Offerings and selling things

Human life well understood is life in relationship to God. All that we do should be connected to God. All that we are should be under God. This is no different for the the activity of selling a product.

Let us assume that you are selling a good product or service and asking a good price. A good product is one that will fulfill a good need that people are having. The product should be good externally and internally. An internal good product is one that carries good energies, energies that are elevating for man. Your product should not be too expensive and not be too cheap. You can sometimes give away things but normally you don't want to sell products for a price under its value, because in that case you would take away the chance for people to offer something to God through their buying the product or service.

There are two moments in the process of selling. The first moment is your selling the product to a customer. The second moment is that of you offering to God the money that you acquired. The first moment is one in that you are functioning as a priest accepting an offering from people. The second moment is that of you as a priest offering your accomplishments to God. Let us study these two moments in more detail.

Your function as a priest accepting the offerings people make through buying things

There are a number of rules to keep in mind for this stage of the selling process.

1. Your selling a product only becomes an offering to God for the people who buy when you really represent God. This rule puts strict demands on you as the intermediary person between the buyer and God. Your heart and mind should be centered on God during the entire process of your selling. This is only possible when you don't deceive the people or try to tempt them with false arguments. You should be honest and fair and friendly to the people. You should really try to love people in a way that God likes. You are selling a product, but that is only an external aspect of your meeting people. Most important is that you engage in a relationship with someone. In this relationship you should try to represent God and you should try to look at the person in the way that God does. In that way, you can overcome when you would have false feelings such as pride, arrogance, jealousy etc. Your main task in the selling process is that you give God's love to the person and that you try to give to the person what the person needs.
2. The buyer of the product should buy in complete freedom. When you understand the money you acquire as an offering to God, you also understand that the buyer should have complete freedom. God can never accept offerings from people who did not really want to bring that offering. An offering is a gift to God. This should be a gift of love. No love can be given if it is forced in some way, through deception, temptation or external pressure. You may attempt to convince the person that your product is good and you may move the person to buy through your love and goodness, but that is not the same as when you try to apply smart sales techniques. After a person bought the product, he or she should have a good feeling about it. The person should really be happy to have given money to you. The person doesn't need to know that you represent God. By your sacred being and pure actions you can make clear to the buyer that you are a good and trustworthy person.
3. Keep the goals that God gave you for a day. At the beginning of the day, before you go out to sell things or deliver services, you can ask God what goals you should fulfill for that day. When you ask for it, usually God gives you an internal goal and an external goal. You should also ask God what to sell and where to sell. The internal goal can be something connected to yourself, something that God wants you to learn for that day, for example. It could also be something connected to the town or people where you are going to sell things. The external goal usually is a certain amount of products to be sold during a specified time period. During the entire day you should try to remain focused on your goals. For example, if you get distracted by having nice conversations with people, it might be that you won't make your goals. When you did not reach the goal at the end of the day, pray to find out what caused it. Sometimes it may have been caused by your own mistakes and then you can learn from that. Sometimes outside factors may have contributed to failing to reach the goals. Also in that case, pray about it to learn more.
4. Consider that offerings from some people cannot be accepted. Some people may offer to buy things or a product of service from you with bad motivation. They may want to hire you as their slave, making profit from you for egoistic purposes. In that case it is better to either put certain conditions for what you want to sell or serve, or you may refrain from selling altogether. God cannot accept offerings that are made by selfish people having evil intentions. For example, God could not accept Cain's offering because Cain had selfish motivation and wanted to get things from God. When you understand yourself to be a priest who must decide whether offerings are acceptable to God, you also know that you need to find out whether people's motivation for buying your product or service is either lofty or clouded by evil intentions.

