Neville Goddard Lectures: “Christmas: The Redeeming Message”

29 Dec Neville Goddard Lectures: “Christmas: The Redeeming Message”

By Neville Goddard 12/19/1963

Tonight’s subject is “Christmas, The Redeeming Message.” If you owned the world, but really literally owned the world and all within it, and a billion dollars your servant, and at the end of your short journey here that was all, wouldn’t that be sheer nonsense? Well, Christmas, the redeeming message, is that man lives forever.

This is the story. There is a West Indian carol called “Mary’s Boy-child”: “Jesus Christ was born on Christmas Day and because of this birth man lives forever more.” That’s a recent thing from the West Indies. But centuries ago this story broke upon the world. Men wanted it, they speculated, but they couldn’t quite discover the secret hidden in the Old Testament. And they thought, and thought that by searching the scriptures, but they could not find the Christ of whom they spoke and of whose coming they foretold. They just couldn’t find it, because it wasn’t in the way they expected it.

Paul makes the statement in the second letter to the Corinthians, the 4th chapter, the 2nd verse, and he speaks of a treasure: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.” When you read it, you wonder what is he talking about, we have this treasure in earthen vessels. It means “conditioned by human limitation: the limitation of human understanding, human language, the meaning of words, and especially that limit set to one person’s unveiling of his own inner consciousness to another.” How could one who is the first really tell it, for everyone knew him in the world as a normal person? And this has been going on for unnumbered ages and suddenly “at length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell.” And he tells it, and he tells it with all the limitations of the earthen vessel, called man. Well, how could he tell it to persuade anyone that this is what was foretold?

Now tonight I will tell it just as it happened. And I hope that someone in the audience—I know that there are many from time to time who may add to it memory images of what I’ve said. Others have taken it down on tape; others have taken it down in shorthand, but they’ve taken it down. The story that you’re told in the Book of Luke… Luke, if you listen carefully, in the very first four verses: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which happened among us, just as they were declared by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, so it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.” He does not claim he was an eyewitness, but he followed closely those who were eyewitnesses.

In scripture, an eyewitness is one who has experienced it. The one essential to be an Apostle was to see the risen Christ, as told us in the first chapter of the Book of Acts. No one can be sent—for an Apostle means one sent—unless he himself experienced the risen Christ. It’s called “seeing the risen Christ.” You don’t see it as another; you experience your own resurrection; that is “seeing” Christ. “For Christ in you is the hope of glory.” “I tell you a mystery,” he said, “a mystery hidden from all ages, all generations, and now made manifest to his saints… this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:26, 27). And so, the one condition imposed upon one who would be sent is that he saw, that is, he experienced the risen Christ.

Luke does not claim that he saw it; therefore, he doesn’t claim he experienced it. But he claims, listen to it carefully, “Inasmuch as many”—and there were many prior to Luke—“who attempted to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us… a narrative compiled from the things told by those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of this word, now it seemed good to me also to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.” Now he does not claim that his record is a greater chronological exactitude than those who preceded him. What he is really claiming, that his narrative is really a better arrangement of the source material: he heard it, these things from those who really experienced it. He heard it and compiled it into a story, into a narrative.