Neville Goddard Lecture, Test Yourselves

Test Yourselves

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TEST YOURSELVES

Faith is not complete until through experiment it becomes experience. God’s promise cannot be tested. It cannot be earned, for it is given by grace. But your faith will be increased when you experiment, when you test God’s law. It is easier to accept the Christian faith than to live by it, but you must live by it for your faith to grow’ In his 2nd letter to the Corinthians, Paul is speaking to the whole world when he says: “Examine yourselves to see if you are holding to the faith. Test yourselves’ Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? – unless of course you fail to meet the test. I hope you will discover that we have not failed.” Now, in the earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, we find these words: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of heaven is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” The word “repent” means “a radical change of attitude (of thinking) towards anything that you either dislike or want to change.” A radical change on your part will produce a corresponding change in your outer world. So now you are urged to examine yourself to see whether you are holding to the faith. Are you accepting as facts the headlines you see in the paper?

The telephone call you just received’ The morning’s mail or the news on TV which suggest unlovely, horrible things to you? A friend calls, and pouring out all the bilge in the world tells you how bad things are and how they are destined to get worse. As you listen, their woes enter and are assumed by you. Now, if you understand this law that imaging creates reality, you should, like a computer, choose what you are going to allow to enter. And when the conversation is finished and your friend’s voice is still fresh and clear in your ear, hear her changed words, the changed tone of her voice, and feel the joy emitted there. Let me now share three stories of a lady who is here tonight. She said: “I have found my telephone technique infallible. It never fails me. One day a friend called to tell me she wanted to take an examination to become a court reporter. Giving me nine reasons why she could never pass the test, I changed every one as I heard it, and when the conversation was finished I imagined an entirely different one. I heard her tell me she had passed the test with flying colors. My friend took the test, and although during the interval of six weeks she remained negative, I continued to believe she had passed. Then one day she called, saying: ‘Do you remember when I took the test?’ and I replied: ‘Yes, and you passed.’ Then she said: ‘Yes, but aren’t you surprised?’ I have been trying to tell her that imagining creates reality, but she cannot understand how an imaginal act unseen by the human senses can be held onto and produce results, but I know it always does’” Her letter continued in this manner: “My telephone technique never fails. I can give you dozen of stories of the results I have received through its use.

Here is another. A friend, in her 50′s desired to change her job for financial reasons. She wanted to return to the electronic plant where she formerly worked but felt that because of her age she would not be accepted. Ignoring all of the negative thoughts, I simply heard her excited voice tell me she had the job.” One week later she called, saying: “They not only gave me the job with a large salary increase, but I am receiving credit for the ten years I worked there before, which will be added to my retirement.” Now in the third story, she said: “My friend’s maid weighed 25 pounds more than she wanted to, and her doctor had told her she must lose this additional weight. Desiring to weigh 140 pounds, she told me how she had tried and tried but could not lose a pound. I ignored her comments regarding her past attempts and heard her tell me she had reached her goal. That she now weighs 140 pounds. Soon after that I left the city for two months, and when I returned the maid called again, saying: “I have been trying to contact you to tell you that I have lost weight. I couldn’t find you when I weighed 140 but now I weigh 139′” How the weight was lost my friend does not know; she only knows that she examines herself to see whether she is holding to her faith in imagining creating reality. She firmly believes in God’s promise and knows that eventually Christ will awaken in her as her very self. But in the meantime, while she waits in faith for the fulfillment of that promise, she is exercising God’s law. She now knows that whatever she desires, if she will but believe she already has received it, she will. So instead of making a false statement on the outside, saying: “I am Christian” and doing nothing about it, she lives by this principle on the inside and makes it a part of her life. You are told: “Why call me Lord, Lord and do not the things that I say?” Well, what did he say? That all things are possible to God, that no matter what you believe, it will come to pass. If you don’t want unlovely things to happen in your world then you must watch what you are thinking in the course of a day. You need not wait until the day’s end to change a thought to fulfill a desire.

 Why not do as my friend does and revise the conversation as you hear it? If the words are not what she wants to hear she does not listen, but puts on that same wire the thoughts she wants to hear come through. She hears what she desires to hear and believes it will come to pass. Scripture tells of those who – calling themselves leaders – are blind guides, and when the blind lead the blind they all fall into a pit. Who are these blind leaders? Those who teach doctrine as the law of God. Those who teach the precepts of men, saying you can’t eat this or wear that, are not the law of God, for in God’s law everything is in order. Are we not told that food will not justify or get you to God, that you are no worse off if you do not eat and no better off if you do? I know and I am persuaded by the law of Christ Jesus that there is nothing unclean in itself, but to any man to whom it is unclean, to him it is unclean. The uncleanliness is in his thinking and not in the thought itself. If someone wants to wallow in self pity, let him. You are not asked to test the man but to test yourself. You are not asked to prove it to another, just yourself. See the world as nothing more than yourself pushed out and everything in it as aiding the birth of your imagination, for the behavior of the world relative to you determined by the concept you hold of yourself’ It doesn’t really matter what your individual personal life is, the whole vast world is yourself pushed out and everyone in it is there to aid the birth of all of your imaginal acts. Regardless of whether it takes one or one hundred thousand, everyone will play his part, and you don’t have to ask his permission for your world is animated by your own wonderful human imagination.

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