Your function as a priest to offer to God the results of your sales

1. All offerings need to be split. You can never just throw all your offerings on God's altar. Always there is the need to split the offering. For example, if you got money from someone who wants something back for it in evil motivation, there is a claim on the money. As soon as you use that money, the person who gave you the money will want to check if you do with the money something pleasing to him or her. If you offer that money to God, you also pass on the evil claims to God and this is not how it should be. Therefore, in prayer, you must ask God how to split the offering. You cannot pass on debts to God. If for example you still need part of the money to pay off debts to the world, you cannot offer that money to God because it is claimed by your debtors. Ask God how to split the offering. How much money is acceptable as an offering to God, how much money should get another purpose. Sometimes offerings need to be split in two, sometimes in three or more parts. In that case, only the most sacred portion of the money can be offered to God. In seldom cases, none of the money you acquired will be acceptable as offering to God.
2. Consider to whom to offer. You are the priest who is responsible to bring the offerings of the people, the buyers, to God. You also need to acknowledge the ones who made your product. You need to pay them off before you can offer to God. Appreciate the value of the product made by the producer. If you got a lot of spiritual trouble in selling a product, it might have been caused by bad conditions made by the producer. Sometimes you may feel that you paid too little to the producer as he or she sold you products with higher value than you realized. In that case, consider to offer back to the producer more than you initially paid. He or she can then use that money as offerings to God. Sometimes God wants you to bring offerings to a higher-ranked priest, for example the highpriest of God's nation, or your parents or restoration parents. Be serious in prayer to find out to whom to offer what.
3. In which manner to offer. Each offering is a gift, a present to God and sometimes a gift to a person. In any case, always present your offering in a dignified manner and 'wrapped' in an acceptable way. Sometimes it is enough to just put money in a clean envelope. Never just 'throw' the money on the offering altar, by manner of speaking. Don't let the person who receives your offering do the work of counting. Present money in the form of clean and neat bills and coins. Do not offer money bills that are literally dirty or stained or torn.

Finally, don't forget about the essential nature of offerings to God. Already all things belong to God. You are not really giving anything to God, you are just giving back what belongs to God. In a sense, not even that is true, because all things belong to God, whether they were stolen or not. What you are really offering is yourself. The offering stands in the place of yourself. What you are offering to God is your own work, your money and your heart. Through offering to God you are restoring yourself and gaining the highest value possible out of what most people consider to be something rather low and dirty, the aspect of life commonly called 'business.'

Creative through your own production

The original situation for each person is that he or she creates something while standing in a direct object relationship to God, unhindered by any person who might want to stand in-between. In this situation, you can express God's love fully and you can entirely explore and develop your own talents. You can make something in love for somebody else and in this way you spread love and joy around you.

As ideal as this sounds, in our practical life things are a bit more complicated. We cannot just isolate us from the world around us. We need materials to make something from. We need tools that we may have to buy in a shop. We need a room that we either bought or rented from the outside world. There are countless obligations that the world puts upon us.

And still, from a spiritual viewpoint it is much better when you can make or create things, possibly as products for sale, on your own and independent from any boss or employer.

When you make things yourself, particularly when you want to sell these as products, you need to consider the following points.

• Only make that what God is asking you. Pray to God what product you should make. Find out the meaning of the product, find out how to make it and make it with the materials that God is telling you.
  

• You are making things in a certain room or production house. Make sure that this house is one that is offered to God. Your room should not be under claim of evil spirits. In your production room you should make good order and separate what is higher from what is lower. Make your production room one of prayer and meditation. Always work in prayer and meditation.

• Always check your motivation for making things. Even when you had a good start of your production in prayer, it is easy to lose your initial good intentions. Check your motivation again and again and especially do not fall in the trap that you start making things in order to get a lot of money. You need money for your offerings to God and you need money for your own life, but money has only as much value as it can gain from your pure love and good motivation.

• Make sure that you make good results. This is meant both internally and externally. Internal good results come when during the entire production process nothing bad intervened, neither in your own mind, nor in the space or people around you. External good results you produce when you make good-quality products. A bad-quality product will never function as a good offering, neither for the recipients or buyers nor for God.

