Neville Goddard Lecture, The Awakening of Faith

The Awakening of Faith

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THE AWAKENING OF FAITH

Those who experience the Christian mystery are charged with the responsibility of telling others. Their aim is the awakening of faith in God. For, as Paul, I ask the question: “How can men call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how can they hear unless there is a preacher? And how can men preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!’ But not all have heeded the gospel, for Isaiah says, ‘Who, O Lord, has believed what he has heard from us?’ So, faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the preaching of Christ.” Now Christ is not a person outside of you who lived 2,000 years ago. Christ is the cosmic being who became humanity by burying himself in every child born of woman. Ask the average person if they believe in God and many of them will say, Yes. But when asked to define Him, they will describe someone other than themselves. So, “How can men call upon one in whom they do not believe?” I tell you: the only God in the universe is your own wonderful human imagination. When you say: “I am,” that is God. There is no other God other than he who is encased in the limitation of your little garment of flesh. How can you call upon him, when you do not believe you are he? And how can you believe in him of whom you have never heard? What preacher ever told you that your own wonderful human imagination is God? They paint a word picture of a god outside of you, but that is not the true God. And when someone comes and tells you who He really is, the idea is blasphemous. No one wants to believe that he is creating the conditions of his life; but God is the only causative power, as there is nothing but God. Everything is caused by Imagination. He is the only reality. So, how can you believe in him of whom you have never heard? And how can you hear of him unless there is a preacher? And how can there be a preacher unless he is sent? This morning’s paper contained an article saying that scientists have discovered that the so-called throne Peter was to have sat upon 2,000 years ago is only 900 years old. They have now taken the chair out of its encasement, but are keeping it as a holy relic, when it was never any more than a piece of wood upon which some self-appointed nut sat while calling himself the emperor, the pope, or holy one. But now after a thousand years of nonsense the truth has been revealed. What are we going to do when man does not want to hear the truth that he is responsible for his own life, that his imagination is the only God? When you look out on the world you may think you had nothing to do with its creation, but you did.

 You do not know it yet, because its purpose has not been revealed to you. But by the restriction and limitation of your own creative power, you became your created world that you may expand beyond it and create a still greater world for even further expansion of yourself. God is ever expanding his illumination. He took upon himself the limit of contraction called man, the limit of opacity called man, that he may break the limitation and expand. That’s the glory of it all. I have experienced scripture and am under an obligation to tell it. Like Jeremiah, “If I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my being, and I am weary with holding it in and I cannot.” I must share my experience with others to encourage all to believe in God, but it is my responsibility to tell them who God is. When men believe the characters of scripture to be historically true, they are taking truth and modifying it to the limitation of the weakness of the human soul. They are not characters of history, but personifications of the aspects of the human mind. This is true from Jesus, down. Jesus is the personification of the fulfillment of the plan that you set up in the beginning of time. Having created the plan before the world came into being, you and I entered our creation. Jesus is the fulfillment of our plan. When his story fulfills itself in you, you must tell your brothers who are sound asleep, to wean them from the nonsense told year after year of some external God to whom they must pay homage, when there is no external God. It is Christ in Man who is his hope of glory, and Christ is God’s plan of redemption which was set up before that the world was. That plan is in the depth of every being, waiting to be awakened and fulfilled. Now we are told that the Pattern Man said: “Unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins.” Put the little word “is” in this sentence as: “Unless you believe that ‘I am’ is he, you will die in your sins.”

Those who heard that statement did not know that he was speaking of the Father, but the Father is the cause. Just as your father is the cause of you – for without a father you could not be, so must all life be fathered. So I say to you: “Unless you believe that your I am is the father of your life, you will continue to miss your goals in life.” Your I AMness is the Lord Jesus Christ and there is no other. How do I know this to be true? Read his story as told in the gospels. Having been born from above, he said: “I am from above and you are from below. Where I am going you cannot now come.” Why? Because, having fulfilled scripture he is returning to the source with the knowledge that he is the source. It isn’t that you will not come, but that you cannot come until you have fulfilled what you agreed to fulfill before that the world was. You and I agreed to dream in concert and we will not break our pledge to each other. We came down from heaven and descended right into our creation, where we are playing the parts we agreed to play, and as long as we think of God as another we are sound asleep. But when the time is fulfilled, one is sent to awaken his sleeping brothers, saying: “He who sees me, sees him who sent me, for I sent myself.” And who am I? I am the one you call God. I call him Father, for, having found him I know that He and I are one. We are told that the one who was sent was called Paul. It was Paul who spent his days from morning to evening testifying to the kingdom of heaven and trying to convince all to whom he spoke about Jesus, both from the law of Moses and the prophets. Some were convinced by what he said, while others disbelieved. But he welcomed everyone who came. That’s all I can do.

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