Source: https://www.bertha-dudde.org/en/proclamation/4950

4950 Earthly life purpose: serving in love in free will....

August 13, 1950: Book 56

This is the purpose of your earthly life, that you humans serve each other in love, because only serving love is true love for your neighbour. The human being must not believe that he can manage without the help of his fellow human being. He needs his neighbour, just as he should help him. Because love should ignite in the human heart, the fellow human being must sometimes be dependent on help, otherwise he would not be given the opportunity to develop his love. What can be proven in the whole of material creation is that everything has its purpose, that therefore every work of creation serves by fulfilling its purpose in a state of necessity to contribute to the preservation and enlivenment of other works of creation.... This is also the human being's task, to serve, however in free will, thus out of love for God and his neighbour. And this serving love alone redeems the human being, for thereby he cancels the old sin, the apostasy of the spiritual from God in arrogance and lust for power.... But anyone who does not submit to this commandment of love for God and his neighbour is still full of arrogance, he does not recognize his purpose of earthly life and therefore remains unredeemed.... he cannot move in freedom after laying down his body, he has not made use of earthly life, he has lived it in vain.... even if it has brought him earthly advantage and he can look back on a busy life at the end. It is about the soul of man, not about his body. The body was given to him so that the soul could mature in him, the body was only the means to an end, for the soul is immortal, but the body dies, and the soul takes nothing of what it has acquired on earth over into the spiritual kingdom. Therefore, as long as the human being only cares for himself and lives apathetically next to his fellow human being, as long as he does not have an open heart and eye for his fellow human being's hardship, he is dominated by selfish love, which is a great obstacle for the soul's upward development. For this self-love pulls down, self-love is a wrongly directed love which never has a redeeming effect but binds the human being even more, which puts itself like a fetter around his spirit, which can never be brought to awakening through self-love. Anyone who loves himself will always look down on his fellow human being, and serving in unselfish neighbourly love is impossible for him, for the ruling principle is still in him and holds him back from every treatment of love. Now the deeper humanity is in selfish love, the greater will also be the earthly adversity which God Himself uses as a means to kindle the flame of love for the neighbour in the heart. Whose heart is touched by the hardship of his fellow human being is not yet hardened and his salvation is not in question. It must be earthly hardship when spiritual hardship has become so great that love has grown cold in people's hearts.... Then God seeks to warm people's hearts with the adversity of their fellow human beings so that they fulfil their purpose of earthly life, to increase their soul's maturity through serving neighbourly love, for only love redeems them, only love sets the soul free and gives it light and strength, only love pulls the soul up from the abyss to the height, only love leads it out of the darkness of night into light and freedom....

Amen

Translated by Doris Boekers