• Make sure that all that you make is offered to God. Some things you can offer to God by giving it to people, in case God wants you to do this. Other things you can sell and in that case you must offer all the money to God. You need to ask God how and to whom to offer this money. Often it is necessary that you split the offering. Part of the offering can be used for higher purposes, part of the offering is only useful for lower applications.

• Have joy from what you are doing. Creative activities can be giving you a lot of happiness when you do it in the right way. Whenever you feel that you do not enjoy your work, spend time in prayer to find out what is wrong and correct it.

• Do not fall for the trap to begin mass-producing things. It is not wrong to make more items of the same, but you should not devalue your own existence by beginning to work like a mechanical robot. Make sure that you are able to put your good love and desire into each of the things you are making.

• Make sure that there is a surging line of positive development in all that you do. Learn to make things better. Improve your spiritual understanding of what you are doing. Make your productive work part of your Formula-Course of Restoration. You do this by offering all that you do to God. Your offerings will please God when you are growing in your process of producing things.

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The creation of things as an employee

For this situation there are to be considered:

• You as the producer or creator of things

• Your relationship to God and how to offer that what you do to God

• The employer for whom you are working and his relationship to God

• The things that you make and the resources from which they were made

You are the maker of things. Even when you make things together with others, there is a part of the product that you made.

When you make things, you are in a creative process. Normally, we don't ever make something just like that. Birds build a nest for their young. We build a house for ourselves and our children to live in. But when you work for a larger corporation, it might be that you are producing things without really knowing for whom you are making them. While in a normal situation you want to put your love into things so it will be felt by the recipients, now you feel that it has little use to put any love and good feelings into what you are producing as you anyway never might come to see the one who eventually buys the product.

You are a creator but in case you work for an employer, especially when this is a larger corporation, your creativity might be subdued. Most people just work for money and if they make a good product, it commonly is so they won't lose their job or because they want to get higher up the career ladder.

Of course, i am not saying that it is wrong to work for an employer, but in order for you to fully develop yourself in your work, you need to find out who your employer is, what is his relationship to God, for which goal are the products made that he is selling. In many cases the employer is out for financial profit. When you are working for such an employer, you are selling that what is higher, your creativity and love, for something that is lower, money. That, in business terms, is not at all a good deal.

You have your relationship to God. When you do something, when you make something, you want to connect that what you do to God. We call this aspect of life 'offering.' Can you offer yourself and what you make and do to God in case that you work for an employer?

This depends very much on who the employer is and also on your own motivation. It could be that you are forced to work for an employer, for example in the case that you are put in a labor camp. In that case it wasn't your own choice to work for this employer. You may choose to do your work well and in your creativity and love for God you bring good love and energy into the things you are making. By doing your work in this manner, you can elevate yourself and God will be able to accept your offerings and use them to improve the situation of the world.

But what when you made your own choice to work for a selfish employer? In that case it is very difficult to offer that what you make to God. You could still try to pray while you work, but if you had prayed before you chose to work for the selfish employer, you might have realized that you should not serve him. You could try to offer to God the money that you earn. Yet this money has very little value. It is money that you earned by selling yourself and you sacrificed your internal and spiritual development for doing this kind of work. The money you earn comes out of the hands of someone who doesn't care about God. That means that he actually stands in the position of having stolen God's creation. You receive from him a part of that what he stole. You can try to offer this money to God, but because your employer is living against God, he won't like it when you do this. He did not give you money so you bring it to God; he gave you money so he will continue to make profit from you.

He actually wants more for himself and less for God. Therefore, when you offer money to God that you earned from an employer who is not centered on God, you also need to make conditions to separate from that employer. This could be the case when you decided to give up working for that employer. This is the situation that the Israelites left Egypt. They had worked long for the pharaoh and when they left Egypt they took with them riches they had gained in Egypt. Because these Israelites had won a battle against the pharaoh, because they had decided to not longer work under his evil dominion, therefore their offerings became acceptable to God.

