Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Unrighteous Steward: Memory”

28 Feb Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Unrighteous Steward: Memory”

11/23/65

Tonight’s subject is “The Steward.” When we speak here of God, I’m really speaking of your own wonderful human Imagination. That’s all the Bible speaks about, really, when it talks and tells us about God. “God the Creator is like pure imagining in myself. He’s at work in the very depth of my being, underlying all of my faculties, including perception, but he streams into my surface mind least disguised in the form of productive fancy” (Douglas Fawcett). As I sit here or stand here, and just think and plot and plan, that’s God in action. I can see him best as I simply dream and remember my dream.

Now tonight we come to this wonderful story which stumps all the scholars. I haven’t read one commentary on it where they can agree. They admit the very oldest manuscript carried the story—it’ not an insertion. We haven’t found any manuscript that doesn’t carry it, and as far back as we can go and find these manuscripts it carries the story of the steward. You’ll read it in the 16th chapter of the Book of Luke. Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthians, he asks all those who followed him to regard him as a “steward of the mysteries” (1 Cor. 4:1). But, you see, the word steward has changed its meaning. When you and I speak of a steward today, as the dictionary defines it, it’s simply a person who takes care of the estates and the properties of someone else. We go aboard a ship and the chief steward is responsible for the services or provisions. That’s his appointed ___(??).

Now, that’s not the meaning of steward as it was used in the Bible. The word steward in the Bible is “a ward of the sty; a keeper of the pig.” And the pig has always been the symbol of the savior and redeemer of the world. Well, the only savior, as we read in scripture, “I am the Lord your God, the Holy one of Israel, your Savior…and besides me there is no savior” (Is. 43:3, 11). This word is simply Yod He Vau He, which we sound as Jehovah. There is no other savior. Your own wonderful human Imagination that is the great…symbolized in the world as a pig. Now you as a steward, you have to guard it and watch it and take care of it.

Now this can be taken down into the very depths of man’s soul, as it must be. Here is the story. “There was a rich man who had a steward, and charges were brought to him that he was simply wasting his goods. So he called the steward and said, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give the account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward.’ And the steward, seeing that he’s out of a job said to himself, ‘I’m too old to dig and I am too proud to beg.’ And this is what he did, “He called all his master’s debtors and he said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ and he replied, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ He said, ‘Sit down quickly and write fifty.’ Then he said to the second, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He said, ‘A hundred measure of wheat.’ He said, ‘You sit quickly and you write eighty.’ And the master, discovering what the steward had done, commended him for his prudence; and then said to his ___(??) to emulate this wisdom, this cleverness of this unrighteous steward, and invited all people to practice this art of unrighteous mammon (Luke 16:1-12). Then he said, ‘If you are not faithful with the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you the true riches?’”…asking all people to emulate. But on a certain level you would think God is encouraging stealing and dishonesty. That you may understand that God does everything, all parts, he’s trying to get you to exercise your Imagination, for that’s God. So anything that will make you exercise this power that is only God, he calls upon you to do it.