Source: https://www.bertha-dudde.org/en/proclamation/8497

8497 Dead knowledge.... Awakening the spirit....

May 15, 1963: Book 89

It is the spirit that makes alive.... You can use many words that your mind forms, and yet they can be and remain dead words unless the spirit is awakened within you and gives them real life.... Understand it, you let your intellect predominate; you seek to fathom everything with the intellect, and you neglect the most important thing, to first bring the spirit to awakening in you, which will then rightly direct all your thoughts and intellect activity, so that you also reach the right understanding of that, which remains incomprehensible for you without this spiritual help. But the spirit is divine part; it certainly slumbers in you, but can only develop when you yourselves move in divine order, i.e. make the principle of love your own. Thus right, truthful intellectual activity is dependent on your inner nature, on your attitude towards love.... You will not be able to deny this fact, that only a life of love ever guarantees you right thinking, that only a life of love also lets the words come alive which you speak, that they then are not just mere form but are valued as spiritual property of meaning.... provided that they are not purely worldly matters but enlightenments which reach into spiritual territory. Because even if a man makes this area to the content of his speeches, he will not be able to give much to fellowman, as long as he himself is still unawakened spirit, because then also all his words are empty and dead, because it is only the spirit, which makes them alive. And again, deeper conversations about spiritual knowledge will also only be held where love is unmistakable, because people without love choose no such content for their conversations.... since these are only filled with the world and therefore no living knowledge can be expected from these. Or speeches are held about it only for professional reasons.... and then they will always remain only dead words without spirit and life. To get from this level to the pure spiritual level is difficult but not impossible.... Who is still too much attached to the world, he can also be led by strokes of fate of the most different kind or other experiences to go into himself and to think seriously. And then already he can listen to the voice of conscience, to the voice of the spirit in him, and now think more seriously. And when his heart is not completely hardened, he will also start to become active in love, and then he penetrates deeper and deeper, and the knowledge, which he had taken in intellectually before, becomes alive in him, what love alone achieves. As long as now also the book of books, which contains divine wisdom, is only read with the intellect and the heart is not yet involved in it, it will also only remain a dead knowledge, because before love does not awaken his spirit, he only reads the letter and does not understand its spiritual meaning.... And such teachers are not qualified to instruct their fellow human beings, for then they cannot speak alive, they only pass on learned knowledge without meaning and life.... And again the fellow human being's state is decisive, to what extent the knowledge is comprehensible to him, i.e., to what extent he takes care of the divine commandments of love.... He will come to understanding when his spirit can instruct him himself, because he lives out love.... Then the word can be offered to him no matter how incomprehensible, everything is bright and clear to him, because he is introduced from the inside what love brings about in him. And only such men should provide a teaching service, who have prepared themselves so that the spirit out of God can work in them, and these are then also called to be active as servants of God. But anyone who calls himself to be without an awakened spirit will hardly be able to work in the vineyard of the Lord, for then he will only be worldly active, even if he puts a spiritual cloak around his profession, he will remain a servant of the world because he will not be able to lead people to where the actual goal is.... because his sermons are dead and help no-one to come to life, for the human being must attain life from within, and this is only possible through a life of love, through which the spiritual spark in the human being makes contact with the Father-Spirit of eternity and then a maturing of the soul is also possible in earthly life.... for the spirit from God addresses the soul, not the intellect.... But this will then also accept everything what the spirit out of God imparts to the soul....

Amen

Translated by Doris Boekers