But also these offerings could not be used for higher purposes. The pharaoh had not given them these riches so they would offer it to the God he hated. Because these things came out of the hands of the pharaoh and his people, they were filled with bad energies of hatred against God and of arrogance of those who build their own reign centered on idol gods. It is therefore necessary that when you make such an offering of what you gained from working for a pharaoh that you fulfill two conditions:

1. That you are in a process of leaving behind to be controlled by the pharaoh or employer who enslaved you.
2. That you do enough to separate the offering from the evil claim of the pharaoh or employer. You must make sure that when God's world uses this offering, no tragedies happen because evil spirits claim that offering.

You are supposed to offer all that you do and that you make and that you earn to God. You got your life from God, you got all things from God. God gave it to you in love so you will do well with it. In case you are more or less separated from God, it is your task to come back to God. You must bring back to God your heart, your mind, your body and all that belongs to you. We are speaking here about you making things of creation. You do this with your body and you are thinking and loving or hating while you do your work. So in fact, your making things is a process that involves your entire being. Your making or producing things can be an activity through which you can offer yourself to God entirely, but God cannot accept that what is against God.

Therefore it is essential that you judge what kind of person your employer is. Is he somebody truly wanting to find God, is he an example to you for your course of restoration, or is he somebody who is unaware of God and of spiritual life? You cannot see your work for an employer as unrelated to who and what your employer is. In most cases, employers in the world want to gather money and power for themselves. They are not setting up a company as a religious condition of offering themselves to God. They take from the earth what God has given to us, but for egoistic use separated from God. God gave us the things in order to enjoy God's love and to spread God's love. We are creative beings and when we do this in God's love, united with God, then we can learn to be like God, giving and loving and always wanting to develop in order to be able to give more to others.

When your employer doesn't know God, he or she got the things he possesses not from God, but from a lineage of ancestors or predecessors who once went against God or left God and who then took dominion over all things in the cosmos.

In some very rare cases your employer might be somebody who is open for change. He might want to find God and in that case you should try to help him come closer to God. For example, Jacob worked for his father-in-law Laban for 20 years. Laban wasn't someone centered on God. He prayed to evil idol gods. Jacob worked a long time for Laban and finally decided to leave Laban. In that situation, it would have been preferable if Laban had followed Jacob and had come to love the God of Jacob.

Still, don't think that you should go working for an employer just in order to bring him to God. In most cases that is not easily possible and why would you work for somebody who doesn't know God and who doesn't desire for God when you could also meet other people who are open to hear about God?

When you make things, there is a lot to be considered. For example, from where did the resources come that are being used? You may work in a factory or an office. To whom belong these things? Long ago, angels and people and other spiritual beings went against God. They built their own world and took all the things that God had given them for themselves. They used these things for themselves and against God-loving people. They tried to control the world, they built empires, they dominate you through states that have nothing to do with God but that spiritually are controlled by evil angels.

How about your relationship to the things that you are using, transforming or making? Are these things being used to bring about a world under God's love or are these things stolen from God and misused to build a world of power and might against God? You need to ask yourself such questions and make the right decision for your own life.

All things need to come back to God. It means that all things must be filled again with God's love and wholesome energies. It is our task to bring back to God ourselves and all things. In case you acquire things, for example money as a salary by working for an employer who doesn't love God, your task is to bring these things back under God's dominion. Realize that in God's eyes that money is stolen property. Even you worked for it, but you actually worked for a thief. A thief paid you with stolen property and you cooperated and even helped that thief to become still richer. It means that in God's eyes you have no rightful claim on that money. In the eyes of the world, that money may belong to you. In God's eyes, it is something that needs to be given back to the rightful owner, that is God. Only after this, when God gives it again to you, you can come to be the legitimate owner of that property.


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The things and man and God

When we speak about economy, we speak about things. Things are available in the form of natural resources and in man-produced products.

