When the man bows down before a power to whom he is no mystery as he is to himself; a power that knows whence he came and whither he is going; why and where he began to go wrong; who can set him right, longs indeed to set him right, making of him a creature to look up to himself without shadow of doubt, anxiety or fear, confident as a child whom his father is leading by the hand to the heights of happy-making truth, knowing that where he is wrong, the father will set him right--then the man is bursting into his flower; then the truth of his being, the eternal fact at the root of his new name, his real nature, begins to show itself; than his nature is almost in harmony with itself. For, obeying the will that is the cause of his being, and that will being righteousness and love and truth, he beings to stand on the apex of his being, to know himself divine. He begins to feel himself free. The truth—not as known to his intellect, but as revealed in his own sense of being true, known by his essential consciousness of his divine condition, without which his nature is neither his own nor God’s—trueness has made him free. Not any abstract truth, not truth its very metaphysical self, can make any man free; but the truth done, the truth loved, the truth lived by the man; the truth of and not merely in the man himself; the honesty that makes the man himself a child of the honest God.

Commentary

by Diane Adams

The knowledge of truth is not something that can be taught; it is not a product of reason or study. Knowing truth is a process: uncovering the truth about who we actually are. Beyond the wounds, the defenses, the social positionings and extrapolations, there is a light inside, a part of us that is like God in that it loves truth, it loves goodness, and it loves love. To find this inside and grow it into who we are is not an intellectual undertaking. If we would know truth, we must be true. 

The deepest understanding of truth comes from the meeting of the spiritual and physical, inner and outer. When the knowledge in the inner man collides with the physical incarnation, then the complete man resonates with this intersection. To experience this alignment between the flesh and the spirit, a simple prescription is available: Do what is right. 

When we choose to do what is right, and reject evildoing, when we demand honesty from ourselves, learn to forgive, learn to serve others, then we do not simply learn; we are becoming what is true. A man who is not true himself cannot learn anything about truth. He will only warp and twist everything around him to suit his own desires. A man who walks the path of truth does not need to learn anything; he is true. 

Truth in this sense is wisdom, a oneness of the struggle between the body and the soul. Inside of this understanding is the first place we finally encounter peace, and from here this too becomes not a thing we know in the mind, not an idea or an emotion, but a part of us even in the darkest reaches of the soul and physical reality. This is what it means to be born again, to have again the experience of coming into the world both as a body and spirit. God himself is ultimate truth, and he has sent his Spirit to guide us into all truth. Unless we become born again, we cannot see the Kingdom of God.