December
4

Your Potential

For a Child is born to us, a Son is given to us; and the sovereignty^* shall be on His shoulder; and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, God, Hero, Father Everlasting, Prince of Peace. Of the multiplying of His sovereignty and peace there shall be no end, on the throne of David, and on his kingdom, to establish her, and to sustain her, in judgment and in justice, from now and even to eternity. The zeal of Jehovah of Armies will do this. (Isaiah 9:6-7)

The Lord, being born as are other men, and having a nature inherited from the mother, was like other men also in respect to the miraculous formation of the rational by means of knowledges, to the end that by combats of temptations and by victories, He might reduce all things into order. Therefore, His rational was conceived and born in the same way as with other men, but with the difference that inmostly in all things that were His, both in general and particular, there was the Divine, or Jehovah, and thus the life of love toward the whole human race, for whom and for whose salvation He fought in all His temptations. (Arcana Coelestia 1902)

Man must first of all be reborn as a little child, and must learn what is evil and false, and also what is good and true; for without knowledge, he cannot be imbued with any good. (Arcana Coelestia 3701)

Man is indeed born of his parents as a man, but he does not become a man until he is reborn of the Lord. Spiritual and heavenly life is that which makes a man, for this distinguishes him from brute animals. It is this spiritual conception and birth which is signified in the Word by the conceptions and births mentioned there. (Arcana Coelestia 3860)

^*In Hebrew this word comes from the word for “Prince,” as “princeship.”

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