Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Friend of Sinners”

01 Jan Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Friend of Sinners”

4/24/64

Tonight’s subject is “The Friend of Sinners.” I think you will find this a very interesting subject. It may be difficult, but you’ll find it interesting. We are told, “Call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” We’re told in the same book, the Bible, there is only one savior, and that savior is Jehovah. Before me no God was formed nor will there be any after me. I, I am the Lord and beside me there is no Savior. It is I who blot out your sins and remove your transgressions. You read this in the 43rd of Isaiah (verse 3). No other Savior. So he must be the one spoken of in the Old Testament as Jehovah, and he is. The word spells the same thing and means the same thing.

So let us tonight see it in a practical light. You and I are inclined to believe that if something is wrong with us it’s caused by something on the outside—maybe our circumstances of life, our surroundings, something, but something on the outside. And yet, the Bible teaches that all of our troubles spring from sin. But you’ve been taught to believe that sin is the violation of some moral code. The Bible doesn’t teach that. The Bible teaches that man sins for want of faith in “I am he.” “Unless you believe that I am he, you die in your sins” (John 8:24). That’s what we’re taught. So, it’s want of faith in “I am he” that is the cause and the only cause of sinning, and sin is the cause of every problem in the world. I don’t care what you name it, regardless of the nature of the problem it simply is it results from sinning.

Now let me share with you two stories that came to me this week, one from a lady, one from a gentleman. I have just seen the gentleman enter, I haven’t yet seen the lady…oh yes, she’s here. So we’ll take her story first. She said, “Having heard you I took thirteen goals, and by the application of this principle I achieved every goal in detail just as I had envisioned it.” But the story I want to share with you is this—she didn’t tell me what she took as goals, having heard me she took thirteen—she said, “Now I’m working on two. They seem more difficult because they are so long in standing, they go a way back in my life; and because of a conditioned mind maybe I find it more difficult to overcome the two. But the thirteen that I simply fixed, I quickly realized them in detail.” But, she said, “Recently I was sitting in the Silence, simply reflecting on my thoughts, and suddenly you appeared in my skull, lifelike, not a little thing, simply a lifelike figure. And you looked directly at me and you said to me, ‘May I tell you, you are looking at your problem instead of the wish fulfilled.’” And then she said, “It seemed so real to me because you stood in my head, but you were lifelike, that then I heard myself say in answer, ‘You are right!’ And so my meditation ended.”

Let that be a warning to you. If you don’t want some uninvited guest to come into your Silence and disturb your meditation, then be faithful to God’s word. If I use, today, the terminology that differs from scripture, it’s only because of the year 1964. I am not changing the word of scripture, for in scripture we are told, “Whatever you desire, when you ask it in prayer, believe you’ve received it and you will.” If I have taken that thought from the Book of Mark, the 11th chapter of Mark (verse 24), and I have put it into what is to me a more understandable, modern expression—“Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled”—I haven’t changed the thought behind it.