father has given you—an opportunity for a joyful, blissful daily life. You may not even realize how severely you are punishing yourself, but it is you who suffer because of it.

Those who have confined the growth of their souls within the bounds of dead rituals miss out on the joy and freedom of living. They do not experience the fullness and bliss that life can offer, but instead, they are burdened by anxiety and fear of failure, whether personal or related to their earthly family. This painful, anxious life is one that you have created for yourself, not one given by the Father. So never blame the Father for your anguish, pain, or difficult life, nor for seeming to turn away from you in times of need. It is you who are feeding yourself these negative emotions by living in a way that is disconnected from the true, vibrant life of the soul.