We cannot speak about economy without considering the meaning of things in relation to God and man. When we look up in the sky we see the stars and the sun and the moon. We walk over the surface of the earth underneath trees. Animals provide us with food and services. All around us are the things that God has created for us. To do as if we could exchange goods without considering the relationship between God and us and the things would be the same as to deny God. To deny God would mean to ignore our deepest essence as people created in the image of God, as children of God.

Imagine that someone builds large ship and all things on it. On that ship, people are born as children of the builder. The children never get to see who built the ship. When they get older, the children begin a fight over ownership of portions of the ship and even over the entire boat. They make rules for who owns what but never consider that there is someone who built the ship and that he had thoughts about the correct use of the ship by his children. This situation more or less pictures that of the present-day economic dealings of people on this earth.

Essentially all things belong to God. We can own things because God gave them to us, but then it is logical that we ask God how we are supposed to deal with the things.

Some people say that God gave us stewardship over the earth and all animals and things on it. The term 'stewardship' implies that we would only be held responsible as caretakers. But because we are God's children, our responsibility and blessing goes further than mere stewardship. As God's children we can fully inherit the right of ownership, yet this will only come to pass when also live and behave as God's children.

We cannot speak about economy therefore without first having to consider our relationship with God. It is only when we have managed to learn to live as full and good and adult children of God that we will be able to have complete ownership over the things that God has given us.

To the degree that people live away from God or even against God, they are not entitled to any ownership. From God's viewpoint, when people have no relationship to their Creator, they are not legitimate owners of anything. What does this tell about ownership by people who don't recognize God as their Creator, or who haven't learned yet to live under God's control completely? It actually means that all those who have not yet restored their relationship to God must be seen as thieves of all what they claim to own. They may be 'innocent' thieves in the sense that they never learned about God and about how to rightly relate to God, but in that case they are like children of thieves who own property that their father had stolen. For thieves and children of thieves alike, the adagio is that they must return the things to the rightful owner.

The aspect of ownership and exchange of goods in relationship to God as Creator is what in religious terms is called 'offering to God.' Whenever we own or use something, whenever we produce or sell or buy something, there is this element of offering to God that needs to be considered.

Think of the following: God created the universe, the stars and the sun and the moon and the earth. God also created all animals and plants. Our bodies are made of atoms that are provided by all that God created. When we don't recognize God as Creator, we do not even have rightful ownership over our own bodies.

God created the universe as a synthesis of spiritual and physical elements. We have a physical body that is home to our spiritual body. After we die, we enter the spiritual world with our spiritual selves. From there, we shall continue to influence life on earth. We are going to visit our descendants from the spiritual world. When we build a house in the physical world, it depends on how we do this in a spiritual sense whether this house also will stand as a firm and noble construction in the spiritual world. Whenever we make something, we are instilling more or less spiritual content into it.

When we make things, we can do this with love for those for whom the things are made. We can also make things in a mechanical manner. In that case there is little difference between what we make and what is manufactured by a robot. In many cases, people make things while feeling bad and even hateful. The world in which we live is made out of energy. Energies are never just neutral. The most beautiful energies are created in love. When we are aware of this aspect of economy, we can build a world of light and happiness because the things we make will create an atmosphere of joy and light for all those making use of the things.

Above i have mentioned the following three aspects of economy:

The matter of rightful ownership of things, which can only be determined by our relationship to God. We are speaking about the offering aspects of economy, which makes out the essence of religion.

The matter of spiritual aspect of things that we own or use or produce. No economy can be set up in the right way without living a life of spirituality.

The matter of energy aspects of things. All things are made out of energy and it is through our love or sometimes hatred that we fill the things we use, own or produce or trade with. In order to learn how to make a good economy, we need to become aware of this energetic factor. The energies of all things are positive and negative, male and female. It is the harmony between positivity and negativity, masculinity and femininity that brings about good creations and good dominion over all the things that God gave us.


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