Glorifying God as necessary motive

An email I wrote and want to archive here:

[Read all 6 paragraphs, they modulate into stranger realms...]

Wilhelm a Brakel (the Dutch Second Reformation theologian who wrote a Christian's Reasonable Service, 4 vols. and expensive-ish) wrote a chapter on patience. His is a complete systematic theology though with an unusual focus on the doing of the faith, so he has strange chapters on things like patience and watchfulness and what fearing God actually is, and spiritual courage and contentment and so on. There have been a few times now where I've been rebuked on a Christian forum or blog for saying something that was 'unbiblical' and I was able to counter by quoting a Brakel answering the subject directly. Since a Brakel is an extremely Reformed orthodox figure in history his words carry weight. One instance was when I said all Christians have to be prophets, priests, and kings. I was rebuked for including prophet. a Brakel has an entire chapter on not only how a Christian is a prophet, but why a Christia *must be* a prophet. (Other systematic theologians use the formula prophet, priest, and king, yet they are usually weak on describing just how a human being can be a prophet [it has to do with knowing the Word of God, mostly].) Then another instance was my saying fear God because when you fear God only you don't fear man. This ranckles modern day church Christian types. They want to defend man when I say this. a Brakel has a chapter on fearing God where he specifically addresses how you cease to fear man once you begin to fear only God. (Fear/reverence.) And he gets at it almost identically to how I was getting at it, though I'd not read him prior to my own writing about it.

The Dutch Second Reformation (Witsius is in that group) were Puritans, but really even more so than the English, at least in their writings. I mean, they wrote more about the practical level of the faith. Teellinck in his Path of True Godliness talks of the world in terms very near General Law (he later became a mystic type, though not losing his on-the-mark doctrine; I just take that to mean that he began to develop all centers and entered perhaps the #4 level. Witsius I've said before had unusual influences in his education. Mysterious talk of teachers giving him more rare knowledge and so on. He though is still very mainstream, though he was very on-the-mark with biblical doctrine (if you don't let issues of church polity and sacraments become of too much importance when sizing up these guys).

Watchfulness and fearing only God, in my view, are the two biblical terms that define self-remembering and non-identifying best. The first is obvious, but the second is just as obvious once you see it. When you come into a state of fearing God you are coming *out of* a state of fearing(reverencing) man. You are coming out of a state of being identified with man and the world (i.e. the creation). I.e. you are coming out of worshiping the creation rather than the Creator. You are going from the prison of fascination with illusion and what not to the clear perception of being vertically-connected in your consciousness.

I don't want to put the above in the place of how the Work language - Ouspensky - describes non-identifying because the Work language gives it the way it needs to be understood and experienced, once you can; but then seeing it in the biblical term just validates it and deepens it.

What deepens the Work is the necessary motive, that you can only come into by degree methinks, of glorifying God. If your motive is self-development alone, or just awakening alone, you hit a wall. Those are good motives for awhile, i.e. they work when just launching into it all; but after awhile to REALLY deny self - which is what the Work teaching demands as well - you have to have the motive to glorify God. Then you get into potential stumblingblocks of moralism and what not, which have to be gotten over by understanding, but...

For instance, a motive in the realm of glorifying God as it can refer to self-remembering effort is to do it for the reason that it effects all of your time and potentially effects other individuals - is a conscious influence for them - connected to you through your circle of time, past, present, future (consciousness effects people through time). This glorifies God in the sense that it is the work of God in awakening people and gathering the harvest in -- in the fullness of time. (That's a pregnant biblical phrase, *the fullness of time.*)